G-Man, page 69
The Lee murder itself occasioned little notice outside the Black press. As the weeks went on, though, the “Reign of Terror” in Mississippi, as the NAACP put it, became impossible to ignore. In Brookhaven, a veteran and farmer named Lamar Smith spearheaded a local voter registration effort only to be gunned down by white men in front of the town courthouse. A few months after that, sixty-five-year-old Gus Courts, a store owner who had worked with Lee on the Belzoni campaign, was shot through his shop’s plate-glass window. He managed to escape with serious but not fatal injuries. And in late August, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till, down from Chicago to visit his mother’s relatives, bought some bubble gum from a general store in the town of Money. During the transaction, he may have whistled at the young white woman running the cash register. A few nights later, a group of white men descended upon his uncle’s house, dragged Till out of bed, and drove him to a shack in the woods, where they proceeded to torture and then shoot him before throwing his body in the Tallahatchie River.
The Till murder made the summer’s violence in Mississippi into a national and even international story, the case that finally prodded many white observers to grapple with the brutality and senselessness of the state’s racial regime. Unlike Lee, Smith, and Courts, Till was just a kid—a kid from the North, no less, unfamiliar with how the South set up its social rules and enforced them. Till’s mother, Mamie, determined to ensure that “the world can see what they did to my boy,” brought his body back to Chicago for an open viewing. Thousands of mourners filed past his coffin over Labor Day weekend, aghast at his bloated body and distended features, all for the crime of allegedly flirting with a white girl.[23]
If the Till case captured the headlines, from Hoover’s perspective it was the least of the summer’s crimes—or at any rate, the one least deserving of Bureau attention. During the first frantic hours after Till’s disappearance, a local agent dispatched overnight teletype updates to Washington, concerned that there would be grounds for federal involvement. But both Hoover and Brownell quickly agreed that the Bureau lacked jurisdiction. They came to a different conclusion about the other crimes, where the connection to voting rights seemed to leave more room for federal action. On May 9, Hoover launched an investigation into the Lee murder, dispatching agents to interview witnesses and gather ballistics evidence. The Bureau ultimately identified two chief suspects, both members of the local Citizens’ Council. Upon reviewing the evidence, however, the Justice Department determined that the link between Lee’s murder and his voting rights work was too weak to move forward with a federal indictment.[24]
As in the lynching investigations of the 1940s, Hoover found the Lee case to be an exercise in frustration: Bureau agents went in and solved the crime, only to be told that their efforts were for naught. The same held true with the Courts and Smith shootings, which proceeded—and ultimately failed—along similar lines. The outcome of the Till case was perhaps worst of all, a miscarriage of justice in which the federal government stood by as a local white jury acquitted Till’s assailants of murder. Hoover blamed everyone else for what went wrong, casting fault on Southern politicians and policemen, on the Justice Department and the weakness of federal law, on the NAACP for pushing too hard, and on the Citizens’ Councils for pushing back. He never seems to have entertained the idea that he himself might have done something different.
Those who endured the violence firsthand were not so ready to absolve him. In the face of such naked miscarriages of justice, legalistic explanations about federal jurisdiction satisfied few interested parties—least of all Hoover’s uneasy allies at the NAACP. On September 7, the NAACP’s national leadership assembled for a meeting with Justice Department officials, hoping to persuade the attorney general—and thus the Eisenhower administration—to use the full power at their disposal to combat white Southern violence. From Mississippi itself, the call was taken up by Dr. T. R. M. Howard, founder of the Regional Council on Negro Leadership and one of the state’s most prominent Black voices. On September 25, in a speech before some twenty-five hundred participants at an NAACP membership meeting in Baltimore, Howard lambasted the FBI, wondering why an organization that managed to uncover so many spies and saboteurs “can never seem to work out who is responsible for killing Negroes in the South.” He laid the blame not on jurisdictional problems or the intransigence of the white South, but at the feet of “J. Edgar Hoover, himself.”[25]
Hoover turned to Thurgood Marshall to defend the FBI, arguing in a letter that the Bureau had tried hard in Mississippi but failed for lack of jurisdiction. Writing back, Marshall affirmed that the FBI had done “a full complete job in so far as the Mississippi situations are concerned.” He lamented along with Hoover that federal law is “not adequate in such situations and should be strengthened.” Howard was not nearly so conciliatory, insisting once again that Hoover should be brought to account. In January, Hoover lashed back and released a public letter denouncing Howard’s “false charges.” In the letter, Hoover professed to be on the same side as Howard, appalled at Mississippi’s wave of violence. At the same time, he pleaded a lack of power and jurisdiction, begging for the sort of understanding that Marshall had extended earlier. “This bureau is doing everything within the scope of existing legislation in civil rights matters,” Hoover insisted, “and our fair and prompt investigations have done much to increase public respect for and consciousness of civil rights.” To Howard, though, the moment for worrying about jurisdictional fine print had passed long ago.[26]
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The conflict with Howard reflected one of the painful facts of the Southern situation as Hoover saw it by the end of 1955: despite all the energy devoted by the FBI to its “limited inquiries,” things were getting more volatile rather than less. In November 1955, a new county grand jury refused to indict on kidnapping charges in the Till case, sparking another round of outrage and recrimination over federal impotence. The following month, the Black community of Montgomery, Alabama, launched a much-heralded bus boycott in protest of segregation only to be met with bombings, threats, and assaults. Two months after that, acting on orders from the Supreme Court, the University of Alabama opened its doors to its first Black student, an aspiring librarian named Autherine Lucy. After several days of violence in protest, the university suspended her.
Along with this deteriorating situation came heightened resistance to Bureau action—not only from Howard or the NAACP, but from Hoover’s onetime fans and sympathizers within the white South. In the fall of 1955, Hoover received a letter from Robert Patterson, founder of the Mississippi Citizens’ Councils, who accused the FBI of working in cahoots with the NAACP “to intimidate Southerners who will not submit to its radical integration aims.” In Georgia, where FBI agents were investigating Cobb County’s all-white jury selection process, the state legislature passed a resolution “severely” censuring both Hoover and Brownell for “flagrant violation of the Constitution” and undue interference in state affairs. Not to be outdone, Mississippi’s legislature passed its own bill restricting FBI investigative activities (though the governor vetoed it on grounds that the state had nothing to hide).[27]
Hoover responded to this criticism with disdain, as the grumblings of lawless, small-minded vigilantes. In the end, though, he was far more lenient toward the South’s segregationists than toward civil rights groups on the other side. In January 1956, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond went public with his suspicion that the FBI was secretly investigating the Citizens’ Councils. From SISS, Eastland followed up with a personal query, insisting to FBI officials that the councils had been a “very stabilizing” force against “the ‘hotheads’ and ‘rednecks.’ ” Under such pressure, Hoover backtracked from his commitment to investigate all groups targeting racial minorities. Agreeing (implausibly) that the Citizens’ Councils showed no signs of violence or “extralegal measures,” in late 1956 he canceled the investigation into council activities, even as he continued to investigate the NAACP and other civil rights groups for their supposed allegiances to communism.[28]
To Hoover, the white South’s intransigence only underscored what he had long believed: that civil rights was a lose-lose situation for the Bureau, and one best avoided. Brownell adopted a different interpretation—and it was his opinion, not Hoover’s, that would win the day. In his view, the South’s willingness to thumb its nose at federal law meant that a better and stronger federal civil rights law was now necessary. On January 5, 1956, Brownell called Hoover to his office for a consultation about a civil rights bill he planned to introduce at an upcoming cabinet meeting. As Brownell envisioned it, the bill would expand and strengthen the Justice Department’s ability to act in civil rights cases, including the creation of a new Civil Rights Division. He wanted Hoover to help present the idea to Eisenhower’s cabinet. Brownell understood that Hoover might harbor personal doubts about desegregation. “Considering the atmosphere in which he was raised, he had a point of view (that he didn’t carry into his law enforcement activities) which did not favor school integration,” Brownell later explained. But he saw another side of Hoover, too: the professional public servant and federal lawman.[29]
And so, on March 9, 1956, Hoover accompanied Brownell to the White House for a meeting of Eisenhower’s Cabinet. Hoover’s presentation that day showed less of the outrage and certainty that had characterized his testimony before Truman’s committee a decade earlier, when he had still hoped that the FBI might make a true success of the anti-lynching campaign. Then, he had described Southern violence as a scourge that could be—indeed, had to be—stopped by a determined federal government. Now, he described it as an understandable, if problematic, reaction to Brown’s attack on racial traditions that had been “handed down from generation to generation.” White Southerners were terrified by “the specter of racial intermarriages” and the prospect of social equality, Hoover explained. “The current tensions represent a clash of culture when the protection of racial purity is a rule of life ingrained deeply as the basic truth.” At the same time, he conceded that the federal government had a duty to enforce the law, whether the white South liked it or not. The question was how.[30]
Brownell’s bill was supposed to solve this problem. Actually getting it passed, though, was another story, as Truman had learned years before. Three days after Hoover’s cabinet presentation, the Southern Democrats of Congress released a “Southern Manifesto,” declaring the Brown decision “a clear abuse of judicial power” and vowing to resist the intrusion of “outside meddlers”—including federal authorities—who attempted to enforce the ruling. Eastland signed the document, as did nearly every other Southern member of Congress, a declaration of political war against the Eisenhower administration.[31]
That Brownell’s bill eventually passed anyway is testament to the political skills of Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, a man with whom Hoover would soon build perhaps the greatest political alliance of his career. What happened along the way, however, only heightened Hoover’s frustration with civil rights work, and accentuated the jurisdictional confusion that had existed for years. In an effort to make the bill palatable to Southern lawmakers, the Senate stripped away several provisions of Brownell’s proposal, narrowing it from a broad civil rights bill into a much more limited defense of voting rights. Senators also added a clause reaffirming the right to local jury trials in all substantial voting rights cases, a measure intended to ensure the failure of any federal prosecution under the new law.
In Hoover’s view the FBI acquired a controversial new set of duties without any increased likelihood of success. Deputy attorney general William Rogers said it was like “giving a policeman a gun without bullets.”[32]
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In the wake of the bill’s passage, Hoover once again tried to ease himself out of civil rights work, to convince Brownell to set the Bureau free to do what it did best: hunt criminals and communists. In October 1957, he met with Brownell to discuss the recent crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Eisenhower had sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Central High School. The FBI had been dispatched to Little Rock to assess the situation weeks before the troops came in. Like the National Guard, the Bureau’s agents met with fierce resistance from local politicians. Given the deteriorating situation, Hoover suggested to Brownell that future civil rights inquiries might best be conducted not by the FBI but by the Justice Department’s new Civil Rights Division. “I made this observation because of the intolerable situations [which] have developed during the last years and months in trying to handle the investigative work in this field,” he explained.[33]
Brownell rejected the idea, and Hoover apparently never brought it up again. A few months later, when a Southern legislative aide suggested the same thing, Hoover dismissed it as a fantasy of someone acting out of emotion rather than logic and devotion to duty. “It is amazing how utterly unobjective some individuals get,” he wrote to fellow Bureau officials in early 1958. “We have a job to do and we will do it.”[34]
Chapter 38
Master of Deceit
(1956–1959)
An advertisement for Hoover’s bestselling book, Masters of Deceit, published in 1958. Hoover tried to keep anticommunism front and center in the late 1950s, when many Americans were losing interest.
National Archives and Records Administration
Despite his misgivings about the new civil rights law, by 1957 Hoover could say that history mostly seemed to be going his way. Eisenhower’s reelection in 1956 had affirmed the influence and popularity of a Republican circle that revered the FBI. And the one man who had for so long disrupted party unity, who had almost torn the Republicans apart in 1953 and 1954, was no longer in a position to wreak havoc. Shunned by his fellow Washingtonians, Joe McCarthy had spent the past few years drinking away his shame, occasionally emerging to warn of a resurgent Red menace or to champion Hoover as a presidential nominee. On May 2, less than four months into Eisenhower’s second term, he died of acute hepatitis at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Accompanied by Tolson, Hoover attended a brief memorial service in Senate chambers, expressing “sorrow over the passing of a friend.” With that, McCarthyism reached its dismal end. Hooverism, by contrast, was stronger than ever.[1]
Hoover’s staying power did not go unnoticed in the national press, where the months after McCarthy’s death brought a rush of tributes to Hoover’s status as the city’s great “indestructible” survivor, an object of “universal respect,” “almost a legend in his own lifetime.” First among his admirers was Pulitzer Prize winner Don Whitehead, one of the deans of the Washington press corps. Two years earlier, he had approached Hoover with the idea of writing a book that would recount “the FBI’s birth, development and struggles,” in Hoover’s words. Just after the inauguration, he published The FBI Story, supposedly an objective “report to the people” but actually, as one reviewer noted, an “authorized biography” in all but name. The book occupied the number one slot on the New York Times bestseller list from February through May 1957, securing Hoover’s place in the literary pantheon even as the nation bade a less-than-fond farewell to McCarthy.[2]
Whitehead’s book warned that the grand struggle that had joined Hoover and McCarthy together—the world-historical “fight against communism”—was not yet complete. But here, too, things seemed to be going Hoover’s way. In early 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged some of the worst crimes of the Stalin regime in a speech before his party’s twentieth Congress, setting off anguished debates and recriminations among communists throughout the world. At home, the American party was fast descending into chaos, its members frustrated, disillusioned, and fleeing the party ranks. An FBI assessment declared Khrushchev’s speech “one of the greatest psychological blows” in the movement’s history. After a decade of Red Scare politics, it was widely assumed that the American communist party would soon collapse altogether.[3]
Certainly the Supreme Court seemed to think so. In June 1957, a month after McCarthy’s death, the court issued a series of decisions restricting the methods available to the FBI and other government agencies in their pursuit of communist activists. One decision drastically narrowed interpretation of the Smith Act, which Hoover had used to such good effect against party leadership. Another ruled that defendants had the right to review FBI informant files if and when the government planned to call the informant to appear as a witness during trial. The Court offered mostly technical reasons. But its decisions also reflected a new confidence that communism had, at last, been crushed in the United States. To the court, as to many Americans in 1957, the Communist Party now looked less like an existential threat than like a pitiable group of diehards clinging to a discredited ideology. Under the circumstances, the court suggested, there was no need for expansive measures to contain them.[4]
Hoover could see that certain aspects of the anticommunist fight were indeed going well, that the old worries over spies in high places or communist domination of the labor movement could be safely consigned to the past. And yet he found it hard to rest easy in 1957—much less to think that the FBI had truly, at last, achieved victory. He remained haunted by the example of his youth, when the Radical Division had helped to destroy the early parties only to see the communists rise again, stronger and better organized, a decade later. To much of the country, the collapse of the Communist Party seemed to present an opportunity to move on from the Red Scare, with Hoover duly recognized as its conquering hero. To Hoover, that desire was itself now a problem. As he conceived it, the great enemy of 1957 was not so much the party itself. It was the public apathy that might allow the communists time to rest and regroup.
