G-Man, page 79
Hoover did not find out about Reuther’s memo until 1963, when journalists Donald Janson and Bernard Eismann published The Far Right, a wide-ranging exposé that identified Smoot, Skousen, and Philbrick “among those promoting extremism,” in the words of an FBI summary. Hoover did not have to be privy to the strategies of the Kennedy White House, however, to see that he could not sit on the sidelines forever. Just weeks after Kennedy’s speech he decided to offer a rejoinder, his first substantive public statement about the controversy that had been roiling the country for months. Like Kennedy, he chose a venue that would demonstrate his political influence and provide a room full of supporters to applaud his message. In Hoover’s case, this meant a gala dinner sponsored by the Mutual of Omaha insurance company, which had selected him to receive its 1961 Criss Award for outstanding public service. The award came with ten thousand dollars, a gold medal, and a lavish dinner for some two hundred handpicked guests at the Mayflower Hotel. To join him for the occasion, Hoover selected a roster of men who reflected his deepest and oldest relationships, beginning with Tolson. He also invited several allies within the right-wing media pantheon, including Sokolsky, Hearst publisher Richard Berlin, and columnist Fulton Lewis Jr.[27]
With this friendly audience as a backdrop, Hoover delivered one of the most remarkable speeches of his career, a blistering polemic at once achingly self-righteous and carefully calculated, an act of official defiance and mollification all at once. Rather than capitulate to Kennedy’s assessment of domestic communism, Hoover doubled down on the message that had so endeared him to the likes of the Birch Society and the Anti-Communism Crusade. “We are at war with the communists and the sooner every red-blooded American realizes this the safer we will be,” he declared. “Fear, apologies, defeatism and cowardice are alien to the thinking of true Americans! As for me, I would rather be DEAD than RED!” At the same time, he gave liberals—and the president himself—something to hold on to. After whipping up the crowd’s sense of embattlement, he concluded by urging that Americans “not be taken in by those who promote hysteria . . . , whether they be the proponents of chauvinism of the extreme right or the pseudo liberalism of the extreme left.”[28]
The speech made a sensation in the press, where reporters could choose whichever side of that equation they happened to prefer. His old New York Post critic James Wechsler shook his head at the sheer audacity of Hoover’s attempt to have it both ways. “The ceremonies again dramatized Mr. Hoover’s ability to remain a ‘non-controversial’ figure, perennially advanced as the Presidential nominee of the extreme right wing even as he retains the plaudits of some sections of the liberal community,” Wechsler wrote. Noting that the remarks would “assure the rabid rightists that his heart belongs to them,” the columnist observed that Hoover had also managed to placate liberals, signaling to them that his heart was with the government and its traditions of responsible expertise. All in all, Wechsler concluded, it was a bravura performance by a master of the political arts: “Let it never be said that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But even Hoover could not sustain the balance forever.[29]
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After the Criss Award, Hoover continued to criticize the Birch Society and other so-called extremists, if often in an oblique manner. That February, in a speech before the conservative Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, in Pennsylvania, he stepped up his attack on not only the “pseudo-liberals of the extreme left” but also the “pseudo-patriots of the extreme right.” Kennedy accepted such words as the best he was likely to get from Hoover. “As a vigilant, experienced American, who has real credentials as a Communist fighter—J. Edgar Hoover—has said, such actions play into communist hands and hinder, rather than aid, the fight against communism,” the president explained. Amazingly, Hoover’s approach also earned him plaudits on the other side of the political spectrum. As the Birch Society controversy reached its peak in early 1962, Barry Goldwater himself reached out to Hoover for “guidance” on how to manage the ocean of inquiries flooding his office. Beyond Washington, self-styled “respectable” conservatives such as Buckley soon began to echo Hoover’s stance. In February, in one of the most debated episodes of Buckley’s career, National Review reluctantly distanced itself from Welch in terms similar to Hoover’s Criss speech, warning that the Birch Society founder would hinder rather than help the conservative cause. Later that month, William Randolph Hearst Jr. weighed in. “For America’s sake I hope all sincere anti-Communists get out of such outfits as the Birchers,” he wrote. Instead, he urged Americans to follow Hoover, “who as head of the FBI really knows what he is talking about.”[30]
Hoover’s domestic intelligence chief, William Sullivan, later marveled at his boss’s balancing act. “If a liberal came in, the liberal would leave thinking that, ‘My God, Hoover is a real liberal!’ If a John Bircher came in an hour later, he’d go out saying, ‘I’m convinced that Hoover is a member of the John Birch Society at heart.’ ” To say that Hoover could manage both constituencies, however, is not to say that he escaped the Birch Society controversy entirely unscathed. Sokolsky noted how painful the split was within the conservative movement. “Many of my old friends feel that I have deserted them,” he wrote in a February column. Hoover, too, experienced a backlash from the Birchers and other far-right admirers, the loss of their previously unshakable faith in his righteousness. He received many bewildered letters, signed by one or another “disillusioned FBI admirer,” pointing out that “even an implied repudiation from a man of your stature carries with it tremendous weight.” Hoover’s former employees took the repudiation particularly hard. “For God’s sake, George, why are you attacking your friends?” Philbrick demanded of Sokolsky in early March.[31]
By that point, though, the split was done. One historian has defined the moment as a division between “responsible” and “extremist” conservatives—two different but related political cultures existing side by side. With his tepid criticism of the Birchers, Hoover put himself in the first camp, a passionate but “responsible” conservative within a liberal Democratic administration, at once the great national figurehead of anticommunism and a man who could be counted upon to draw a line between the experts and the masses.[32]
Even as the Kennedys grudgingly took what they could get from Hoover, it was increasingly the “responsible right” that would embrace him, providing him with social and ideological ballast that would define his political community for the next decade. And yet in critical ways Hoover remained distinct from men like Buckley and Sokolsky and Goldwater, icons of so-called responsible conservatism. They were provocateurs and politicians, interested in shifting public debate. Hoover exercised real state power, a fact that made him both valuable and potentially dangerous to the conservative cause. In all the discussion of “pseudo-liberals” and “pseudo-conservatives,” of “extremists” and “responsible” moderates, there was little mention of what the FBI was actually doing with its accumulated power. If Hoover had been serious about constraining the New Right, he would have targeted groups such as the John Birch Society in the ways he had once gone after the Communist Party. Instead, his focus remained more or less where it had always been. Like the Birchers, Hoover remained focused on battling communism above all other priorities.
Chapter 43
In Friendship
(1961–1962)
Hoover accused many civil rights organizations and activists, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of harboring communist ties. He used that claim to justify widespread surveillance and disruption. Cartoon is from the Baltimore Afro-American.
COURTESY OF THE AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS ARCHIVES
On the morning after the siege of Freedom Ride supporters inside the Montgomery church, Hoover asked for a background memo on one of the Black ministers trapped inside. The man was a “prominent integrationist,” agents reported back, a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s and a pioneer in the techniques of nonviolent direct action that had become increasingly popular ever since. He maintained a few vaguely communist connections; he once thanked the Socialist Workers Party for supporting the bus boycott and had been known to attend meetings with communist-friendly progressives. But as far as the reporting agent could tell, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had “not been investigated by the FBI” in any serious way. “Why not?” Hoover asked, two hastily scrawled syllables that would soon set off one of the most expansive and controversial investigations in FBI history.[1]
There is something absurd about the idea that Hoover had barely heard of King in 1961. It had been more than five years since King came to national attention during the Montgomery bus boycott, when at the age of twenty-six he stepped forward as the campaign’s public face and chief strategist. The son of a prominent Atlanta minister, King had been as surprised as anyone to find himself cast in that position. His early ambitions had been far more conventional: college, divinity school, then a Ph.D. at Boston University, all in hopes of carrying on his father’s ministerial legacy. But when history intervened, King rose to meet the moment. Timing and circumstance happened to intersect particularly well with his talents, as they did for Hoover a generation earlier.
Since the boycott, King’s name had appeared several times in Bureau files. When he helped to organize a prayer pilgrimage at the Lincoln Memorial in 1957, Bureau reports noted his presence and apparent interest in school desegregation. After he was stabbed the following year during a book tour in Harlem, agents noted that the communist leader Ben Davis volunteered to donate blood. As recently as February 1961, Crime Records had analyzed an essay that King wrote for The Nation magazine, concluding that King was “in error” when he referred to the FBI as a segregated institution but that “he obviously would only welcome any controversy or resulting publicity.” Hoover felt the FBI should not play into King’s hands by delivering a public response.[2]
If his “Why not?” notation a few months later did not reflect a total absence of information about King, it did say something important about Hoover’s priorities: before the summer of 1961, King as an individual did not much matter at the Bureau. Until the Freedom Rides, Hoover had shown little appetite for learning the fine points of King’s history or knowing much about the movement’s emerging generation of leaders. The Kennedys initially gave him little reason to change. In the weeks after the Freedom Rides, the Justice Department held a few inconclusive meetings with civil rights leaders, promising support for voter registration in exchange for a deescalation of sit-ins and bus rides. Mostly, though, they simply moved on to Cold War crises like the Vienna summit and the construction of the Berlin Wall.
Hoover’s lack of interest largely held over the next several months. Rather than learn much about King himself, Hoover quickly came to focus on two advisers close to King, both of whom maintained ties with the Communist Party. Many historians have depicted Hoover’s approach as Cold War opportunism, in which he imposed a tried-and-true anticommunist framework onto an exciting young movement. With little to go on besides his own biases and paranoia, this story suggests, Hoover seized upon the defunct communist affiliations of a few mid-level advisers to justify an extended campaign of vilification and harassment. FBI documents suggest that the story is not quite so simple. Hoover approached the King investigation with his prejudices intact, including the racism that often made him see calls for justice as a threat to national security. But he did not need to go out of his way, or dig deep into the recesses of a paranoid psychology, to come up with a link between King and communism. As FBI files show, King was indeed working closely with two men, Stanley Levison and Jack O’Dell, who were connected, both present and past, to the Communist Party’s clandestine apparatus. In Cold War Washington, Hoover was not the only one who found that news alarming.[3]
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It took no great leap of the imagination to think the Communist Party and the new generation of civil rights activists might somehow be linked. Since the 1930s, communists had been denouncing Jim Crow as a system of class oppression and white America as an agent of racist imperialism. So it made sense that some of the men and women now involved in the civil rights surge might have a touch of red in their pasts. Certainly this was true of several men in King’s inner circle, who had been youthful converts to communism before concluding that the party’s rigidity (along with the threat of government suppression) made the communists a moribund vehicle for transforming Black life. Wyatt Tee Walker, executive director of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had cut his teeth in the Young Communist League during the 1940s. So had Bayard Rustin, the penetrating organizer who had counseled King through the Montgomery bus boycott and emerged as one of the movement’s most influential nonviolent strategists. (Rustin also happened to be gay, a matter that attracted the FBI’s attention and created tensions within King’s group of Christian ministers.)[4]
Hoover built files on all these men, convinced that their youthful communism made their loyalty forever suspect. But the figure who truly alarmed him in 1961, as the Bureau began to investigate King, presented a different issue altogether. A white New York businessman and liberal activist, Stanley Levison did not openly acknowledge party membership, in the past or in the present, or even admit a serious interest in communism. But according to Morris and Jack Childs, the trusted and well-protected informants of SOLO, Levison had long been one of the party’s most important secret fundraisers and financiers, as well as an active participant in its underground apparatus. In the early 1960s, when the Bureau realized that Levison was one of King’s advisers, Hoover was surprised to learn that Levison was still working with the party. Hoover did not pause to consider that the situation might be relatively benign: that Levison might feel torn between old loyalties and new opportunities to support the cause of racial justice. Instead, he worried about a possible Soviet connection. He had seen stranger things turn out to be true: Julius Rosenberg really was an atomic spy, and Kim Philby, one of the highest officials in British intelligence, really had colluded with the Soviets for decades. The implications of the Levison story seemed almost as explosive: at a moment of peak Cold War tension, the Soviet Union might be whispering in the ear of one of the civil rights movement’s emerging leaders.[5]
Jack Childs had alerted the Bureau to Levison’s communist ties as early as 1952, when the party leadership was facing stiff jail sentences under the Smith Act. According to Jack’s initial debriefing, that year Levison was serving secretly as a Communist Party fundraiser, courier, and underground facilitator, a vital link in the party’s clandestine financial network. The Bureau had barely heard of Levison in 1952 despite its intensive investigation of the party, but there appeared to be an easy explanation for that fact. According to Jack, Levison’s work was so covert that only a handful of high-ranking party insiders knew any of the details. Based on this tip, Hoover began to seek out more information.[6]
What he found was not especially alarming, at least on the surface. To the outside world, Levison appeared to be a supremely ordinary figure: a middle-aged Jewish businessman with a slight paunch and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses—“nothing outstanding,” in the words of an early Bureau report. Born and raised in New York, he appeared to have flirted with radical causes in his youth before settling into a conventional bourgeois life. By the 1950s, he lived on the Upper West Side with his wife and son. He spent most of his time tending to various small businesses, including a Ford dealership in New Jersey and a laundry in Ecuador. He had a twin brother named Roy, who co-owned several of the businesses. He held a law degree from St. John’s University that he rarely used. When he was not tending to work and family, Levison devoted his time to liberal politics as New York treasurer for the American Jewish Congress, planning rallies on behalf of the Rosenbergs and against the likes of Joe McCarthy.[7]
According to Jack’s account, however, there was another side to Levison—one that was rarely shown to anyone outside the innermost circle of the Communist Party. While supposedly living a bourgeois existence, Levison began participating in the Communist Party’s secret apparatus, using his outward respectability to provide cover for clandestine financial transactions. Beginning in the late 1940s he solicited money from wealthy contacts, ran side businesses on the CP’s behalf, and donated tens of thousands of dollars to CP coffers. Jack knew all this because he worked directly with Levison as a point man for the party’s “reserve fund,” a secret stash of money designated for bail and other emergency expenses. Levison ran the so-called Wall Street Group, an assemblage of heiresses, bankers, and other bourgeois types willing to contribute money and expertise. By Jack’s estimate, during the mid-1940s Levison and his brother, Roy, donated at least ten thousand dollars per year to the party and helped to solicit thousands more from anonymous party “angels.”[8]
Jack’s own brother, Morris, bore out these claims. When Morris decided to rejoin the party at the FBI’s behest in 1952, it was Levison who showed up in Chicago as an emissary from the CP leadership, assigned to vet Morris’s reliability and motivations. And when Morris made his first trip to New York in order to recontact old party friends, it was Levison who escorted him to a safe-house apartment and then to the private homes of party leaders. Levison schooled Morris in clandestine technique, instructing him to rely exclusively on public transportation and to take roundabout routes to any party engagement. He also built elaborate ownership structures for CP businesses, often serving as the front man and owner in name. FBI files emphasized that Levison’s activities were “intended as a fund raising enterprise for the party and not, to Informant’s knowledge, for espionage purposes” or for the “smuggling of atomic bombs.” This did not do much to reassure Hoover. In 1953, a year after Jack’s initial revelations, the New York field office added Levison’s name to the Security Index, convinced of his importance “in both open Communist Party activity and the Communist Party underground apparatus.”[9]
