G-Man, page 84
Kennedy proceeded with sending his civil rights bill to Congress, a leap of faith by a Democrat still dependent upon the South for reelection. Meanwhile, the Justice Department worked closely with Courtney Evans to figure out how much they could say to King without jeopardizing SOLO. O’Dell was the easier case, given his open history of Communist Party membership—though officials still worried about disclosing any current evidence of “Communist influence or control.” Levison remained more of a challenge, since his role in party finances had always been known to so few individuals. Based on Evans’s advice, Burke Marshall decided that “it was not in the best interest of the United States to inform Dr. King that we had any firm information that Levison was under communist control.” Instead they would once again ask King to trust them, and hope that this time he would do as they asked.
The plan went into effect on Saturday, June 22, 1963, in the midst of a civil rights summit at the White House. Before the meeting began, Marshall pulled King aside to discuss Levison and O’Dell, following the limits laid out by the FBI. Lest the warning be dismissed again, Bobby personally followed up with King, letting him know how important it was to the White House. Then, just when King might have thought the worst was over, the president himself asked for a few moments of private discussion. Strolling through the Rose Garden with King, Kennedy laid out an extreme version of what Hoover had described over the past two years, identifying Levison as a fixture of the Soviets’ secret U.S. apparatus, O’Dell as a member of the national board (“the number five Communist in the United States”), and Levison as O’Dell’s clandestine party guide and mentor. The bottom line was clear: “They’re Communists. You’ve got to get rid of them,” Kennedy said, especially if King wanted the White House to continue moving forward with a civil rights agenda. He insisted throughout that the warnings were in King’s interest, that they were both lucky to be getting another chance to fix the situation before it ended up on the front pages.
King conceded that O’Dell was probably a lost cause, an open communist with a well-established history that could be used as a political weapon. On Levison, though, he dug in again, refusing to believe what the president said about his friend’s communist background. “I know Stanley, and I can’t believe this,” he told the president. “You will have to prove it.” That day, the White House put in two calls to Hoover, one at 11:53 a.m. and another at 12:30 p.m. But Hoover never gave permission to disclose the details that King was seeking.
What would have happened if Hoover had actually done as King had asked, if he had finally shared the wealth of detail amassed by the Childs brothers over the previous decade? Possibly King would have continued to defend his colleague, arguing that communists had fought for noble causes including labor rights, anti-fascism, and racial equality. Or perhaps he would have felt betrayed by Levison’s apparent secrecy and subterfuge. In either case, it seems unlikely that the loss of Levison would have made a dramatic difference for the broader movement, given its momentum and growing mass appeal. But King did not see things that way. When Marshall came back to him with only “vague allegations of Levison’s unspecified Soviet contacts,” in the words of one historian, King once again sided with his friend and dismissed the whole matter as a figment of Hoover’s imagination.[19]
* * *
—
On June 23, the day after the White House meeting, Hoover announced that the FBI had arrested Medgar Evers’s murderer, a Mississippi Citizens’ Council member named Byron De La Beckwith. Around the same time, King gathered a group of SCLC officials to speak with O’Dell, just as he had promised the president he would do. O’Dell resented facing down the FBI’s accusations. “Hoover can kiss my ass! I am not the issue!” he insisted. But Hoover was one step ahead, having leaked reports of O’Dell’s ongoing employment at the SCLC to The Birmingham News, among other papers. Conceding the inevitable, King wrote a letter of dismissal to O’Dell, but not without taking a jab at Hoover. Though he never mentioned Hoover’s name, King noted that in Cold War America “any allusion to the left brings forth an emotional response,” painting Hoover-style anticommunism as fundamentally irrational and outdated. In asking for O’Dell’s resignation, he also pointed out that nobody had yet supplied firm evidence that O’Dell maintained “any present connections with the Communist party.”[20]
When it came to Levison, though, King held true to what he’d told the president in the Rose Garden: he would not sever ties without proof. And since proof was not forthcoming, he tried instead to perform an end run around the president’s request. His latest idea was to rely on friendly go-betweens—New York lawyer Clarence Jones and the rising young singer Harry Belafonte—when he needed to get in touch with Levison. Under the new arrangement, Belafonte recalled, “I would go to a friend’s house and call a third party, who would relay the message that Stan should call their mutual friend. Stan would then go out to a pay phone and call me at the friend’s house. Both parties were then on ‘safe phones,’ as we called them, and the FBI was, we hoped, left out of the loop.” Belafonte occasionally experienced his own twinges of doubt about Levison. “Was Hoover right?” he sometimes wondered. “Maybe Stan was an active communist, taking his orders from Moscow.” But he set that “paranoia” aside in order to help King get out from under the FBI’s pressure and scrutiny.
King appears to have believed that the new setup would satisfy the White House—that he and the Kennedys were tacitly in cahoots against Hoover, seeking to save face rather than address a bona fide national security threat. He was mistaken. On King’s behalf, Jones disclosed the new plan to the Justice Department. Rather than offering a wink and a nod, Bobby was quietly horrified. In July, he proposed something that even Hoover had not fully entertained: wiretaps not merely on Levison, but on King himself. Courtney Evans claimed to have discouraged the idea, pressing the attorney general to think about “the repercussions if it should ever become known that such a surveillance had been put on King.” But Bobby insisted that he was not worried and that he wanted “as complete coverage as possible,” according to Evans.[21]
The attorney general backed off from his ambitions a few days later, approving a wiretap on Jones but not one on King. By that point, though, Hoover was already thinking about his own next move, with or without the attorney general. On August 28, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered seventeen of the most stirring minutes of oratory in all of American history while Hoover sat at Bureau headquarters, keeping his schedule clear in case of emergency. Belafonte later speculated about what the day must have been like for Hoover, as “not just 100,000, but more than 250,000—more people than we imagined in our wildest dreams” amassed along the National Mall in support of racial equality. “What, I wondered, must J Edgar Hoover be thinking at that moment, holed up in his dark little den at the FBI?”[22]
One thing Hoover was thinking was that perhaps the time had come to make nice with civil rights protesters, given their growing power and influence. With the march underway, the radical journalist William Worthy, head of the tiny but outspoken Freedom Now Party, vowed to bring the struggle to Hoover’s doorstep with a sit-in at FBI headquarters. To head off that confrontation, Hoover made a surprise decision to invite Worthy and his fellow Freedom Now leaders to the Bureau for a sit-down conference. Worthy had long excoriated Hoover as the worst of the worst, a pillar of white supremacy. He nonetheless accepted Hoover’s invitation, arriving at the director’s reception room the next morning for what was surely one of the strangest confabs in civil rights history. Hoover remained silent as Worthy and his companions described the “lack of law enforcement” in civil rights cases and the fact that “the FBI had not measured up to its responsibilities.” Once they finished speaking, he launched into his own monologue, rattling off the FBI’s investigative successes and blaming any frustrations on its lack of jurisdiction. Hoover felt that Worthy left the meeting less “sarcastic” than when he went in, and decided that such personal exchanges might be a way of managing the future. He instructed that Freedom Now representatives “be promptly and courteously received” if and when they showed up at FBI offices. “It is felt that by such an approach, not only can the Bureau forestall any ‘sit-ins’ and unfavorable publicity,” he wrote, “but do much to enable Negro leaders to understand the true role of the FBI in these investigations.”[23]
If Hoover had, in fact, adopted that model, the next several years might have looked radically different: a dialogue in good faith between the FBI and the civil rights movement, as the country attempted to make progress on racial justice. But Hoover was also thinking about other things, and those ideas would have far greater consequences than his one-off meeting with a minor player. On August 23, five days before the March on Washington, the Domestic Intelligence Division had submitted a “detailed memorandum concerning the efforts of the Communist Party, USA, to exploit the American Negro.” The memo argued that while the communists were taking a renewed interest in the civil rights movement, the movement did not seem much interested in them—an argument that Hoover had made frequently in the 1950s. He no longer believed that the communists were quite so ineffective, however, and pushed back hard against any suggestion that the Bureau could rest easy. “This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” he wrote, accusing his aides of overlooking obvious evidence of communist influence. “I for one can’t ignore the memos re King, O’Dell, Levison, Rustin, Hall et al as having only an infinitesimal impact on the efforts to exploit the American Negro by the Communists.”[24]
His note set off a new round of activity at the Bureau, as officials rushed to reassess their strategies and to ensure that they followed Hoover’s dicta. It also ultimately changed the Bureau’s approach to King, who was no longer to be considered merely a target of communist influence, but a growing problem in his own right. In the wake of the march, Sullivan composed an obsequious memo backtracking on his office’s previous claims and acknowledging that “the Director is correct,” as always. Intuiting what Hoover seemed to want, Sullivan argued that the moment had come to face the King issue head-on, without relying on advisers or friends as points of entrée, and without waiting for the White House to force King into action. “Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders above all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes,” Sullivan wrote, in what would become one of the most influential memos in Bureau history. “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.” Over the next few months, with the approval of both Hoover and Bobby Kennedy, the FBI installed wiretaps at King’s home and offices.[25]
Chapter 46
The President Is Dead
(1963)
Mug shots of Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963.
National Archives and Records Administration
When a bomb tore through Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, less than a month after the March on Washington, many people assumed that it would be the FBI’s biggest case of the year. The congregation had been at the epicenter of the summer’s protests: “a large Negro church in which many pro-integration demonstrations” had been held, in the words of an “urgent” telegram to Hoover from Birmingham that afternoon. The bomb struck just as the church was filling up for Sunday services. Four girls—eleven-year-old Denise McNair, along with fourteen-year-olds Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins—had been looking into a mirror in the basement restroom when the explosion burst in on them, ripping off their Sunday-best dresses and burying them beneath a pile of steel, stone, and brick.[1]
The writer James Baldwin, at the peak of acclaim for the essays in his collection, The Fire Next Time, declared Hoover responsible for their deaths. “I blame J. Edgar Hoover in part for the events in Alabama,” he told The New York Times, citing the FBI’s dismal record on racial violence. “Negroes have no cause to have faith in the FBI.” James Wechsler, Hoover’s inveterate critic at the New York Post, wondered if this brutal crime, coming after years of federal hesitation, might finally do Hoover in. “The bomb that destroyed four children in Birmingham should have finally shattered the Hoover myth,” he wrote, while conceding that “such legends die hard.” The statistics from Birmingham spoke for themselves: at least forty racially motivated bombings since 1947, with not one successful arrest or conviction.[2]
Hoover still blamed those numbers on forces outside the FBI, describing civil rights as thankless work in which “both sides in the racial issue” attacked the FBI from “their respective points of view.” Even to Hoover, though, the church bombing had been so terrible—and so heavily publicized—that sitting back seemed impossible. When a Justice attorney telephoned the FBI that night, the official on duty assured them that Hoover and the rest of the Bureau “considered this a most heinous offense and that we had entered the investigation with no holds barred.” They did so under the 1960 Civil Rights Act, which had expanded the FBI’s jurisdiction in bombing cases. Based on this authority, Hoover ordered an investigation undertaken that afternoon with “all possible speed.”[3]
For the moment, Hoover refrained from making any public statement about the bombing, fearing that he would seem to be “coming in the back door to capitalize on a tragic incident,” in the words of one Bureau official. The best way to send a message, they decided, was to get to the heart of the matter as fast as possible and to speak out “only when we have accomplishments.” But before Hoover could announce any accomplishments or do much to redeem his record on Southern bombings, an even more spectacular crime intervened. It turned the nation’s attention away from Birmingham and toward Dallas.[4]
* * *
—
Hoover had just returned from lunch when the report flashed over the ticker on November 22. Three minutes later, at 1:43 p.m., he reached Bobby Kennedy at Hickory Hill, in Virginia, where the attorney general was enjoying a poolside tuna sandwich. “I have news for you,” Hoover said, as a nearby workman began to run toward Kennedy’s pool, transistor radio in hand. “The president’s been shot.” The wounds were serious, even critical, Hoover reported. The gunman remained at large. He promised to find out more, then hung up and took a call from the field office in Dallas, where the president had been rushed to Parkland Hospital, the right side of his skull and brain shattered by at least one bullet.
Bobby later expressed astonishment at Hoover’s flat, unapologetic tone, his near-total lack of concern or sympathy. This would soon become a standard portrait of those first awful minutes: Hoover stoic and uncaring; Bobby racked by grief, panic, and fear. Under the circumstances, though, Hoover’s emotional distance had certain advantages. Bobby’s secretary, Angie Novello, had refused to make the phone call, unwilling to be the first one to relay the terrible news. Hoover did what he felt his position demanded. The attorney general might be the president’s brother, but he was also Hoover’s boss. Hoover concluded that his boss ought to be informed about a major crime in the making.[5]
There were two more phone calls out to Bobby in Virginia that afternoon, as the Bureau went into mass alert. The first came at 2:10 p.m., when Hoover called to report that “the president is dead” nearly half an hour before the public announcement from Dallas. Deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach remembered that even then Bobby was furious at Hoover. “Hoover just called me,” he told Katzenbach, in the latter’s account. “The president is dead. I think Hoover enjoyed giving me the news.” In Hoover’s own version, the exchange was not nearly so stark. “I asked the attorney general whether or not he wanted to go to Dallas, and told him that we would facilitate the trip,” Hoover recalled. “He said no; his plans were nebulous.”
Hoover’s final call that afternoon reported that the president’s body was heading east on Air Force One, and that Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as president. He also noted that the FBI “had moved in even though this was not a federal crime.” The instinct to discuss jurisdiction at such a moment did not further endear him to Bobby. As a Bureau official later pointed out, however, this was simply what Hoover did in times of crisis. “I think Mr. Hoover’s reaction was like it would have been in any other incident: ‘What is the FBI’s responsibility insofar as this matter is concerned? What is the principal thing the FBI should do at this time?’ ”The answers were not so obvious. As Hoover would explain many times over the next twenty-four hours, the murder of the president was just that: an act of murder, falling under the jurisdiction of the local authorities.[6]
Throughout the country, news of the president’s death brought routines to a halt. At the Bureau, by contrast, Hoover’s great bureaucratic machine shifted into high gear. Whatever the fine points of jurisdiction, it was clear that the country would be looking to the FBI to do something; as with Birmingham, hanging back was not an option. In Dallas, agent James Hosty ascribed a surreal quality to the afternoon, as if the rules and regulations designed for other cases could not possibly apply in a crime of this magnitude. “The president of the United States was gunned down less than six blocks from where I was eating lunch,” he later wrote. “And then FBI headquarters was asking me to help find the president’s assassin.” Hoover’s first assumption, widely shared by other law enforcement officials, was that a right-wing zealot had carried out the assassination. His initial instructions prodded his agents in this direction. “All offices immediately establish whereabouts of bombings suspects, all known Klan and hate group members, known racial extremists,” he ordered in an “urgent” message to the field offices.[7]
