G-Man, page 89
In recent years, Hoover’s attention had shifted somewhat to Muhammad’s most famous disciple, Malcolm X (often identified in Bureau files by his given name, Malcolm Little). Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam but the FBI kept its surveillance going, documenting his rising influence as well as his internal disputes with his former allies. In December, he described the Kennedy assassination as “chickens coming home to roost” and said he was “glad” to see it, an inflammatory statement that raised Bureau alarm. By 1964, he was talking about “the ballot or the bullet” as the choices available to Black Americans—and unlike King, he did not necessarily recommend the former. In response, Hoover authorized a wiretap at his residence, sought to exacerbate his divide with Muhammad, and tracked his movements abroad. The media often portrayed Malcolm X as King’s chief rival, with a distinct vision of how best to attack and defeat American racism. At the FBI, Hoover cared little for such distinctions and treated them more or less the same.[5]
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On December 23, a month and a day after Kennedy’s assassination, Sullivan convened a meeting about King. A planning memo laid out some of the possible questions to be addressed: “What do we know about the background of King’s girlfriends and their husbands?” “Could we convert any of their weak points to strong points for us?” “What are the possibilities of using Mrs. King?” “What are the possibilities of placing a good looking female plant in King’s office?” Five men from Hoover’s seat of government attended the meeting, along with two agents brought in from Atlanta. Over the course of nine hours, they discussed how to use wiretaps, bugs, press leaks, photographs, gossip-spreading, physical surveillance, tax inquiries, anonymous letters, and other counterintelligence techniques against King—all while avoiding “embarrassment to the Bureau.” By early evening, they had settled on a multipronged program, designed to unfold in stages over several weeks and months. The first order of business was to expand surveillance of anyone connected with SCLC: all employees, financial institutions, and donors. Next, agents would gather anything they could find “concerning weaknesses in his character which are of such a nature as to make him unfit to serve as minister of the gospel,” as Sullivan put it in a summary memo. Finally, “at an opportune time,” they would “expose King as an immoral opportunist,” presumably through media or congressional contacts. Sullivan recommended a ninety-day period in which the Bureau would expand its surveillance and gather additional information about “the clerical fraud and Marxist” before taking more ambitious action.
Hoover granted his “OK,” a standard scrawl at the bottom of the two-and-a-half-page memo. After a pause for the Christmas holidays, the King team began to put their plan into effect. The linchpin of Sullivan’s strategy involved expanding from wiretaps into hidden microphones that would record King not merely talking about his assignations, but actually carrying them out. King spent most of his time on the road, journeying wearily between speaking engagements, collapsing for the night in hotel rooms. From the wiretaps agents hoped to learn in advance about his travel plans. Once they knew where he would be staying, they would arrive early at the hotel, place microphones in his room, then sit back and listen.[6]
A chance to test the plan presented itself within days. In early January, the FBI learned that King was due in Washington to observe Supreme Court oral arguments in an Alabama libel case. He planned to stay at the posh Willard Hotel just down the street from the White House, the same place Kappa Alpha had once hosted its annual tea dances. In preparation for King’s arrival, Sullivan assembled a small group from the Washington field office, including its best “sound man” (skilled in bugs and wiretaps) and “hotel contact man” (who maintained the Bureau’s local network of sympathetic hotel staff), to determine the most efficient way “to effect technical coverage on King.” With the help of a friendly source at the Willard, the “sound man” settled on the lamps in a typical Willard room as the most promising site for surveillance. From there, he acquired two identical lamps, wired them with transmitters, and handed them off to a housekeeper, who innocently placed them in King’s room. Before King arrived on January 6, Sullivan’s team took up residence in two nearby rooms equipped with radio receivers and tape recorders. At least once each day, they removed the logs and tapes from the hotel room and walked them over to the Washington field office. The rest of the time, they remained isolated in the monitoring rooms, one floor above King.[7]
Only Hoover and a handful of other federal officials, agents, and confidants have ever heard the recordings. (After Hoover’s death, a court order placed the tapes under embargo for fifty years, set to expire in 2027.) But they spoke a good deal to each other and to allies outside the Bureau about what they thought they heard. According to Hoover, the evening was filled with sexual activities of an “immoral + degenerate” nature, involving not only King and more than one woman but also several of his fellow ministers. One agent recalled hearing King proclaim, “I’m fucking for God!” and “I’m not a Negro tonight,” amid the many other sounds—sighs, laughter, the clink of glasses—coming from the room. A written summary of the recordings, apparently prepared by Bureau officials in early 1968, added detail to those recollections. According to the document, written in a tone of bristling outrage, the dozen or so people gathered in the room that night engaged in a fantastical “sex orgy,” complete with “excessive consumption of alcohol and the use of the vilest language imaginable.” King allegedly participated in and even joked about the full range of activity, declaring himself a proud founding member of the “International Association for the Advancement of Pussy Eaters.”
As the historian David Garrow first noted in a 2019 article for the British magazine Standpoint, the summary contained a far more serious allegation as well. “When one of the women protested that she did not approve” of the group’s sexual practices, the report alleged, a Baptist minister from Baltimore “immediately and forcibly raped her.” A handwritten note, presumably added by Sullivan or another Bureau official, claimed that “King looked on, laughed and offered advice” while the rape took place. These allegations remain just that: allegations. Without the release of the tapes, the summary account tells us only what Bureau officials—and Hoover himself—believed to have occurred, as interpreted through their own racial biases and through surveillance that allowed them to hear but not see what was happening. In any case, it does not absolve either Hoover or his agents of their own misconduct.[8]
If a rape did take place at the Willard that evening, at the time Hoover made little distinction between that criminal violation and the other “natural or unnatural sex acts” alleged to have occurred, in the summary report’s charged language. His interpretation of the recordings drew upon racial stereotypes about Black men’s rapacious, unbounded sexuality. It also built upon Hoover’s outrage at Kennedy’s secret philandering: here was yet another public figure who acted the part of the saintly family man while indulging private appetites. Hoover would ultimately treat the white man and the Black man very differently, however. Even before the Willard incident, he had begun to rely on language of filth and degradation to describe King. “This is disgusting,” he wrote in the margins of a wire-service report announcing King’s award from a Catholic lay group for “Christ-like behavior.” After the night at the Willard, Hoover’s comments grew more vicious. “King is a tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges,” he wrote on one of Sullivan’s reports. In conversation with Bureau officials, Hoover cheered that the Willard tapes “will destroy the burrhead,” deploying a racial epithet that said far more about Hoover’s own moral failings than about King’s.[9]
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Johnson delivered his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, two nights after the Bureau’s discoveries at the Willard. In that speech, he declared racial justice to be “a moral issue” that “must be met” by swift passage of the civil rights bill. To another president and another FBI director, the timing of those two events—the Willard surveillance and the call for civil rights legislation—might have created an inexorable conflict. Neither Johnson nor Hoover saw the situation that way. On January 14, Hoover dispatched DeLoach to brief the White House on what the FBI had found at the Willard, eager to keep the president in the loop. As Johnson’s emissary, Walter Jenkins read the FBI’s report “word for word” and declared King’s behavior “repulsive.” Then he recommended that the FBI move forward with what it was already planning to do. According to DeLoach, Jenkins believed that “the FBI could perform a good service to the country if this matter could somehow be confidentially given to members of the press.” DeLoach assured Jenkins that “the Director had this in mind” for the future.[10]
Johnson apparently made no mention of the Willard incident or any of the FBI’s plans when he met with King and other civil rights leaders on January 18. But even as Johnson assured King that the civil rights bill would be forced through the House “without a word or a comma changed,” Hoover was beginning to test whether Congress might also be a useful vehicle for exposing King. On January 29, Hoover appeared before a House appropriations subcommittee to deliver his annual testimony. When it came time to discuss civil rights, he warned vaguely about the potential for “infiltration, exploitation, and control of the Negro population” by the Communist Party. Then he moved off the record to discuss King’s communist ties and sexual activities. Everyone understood what happened to “off the record” comments in Washington: they entered the Capitol Hill whisper chain, passed from congressman to staffer to reporter in backroom chats. Coming in the midst of a congressional showdown over Johnson’s civil rights bill, Hoover’s comments spread rapidly.
Still, on February 10, less than two weeks after Hoover’s testimony, the House passed the civil rights bill, exactly as Johnson had hoped. A week later, Jenkins summoned DeLoach to the White House and asked for the full King file—not just the revelations from the Willard and the wiretaps, but the years of background material on Levison and O’Dell. The impetus for the meeting supposedly came from Johnson’s civil rights aides, who worried that Hoover’s rumormongering about King might endanger the civil rights bill as it made the treacherous passage from House to Senate. Bobby Kennedy, too, was rumored to be sorting out how to make a move, either for or against King. DeLoach assured Jenkins that Hoover had everything under control. The FBI would take no action that might imperil Johnson’s political agenda.
Hoover mostly lived up to that promise. In mid-March, hoping to disrupt the civil rights bill’s passage through the Senate, Louisiana congressman and HUAC chair Ed Willis called on DeLoach with a proposition: the committee wanted to subpoena Hoover to testify on the record about King’s many foibles. DeLoach also received a query from Virginia congressman Howard W. Smith, a passionate anticommunist who was now head of the House Rules Committee. Smith’s effort to derail the civil rights bill by adding a clause outlawing sex discrimination was backfiring spectacularly, resulting in legislative language that now included women as a protected class. Now he saw a chance to strike another blow through the FBI. Both legislators were “seriously disturbed about the fact that there appeared to be considerable derogatory information about King and apparently no one in the Congress was taking steps to advise the general public,” DeLoach reported to Hoover. The tricky calculation, all agreed, was “the timing of exposing King.”[11]
If Hoover had embraced Willis’s idea—going before HUAC to testify about Levison and O’Dell and the Willard—he would have seriously damaged King’s reputation. But he would also have disrupted Johnson’s plans and risked exposing the Bureau’s operation. So he decided to remain silent, at least until after the presidential election.
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The FBI continued to gather information on King throughout the spring of 1964, as the Senate took up the civil rights bill and then settled in for another filibuster. Their hotel-room bugging captured King making a tasteless joke during a televised rerun of John Kennedy’s funeral. “Look at her!” King supposedly crowed as Jackie Kennedy bent down over her husband’s casket, “sucking him off one last time”—a comment that Hoover promptly shared with Bobby Kennedy. In Los Angeles and Atlanta, agents overheard King in conversation with a “girl friend” and “another girl friend,” their identities and backgrounds immediately subject to FBI inquiry. In Detroit, a team of the Bureau’s “very best men” bugged his hotel room and considered ginning up a police raid to catch him in the act. The most sensational new developments came from Las Vegas, where an investigator for the gaming commission interviewed a white showgirl and sometime prostitute who said she’d spent a night with King, gospel singer Clara Ward, and another male friend of King’s. Together, they supposedly engaged in “unnatural” acts. Like Hoover, the investigator recognized the implications of this blockbuster claim. “The good doctor doesn’t exactly practice what he preaches, or does he?” he asked in a gleeful memo.[12]
In June came the last phase of debate over the civil rights bill. West Virginia senator Robert Byrd filibustered the bill for more than fourteen hours. But the final word went to Goldwater, who delivered a mournful eight-minute speech on the evening of June 18 decrying the imminent destruction of Americans’ “God-given liberties.” The next day, supposedly beaten down by what Goldwater described as Johnson’s “sledgehammer political tactics,” the Senate voted to pass the bill. The victory cost Johnson dearly among Southern Democrats, who now regarded him as a cross between a fool and a race traitor. On June 19, though, the most difficult phase seemed to be over, with the Senate votes tallied and definitive.[13]
Then a crime out of Mississippi threw the whole calculus out of balance.
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The FBI’s resident agent in Jackson, Mississippi, received the phone call just after ten p.m. on Sunday, June 21. According to the worried voice on the line, three young civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney—had gone missing that afternoon somewhere in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner were white left-leaning activists from New York. They had come to Mississippi as an advance guard for Freedom Summer, a bold new voter-registration project that placed Northern volunteers, including white college students, in local Black homes. Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old Black man, lived in Mississippi, observing, absorbing, and objecting to its indignities. The three men had gone to Neshoba to investigate a recent church burning but failed to call in for their four p.m. safety check. The chain of alarm that followed extended first to the Freedom Summer regional office, then to the jails, and finally, six hours later, to the local Bureau office.
The FBI agent at Jackson took no action that first night, other than telling the worried civil rights workers to “keep me informed.” Nor did he do much the following morning, perhaps hoping that the young men would still show up. By Monday evening, however, it was clear that they would not be returning anytime soon and that they had likely suffered a torturous fate. Just before six p.m., Bobby Kennedy ordered the FBI into the case and notified the president about the unfolding crisis. Half an hour later, Walter Cronkite announced to the country that “three young civil rights workers disappeared . . . on Sunday night near the central Mississippi town of Philadelphia, about fifty miles northeast of Jackson.” The case would be treated, for now, as an interstate kidnapping, even though everyone feared that the boys were already dead somewhere in the swamps of Mississippi.[14]
Hoover ordered a fleet of agents into Neshoba County, where they quickly found that they were not popular men. At the Freedom Summer offices, both volunteers and locals felt that help had come too little, too late, while local whites showed the same hostility and contempt they had displayed for years in lynching investigations. By four p.m. Hoover nonetheless had some real news for the president. “I wanted to let you know we found the car,” he told Johnson by phone. “Nobody knows this at all, but the car was burned, and we do not know yet whether any bodies are inside of the car.” A few hours later, he called back to report that the bodies were not in the car, and that the investigation would be continuing.[15]
Hoover had little more news to offer over the next several weeks, as the investigation began to slow and then stall, hampered by the silence that always seemed to descend over white residents in such cases. He nonetheless proved useful to Johnson, helping the president to manage the final push toward civil rights legislation even as heightened emotions and deep uncertainty about the missing young men kept Mississippi on the verge of an “explosion.” For all his political experience, Johnson had never before dealt with this sort of ongoing unsolved crime, or with the blend of public scrutiny and high contingency it entailed. Hoover had decades of accumulated wisdom. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was willing to listen.
