G-Man, page 91
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Until this moment, Johnson’s pressure had arguably brought out the best in Hoover, inspiring the director to look beyond his rigid self-interest, to transform his Government Men once again into avenging angels of federal power. By forcing the FBI into the civil rights battle, and by constraining the exposure of King, Johnson pushed Hoover into the role of statesman and peacemaker, the one man capable of easing the white South into its new legal regime. He had given FBI agents a chance to showcase their investigative prowess, then championed them when they came through. Johnson viewed Hoover mostly as a political asset, but his attitude had broadened rather than narrowed Hoover’s range of action. With Johnson’s prodding, Hoover showed that the FBI was still capable of producing solid and professional work. Then, in August, Johnson asked Hoover for a favor that would have shattered any illusion of Hoover’s apolitical professionalism or support for civil rights, if it had become widely known.
Their scheme involved the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, scheduled for August 24–27, where Johnson would, if all went well, be affirmed as his party’s nominee. Johnson saw threats to that prospect coming from two directions. First were the men he perceived as party rivals, ambitious fellow Democrats who might set out to steal the convention and thus deny him the nomination. Second was a Freedom Summer delegation planning to truck into Atlantic City under the banner of the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, where they would stage a convention-floor fight against the lily-white Mississippi delegation. Johnson viewed both insurgencies as personal affronts, displays of ingratitude and hostility from the very people he had worked so hard to appease. He was also bitter about the possibility of a convention-floor challenge from Bobby Kennedy, his own attorney general, who might attempt to capitalize on public sympathy over the assassination. But it was the MFDP that threatened to crack the Democratic coalition so essential to Johnson’s political success. Seating the Black delegates, Johnson feared, would lead to a walkout from the white South. Not seating them would undermine his hard-won moral authority on civil rights. Hoover was once again supposed to help hold it all together.
This time, there would be no statesmanlike ceremony, no special appearance by Hoover. Instead, Johnson wanted bugs, taps, and confidential informants. According to DeLoach, Hoover privately complained that “Lyndon is way out of line” in asking the FBI to conduct surveillance at a political convention. But Hoover knew “when he was trapped.” On July 25, he left for La Jolla with Tolson. While he was gone, DeLoach took charge of planning for the convention.[9]
What Johnson wanted above all was a “showcase convention,” as DeLoach later described it, with “no ‘incidents,’ no angry demonstrators on TV, no pictures of police cracking the heads of civil rights protestors.” In early August, Hoover instructed DeLoach to assemble a “special squad” of agents who could be counted upon to act with discretion on the president’s behalf. To supplement the agents, he ordered the FBI’s best, most experienced civil rights informants to amass in Atlantic City. One of those informants, Julius Hobson, ran the Washington office of CORE; he knew all the major figures who would be coming to town for the convention, including King. Several of the agents themselves would pose as reporters for NBC News, with the company’s approval and cooperation. Aiding them all would be an extensive array of taps and bugs planted at meeting halls and local hotels where civil rights “agitators,” including King, were likely to be staying.[10]
Hoover returned to Washington in late August, just in time to watch the operation play out. The convention opened to immediate controversy, with Alabama governor George Wallace denouncing the entire proceeding as a desecration of white supremacy, while the Freedom Summer activists prepared to deliver their own televised version of events. They had traveled north with a full-scale model of the torched and blackened station wagon where Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner endured their final moments. They also brought a secret weapon in the form of Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, whose eloquent testimony about the passion and pain she experienced in attempting to register to vote in Mississippi proved to be the convention’s greatest televised sensation. Bureau informants kept track of it all, transmitting verbatim reports from the MFDP strategy sessions held in the basement of a local church, while agents posing as reporters followed up with “interviews” and off-the-record conversations with civil rights activists. Based in part on such information, Johnson scheduled a surprise press briefing from Washington in an attempt to distract from Hamer’s speech.[11]
Johnson refused to come to Atlantic City until the nomination had been secured. So it was up to DeLoach’s team to keep the president apprised of what was happening along the boardwalk and inside the convention hall. They worked through the two Johnson aides assigned to manage events on the ground in Atlantic City: the always loyal Walter Jenkins and the younger Bill Moyers. DeLoach delivered twice-daily reports to them, one in the morning and one in the evening, documenting various plans for demonstrations, ongoing political calculations, and unseemly late-night goings-on. One noted that King would likely back Johnson no matter what happened with the MFDP, for fear that Goldwater’s “coalition of racists and the extreme reactionary conservatives of the North” might actually capture the White House. Another documented King’s plans to meet up with a woman from Philadelphia at a motel room near the turnpike as soon as he could get away. According to Senator Richard Russell, the president stayed up late poring over the Bureau’s intelligence and strategizing about the next day’s sessions. “He loves this,” Russell noted in his private diary. “Hoover has apparently been turned loose and is tapping everything.”
In truth, neither Bobby Kennedy nor the MFDP stood much chance of unseating a popular incumbent president. But this is not what Johnson believed at the time, and he credited “the presence of [Bureau] men, although completely unobserved by all except my immediate assistants” with helping him to keep the convention on his side. In total, DeLoach provided forty-four pages of on-site intelligence to the White House, much of it relating the private conversations and strategy sessions of civil rights leaders. That information, DeLoach concluded, “enabled [the Johnson team] to make spot decisions and to adjust Convention plans to meet potential problems before serious trouble developed.”[12]
One of those decisions involved offering two at-large delegate slots to the MFDP, whose members promptly rejected it. Members of the official all-white delegations from Mississippi and Alabama walked out as well, though without upending the entire convention as Johnson had feared. Johnson finally arrived in the city on the evening of August 26, once the controversy had been more or less settled, prepared to accept the party’s nomination as its presidential candidate the following day. Hoover never left Washington, but he paid close attention to DeLoach’s reports. On September 1, he awarded DeLoach a three-hundred-dollar bonus for achieving “successful results” in one of the strangest and most politically sensitive operations ever undertaken by the Bureau.[13]
DeLoach later admitted that the FBI should never have been in Atlantic City, that Hoover should have held the line at such blatant political use of his men. “At best,” he wrote, “it was demeaning; at worst, it was a serious breach of the law.” That fall, though, he knew better than to express any reservations about the director’s blossoming alliance with Johnson. “While this was rather a unique experience for us,” he wrote to Hoover on September 8, “I do hope that our work, in some small manner, further contributed to the President’s great confidence in you and the FBI.”[14]
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At least one event made Hoover’s job easier during the final months of 1964. In early September, just after the Atlantic City convention, Bobby Kennedy resigned as attorney general in order to run for the Senate from New York. He tried to make peace as he left, sending personal notes to both Hoover and Tolson thanking them for “having made an important contribution to the country in a time of maximum need.” After almost four years of rancor, Hoover saw no need to placate his now-former boss. On September 3, Bobby threw a farewell party in the Justice Department courtyard for some two thousand employees. Hoover and Tolson declined to attend, though they may have heard strains of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” wafting up through the Justice corridors.[15]
Nobody thought Bobby was gone from Washington forever. “RFK Goodby Sounds like ‘I’ll Be Back,’ ” The Boston Globe noted. Meanwhile, Hoover had other problems to handle. On September 24, the Warren Commission delivered its report to the president in a somber ceremony in the White House Cabinet Room. Less than forty-eight hours later, Hoover released his own report—not on the assassination but on the summer’s riots in Harlem. Throughout September, at Johnson’s request, he had been collaborating with former New York governor Thomas Dewey about the report’s scope, which had ballooned to include recent racial uprisings in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, as well as in smaller cities like Paterson, New Jersey, and Dixmoor, Illinois. As DeLoach noted, the president hoped to “convince the American public that the Johnson Administration is actually attempting to do something about the many riots going on.” Hoover delivered more or less what the president wanted. The final report reflected some of Hoover’s usual preoccupations. According to the FBI, “hoodlums” and “irresponsible Negroes,” many of them inspired by Malcolm X, helped to fuel the disorder in Harlem. Mostly, though, the report was a marvel of careful messaging, in which Hoover catered to Johnson’s preferred view. After decades of scoffing at the “sentimentalists” and “bleeding hearts” who emphasized poverty as a cause of crime, Hoover concluded that “underlying economic and social conditions” had precipitated the summer’s episodes of unrest. He even ruled out speculation that the Communist Party had played a role in planning the violence.[16]
To Hoover’s conservative allies, the FBI’s stance was thoroughly perplexing. “We must hope that future attempts to conscript the FBI as a propaganda agent for the administration’s policies will fail,” grumbled National Review, warning that Hoover was putting his “hero” status among conservatives in jeopardy. At the White House, though, it was yet another example of the president’s genius in establishing his alliance with Hoover. Against all odds, Johnson “maneuvered his anticommunist FBI director into issuing a report that endorsed the war on poverty [and] helped blunt the Goldwater Republican challenge,” one historian has noted. Though Hoover had spent forty years insisting that the FBI could not be swayed by political concerns, he turned out to be as susceptible as anyone to Johnson’s masterful blend of praise, coercion, and power.[17]
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Hoover performed one more favor for Johnson before the election. This one was as much personal as it was political. On October 7, after a party at the Newsweek office, Walter Jenkins—the FBI’s chief contact at the White House—walked to the local YMCA and entered the men’s bathroom. There, he met a homeless army veteran and proceeded to have sex with him. Neither man realized that the vice squad was watching as part of a sting operation. The police arrested Jenkins and took him down to the station for booking. A week later, when Evening Star reporters learned of the arrest and threatened to write about it, Jenkins reached out to Johnson adviser Abe Fortas, confessing that he was devastated by the impending scandal and wanted to die. Fortas checked Jenkins into the George Washington University Hospital. Then he called DeLoach, who volunteered to see if anything could be done to hush up the police report. When it turned out that the news was already on its way into print, they brought Hoover into the loop to assist the Johnson campaign one more time.[18]
The Republicans came out punching hard. On behalf of the Goldwater campaign, they demanded to know whether Jenkins had revealed national security information during these assignations, and whether he had ever been subject to a thorough security check. Within twenty-four hours, hoping to insulate his own campaign, Johnson formally ordered the FBI to investigate and report back, just as it had done in Harlem. Behind closed doors, Hoover professed once again to be outraged by Johnson’s presumption, including not only the pressure to issue an immediate press release absolving Jenkins of any taint but also to find out who had tipped off the press in the first place. “I told Fortas this is not in accord with what I think should be done,” Hoover complained. As during the convention, however, he also concluded “that I will have to carry out these instructions.” Over the next few days, Hoover dispatched agents to interview everyone involved, including Jenkins’s friends, family, and coworkers.[19]
What they found was not a grand national security conspiracy, but a sad tale: Jenkins, father of six, had been arrested in the same bathroom, for the same purpose, five years earlier. His security clearance had been completed a year before that encounter—hence the ostensible ignorance of the White House about his sexual activities. Both DeLoach and Johnson professed to be baffled that they had been working side by side with a man who kept such secrets and who seemed to exhibit all the signs of vigorous heterosexual manhood. “There has never been the slightest inclination of homosexuality,” DeLoach said, recalling how he and Jenkins had attended church, gone on walks, and cracked jokes together—even “played golf at least fifty times.” Johnson, too, seemed perplexed that his own aide could have succeeded in hiding such a significant fact. DeLoach assured him that “these things in Washington have come up quite often before” and that the FBI would figure out how to handle it.[20]
Hoover did not find the incident nearly as confusing. He speculated that Jenkins—like Sumner Welles and so many others over the years—had simply lost control of himself, succumbing to the sort of temptation that might befall any man. As Hoover explained to Johnson on October 19, four days into the investigation, Jenkins had been under enormous stress, with the election and his White House duties to manage. As a result, he had a breakdown, leading to his homosexual activity. “I stated I thought in regard to Mr. Jenkins that they will find it was something mental,” Hoover recalled to Tolson, “and if so, it would be well if a medical report can be prepared in due time that this man’s condition requires institutionalizing.” Nobody seems to have questioned how, exactly, a few drinks and a loss of self-control would inexorably lead a man to the basement of the YMCA.[21]
Johnson’s political opponents saw no reason to give anyone—Jenkins, Johnson, or even Hoover—the benefit of the doubt. On October 15, in a routine gesture of sympathy, Hoover had sent flowers to Jenkins in the hospital, along with a card wishing for a speedy recovery. Six days later, with the investigation in full swing, someone mentioned this fact to the press. The subsequent coverage emphasized Hoover’s conflict of interest: Why was he investigating a man to whom he had sent flowers? More difficult was the innuendo that Hoover might have more in common with Jenkins than he wished to acknowledge.[22]
Hoover acted tough. “I’ve got a pretty powerful hide on that,” he told Johnson. “I’ve listened to it so long.” What he did not do, to Johnson’s relief, was renounce Jenkins. On October 22, with less than two weeks to go before the election, Hoover issued a report absolving Jenkins of any national security violations. To the Goldwater camp, this seemed like yet another example of Johnson-Hoover collusion: “misuse” of the FBI “for blatantly political purposes,” in the words of one Republican senator. While Hoover was doing Johnson a political favor, however, the report also seems to have reflected what he actually believed. “My feeling of Jenkins, and I know him officially and personally, is that I like him and feel sorry for him,” he wrote in a memo to Tolson and other Bureau officials. “It is a pitiful case and I think it is time for people to follow the admonition of the Bible about persons throwing the first stone and that none are without sin.”
Johnson expressed gratitude for Hoover’s approach. “You handled it with thoroughness and with diligence and with compassion,” he told Hoover by phone. Such words were not often spoken about the FBI director, especially when it came to sensitivity about other men’s vulnerabilities. But the Jenkins story brought out something human in both Hoover and Johnson, a point of private connection between two quintessentially political men.[23]
It did not hurt that the politics worked out as well. On November 3, less than two weeks after the Jenkins report, Johnson won the presidential election in one of the great landslides of American history, trouncing Goldwater with more than 90 percent of the electoral college and 61 percent of the popular vote. The next day, Hoover wrote to Johnson offering “congratulations on your overwhelming victory.” He promised, during the four years ahead as during the campaign itself, “to assist you in the many problems that lie ahead.”[24]
Chapter 50
The Most Notorious Liar
(1964–1965)
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leaving Hoover’s office after their first and only sit-down meeting, December 1, 1964. Newly released documents help to show the full extent of the FBI’s surveillance and harassment campaign against King.
Library of Congress, NYWT&S Collection
For almost a year, with the civil rights bill and then Johnson’s election hanging in the balance, Hoover had postponed his plan to “expose” Martin Luther King. In November 1964, with those hurdles behind him, he took up where he had left off. For his initial audience, he chose the small but dogged Washington women’s press briefing group, an offshoot of the more powerful National Press Club, which did not deign to admit women as members. As a regular practice, the women’s club had scheduled private meetings with high-profile Washington officials to explore “their responsibilities, current problems of interest, etc.,” as they explained to DeLoach. After some initial skepticism, Hoover and DeLoach concluded that the meeting offered an opportunity for Hoover to promote his agenda for the new presidential term. It also provided a chance to test the waters about King and other hot-button issues. “I explained . . . that the ladies must fully understand that some of the Director’s comments may have to be ‘off the record,’ ” DeLoach noted in a memo.[1]
