G-Man, page 92
On the morning of Wednesday, November 18, more than two dozen women filed into Hoover’s office. Hoover was always “shy on such occasions,” DeLoach recalled, “and tried to avoid them.” When avoidance was not possible, he covered up his nervousness by speaking so fast and breathlessly that nobody else could get a word in edgewise. His monologue on November 18 proved especially dizzying, as if the pent-up frustration of the previous four years needed to be released all at once. Hoover took aim at the Warren Commission: “unfair and unjust,” he declared, “a classic example of Monday morning quarterbacking.” He attacked the Birchers (“I have no respect for the head of the society”), gun owners (“There are licenses for automobiles and dogs; why not guns?”), even Congress itself (“Naturally I get more and more irritated when I see Congress passing along to us matters that should be handled by the states”). DeLoach had set aside an hour for the briefing, but Hoover continued on into a second hour, then a third. He spoke on crime and states’ rights, on lie detectors and juvenile delinquents, on the Neshoba County crime and the corruption of Southern law enforcement.
Of everything Hoover said that morning, however, one set of comments stood out. Without any special notice, he turned to the subject of King, who was then having a banner few weeks as the recently announced recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover seized the occasion not to comment on the prize, but to “correct” the record on King’s two-year-old criticism of the Bureau for staffing its Southern offices with Southern-born agents. “In view of King’s attitude and his continued criticism of the FBI on this,” Hoover told the reporters, “I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country.” Then he went off the record for “further comments,” just as he had done before the appropriations committee. There is no reliable account of what he said, but it is not hard to imagine the range of possibilities: Levison and O’Dell, the girlfriends and assignations, King’s claim that he obeyed a higher law than that imposed by mere courts and policemen.
DeLoach later claimed that he tried to get Hoover to retract the “notorious liar” comment. “I grabbed pencil and paper, scrawled a note, and passed it over to Hoover. It read, ‘Don’t you think you should insist that the remark about King was off the record?’ ” Hoover refused—not just once, but three times—in response to DeLoach’s increasingly insistent notes. “DeLoach advises me to tell you ladies that my calling Dr. King a notorious liar should be off the record,” he informed the room. “I won’t do this. Feel free to print my remarks as given.”[2]
And so they did. Measured by the firestorm that followed, Hoover made a terrible decision that day, committing to a remark that would ultimately become one of the most “notorious” episodes of his career. And yet DeLoach’s version of events also suggests that Hoover was no rambling old man—that Hoover knew, or thought he knew, what he was doing. This was Walter Winchell’s opinion, presumably culled from conversations with Hoover. The FBI director’s performance, Winchell wrote, “was not, as assumed by editorial page critics, a sudden tantrum” about King. Hoover had simply “delayed his blast until after Election Day so that the White House would not be involved.”[3]
* * *
—
The next morning, Nicholas Katzenbach reluctantly entered the director’s office to discuss what to do. A former law professor, festooned with degrees from Yale, Princeton, and Oxford, Katzenbach had been recruited into government during the Kennedy years as an assistant attorney general, a member of the brash young team that had so alienated Hoover. In 1963, he had faced off against George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, his bald pate and slump-shouldered tall-man’s posture a famous contrast to Wallace’s defiant snarl and squat frame. After the assassination, he had pushed for the Warren Commission, and then for full transparency in the FBI’s posthumous investigation into Oswald. Now he had become acting attorney general, appointed to keep things running while Bobby Kennedy moved on to his new job as the junior senator from New York.[4]
With Katzenbach, Hoover tried to backtrack about the King comment, no doubt aware that it was not going over well among administration liberals. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “It was a mistake to see all those women reporters.” Hoover blamed DeLoach for orchestrating the event and for convincing everyone that it was a good idea. Grudgingly, Katzenbach decided to close ranks and declare his support for Hoover. Later that day, when the reporters asked him if he agreed with Hoover’s comments about King, the acting attorney general replied, with studied neutrality, “I’m pleased with the FBI’s job in the South.” He then added, “Civil rights leaders often feel that more should be done. Generally, it’s impatience on their part.”[5]
Those same civil rights leaders were already at the White House, however, complaining to Johnson that his FBI director was out of control and ought to be disciplined. The meeting had been scheduled days earlier, with Johnson hoping to discuss his civil rights agenda for the new term. The participants—including NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins, long a friendly Bureau contact—now found the meeting hijacked by a discussion of Hoover. “We stand with Dr. King in his conviction that the FBI has not provided adequate protection to Negroes in the South,” Wilkins told the press. Nearly every faction of the movement seemed to agree, united in their indignation about Hoover’s comments if not on questions of strategy and tactics. That same day, a spokesman from CORE called to tell DeLoach that his group would be issuing a statement in solidarity with King, even though “CORE leaders considered the FBI as a friend of theirs,” as DeLoach reported to Hoover. Hoover might have welcomed the advance warning as a tribute to his years of engagement, some of it mutually beneficial, with the nation’s civil rights groups. Instead, he declared them all a bunch of “hypocrites.”[6]
The press mostly responded with shock at Hoover’s attempt to malign a soon-to-be Nobel laureate. Even his admirers seemed to think he had gone too far. “Please sir, shut up,” one fan suggested. “You are, we’ll all acknowledge, a top-flight administrator, an excellent cop, and a highly accomplished empire builder and bureaucrat. But that doesn’t give you any right to call some of our most distinguished citizens liars and bleeding hearts while you are still on the public payroll.” Newsweek editor Ben Bradlee (soon to become editor of The Washington Post) commissioned a story about rumors that Johnson planned to fire Hoover. Bradlee also let it be known around town “that the FBI had told him that Martin Luther King was a sexual degenerate,” but that he disapproved of the FBI’s underhanded tactics far more than he disapproved of King.[7]
King himself happened to be off in the Bahamas, attempting to relax and work on his Nobel speech. By the middle of Friday afternoon, reporters began to helicopter onto the sandy expanse near King’s hotel in order to find out what the man himself had to say. Put on the spot, King conjured up a surprisingly generous, if patronizing, response. “I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure,” he told reporters. “He has apparently faltered under the awesome burdens, complexities and responsibilities of his office.” The FBI later captured a less sympathetic perspective via wiretap. King’s father urged his son, via Coretta, “to be moderate in his approach to this problem,” but King—like Hoover—was in no mood for compromise. “Hoover is old and getting senile,” he told a friend, “and should be hit from all sides.”[8]
DeLoach persuaded Hoover not to hit back that first weekend. For the most part, Hoover listened. On Friday, he appeared at a reception hosted by the widow of a prominent Washington developer, taking up a roost by the door and chatting with senators as if nothing were amiss. The criticism and mockery rankled, however, especially because Hoover felt he had done nothing wrong—that he was, once again, the victim of a hostile press. After all, King had lied, sometimes directly to the president. Plus, the Bureau was now devoting hundreds if not thousands of agents to civil rights cases—even, back in July, to protecting King himself. Hoover seemed genuinely baffled by the uproar over his comments, and by the media’s refusal to pursue his off-the-record hints. “I cannot understand why we are unable to get the true facts before the public,” he wrote to DeLoach. “We can’t even get our accomplishments published.”[9]
Many of Hoover’s closest friends—men who had been with him for decades—shared this sense of grievance, calling in to assure Hoover that he would survive and even prosper once things settled down. “History has a way of putting such incidents in perspective and in the end you will come through with your reputation untarnished,” Nixon wrote. Indeed, the one man whose opinion really mattered, Lyndon Johnson, seemed to find the whole episode highly amusing, one of the few times he’d caught Hoover in a major public misstep. In conversations with DeLoach, the president treated Hoover like a dotty old uncle, sometimes prickly and theatrical but still worthy of family love. “We all get to feeling sorry for ourselves once in a while, and feeling like somebody’s picking on us,” he told DeLoach two days after Hoover’s press conference.[10]
When questioned by reporters, Johnson announced gravely that he would not consider dismissing Hoover, despite the very serious outcry over the director’s remarks. To his aides, he offered what would become one of the most famous phrases of his presidency. Asked why he would not, at last, get rid of the sixty-nine-year-old FBI director, Johnson allegedly explained in his most down-home, East Texas patois, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”[11]
* * *
—
Johnson might have been less amused if he had understood the full scope of what Hoover and the FBI were planning. Though DeLoach apparently believed that a full retreat was in order, Sullivan insisted that the time was ripe to push ahead in their long-delayed counterintelligence campaign against King. Hoover agreed with Sullivan.
They waited until Saturday to begin carrying out the plan. “Sometime during the morning,” recalled Seymor Fred Phillips, an agent in the Domestic Intelligence Division, “Sullivan came into my office and asked me for some unwatermarked stationery. I secured some from my secretary’s desk and after checking it through the light, I offered it to Sullivan.” A bit later, Sullivan called over to ask for the SCLC’s address in Atlanta. When Phillips stopped by to deliver the information, his boss “seemed to be busily at work at a typewriter on a stand next to his desk.” Sullivan inquired once again if the paper on which he was typing was truly, definitively untraceable.
What he was typing during those Saturday hours, on that unwatermarked paper, was a single-page letter addressed to King, allegedly written by a Black man disillusioned by his hero’s moral failings. “King, In view of your low grade, abnormal personal behavior I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr.,” the letter began. “And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast.” The letter went on to describe the varieties of “sexually psychotic” crimes allegedly committed by King: “all your adulterous acts, your sexual orgies extending far into the past.” Its language conjured up the degraded images often attributed to Black men in American culture, labeling King an “evil, abnormal beast,” a “dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile,” and a “filthy, abnormal animal.” At the same time, it showed a frightening level of specificity, describing sexual escapades with other “ministers of the Gospel,” and going so far as to identify one of King’s West Coast “playmates” by name. The message concluded with a vague threat and a deadline: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days.” Once he completed the letter, Sullivan placed it in a sealed envelope along with an audio “highlights” reel gleaned from the FBI’s hotel-room recordings.
Few people know precisely what ended up on that tape; it is under court embargo until 2027, along with the rest of the King recordings. And there are other lingering mysteries: What did Sullivan believe was the “one thing” that King knew to do? And why did it have to happen on Christmas, thirty-four days from November 21? King and his confidants saw a dire possibility. “There was no question that there was a strong suggestion that Martin commit suicide in this sick letter,” recalled Andrew Young, one of King’s closest advisers.
Whatever they were seeking, Hoover and Sullivan wanted above all to make sure that the operation could not be traced directly to the Bureau. Around noon, Sullivan summoned Phillips again—this time, with instructions to take the mysterious package over to Bureau headquarters. The next phase of the operation fell to agent Lish Whitson, who received a phone call from Sullivan at home that afternoon with instructions to drop everything and proceed immediately to the north terminal of Washington’s National Airport. Once there, Whitson was approached by a young man who identified him as “Mr. Whitson” and then thrust a brown-paper package, approximately eight inches square and one inch thick, into his hands. Whitson had been told to fly to Miami. Once there, he called Sullivan for further instructions. As Whitson would inform congressional investigators more than a decade later, he “did as directed and upon calling Sullivan was instructed to address the package to Mr. Martin Luther King.” From there, he had the package weighed, added the proper postage, and dropped it into the U.S. mail, addressed to King, with no return address. On Sunday, he flew to Washington. On Monday, back in the office, he informed Sullivan that the whole journey had gone well. Sullivan promised “someday” to “tell you all about” what had been inside the package.[12]
* * *
—
While Sullivan orchestrated the mailing to King, Hoover and DeLoach launched another, related project: containing the damage to Hoover’s reputation as a result of the “notorious liar” comment. For days after the briefing, Hoover hesitated to reengage the press, grumbling away in private memos and phone conversations but refusing public comment. Then, on Tuesday night, once Whitson was safely back from Florida, Hoover broke his silence. The forum was a black-tie dinner for 1,114 patrons in the grand ballroom of Chicago’s Hilton Hotel, a benefit for Loyola University’s medical school. Hoover was the guest of honor, recipient of the newly inaugurated Sword of Loyola prize, in “tribute to a national or international figure who exhibits a high degree of courage, dedication, and service.” And perhaps, after the previous week’s uproar, it did take a certain misguided courage for Hoover to continue to speak his mind.
He came with a script and mostly followed it, decrying the “bleeding hearts” who coddled juvenile delinquents and the criminals who took advantage of the system. At some point, however, he apparently departed from his Crime Records text to deliver a rebuttal to King—indeed, to all the critics and civil rights sympathizers who’d had so much to say over the past five days. “It is a great misfortune that the zealots or pressure groups always think with their emotions and seldom with reason,” he declared. “They have no compunction carping, lying and exaggerating with the fiercest passion, spearheaded at times by Communists and moral degenerates.” He did not name any specific “degenerates,” but he did not need to. The speech was aimed not at the genteel Catholics in the room but at King and his allies, who would surely read his remarks in the press and realize that he had no intention of backing down.[13]
They got the message. On November 27, three days after Hoover’s talk, NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins contacted DeLoach to request an emergency face-to-face meeting. He apologized for the disruption—it was Thanksgiving weekend—but he felt that the matter could not wait. “Wilkins stated he personally knew about whom the Director was talking,” DeLoach reported, “although many other Negroes did not know.” According to Wilkins, movement leaders recognized that the FBI might be planning to expose King’s infidelities, with dire consequences to follow. Wilkins stipulated the “truthfulness of the sexual degenerate allegations and communist allegations against King,” according to DeLoach, and maintained “that he personally did not mind seeing King ruined.” But Wilkins also knew that “if King was ruined the entire civil rights movement would be ruined,” an outcome he was keen to avoid. The timing for a scandal could hardly have been worse: King was just days away from receiving the Nobel Prize. And he had already announced plans for a voting-rights campaign in Selma, Alabama. Wilkins pleaded with DeLoach for time in which his fellow civil rights leaders could put a little pressure on King—perhaps even persuade him (in a painful twist of logic) to stop attacking Hoover. In the meantime, Wilkins expressed a desperate hope that “the FBI would not expose King before something could be done,” such as convincing King to leave public life and take up the presidency of “a small college.” DeLoach replied disingenuously that the FBI would never engage in gossip-mongering and gutter talk. That said, “if King wanted war we were prepared to give it to him.”[14]
