G-Man, page 95
FBI agents assigned to the march believed they had played at least some role in making that moment happen, even if the marchers, still resentful of Hoover’s watch-and-film stance, did not necessarily see things that way. “There had been visible proof that a peaceful march could be held in any part of the United States,” a supervising official later reflected. “And there was a lot of pride on the part of law enforcement.” But there was shame and disappointment, too, because the story of Selma did not end with an inspiring speech on the Montgomery capitol steps. That night, as the marchers were being ferried by car back to Selma, four Klansmen night-riding along Highway 80 pulled up beside an Oldsmobile station wagon and fired into the driver’s side window. One of those blasts struck a march volunteer named Viola Liuzzo near her left ear and severed her spinal cord, “causing almost instantaneous death,” in the Bureau’s description. Liuzzo was a mother of five from Detroit. She said she had felt called to answer King’s plea for racial solidarity. She was also a white woman driving a Black male passenger in a car with a bumper sticker declaring “All the Way with LBJ,” a social crime for which she had been executed.[20]
* * *
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The Liuzzo murder showed the limits of Hoover’s Klan initiatives. Despite months of counterintelligence work, despite its hundreds of informants, the FBI failed to prevent a White Hate murder from marring the year’s most important civil rights demonstration. Within twenty-four hours, though, Hoover had turned the episode around. Johnson called in to FBI headquarters three times on the night of the murder—first at 12:55, then at 1:07 and again at 1:11—hoping for an update or at least a bit of solace. At 8:10 the next morning, Hoover called back with the news Johnson most wanted to hear: the FBI had solved the Liuzzo case and was getting ready to arrest the perpetrators.
Hoover’s reports to Johnson that morning betrayed many of his long-standing prejudices. Rather than sympathize with Liuzzo, he defamed her as a drug addict and sex seeker, allegedly out for a “necking party” with her teenage Black passenger (claims for which there was little evidence). He warned Johnson against speaking directly with her husband, a Teamsters employee who Hoover “wouldn’t say [was] a bad character” but who was definitely one of their “strong-arm men.” Still, there was no getting around the fact that the FBI had pulled off something spectacular—proof that its new anti-Klan initiative, if not yet perfected, was at least starting to work. One of the four Klansmen in the car that targeted Liuzzo was none other than informant Gary Rowe, who had called in to his contact just after midnight. Rowe claimed that he had not fired his own gun, an assertion that the FBI accepted without too much initial probing. He also delivered the names of the three men who had murdered Liuzzo, along with a detailed story about what they had been doing earlier in the evening, how they had carried out the shooting, and where they had gone once the deed was done.
Johnson was gobsmacked at the FBI’s quick work. “Anybody that could have a man in that car—that’s the most unthinkable thing I ever heard of!” he spluttered to Hoover a few weeks later. “It makes me scared, by God, to even talk back to my wife! Afraid you’ll have somebody there arresting me!” Neither Hoover nor Johnson spent much time contemplating why Rowe had not tried to stop the murder. What mattered that morning was getting the news out and grabbing the “chance to show what good work the FBI has done,” as Johnson put it to Hoover. The president already had a press conference planned for late morning to honor several “notables of the space age.” In a conversation just after nine thirty, he proposed that Hoover and Katzenbach rush into the room during that conference to deliver the startling news about the Liuzzo case. “I think it might make it a little dramatic,” Johnson suggested.
As it turned out, Hoover’s men did not make the arrests in time to meet Johnson’s press-conference deadline. But around 12:40, Johnson broke into the nation’s regularly scheduled daytime programming with the Liuzzo announcement. Standing at his side were Hoover and Katzenbach, who had decided to enter calmly alongside the president rather than dash in with breaking news. The news itself was “dramatic” enough: the arrests of four Klansmen for Liuzzo’s murder, less than twenty-four hours after the fatal shot. Johnson identified all four by name (including Rowe, who had been arrested to conceal his role as an informant). He also identified “Mr. Hoover and the men of the FBI” as the ones who had made it happen through “their prompt and expeditious and very excellent performance.” Far more than the Birmingham bombing or the Mississippi murders, the Liuzzo case allowed Johnson to present the FBI as what he wanted it to be: an all-knowing, ever-watchful check on the excesses of Klan violence in the South. “If Klansmen hear my voice today,” Johnson said, “let it be both an appeal and a warning to get out of the Ku Klux Klan now and return to a decent society before it is too late.”[21]
* * *
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Rowe spent the next several weeks under FBI protection, moving from house to house and hotel to hotel under the code name “Thomas Dixon,” after the famous Kappa Alpha author of The Clansman, the novel on which the KKK’s favorite film, The Birth of a Nation, was based. On April 21, 1965, after nearly a month of trying to avoid raising suspicions, he testified against his fellow Klansmen before an Alabama grand jury, bringing an end to his career as an FBI informant. His sacrifice did not add up to much initially, as the first two state trials in the case ended in a hung jury and an acquittal. Despite the setback, Hoover argued that it was “important that the case be pressed with vigor because it is a ‘symbol’ in the minds of the civil rights people.” And when Rowe finally testified in federal court, something incredible happened: a jury of white men convicted three fellow white men of violating the civil rights of a protester.[22]
Years later skeptics would raise questions about whether Rowe was quite the hero the FBI made him out to be, and about whether his claim that he never fired his gun ought to be considered believable. In 1965, though, the conviction looked like a pure victory, with Hoover and his men now sure “that they finally, after years of dire frustration, had the Klan ‘by the balls,’ ” in the words of one journalist. In conversation with the attorney general, Hoover declared the trial “the turning point”—the beginning of the end for the Klan. And by some measures he turned out to be correct. Between 1965 and 1968, the Klan began to fall apart much as the Communist Party had done a decade earlier, unable to withstand the juggernaut of prosecution, in addition to the FBI’s ongoing campaign of exposure, surveillance, and disruptive measures. Over the course of the White Hate program, Hoover received a total of 444 proposals from the field, of which he approved 285. According to the Bureau’s estimates, 139 of those produced results, ranging from the discrediting of particular Klan leaders to the sowing of paranoia and discord.[23]
Throughout those years, Hoover never lost sight of his original intentions with COINTELPRO: not to go after White Hate extremists, but to contain and control the communists and their left-wing allies. After 1967, he increasingly returned to that vision, sidelining the Klan effort in favor of what would ultimately become a far more infamous series of programs targeting the sprawling, energetic movements of the emerging New Left. For many agents on the ground, though, it was the Klan operation that would eventually become the greatest point of pride. “The best thing we did during all those years was knock down the Klan,” one agent later reflected, describing how men like Bowers and Venable went from “invincible” to marginal in a matter of months. Even liberals normally skeptical of Hoover’s methods and intentions were inclined to make an exception where the Klan program was concerned. “It is unfortunate that the value of these activities would in most cases be lost if too extensive publicity were given to them,” Katzenbach wrote to Hoover in the fall of 1965, after reviewing a report on the FBI’s Klan penetration techniques. “However, perhaps at some point it may be possible to place these achievements on the public record, so that the Bureau can receive its due credit.”[24]
Chapter 52
Hoover Knows Best
(1965–1966)
In 1965, Hoover authorized a dramatic television series based on FBI case files. The FBI starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (left) as Inspector Lewis Erskine. Cover is from July 1967.
TV Guide/© 1967 TVGM Holdings
On March 3, 1965, four days before the Selma marchers first set out to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Hoover had ventured to the White House to discuss another matter of urgent concern. According to him, the country was in the throes of a crime wave as serious as what Franklin Roosevelt had confronted in the 1930s, when the likes of John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly had roamed the countryside. Hoover argued that the rising crime rate foretold a broader social collapse, with growing numbers of Americans holding the entire concept of “law and order” in contempt. He lumped all manner of problems under that rubric, from the 1964 uprising in Harlem to the Klan murders in Neshoba County. At the same time, he singled out ordinary, seemingly apolitical, street-level crime as a growing problem in its own right. He warned Johnson that the crime issue threatened much of what the White House hoped to accomplish on poverty and civil rights. And on this subject, as on so many others, Hoover thought he could be an asset to the president.[1]
The 1964 campaign had already pushed crime to the front of the national agenda as something that all Americans, not just a handful of police officials, were told to fret about. Goldwater had made it a centerpiece of his candidacy. George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, had complained that “if you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today, the man who knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital.” Though Johnson won the election, the concerns laid out during the campaign did not disappear. In December 1964, according to a Harris poll, fully 73 percent of Americans believed that crime was on the rise. They thought the federal government should do something about it.[2]
Hoover believed that he knew what should be done—not just because crime was one of his areas of expertise, but because he had been through it all before. Though the crime debate of the 1960s was increasingly framed in terms of race, civil rights, and a growing “urban crisis,” to Hoover it also looked like what had happened in the 1930s, when the FBI had made its reputation as a crime-fighting force. It was then that Hoover had begun to keep the nation’s crime statistics, a bureaucratic triumph that allowed him to exercise influence over the issue’s framing and reception. As those statistics now began to presage another crisis, he turned to methods and ideas from that era, including the calls to arm local police with advanced weaponry, to step up professional training, and to use the federal government as a coordinating mechanism for local police. He also launched his own cultural initiatives, adapting the public relations experiments of the 1930s—the era that created the vaunted “G-Man”—for the modern television viewer.
To younger audiences, these methods could make him seem dated, an old man out of touch with changing times. Even inside the FBI, some junior agents scoffed at Hoover’s gangster-fighting language and throwback style. By other measures, though, Hoover was ahead of the curve, one of the key officials who had helped to establish the terms and policies through which the country—and now the president—understood what was happening on American streets. From his decades of fulminations on criminal “rats,” delinquents, and the “sob sisters” who aided them, Hoover had developed a ready-made tough-on-crime language—what one columnist described as good old-fashioned “lawnorder” talk. From his technocratic side came a menu of policy options about how to solve the problem, beginning with political and monetary support for the nation’s police. In 1965, he brought all these ideas to Johnson, certain that the president did not need to reinvent Roosevelt’s War on Crime but merely to recycle it.[3]
* * *
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Hoover’s story of what was happening with crime and policing began with the numbers—and the numbers looked grim. According to the FBI’s statistics, crime increased 12 percent between 1960 and 1961, and then kept up more or less that same pace in every year that followed. In 1964, it rose 13 percent compared to 1963, including an alarming 9 percent growth in murders. That made for an increase of more than a quarter of a million episodes of “serious crime,” in Hoover’s words, each one adding to the nation’s growing ranks of victims. And things only appeared to be getting worse. Between 1963 and 1968, the nation’s murder rate nearly doubled, by far the greatest increase in Hoover’s three-plus decades as the collector of national crime data.[4]
From these numbers Hoover constructed a portrait of a nation under siege. “Today, thousands of Americans live in fear,” he wrote. “They fear for their lives, the safety of their families, their homes, and their businesses. The cause of their fear is CRIME.” To explain how the crime spike had occurred, he turned not to structural causes such as poverty or racism but to the factors he had been lamenting for decades: moral decline, parental neglect, and lenient probation and parole policies. He also added another element drawn from the 1930s: in the throes of social crisis, Americans were losing respect for established authority, especially for the police on the front lines of struggle. That phenomenon, too, could be documented in numbers. In 1964, killings of police officers reached an all-time high, with a total of fifty-seven murders.[5]
To Hoover, both the politics and the statistics brought back the awful years of 1933 and 1934, when his green agents had been gunned down with impunity. Back then, he had solved the problem by arming his men. He had also argued for a radical alteration in law enforcement methods, beginning with “scientific” police reform and extending to the film codes, with their mandate to turn the police into heroes. Now the rising crime rate seemed to be mixed up with countless additional factors: race riots and the Beatles, civil disobedience and the Ku Klux Klan and the cultural power of the American teenager. Those were hard to quantify, but they were all connected, in Hoover’s view, to a crisis of historical proportions—part of the “unceasing conflict between the forces of law and order and a criminal element which is bold, arrogant and constantly increasing in numbers.”[6]
Unless, as many experts suggested, Hoover’s numbers were exaggerated. Even as he delivered what appeared to be hard facts, criminologists and social scientists pushed back with the same analysis that they had offered in the 1930s: Hoover’s great crime wave was partly a fiction, a matter of manipulation and distortion on the part of the FBI. In March 1965, The New York Times published a story quoting several experts who felt “the FBI figures are terribly in need of adjustment” but who “don’t dare say so publicly,” for fear of incurring Hoover’s wrath. Speaking under cover of anonymity, they pointed to innocuous explanations for the alleged surge in crime: perhaps it was due to economic prosperity (when more people owned cars, there was more car theft) or to the simple fact that millions of babies born in the postwar boom were now teenagers and young adults, the age groups most likely to engage in criminal activity.[7]
Or perhaps, as many experts have argued both then and since, all the talk of crime and juvenile delinquency was mostly a coded conversation about race. Modern crime statistics often reclassified the by-products of poverty and youthful exuberance as serious infractions, thus creating an impression that urban Black teenagers posed a special danger to the social order. The statistics were also based on the number of arrests, a calculation that tended to show where the most policing was happening, not necessarily the most crime. Those logical leaps distorted the crime picture, making it ripe for misinterpretation. In crime, as in so many other issues, law enforcement officials like Hoover could often see what they wanted to see.[8]
Still, there were certain classifications, such as murder, in which the numbers were hard to fudge. And it was here that Hoover made his best case. “These are not statistical abstractions conjured up by the FBI,” The Washington Daily News wrote, responding to Hoover’s critics. “No amount of FBI-baiting can soften the shocking impact of these figures.” Indeed, what mattered, politically speaking, was not whether the statistics were true but whether the public believed them—whether the numbers that Hoover was describing, and the narrative he assigned to explain them, seemed to accord with Americans’ lived experience.[9]
* * *
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Among the cities where the crime issue loomed largest was Washington, D.C., for seven decades the site of so many of Hoover’s personal and political struggles. “The District has not been spared in the general increase in crime now being experienced throughout the United States,” Johnson declared in a message to Congress in February 1965, proposing a commission to explore “crime and law enforcement in the District.” According to FBI statistics, crime in the district went up 34 percent in the first six months of 1964 alone, with rape, robbery, assault, and burglary up 47 percent. Then, in the first three months of 1965, homicide and “non-negligent manslaughter” more than doubled compared to the same period in 1964. Those numbers meant that crime in Washington was actually growing faster than in the nation at large.[10]
Much of the ensuing debate concentrated on a single fact: in the 1960 census, the capital crossed a threshold, becoming the first major city in the U.S. with a majority-Black population. As many scholars have argued, the relationship between that development and the rising crime rate was far from straightforward. But many contemporary observers found it impossible to separate the two. “What shocks the visitors is that in the very shadow of the greatest power instrumentalities on earth, there is this bewildering paradox—inability to guarantee safety for the individual on the street,” a visitor from Michigan noted. “A race problem? Yes, it is in large part.” Even where race went unmentioned, there was no mistaking the rising tide of anxiety expressed by the political class about the capital’s changing population. “No matter how its cause is justified or how sugarcoated the sociologists try to make it, Washington is a crime-ridden city,” an Alabama congressman declared in the spring of 1965. “The streets are not safe at night. In fact, daylight muggings, robberies, assaults, and rape are commonplace.”[11]
