Civil Rights Events

J. Edgar Hoover

 

J. Edgar Hoover lived in Washington, D.C. all his life. In 1895 he was born in a white, Protestant, middle-class neighborhood known as Seward Square, three blocks behind the Capitol. His family had been civil servants for generations, including his father, Dickerson Naylor Hoover, who worked for the Coast Guard (Biography 1).

 

The eight decades of Hoover's life tell their own story. As early as his teen years, his mind was closing on issues that were to dominate his era. In the school debating society, he argued against women getting the vote and against abolition of the death penalty. He could never bear to come second in anything. When his father began to suffer from mental illness, a niece told me, Hoover "couldn't tolerate the fact. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect." Another relative said: "I sometimes have thought that he really had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people." William Sullivan, a close FBI associate, thought his boss "didn't have affection for one single solitary human being".

 

Hoover joined the Bureau – at that time just the Bureau of Investigation (the word "Federal" was only added in the 1930s) – as America's first great Communist scare was getting under way, and handpicked as his assistant a man named George Ruch. … Ruch expressed astonishment that left-wingers should even "be allowed to speak and write as they like". Hoover and Ruch favoured deporting people merely for being members of radical organisations, and used the Bureau to spy on lawyers representing those arrested in the infamous Red Raids of 1920. One of them, on whom he was to keep tabs for half a century and deem "the most dangerous man in the United States", was future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter (Summers 2).

 

In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge appointed him head of the Bureau of Investigation, a position Hoover had long coveted. It was in this position that he finally received the power he craved. Hoover inherited the Bureau just after it had been severely tainted with scandal from previous administrations. Upon acceptance, Hoover demanded it be completely divorced from politics and responsible only to the Attorney General. Hoover's conditions were met and he set out on a rejuvenation campaign which would build the Bureau into one of the most powerful government agencies in 20th century America.

 

… To make his agency respectable, Hoover assembled an elite group of men, white and college-educated, who would represent the Bureau as agents. He demanded conformity and a strict moral code from all of them, demanding them to abstain from alcohol and relations with women. He instituted a training school and effectively made his organization into the symbolic guardian of the country's laws, citizens, and its morals (Biography 2-3).

 

The favourable publicity Hoover enjoyed was partially deserved. He cleaned up a Bureau that had been notorious for corruption and inefficiency, replacing it with an agent corps that became a byword for integrity.  …

 

Hoover brought modernity and co-ordination at a time of disorganisation. He built the first federal fingerprint bank, and his Identification Division would eventually offer instant access to the prints of 159 million people. His Crime Laboratory became the most advanced in the world. He created the FBI National Academy, a sort of West Point for the future elite of law enforcement (Summers 3).

 

In 1936 [President Franklin] Roosevelt instructed Hoover to keep him informed on fascist and Communist activities in the U.S. Hoover took the opportunity to increase his domestic surveillance efforts and to maintain a "Custodial Detention List" which included names of "questionable" individuals for possible accusations during wartime. This list included Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he personally despised for her liberal leanings, and later, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Lyndon B. Johnson, a personal friend to Hoover, postponed the F.B.I. director's retirement indefinitely. Hoover remained with the Bureau until his death at the age of 77 in 1972 (Biography 4).

 

Hoover never joined a political party and claimed he was "not political". In fact, he admitted privately, he was a staunch, lifelong supporter of the Republican party. He secretly aspired to be president and considered running against Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he thought suspiciously left-wing. Hoover publicly expressed support for Senator Joe McCarthy shortly before McCarthy claimed Truman's State Department was harbouring 200 members of the Communist party. His agents slipped file material to the senator for use in his infamous inquisition, while publicly denying doing so.

 

…

 

… Hoover's Division 8, euphemistically entitled Crime Records and Communications, had a priority mission. Crime Records pumped out propaganda that fostered not only the image of the FBI as an organisation that spoke for what was right and just, but of the Director himself as a champion of justice fighting "moral deterioration" and "anarchist elements". Hoover used the department to preach the notion that the political left was responsible for all manner of perceived evils, from changing sexual standards to delinquency (Ackerman 2).

 

Hoover had gone easy on the mob. It is now clear that Hoover had contacts with organised criminals or their associates in circumstances that made it possible – likely even – that they learned of his sexual proclivities. More than one top mobster claimed the outfit had a hold on Hoover. Meyer Lansky, the syndicate's co-founder, was said to have "pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation" and an associate quoted Lansky as claiming, "I fixed that sonofabitch." Carmine Lombardozzi, who was known as "the Italian Meyer Lansky", said: "J Edgar Hoover was in our pocket" (Summers 8).

 

By 1960, the FBI had opened “subversive” files on some 432,000 Americans. Hoover deemed the most sensitive files as “personal and confidential” and kept them in his office, where his secretary, Helen Gandy, could watch them (Ackerman 2).

 

Hoover's public position on race, Southerner that he was, was that of the paternalistic white nativist. Less openly, he was racially prejudiced. He shrugged off the miseries of black Americans, preferring to claim they were outside his jurisdiction. "I'm not going to send the FBI in," a Justice Department official recalled him saying testily, "every time some nigger woman says she's been raped." FBI agents paid more attention to investigating black militants than pursuing the Ku Klux Klan.

 

...

 

A rumor has persisted that Hoover himself had black ancestry. Early photographs do show him looking somewhat negroid, with noticeably wiry hair. Gossip along those lines was rife in Washington and – true or not – Hoover must have been aware of it. Did anxiety on that front shape the way he behaved towards blacks – just as he lashed out at homosexuals while struggling with his own [presumed] homosexuality (Summers 4-7)?

 

The unfolding story of the civil rights protest movement and the leadership role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a most ignoble chapter in the history of FBI spying and manipulation. As the civil rights movement grew and expanded, the FBI pinpointed every group and emergent leader for intensive investigation and most for harassment and disruption …. The NAACP was the subject of a COMINFIL investigation. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were listed by the FBI as "Black-Hate" type organizations and selected for covert disruption of their political activities. But the most vicious FBI attack was reserved for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All of the arbitrary power and lawless tactics that had accumulated in the bureau over the years were marshaled to destroy King's reputation and the movement he led. The FBI relied on its vague authority to investigate "subversives" to spy on King and SCLC; its vague authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping and microphonic surveillance to tap and bug him; its secrecy to conduct covert operations against him. The campaign began with his rise to leadership and grew more vicious as he reached the height of his power; it continued even after his assassination in 1968.  (Halperin 63).

 

In a memoranda sent to Hoover, King's “I Have a Dream” speech [culminating the March on Washington] was characterized as "demagogic," and the presence of "200" Communists among the 250,000 marchers caused the Intelligence Division to state that it had underestimated Communist efforts and influence on American Negroes and the civil rights movement. King was singled out:

 

“He stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now . . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security” (Halperin 77).

 

On October 10 and 21, Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave the FBI the authority to wiretap King.   "Hoover had come to Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy and said, 'Look, Stanley Levinson — King's adviser — is a communist. He's a secret communist, he's an underground communist, and he's using Martin Luther King as a cat's paw.' Well, when you put it that way, you weren't gainsaying Hoover if you were John or Bobby Kennedy. So they said yes" (History 4).

 

On October 18, 1963, the FBI distributed a … memorandum on King, not only to the Justice Department, but to officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Defense Department intelligence agencies. It summarized the bureau's Communist party charges against King and went much further. According to - Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, it was a personal diatribe . . . a personal attack without evidentiary support on the character, the moral character and person of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it was only peripherally related to anything substantive, like whether or not there was Communist infiltration or influence on the civil rights movement.... It was a personal attack on the man and went far afield from the charges [of possible Communist influence].

 

The attorney general was outraged and demanded that Hoover seek the return of the report. By October 28, all copies were returned. This was the first-and last-official action to deter Hoover's vendetta against King.

 

In November, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson became president and the Justice Department was in a state of confusion with the attorney general [Robert Kennedy] preoccupied with his personal grief. King viewed the assassination as a tragedy, and hoped it would spawn a new public concern for peace and reconciliation.

 

While the nation mourned, the FBI held a conference at the beginning of December to plan its campaign to destroy King and the civil rights movement. At that all-day meeting FBI officials put forward proposals …. Officials of the nation's number-one law enforcement agency agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggressive" newsmen, "colored" agents, Dr. King's housekeeper, and even Dr. King's wife or "placing a good looking female plant in King's office" to develop discrediting information and to take action that would lead to his disgrace.

 

… By January, the FBI had initiated physical and photographic surveillance of King, deploying its most experienced personnel to gather information, and had placed the first of many illegal bugs in Dr. King's room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

 

According to Justice Department regulations at the time, microphonic surveillance, although it necessitated a physical trespass and was more intrusive than a phone tap, did not require the approval of the attorney general. Even under its own regulations, however, the FBI could only use this technique to gather "important intelligence or evidence relating to matters connected with national security." In this case the FBI planned to use "bugs" to learn about "the [private] activities of Dr. King and his associates" so that King could be "completely discredited." It was clearly illegal.

 

The Willard Hotel "bug" yielded "19 reels" of tape. The FBI, at least in its own opinion, had struck pay dirt. The bug apparently picked up information about King's private extramarital and perhaps "inter-racial" sexual activities. This opened up the possibility of discrediting King as a Communist who engaged in "moral improprieties."

 

For J. Edgar Hoover, "immoral" behavior was a crime comparable to "subversive" activity-and of equal utility. Hoover gathered such information on prominent persons to use for political and blackmail purposes. Often he would share such "official and confidential" information with presidents when his surveillance uncovered "obscene matters" on the president's opponents or aides. Sometimes he would let people know he had such information on them, and that list includes Presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In this case, however, Hoover did not plan to let King know he had the information to gain a "political" power advantage over him; he planned to use it to destroy him politically. With the Willard Hotel tapes, the FBI campaign moved into high gear.

 

With Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pressing action on civil rights legislation and calling for a "War on Poverty," Martin Luther King was a man the country and the world thought worthy of honor. In December 1963, Time magazine named him "Man of the Year." … Hoover wrote across a memorandum, "They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one."   

 

In 1964, while continuing his "nonviolent" activities on behalf of civil rights in St. Augustine, Florida, and other cities, King was awarded honorary degrees by universities; he was invited by Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, to speak at a ceremony honoring the memory of President Kennedy; he had an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome; and, in October, he was named by the Nobel Prize Committee to receive the Peace Prize in December (Halperin 77-80).

 

Dr. King was well aware early in 1964 of Hoover’s antipathy.  Based on unsubstantiated FBI allegations, in April of 1964 conservative columnist Joseph Alsop alleges that an unnamed associate of Dr. King is a Communist. News reports quickly follow, detailing supposedly secret testimony to Congress by FBI Director Hoover charging "Communist influence" over the Civil Rights Movement."

Dr, King answered back.  As a general rule, Dr. King prefers not to respond to false charges and personal slanders against himself. But when the Freedom Movement as a whole is smeared he stands to its defense. On April 23 he tells a press conference: "[It is] difficult to accept the word of the FBI on communistic infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement when it has been so completely ineffectual in protecting the Negro from brutality in the Deep South" (Hoover 1-2).

Though he considers himself entitled to defame and vilify anyone he chooses, the slightest criticism of himself or the FBI sends Hoover into a towering rage. King's retort is no exception, and Hoover's already virulent hatred intensifies. FBI agents are ordered to expand their surveillance and redouble their efforts to find damaging personal information that can be used to destroy King's reputation (Halperin 80).

In October, the world learns that Dr. King has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover's obsessive malice can no longer be restrained, it finally erupts into public view on November 18 when he tells a group of journalists that in reference to King's criticism of FBI effectiveness, "I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country. He goes on to charge that King is, "one of the lowest characters" in America, and "controlled" by Communist advisors.
 

King responds that he is "appalled and surprised" by Hoover's attack. He offers to meet with the FBI Director to discuss the Bureau's "seeming inability to gain convictions in even the most heinous crimes perpetrated against civil rights workers." He cites as examples the brutality in Albany, the four little girls killed in Birmingham, and the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

Hoover intensifies his vendetta against King. Behind the scenes, FBI officials escalate their smear campaign by leaking more derogatory stories to the media. Meanwhile, FBI field agents meet with religious organizations, universities, and government officials to "confidentially" brief them that Dr. King is "associating with Communists" and having extramarital affairs in hotel rooms while on the road for speaking engagements and meetings.

From their illegal hotel bugs they assemble a composite audio sex-tape. They package the tape with a phony letter supposedly from an unidentified Afro-American man. The letter threatens King with public exposure unless he commits suicide before accepting the Nobel Prize. To conceal its FBI origins, they mail it from Miami on November 21. When the package arrives at the SCLC office in Atlanta, staff members are busy preparing for Dr. King's trip to Europe for the Nobel Prize. They assume it's just another recording of a King speech, so without reading the letter they toss the package into a pile of low-priority correspondence to be dealt with when someone has time. Dr. King doesn't actually hear the tape or read the letter until weeks after returning from Oslo (Hoover 3-6).

In part, the letter said: King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [This exact number has been selected for a specific reason; it has definite practical significance]. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

It was thirty-four days before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies (Halperin 86).

Publicly, Hoover presses his attack. In a Chicago speech on November 24, he characterizes the Civil Rights Movement as: "pressure groups that would crush the rights of others under heel." And, "They have no compunction in carping, lying, and exaggerating with the fiercest passion, spearheaded at times by Communists and moral degenerates."

Dr. King fears that the public controversy with Hoover risks diverting the Freedom Movement from the critical work ahead. It distracts media attention from the real issues, and with first the Nobel Prize and then the Selma campaign on the horizon he is unwilling to expend precious time and energy responding to FBI slanders. As a conciliatory gesture, he arranges through intermediaries to meet face-to- face with the FBI Director on December 1st. King allows Hoover to dominate the meeting with a long rant justifying and defending the Bureau. Afterwards, King further defuses the situation by telling the press that the meeting was friendly and amicable and that, "I sincerely hope we can forget the confusions of the past and get on with the job."

Dr. King's effort partially succeeds. Hoover and the FBI cease their public attacks, but covert efforts to destroy King and thwart the Freedom Movement continue (Hoover 3-7).

 … two noted specialists in psychiatry and psychology said they believed Hoover's sexual torment was very pertinent to his use and abuse of power as America's top law-enforcement officer.

 

Dr John Money, professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, thought Hoover "needed constantly to destroy other people in order to maintain himself. He managed to live with his conflict by making others pay the price." Dr Harold Lief, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that Hoover suffered from "a personality disorder, a narcissistic disorder with mixed obsessive features… paranoid elements, undue suspiciousness and some sadism. A combination of narcissism and paranoia produces what is known as an authoritarian personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi" (Summers 5-6).

 

Hoover stands as a reminder that 48 years of power concentrated in one person is a recipe for abuse. It was mostly after his death [1972] that Hoover’s dark side became common knowledge — the covert black-bag jobs, the warrantless surveillance of civil rights leaders and Vietnam-era peace activists, the use of secret files to bully government officials, the snooping on movie stars and senators, and the rest (Ackerman 4).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Ackerman, Kenneth D.  “Five myths about J. Edgar Hoover.”  The Washington Post.  November 9, 2011.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-j-edgar-hoover/2011/11/07/gIQASLlo5M_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80c5147725d5

 

“Biography: J. Edgar Hoover.”  American Experience.  Web.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eleanor-hoover/

 

Halperin, Morton; Berman, Jerry; Borosage, Robert; and Marwick, Christine.  “The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U. S. Intelligence Agencies.”  Penguin Books, 1976.  Web.  http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/Vendetta_MLK_LS.html

 

“The History Of The FBI's Secret 'Enemies' List.”  NPR Fresh Air.  February 14, 2012.  Web.  https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862081/the-history-of-the-fbis-secret-enemies-list

 

“Hoover Attempts to Destroy Dr. King (Nov-Dec).”  Civil Rights Movement History
1964 July-Dec.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm#1964fbi

 

Summers, Anthony.  “The Secret life of J Edgar Hoover.”  The Guardian.  December 31, 2011.  Web.  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/01/j-edgar-hoover-secret-fbi

 

“Biography: J. Edgar Hoover.”  American Experience.  Web.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eleanor-hoover/