Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

4 ANATHEMA TO EVIL MEN

DURING THE LATE fall and early winter of 1967, Martin Luther King pressed forward with his ambitious plans to lead his Poor People's Army to Washington the following summer. One person who was most assuredly keeping a close eye on King's proposed demonstration was J. Edgar Hoover, the seventy-two-year-old director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover was born and raised in the District of Columbia and had spent his entire professional life there, serving under nine presidents. A devout Presbyterian who once dreamed of being a minister, Hoover had long ago appointed himself a guardian of the capital's morals. The director saw the prospect of an army of indigent subversives encamped on the Mall not only as a threat to the Republic but also as a Vandal attack on his native city.

Sitting at his desk in his inner sanctum on the third floor of the gray granite Justice Department building, with his mother's black Bible always parked at his elbow, America's number-one G-man had read the FBI reports about the new SCLC project with increasing alarm. What was King really up to? he worried. Was this the start of a full-scale black revolution? Were the Soviets behind the scheme? Most important, how could the burrhead be stopped?

Burrhead--that was one of his many names⁶² for King, the man on whom he had fixed a nearly pathological hatred ever since the civil rights leader first emerged on the national scene in 1955. Hoover's FBI had been waging a protracted yet so far unsuccessful campaign designed (as various FBI memos colorfully put it) to "see this scoundrel exposed," to "take him off his pedestal," and to "neutralize him" as a force in American life. In a private communication earlier in 1967, Hoover told President Johnson: "Based on King's recent activities⁶³ and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation."

Although J. Edgar Hoover was still utterly in control of the FBI, he was in his waning years, a liver-spotted and somewhat fusty caricature of himself. He had developed a paunch, his eyes were baggy, and his chin had become an odd-looking knob of ruddy flesh. He suffered from hypertension and other ailments. He still dressed as dandily as ever, in sharp pin-striped suits with color-coordinated handkerchiefs and ties, but he had lost some of his boldness of step. He had developed weird phobias⁶⁴ about germs, about flies, about the slightest breach in the yolk of his morning poached egg. His speech seemed curiously dated now; he peppered his tirades with Depression-era phrases that gave some of his younger agents pause, phrases like "criminal scum" and "moral rats" and "alien filth." He was fond of saying that his enemies were afflicted with "mental halitosis."⁶⁵

By the late 1960s, Hoover was a living anachronism, dwelling in a rigid world of his own making. Art Buchwald joked that he was "a mythical person⁶⁶ first thought up by the Reader's Digest." As always, Hoover wielded his blue pen with grumpy exactitude. As always, he composed his Rabble-Rouser Index and other lists of dangerous radicals, real or imagined. He still took his regular "non-vacations" (the press was told that even when he was away from Washington, the director never stopped working) to shuffleboard palaces in Miami Beach or to hotels of faded glory near the horse tracks at Del Mar or Saratoga Springs, where he always booked adjoining suites with his lifelong friend and second-in-command, Clyde Tolson. Hoover's confirmed bachelorhood, combined with his curiously matrimonial relationship with Tolson, had led to widespread speculation. And to endless jokes, like this one from Truman Capote: "Are you familiar⁶⁷ with the term 'killer fruit'? It's a certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream. Like Hadrian, or J. Edgar Hoover."

HOOVER'S FBI HAD become a curiously self-reinforcing enterprise. The six thousand agents spread across the country were expected to ape the director's views, mimic his style, and anticipate his needs. "You must understand,"⁶⁸ one special agent in charge wrote to a colleague, "that you're working for a crazy maniac and that our duty is to find out what he wants and to create the world that he believes in." Once, when Hoover broke out his blue pen and scrawled angrily over a memo, "Watch the borders,"⁶⁹ agents scurried to the Mexican and Canadian borders to ascertain what Hoover meant--only to learn that the boss was merely concerned with the width of that particular memo's margins.

Hoover's FBI office was a reliquary of former times. There was John Dillinger's death mask on the wall. There was the cozy arrangement of feminine-looking overstuffed chairs, the dainty teacups and other pieces of china handed down from his dear departed mother, his trophy sailfish displayed over the door. There was his steadfast secretary, Helen Gandy,⁷⁰ working away in the adjoining room. She took his calls, paid his bills, checked in his laundry, arranged for the gardener to visit his house, and handled every imaginable piece of minutiae, just as she had done for forty-nine uninterrupted years.

If Hoover was a throwback, he still had a powerful political currency--and a job security perhaps unmatched in Washington. He had become director of what was then the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, when he was twenty-nine years old. As the FBI's first and only director, he sat at the center of a world he had practically invented. The nomenclature, the clerical voice, the dress code, the penchant for acronyms and quasi-military structures--it was all his. At every inauguration since that of Calvin Coolidge, Hoover had been there, unbudging and apparently unfireable. He was a man who possessed a "terrible patience," it was said. The veteran Washington hand Hugh Sidey, writing in Life, noted the countless times he'd attended inaugural parades or funeral corteges or moments of national celebration, only to look up and see Hoover standing on his office balcony, "high and distant and quiet,⁷¹ watching with his misty kingdom behind him, going on from President to President, and decade to decade."

Through all those years, Hoover brought an air of professionalism and scientific rigor to police work. He had overseen the adoption of every imaginable advance in the craft of criminology--from centralized fingerprinting and a state-of-the-art ballistics-firing facility to a systematized method of bureau reporting and note taking. The FBI Crime Lab, the Public Enemies list, America's Most Wanted, the widespread use of fiber and handwriting analysis--all of it came about during Hoover's long tenure. With good reason, the journalist Jack Anderson wrote that Hoover had "transformed the FBI⁷² from a collection of hacks, misfits, and courthouse hangers-on into one of the world's most effective and formidable law enforcement organizations."

Late in the second decade of the twentieth century, the young Hoover had made himself Washington's first expert on the perils of anarchism and Communism, and since then every subversive, or alleged subversive, had passed within his sights. He'd led the notorious Palmer Raids on suspected radicals. He'd hounded Marcus Garvey. He'd arrested and deported Emma Goldman. During the Depression, the bureau became virtually synonymous with solving high-profile crimes. Hoover's agents had caught Machine Gun Kelly, had caught and killed John Dillinger, had caught the Lindbergh baby murder suspect, Bruno Hauptmann. In the Cold War, G-men had helped snag Alger Hiss and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Over the years Hoover had developed files on countless public figures, collecting every morsel of compromising gossip and lore. Frank Sinatra, Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Helen Keller--Hoover, it seemed, had kept his eyes on everyone. John F. Kennedy had tried to get rid of Hoover but feared, with good reason, that the resourceful director had too much dirt on him. The president's brother Robert, who as attorney general had nominally been Hoover's boss, called the director "dangerous and rather a psycho⁷³ ... I think he's senile and rather frightening."

After JFK was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson also briefly considered letting Hoover go, but then saw the light, reportedly saying: "I'd rather have him⁷⁴ inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in." On January 1, 1965, when Hoover reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy, Johnson waived the requirement and kept him on as director indefinitely. "J. Edgar Hoover," the president declared in a ceremony, "is a hero⁷⁵ to millions of decent citizens, and an anathema to evil men. Under his guiding hand, the FBI has become the greatest investigative body in history."

Hoover, Johnson later rhapsodized, "is a pillar of strength⁷⁶ in a city of weak men."

HOOVER HAD BEEN obsessed with Martin Luther King Jr. for at least a decade. Throughout most of the 1960s, Hoover had been carrying on a semipublic feud with King and the SCLC. The FBI director openly called King "the most notorious liar⁷⁷ in the country." When Time proclaimed King its "Man of the Year" of 1963, Hoover indignantly scrawled on a memo, "They had to dig deep⁷⁸ in the garbage to come up with that one." In 1964, after the news broke that King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize--the youngest recipient in history--Hoover groused that the only award King deserved was the "top alley cat⁷⁹ prize." When King visited with Pope Paul VI at Vatican City, Hoover was beside himself. "I am amazed,"⁸⁰ he scribbled over a news clip, "that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate."

Hoover had been convinced early in King's career that the civil rights leader was a tool of the Soviets, and in late 1963 he persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize the use of wiretaps and other surveillance to ferret out King's supposed Communist ties. Years of focused investigation and countless man-hours of surveillance failed to bear out Hoover's suspicion, however. The best evidence the FBI was able to dig up was that one of King's legal advisers, a liberal Jewish attorney from New York named Stanley Levison, had in his youth been briefly associated with the Communist Party but that he had, by all accounts, severed his ties years ago.

Hoover's agents also learned that a man affiliated with the American Communist Party who shared King's blood type had answered a public call and apparently donated blood to King in 1958 when he was stabbed during his book signing in Harlem; for a time FBI memos made much of the fact that Commie blood was thus literally coursing through King's veins.

Yet this was the sum total of the investigatory fruit gleaned from Hoover's many expensive years of watching and Red-baiting King. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a Communist, had never been one, and had no ties to China or the Soviets. The massive FBI effort spent chasing this will-o'-the-wisp was a profligate waste of public dollars. As King once put it, "There are as many Communists⁸¹ in the freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida."

All those years of spying on the civil rights leader did produce other kinds of intelligence, however--intelligence that Hoover found equally tantalizing. King, the FBI discovered, had a weakness for women. His agents found out about his several mistresses and discovered that beautiful young ladies had a way of throwing themselves at him as he moved about the country, advances the civil rights leader did little to discourage. Not only that, Hoover was shocked to learn, King used raunchy language when he talked about sex, he smoked and drank and partied into the small hours, and he told off-color jokes. The FBI had taped a garbled recording of King in a hotel in Washington supposedly having intercourse and using rather profane language during the act.

Hoover was appalled and at the same time titillated by what he read, calling King "a tom cat⁸² with obsessive degenerate sexual urges." One FBI official wrote that Hoover, when studying King's surveillance reports, would "narrow his eyes⁸³ and purse his lips." The straitlaced Hoover "saw extramarital sex⁸⁴ as evidence of moral degeneracy--an opinion that many Americans still shared in the 1960s, before Hollywood taught that promiscuity was ennobling."

Robert Kennedy, no stranger to sexual high jinks, said that "if the country knew⁸⁵ what we know about King's goings-on, he'd be finished." Hoover certainly tried to share his growing King dossier with the nation; his FBI subordinates regularly leaked salacious details to the press, to members of Congress, to President Johnson, and even to diplomats overseas. But the media never took the bait, and the charges never stuck.

For Hoover, this was a source of powerful frustration. "I don't understand⁸⁶ why we are unable to get the true facts before the public," he wrote in one memo. "We can't even get our accomplishments published. We are never taking the aggressive."

Yet finally, the FBI did take the aggressive. An FBI official, believed to have been the head of intelligence operations, William C. Sullivan, sent King an anonymous package that contained a kind of "greatest hits" compendium tape of the FBI's most lurid recordings, accompanied by a hateful note urging King to commit suicide. "King, look into your heart,"⁸⁷ the note began. "You are no clergyman and you know it ... you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. But you are done. Your 'honorary' degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done. The American public ... will know you for what you are--an evil, abnormal beast. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is ... There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

What made this package all the more disturbing for King was that Coretta opened it. Yet the note with its accompanying tape--most of which was inaudible anyway--failed to produce the desired effect. If anything, it strengthened King's marriage and his resolve to carry on in the face of what he and Coretta both now realized was a full-scale FBI effort to ruin him.

"They are out to break me,"⁸⁸ he said to a friend. "[But] what I do is only between me and my God." King, in his own way, was determined to fight back. "Hoover is old⁸⁹ and getting senile," he said, "and should be hit from all sides."