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

7 SURREPTITIOUSNESS IS CONTAGIOUS

IF MARTIN LUTHER KING had a committed enemy in J. Edgar Hoover, he had an equally staunch ally working in the same Justice Department building: the attorney general of the United States, Ramsey Clark. Ambitious, idealistic, a Marine with both a master's and a JD from the University of Chicago, the forty-year-old Clark was a tall, slender man with smoldering eyes and a full head of black hair. Clark had long admired King. He regarded the civil rights leader as "a moral crusader,¹¹⁶ a unifying force, a persuasive voice demanding social justice, and an apostle of perhaps the most important lesson a mass society can learn--change through nonviolence."

As the nation's highest law-enforcement official, Clark had long feared the possibility that someone might kill King. For years, his office had tried to keep abreast of every alleged plot and rumored bounty on King's head. Two years earlier, Clark, then an assistant attorney general, had traveled to Alabama to monitor the Selma-to-Montgomery march and personally scouted sections of the route for likely places where an assassin might hide. He had a strong premonition that King might be shot in Selma, a premonition based on hard evidence: the FBI had identified more than twelve hundred violent racist white males, many with felony convictions for racial offenses, who reportedly planned to converge on Selma. Worried about the threats, Clark sought out King during the march and found him in a tent by the side of the road, sound asleep.

"Here we all were biting our nails,"¹¹⁷ Clark recalled, "and he was just sleeping like a baby. The man knew no fear--he literally walked in the valley of the shadow of death. I came to respect that."

Born in Texas in 1927, Clark was the son of Tom Clark, a prominent Dallas lawyer who had himself served as attorney general (in the Truman administration) and who had recently retired as a Supreme Court justice. As a fair-haired prince of Washington, young Ramsey had grown up in a house filled with government insiders, diplomats, judges, and bureaucrats. When his father was AG, Ramsey used to toddle down the halls of the FBI and was even allowed to sit in J. Edgar Hoover's office.

The FBI director still viewed Clark as a little kid and patronized him to extremes. Hoover took a dim view of Clark's squishy liberal politics and his egghead notions about the root causes of crime. Hoover believed Clark was soft on Communism, soft on civil unrest, soft on law and order. Clark was the sort of man who, in his frequent writings on crime, was not the least bit bashful about writing sentences like this: "We must create a reverence¹¹⁸ for life and seek gentleness, tolerance and a concern for others." Troubled by the rise of what he regarded as an American police state that increasingly relied on electronic technology to spy on its own citizens, Clark argued that "a humane and generous concern¹¹⁹ for each individual will do more to soothe and humanize our savage hearts than any police power that man can devise."

These were the sorts of sentiments that made Hoover sick to his stomach.

Even though Clark was, technically speaking, his boss, Hoover freely telegraphed his disdain for his younger superior down through the FBI ranks. He had a variety of nicknames for the attorney general. He called him "the Jellyfish."¹²⁰ He called him "the Bull Butterfly" and "the Marshmallow." He said Clark was the worst head of Justice he'd ever seen. He even suspected the nation's top law-enforcement official might be a hippie. He once visited Clark's house and was appalled to find Mrs. Clark barefoot in her own kitchen. "What kind of person is that?"¹²¹ Hoover later groused to a reporter.

Clark, for his part, kept wisely discreet on the subject of Hoover. "I describe our relationship¹²² as cordial and he describes it as correct," Clark had been quoted a few months earlier. Off the record, however, he believed Hoover's bureau had become too "ideological" and too obsessed with finding Communists under every rock. Most important, he felt, the FBI was compromised "by the excessive domination¹²³ of a single person and his self-centered concern for his reputation."

Clark knew all about Hoover's fixation on Martin Luther King. He had to know: Hoover's FBI kept coming to him with requests to wiretap and bug King's office, residence, and hotel rooms, and in every case Clark denied the request. The attorney general believed electronic surveillance could be used only in matters where national security was demonstrably threatened. "Surreptitiousness is contagious,"¹²⁴ Clark argued. "If you invade privacy with a bug, why not break and enter? A free society cannot endure where such police tactics are permitted. Tomorrow you may be the victim." The practice of bugging and wiretapping, he said, was "more than a mere dirty business¹²⁵--it tinkers with the foundations of personal integrity."

With subversives of King's caliber, however, Hoover saw no point in such constitutional niceties. As an object of Hoover's wrath, King represented the perfect trifecta, Clark realized. "Hoover had three¹²⁶ fairly obvious prejudices," Clark told Hoover's biographer Curt Gentry. "He was a racist, he upheld traditional sexual values, and he resented acts of civil disobedience--and King offended on every count."

On the subject of King and nearly every other issue, Hoover and Clark failed to see eye to eye. Their worldviews were diametrically opposed, and their dysfunctional relationship was strained all the more by the simple administrative fact that Hoover had to deal with Clark's office on a daily basis. To handle that noxious task, the director nearly always relied on a trusted surrogate named DeLoach.

CARTHA D. DELOACH (everybody called him Deke) held the august position of assistant to the director, which made him third in command at the FBI. He was officially in charge of the FBI's General and Special Investigative divisions, as well as Domestic Intelligence and Crime Records. His real job, however, was to divine, down to microscopically fine tolerances, the boss's cryptic and ever-changing whims. He was good at it--so good, in fact, that many insiders considered DeLoach the likely successor to Hoover should the director die or step down.

DeLoach didn't relish his role as Hoover's liaison to Ramsey Clark. He hated being put in this delicate position between two powerful men--"wobbling on the tightrope," he called it. In truth, DeLoach had no great love for Clark either, but he thought Hoover went too far sometimes, that he treated Ramsey Clark "like a small child."

A tall Irish Catholic from the little town of Claxton, Georgia, Deke DeLoach had hooded eyes, a pink jowly face, and sandy hair oiled back into the tamest possible suggestion of a pompadour. Forty-eight years old, he'd labored for twenty-six years in the FBI, serving as a special agent and gradually working his way up in field offices as varied as Cleveland and Norfolk. A power broker within the American Legion, DeLoach was an accomplished consigliere and Washington company man, someone adept at navigating the vast rivers of memos Hoover's FBI released each day.

In fact, DeLoach practically spoke in FBI memo-ese, in a rounded, sonorous, slightly officious drone that said everything and nothing but somehow reassured people. Among his various responsibilities, DeLoach was Hoover's liaison to the White House, and he had so successfully installed himself there that President Johnson effectively let him set up a second office in the West Wing. One reporter called DeLoach the FBI's "Dutch uncle." Graced with the politesse Hoover lacked, he could be charming in a guarded, superficial way, yet his temperament could turn on a dime, and he'd lash out with the full institutional fury of the agency he represented. One did not want to get crosswise with Deke DeLoach.

Although DeLoach loyally defended the director and daily did his bidding, he had to concede that Hoover was "a man of monstrous ego,"¹²⁷ as he later put it. He was "crotchety, dictatorial,¹²⁸ at times petulant, and somewhat past his prime." Like MacArthur during the occupation of Japan, DeLoach said, Hoover had made himself "a demigod." In his presence, "you were not so much¹²⁹ an individual personality as a cog in the vast machinery of the universe he'd created. You existed at his whim, and if he chose to, he could snap his fingers and you'd disappear."

DeLoach had been watching Hoover's "intense animosity" toward King for years. And not only watched: the assistant director had played a direct role in many of the COINTELPRO activities (as the FBI called its various counterintelligence campaigns) against King. DeLoach seemed nearly as shocked by King's sexual escapades as Hoover. "Such behavior,"¹³⁰ DeLoach later wrote, "seemed incongruous in a leader who claimed his authority as a man of God. So extravagant was his promiscuity that some who knew about it questioned his sincerity in professing basic Christian beliefs and in using the black church as the home base of his movement."

Yet DeLoach thought the FBI feud with the civil rights leader had gone too far--he described Hoover's anger as growing "like the biblical mustard seed,¹³¹ from a small kernel into a huge living thing that cast an enormous shadow across the landscape." At the very least, he thought, the bureau's war against King was "a public relations disaster of the first order" that would "haunt the FBI for years to come."

IN LATE 1967, as more reports came filtering into the FBI about the planned Poor People's Campaign, Hoover began to chomp at the bit for better intelligence. He wanted new wiretaps placed on the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. A memo was circulated throughout the FBI hierarchy, discussing the merits of installing taps. "We need this installation,"¹³² the memo said, "to obtain racial intelligence information concerning their plans ... so that appropriate countermeasures can be taken to protect the internal security of the United States."

By late December 1967, a formal request for legal authorization to install telephone wiretaps had reached Deke DeLoach's desk. As usual, it would be his odious task to serve as a buffer between Hoover's FBI and the attorney general. He, for one, was not optimistic about Clark's response. "A.G. will not approve,"¹³³ he predicted in a memo, "but believe we should go on record."

On January 2, 1968, the formal request was sent to Clark seeking his legal approval to tap the SCLC offices in Atlanta. "We [must] keep apprised of the strategy and plans of this group," the request argued. "Massive demonstrations could trigger riots which might spread across the Nation."

But just as DeLoach guessed, Clark rejected the request out of hand. "There has not been an adequate¹³⁴ demonstration of a direct threat to the national security," Clark replied. The attorney general did leave the door slightly ajar for future discussion, however. "Should further evidence be secured of such a threat," he wrote, "or should re-evaluation be desired, please resubmit."