Edgar doled out dirt on King to any officials whose duties might somehow touch on the Nobel – at the State Department, the USIA and the United Nations. In London, FBI representative Charles Bates received orders to fly to Scandinavia ‘to tell our ambassadors there what kind of guy he was. My orders came direct from Hoover.’ Bureau technicians prepared to go to Oslo to bug King when he arrived for the Nobel ceremonies, a flagrant contravention of the rules confining the FBI to operations in the United States.
In Washington, Edgar took an extraordinary step. After refusing their interview request for months, he suddenly agreed to see a group of eighteen female journalists. During a monologue lasting three hours, he told them how unfair the Warren Commission had been to the FBI, about ‘bleedingheart judges’ and how Fidel Castro was ‘trying to brainwash the Puerto Ricans.’ Then, quite coolly, he told them Martin Luther King was ‘the most notorious liar in the country.’
Hovering at his master’s side, Cartha DeLoach frantically passed Edgar notes warning him to stipulate that his last remark was off the record. ‘Mr Hoover threw the notes away,’ DeLoach recalled. ‘He told the women he wanted it on the record … and they rushed for the phones.’
Calling King a liar was front-page news. Edgar went through the motions of saying the ‘lie’ had been King’s claim that agents in trouble spots were southerners, likely to be racist themselves. That squabble, though, had occurred two years earlier. Now Edgar was hinting at something else. King, he added, was ‘one of the lowest characters in the country … I haven’t even begun to say all I could on this subject.’
Some Bureau officials felt, as one put it, that the ‘boss had flipped.’ So did King. ‘Mr Hoover has apparently faltered,’ he told a reporter, ‘under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office.’ As FBI eavesdroppers listened, he told intimates Edgar was ‘old and broken down … senile … should be hit from all sides,’ until President Johnson brought him to heel.
Edgar yearned to say something even stronger, not least when King asked to meet with him to discuss the Bureau’s failings. ‘I can’t understand why we are unable to get the true facts before the public,’ the Director wrote William Sullivan. ‘We can’t even get our own accomplishments published. We are never taking the aggressive [sic]…’
The men around Edgar answered the call. A week after the press conference, with the Nobel ceremonies nearing, Newsweek Bureau Chief Ben Bradlee reported a development to Attorney General Katzenbach. DeLoach, he said, had been telling Newsweek about ‘some interesting tapes involving Dr King.’
Katzenbach, greatly alarmed, flew with the head of the Civil Rights Division, Burke Marshall, to brief the President in Texas. Though Johnson acted concerned, he merely warned the Bureau that its operation was backfiring.
DeLoach has repeatedly denied Bradlee’s story. In 1975, in Senate testimony, he said he did ‘not recall’ talking to reporters about the King tapes. ‘No offer,’ he said, ‘was ever made by me, Hoover, Tolson or anybody in the Bureau to the best of my knowledge – and I would swear this on a stack of Bibles – to play those tapes.’
Bradlee, who later became editor of The Washington Post, was no less adamant. ‘DeLoach asked me if I was interested in looking at transcripts. He was making me the offer to look at them … I told him I had no interest.’
A long list of distinguished reporters had similar experiences. John Herbers of The New York Times recalls ‘a special agent … one of the people that worked for DeLoach … told me about these things that they had on King. He was holding the tapes out for me, in case I wanted to hear them. I thought they were off base.’
At the Los Angeles Times, David Kraslow listened ‘nauseated’ as an FBI man tried to read him a ‘juicy section’ of a King tape over the telephone. Transcripts were ‘made available’ to columnist Jack Anderson, who refused to publish. According to Mike Royko, of the Chicago Daily News, a former agent raised the subject after a golf game. ‘He very casually brought up King and asked if I would be interested in reading some transcripts that concerned illicit sex things … I thought, “How dumb can they be?” I was totally sympathetic to King and his movement.’4
On King’s home turf, agents tried a different tack with Eugene Patterson, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Patterson was told when King would be arriving at a Florida airport on the way to a secret meeting with a woman. ‘Why not,’ said the agent, ‘have a reporter and photographer there? Expose him to the South and the world.’
Patterson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials urging racial justice, turned the FBI down flat. ‘The agent who failed to persuade me,’ said Patterson, ‘paid the price by being transferred to New Orleans on the pretext that he was forty-one pounds overweight. I had great sympathy for him, for it had been totally out of character for him to make the approach. He did it because he was terrified of Hoover – they all were.’
Edgar himself showed photographs – purporting to link King with Communists – to Hearst’s Mark Monsky. He mentioned the sex tapes over lunch to Washington Star editor Newbold Noyes, a man DeLoach thought could be ‘led around by the nose,’ and reportedly played them to Eugene Lyons of Reader’s Digest.
Not one newspaper obliged Edgar by running the sex smear, but nor did any editor have the guts to expose him for what he was up to. Word of the FBI dirty tricks, meanwhile, soon filtered back to King himself.
Horrified at the potential damage, he now urged government contacts to arrange the meeting with Edgar he had been requesting. On December 1, 1964, just days before the trip to Oslo, Edgar, King and their aides sat down together in the Director’s office.
‘Mr Hoover was very, very cold,’ Ralph Abernathy recalled, ‘and Dr King tried to be very, very warm. Mr Hoover sat there in his blue suit and would not smile at all. He called us “boys.”…’ The black men sat perplexed as Edgar launched into a fifty-minute monologue on the FBI’s work in the South and on his efforts to hire black agents. ‘The old man,’ King was later heard saying on a Bureau wiretap, ‘talks too damned much.’
‘Mr Hoover gave Martin a lecture,’ Ralph Abernathy recalled, ‘reminding him he was a man of the cloth … He said, “You boys, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you don’t have to worry about anything. But if you’re doing something wrong, we know about it …”’
That was apparently the closest Edgar came to revealing he had sex dirt on King. For King, who may already have known about the suggestive pictures the FBI had of him with Rustin, the omission brought no comfort. ‘Martin responded by becoming nervous and eating his nails,’ said Abernathy. ‘He was troubled …’
King looked that way when he emerged to tell the press he and Edgar had ‘a much clearer understanding.’ Had he retracted anything he had said about Edgar? ‘No,’ he said, and ducked into an elevator. In the corridor, even as he met with Edgar, an FBI official had been trying to interest a newsman in pictures of King with a woman.
Anxiety about the FBI compounded the fatigue that had recently sent King to the hospital. On the long flight to Europe he fretted about it aloud. His wife, Coretta, who accompanied him to Oslo, remembers his deep depression. ‘It was a time when he ought to have been happy … But he was worried that the rumors might hurt the movement, and he was worried about what black people would think … Somehow he managed all the official functions …’
King returned to the United States to a tumultuous welcome, and a private jet provided by New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller to carry him on his way. Edgar, meanwhile, rushed a letter about King’s ‘personal conduct’ to Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey, because he had greeted King at a reception in the Waldorf-Astoria.
In early January 1965, at home in Atlanta, Coretta King opened a small box that had been forwarded from King’s headquarters. It contained a reel of tape, which aides assumed was a recording of one of her husband’s speeches. Her husband’s voice was indeed on the tape, but this was no speech. And with it came an unsigned, typed note t
hat read, in part:
KING,
In view of your low grade [censored at FBI] I will not dignify your name with either a Mr or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII [censored words]. King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes …
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 … Your ‘honorary’ degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King I repeat you are done …
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 [sic] (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant) [sic]. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudalant [sic] self is bared to the nation.
Soon King was listening to the accompanying tape with his friend Abernathy. ‘There were muffled voices,’ Abernathy recalled, ‘that seemed to come from a faraway room … I recognized Martin and then myself … Then there were other sounds … Clearly what we were hearing were whispers and sighs from a bedroom.’
The two men sat in silence when King switched off the tape. Then Abernathy said simply, ‘J. Edgar Hoover.’ He was right, as a Senate committee established a decade later. The tape was a composite, made up of several surveillance recordings and prepared in the FBI laboratory. Edgar’s aide William Sullivan had told a trusted agent, Lish Whitsun, to fly to Florida with the package and mail it to Mrs King from a post office near Miami airport.
Edgar had the satisfaction of knowing the victim’s reaction within twenty-four hours. ‘They are out to break me,’ King was overheard saying on a wiretap, ‘out to get me, harass me, break my spirit.’ According to relatives and close friends, he fell into a deep depression, tormented by insomnia.
A few days later, when Bureau agents tracked King down to a secret hideaway, they called in a false fire alarm. Fire trucks arrived, sirens blaring, and King guessed at once who had sent them. One local agent has since recalled that this was deemed ‘a good prank, something to be proud of.’ As if he too were proud, Edgar sent a report on King’s emotional crisis to the White House.
The motive for mailing the tape, had the package not been delayed by a mail pileup, had been to ‘scare King off’ from collecting his Nobel Prize – the honor Edgar himself so coveted. Sullivan said years later that the idea originated with Edgar and Clyde, and the record shows that the tape was mailed the day after a demand by Edgar for aggressive action.5
The harassment continued, and for a while King became even more depressed. Then he rallied. After an intense discussion with Abernathy, he decided not to give in to the pressure in any way. ‘We were not going to let Hoover and the FBI turn us around,’ Abernathy recalled in 1989, ‘because we were fighting a just cause.’
Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, 1968, at the age of thirty-nine, the day after making a speech anticipating his own death. Felled by a single rifle shot as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, he died within minutes. Poor black communities across the country exploded in grief and rage. The nation’s leaders joined King’s widow at a funeral attended by 150,000 people.
Edgar was not among the mourners. Although the public was told he was personally running the murder investigation, he spent the following morning having his photograph taken for public relations purposes. The next day he did what he had done after President Kennedy was killed – went to the races. In the weeks that followed, he failed to show up for meetings with the Attorney General to discuss the progress of the inquiry.
Two months later, following a manhunt, a small-time criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested in London and extradited to the United States. He pleaded guilty to King’s murder and was sent to jail for ninety-nine years.
That, however, was not the end of the story. Ray’s guilty plea was the basis of a deal between his attorney and the prosecution. He immediately recanted the plea and requested a mistrial. Then the judge died, and – in spite of repeated legal efforts – the evidence against Ray never was tested in criminal court. He died in jail in 1998.
Few believe Ray acted alone. William Sullivan, who took part in the 1968 investigation, had serious doubts. And ten years later, after a massive new inquiry, Congress’ Assassinations Committee concluded that there had indeed been a conspiracy. It suspected Ray had been hired to shoot King, and that his two brothers were also involved.
After Ray’s arrest, asked whether there was any evidence of conspiracy, Edgar said, ‘None whatsoever.’ The day after the guilty plea, he approved this proposal by DeLoach:
I would like to suggest that consideration be given to advising a friendly newspaper contact on a strictly confidential basis, that Coretta King and Reverend Abernathy are deliberately plotting to keep King’s assassination in the news by pulling the ruse of maintaining that King’s murder was definitely a conspiracy and not committed by one man. This, of course, is obviously a rank trick in order to keep the money coming in to Mrs King and Abernathy. We can do this without any attribution to the FBI and without anyone knowing that the information came from a wiretap.
Ralph Abernathy had two main suspicions at the time. His first thought was that the Ku Klux Klan was behind it. His second, he recalled, was that King had been killed ‘by someone trained or hired by the FBI and acting under orders from J. Edgar Hoover himself.’
In 1988, in a television interview from prison, Ray said he made his original confession only under pressure from the FBI. He claimed agents threatened to jail his father and one of his brothers if he did not do so. He had been framed, Ray alleged, to cover up an FBI plot to kill King.6
The Assassinations Committee did not believe the Bureau was involved in the murder. It did, however, conclude that the inquiry into the crime was inadequate. No one has satisfactorily explained why it was two weeks before the FBI issued an alert for Ray, a prisoner on the run from jail, when his fingerprints had been found on personal belongings found near the scene of the crime. ‘The belongings even included a radio bearing Ray’s prison identification number – 00416.’
Former Atlanta agent Donald Wilson remained bewildered by his superiors’ actions during the hunt for Ray, recalling as he did the strange reaction when he and a colleague spotted a man they believed to be the suspect. ‘We saw the guy when we were driving near an apartment Ray was known to have used … He was the spitting image of Ray, and we thought, you know, “This is it, this is our future. We’re golden!” We got on the radio to the control post and said we wanted to detain the man and ask for identification. But the radio came back and said we were to take no action, return to the office and sign out. We looked at each other in disbelief, but we did as we were told.
‘I’m not saying it was Ray,’ Wilson said. ‘The point is that it could well have been. He wasn’t apprehended till much later, by the police in London. Why were we stopped? The top people were calling the shots, including someone they’d sent down from Washington. I was really suspicious even then. I thought there was something wrong going on …’ Arthur Murtagh, who was also serving in Atlanta at the time, had misgivings, too. ‘I was told we weren’t to talk about conspiracy,’ Murtagh recalled. ‘I think it was a political decision.’
Murtagh recalled the depth of hatred whipped up by Edgar’s long vendetta. ‘When they announced King’s death on the radio,’ he said, ‘my colleague literally jumped in the air and said, “We finally got the son of a bitch!” I don’t know what he meant by “We got him,” but that’s what he said …’
Even if Edgar and the FBI had no part in the actual crime, they must surely bear some of the blame. ‘Among the kind of paralegal groups they did business with,’ said King’s colleague Andrew Young, ‘it is quite possible that one of thos
e groups took it upon themselves to plan and execute Martin’s assassination – knowing that the FBI would be pleased with it and wouldn’t give them too much trouble … They created the climate in which Martin’s assassination was acceptable.’
Character assassination of King continued even while his murder was being investigated. ‘Hoover sent word through one of his appointed leaks,’ said Jack Anderson, ‘that they had a line on the assassination. They said King had been playing around with a dentist’s wife in Los Angeles, and they thought the dentist might have killed King in revenge. I couldn’t ignore the lead, so I went to see her – she was a very beautiful woman. She more or less admitted she and King had been lovers.
‘What the FBI had told me seemed to fit together, until I talked to the husband. It was obvious that he had neither the inclination nor the ability to have killed King, and that the FBI story was false. My conclusion was that Hoover was hoping I’d bite and run a story – because the effect would’ve been to discredit King. The real story he wanted out was that King had been running around with other men’s wives.’
Edgar later strove to prevent King’s birthday from being declared a national holiday, and approved a scheme to persuade members of Congress that King had been a ‘scoundrel.’ Such briefings, he stressed, should be conducted ‘very cautiously.’ The politicians were briefed, and King’s birthday was not declared a holiday until 1983.
In 1975 President Ford would declare that those responsible for the FBI smear operation against King should be brought to trial. The FBI Director who succeeded Edgar, Clarence Kelley, agreed with him. By then Edgar was dead, as was Clyde. Other officials involved were still alive, but none was ever charged.
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