by Tim Weiner
LBJ suggested that Kennedy order Hoover to shadow King.
The attorney general said he had no power to tell Hoover to do anything. “I have no dealings with the FBI anymore,” Kennedy said. “It’s a very difficult situation.”
“He sends all kinds of reports over to you … about me planning and plotting things,” Kennedy told LBJ, “plotting the overthrow of the government by force and violence … leading a coup.”
Johnson professed shock and ignorance about these reports. It was not the last lie he would tell Kennedy about his relationship with Hoover.
“Mr. Johnson at all times recognized strength and knew how to use strength,” said Deke DeLoach, Hoover’s newly appointed liaison to LBJ’s White House. “Hoover was riding the crest of the wave at the time and Mr. Johnson knew how to use him. They were not deep personal friends by any stretch of the imagination. There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other.”
“WE’RE FIXIN’ TO DECLARE WAR”
Lyndon Johnson concentrated information and power in the Oval Office better than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. He admired the way Hoover used secret intelligence. He used the FBI as a political weapon in ways no president ever had done.
He needed Hoover’s help to use every ounce of his presidential power—to wield his political clout as freely and as secretly as possible; to contain the Communist menace, foreign and domestic; to snoop on his friends and enemies in Congress and on the Supreme Court, to keep the lickspittles of the liberal left in check, and to slay the dragons of the far right.
LBJ never used power more effectively than when he ordered Hoover to destroy the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, a red-white-and-blue war against the Klan’s church-burning terrorists.
Burke Marshall, the chief of the civil rights division at the Justice Department, remembered LBJ saying that “three sovereignties” were involved in the battle: “There’s the United States and there’s the State of Mississippi and there’s J. Edgar Hoover.” To handle all three required a combination of brute force and great finesse. LBJ made it work.
On Sunday, June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared after fleeing a jailhouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in their station wagon, with Klansmen hot on their trail. Once they went missing they were presumed dead. Mississippi saw, on average, twenty-five civil-rights-connected shootings, beatings, bombings, and arsons every month during 1964. But a triple murder—and one that involved two white men from the North—was out of the ordinary.
Hoover called LBJ at the White House two days later. “We have found the car,” Hoover told the president. It had been set ablaze eight miles outside Philadelphia.
“Apparently, these men have been killed,” Hoover continued.
“Or maybe kidnapped and not killed,” said LBJ, with little hope.
“Well, I would doubt whether those people down there would give them even that much of a break,” Hoover said. “The car is so burned and charred with heat …”
“The car is still burning?” LBJ asked.
“The car is still burning,” Hoover said.
“We’re going to have more cases like this down south,” Hoover told the president. “What’s going to complicate matters is the agitators of the Negro movement.”
The search began in the hot and hostile terrain of Neshoba County, Mississippi. The Klan had sworn members working for the Mississippi Highway Patrol (MHP) and the county sheriff. The FBI had a paltry presence in Mississippi; some old-time agents, who had to work and live with state and local law enforcement officers, were unenthusiastic about making a federal case out of the murder of three agitators.
On June 24, LBJ shocked Hoover by sending the retired CIA director Allen Dulles to talk with the governor of Mississippi and the chief of the Mississippi Highway Patrol. The president stroked and reassured Hoover: “I haven’t got a better friend in this government than you.… Ain’t nobody going to take over anything from you as long as I’m living.… Ain’t nobody going to take our thirty-year friendship and mess it up.”
On June 26, Dulles reported back to LBJ at the White House. The president put him on the phone with Hoover. “You ought to review the number of agents that you have in that state,” Dulles told the director. The Mississippi Highway Patrol and the county sheriffs were “not really going to enforce this business, I’m afraid, unless they have somebody looking over their shoulders.… There are a half a dozen other situations down there that are full of difficulty and there might be terroristic activities of any kind.”
Hoover was deeply skeptical. “That’s going to be an almost superhuman task, don’t you think, Allen?”
While LBJ listened on a speakerphone, Hoover focused on keeping the integrationists in line. “These people have been trained … and are going to live in the homes of the colored population,” Hoover said. “They will hold meetings in each community to give them the education they’re supposed to have” in order to be registered to vote under Mississippi law. “You’ve got to almost keep a man, keep an agent, with these individuals as they come into the state,” Hoover said. “Because this Klan crowd—members of the MHP are Klansmen, many of the chiefs of police are, the sheriffs are.” Hoover wanted a contingent of U.S. marshals, not the FBI, to deal with the Mississippi Highway Patrol and the National Council of Churches and the black activists alike.
LBJ got back on the line, telling Hoover to beef up the FBI’s manpower in Mississippi: “Maybe we can prevent some of these acts of terror by the very presence of your people.”
The president called Hoover again on the evening of June 29. LBJ had invited the mother of one of the missing men, Andy Schwerner, to the White House. Hoover was unhappy. “She’s a communist, you know,” he told the president. “She and her husband both have been active members of the Communist Party in New York for a number of years.”
LBJ, coughing heavily, straining his voice: “Is she an actual member?”
Hoover, wearily: “Oh, yes, she’s an actual member.”
Hoover, nevertheless, had started to comply with the president’s command. “I’m opening a main office,” he said, “a full-time office at Jackson, Mississippi, with an agent in charge and a full staff as we would have in New York or San Francisco.”
On July 2, 1964, LBJ asked Hoover to go to Mississippi and proclaim the omnipresence of the FBI. The director was dubious. “Whatever you do, you’re going to be damned,” Hoover said. “Can’t satisfy both sides.”
Then he got a direct order from the president of the United States.
“Ain’t nobody going to damn you,” LBJ said. “Nobody but a few communists and a few crackpots and a few wild people are against you in this country. They’re unanimous. Ain’t anybody in this country has the respect you have.”
“See how many people you can bring in there,” said the president. “You oughta put fifty, a hundred people, after this Klan, and studyin’ this from one county to another. I think their very presence may save us a division of soldiers.… I think you oughta have the best intelligence system, better than you got on the communists. I read a dozen of your reports last night here ’til one o’clock on the communists. And they can’t open their mouth without your knowin’ what they’re sayin’.”
“Very true,” Hoover said.
LBJ knew how to twist Hoover’s arm: “Now I don’t want these Klansmen to open their mouths without your knowing what they’re sayin’. Now nobody needs to know it but you, maybe, but we ought to have intelligence on that state.…
“If I have to send in troops … it could be awfully dangerous,” LBJ said. “I’m having these demands for 5,000 soldiers.… To send in a bunch of Army people, divisions, is just a mistake. But I’ve got ample FBI people.… You figure out where you can borrow them … See how many we can put in next week.”
“I want you to have the same kind of intelligence that you have on the communists,” the president said.
LBJ was telling Hoover to g
o after the Klan in language he understood. Hoover obeyed. The FBI would pursue the Klansmen, penetrate their ranks, subvert them, and sabotage them, so long as Lyndon Johnson commanded that it be done.
“Mr. Hoover never would have changed by himself”—not without LBJ’s forceful command, Burke Marshall said. “The FBI was grudging about doing anything” against the Klan. “Mr. Hoover viewed the civil-rights activists as lawbreakers. The FBI was worse than useless, given his mind-set”—until the president ordered him to change his mind.
Hoover assigned a hard-headed but highly intelligent favorite of his, Joe Sullivan, to run Mississippi. Sullivan chose Roy K. Moore as his special agent in charge. Moore was an old marine. An unusual number of the best young FBI men he sent to Mississippi were combat veterans culled from FBI outposts across America.
“I want you to gather intelligence by trying to infiltrate the Klan,” Moore told his men. “We’re fixin’ to declare war.”
Moore tutored many first-tour agents in “techniques to gather intelligence … that have been used since the days of the Egyptians,” said an FBI rookie named Billy Bob Williams, an ex-marine who rooted out Klan torture chambers and killing fields in desolate Mississippi Delta hamlets.
“Martin Luther King yelled and screamed that there weren’t enough Yankee agents down in Mississippi—so, lo and behold, I find myself down in Mississippi,” the FBI’s Donald J. Cesare said. In Philadelphia, the hotbed of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a town of about 40,000, “there must have been forty to fifty agents searching all over that place,” out looking for corpses.
Cesare was an unusually experienced man for an FBI rookie. He came to Mississippi from his first tour, in Dallas, where he had investigated the Kennedy assassination. A decade before, he had been a tobacco-chewing captain in the United States Marine Corps, recruited by the CIA as a paramilitary officer during the Korean War. Among other assignments, he had trained Tibetan guerrillas loyal to the Dalai Lama. He wanted to go to East Africa in 1963, but the CIA wanted to send him back to Asia. Cesare quit—and wound up in charge of Neshoba County, Mississippi, instead of Nairobi, Kenya. Why? Because his father, chief of police in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, had always wanted his son to join the Bureau.
Cesare’s chief, Inspector Joe Sullivan, found out where the three civil rights workers’ bodies were buried. Sullivan was “very friendly with Maynard King, who was a Mississippi State Highway Patrol Captain,” Cesare said. Sullivan never told his underlings how he got the information. But Hoover knew.
On the evening of August 4, 1964, Deke DeLoach called the White House, interrupting a war council. The president had received a startling report of a Communist attack that day on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin—a false report, but one taken as truth. The intelligence fiasco was the opening shot of America’s war in Vietnam. That night, on live television, the president told the American people that the United States had begun bombing Vietnam.
He was far happier to talk to DeLoach.
“Mr. Hoover wanted me to call you, sir, immediately and tell you the FBI has found three bodies six miles southwest of Philadelphia,” DeLoach said. “A search party of agents turned up the bodies just about 15 minutes ago.”
“You pretty much have in mind who did this job?” LBJ asked.
“Mr. President, we have some very excellent suspects,” DeLoach said. “We have some excellent circumstantial evidence.”
“How’d you find the spot? Somebody give you a lead?”
“Yes, sir, someone we have to protect with a great deal of caution, of course.”
“You don’t have much doubt but what these are the bodies, do you?”
“Mr. President, we feel very definitely these are the bodies,” DeLoach said. “It took a hell of a lot of shoveling and digging to get at them.”
Through Maynard King, who had led the FBI to the bodies, the Bureau recruited another Klansman, Delmar Dennis, a handsome twenty-seven-year-old preacher with a photographic memory. Sullivan assigned Don Cesare to handle Dennis. The preacher had a good head under his hood. He remembered license plates. He remembered phone numbers. He remembered names, dates, and places. Cesare was authorized to pay Dennis whatever it took to keep him serving as the FBI’s secret agent inside the Klan.
“I paid him close to a quarter of a million dollars,” Cesare said—a sum worth about $1.75 million today, far greater than any FBI informant ever before had received.
Delmar Dennis earned it. “He identified all the law enforcement in Neshoba County as Klansmen,” Cesare said. He named the officers who cornered, shot, killed, and buried the outside agitators; “in particular he spelled out the order which called for the murder of the three civil rights workers which originated from Sam Bowers, who was the Imperial Wizard of the Klan in Mississippi, to the Neshoba Klavern—at that time, headed by Edgar Ray Killen,” Cesare said. “Delmar was so trusted in the Klan that he served not only the Bureau, but he also served the Klan—not only as a courier of Klan information, but he was a distributor of Klan funds too.”
It took a very long time before men like Killen and Bowers were brought to justice; in Killen’s case it took forty years. Delmar Dennis wound up a broken and disillusioned man, torn by his role as an informer. But with his recruitment, the FBI was inside the Mississippi Klan.
WHITE HATE
The day after the corpses of the three civil rights workers were found, LBJ called Hoover. “I knew you’d do it,” the president said. “If you just think that you gonna get off the payroll ’cause you’re getting a little older, you crazy as hell. I don’t retire the FBI.”
“That’s very nice of you, Mr. President,” Hoover said with evident pride. “I just finished up my physical and I passed it 100 percent.”
Then he got down to the Mississippi murder cases: “Each of these men had been shot,” he said. “And we have the names of the people who did it. Now, to prove it is gonna be a little tougher job. The sheriff was in on it. The deputy sheriff was in on it. The justice of the peace was in on it. And there were seven other men. So we have all those names and as I say we’re concentrating now on developing the evidence.”
The deep penetration of the KKK in Mississippi led Hoover to authorize a full-blown counterintelligence program against the Klan.
COINTELPRO—WHITE HATE was inaugurated on September 2, 1964, two months after the president had told Hoover to pursue the Klan just as he had chased the Communists. WHITE HATE went on for seven years, inflicting serious and lasting damage on the Klan. White-shirted agents would fight white-sheeted Klansmen like snake-killing jungle warriors, but their job called for something more subtle than kicking down doors. It required recruiting and running informants. The FBI men had to act more like spies than soldiers. Two hundred FBI agents had worked on the Mississippi killings; they had interrogated 480 Klansmen. After the Klan murdered Lemuel Penn, a black army reserve lieutenant, outside Atlanta, the FBI expanded its work to cover every major Klan group in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
These were internal security cases, not criminal investigations. They depended on the infiltration, surveillance, and sabotage of the members of the Klan and their murderous leaders.
WHITE HATE intensified rapidly in the fall of 1964. It involved all the techniques developed in the FBI’s long-running attack on the Left. Once a week during the fall of 1964, FBI agents interrogated all known members of the White Knights of the KKK, blaming other Klansmen for being snitches and naming names, sowing deep suspicion among Klan members. Few knew who was an informer and who was not. The FBI dangled small fortunes before potential KKK informers, offered outright bribes to Klansmen who could serve as double agents inside state and local police forces, planted bugs and wiretaps in Klaverns, carried out black-bag jobs to steal membership lists and (on at least one occasion) dynamite caches. The FBI’s infiltration of the Klan proved better than the Klan’s infiltration of state and local law enforcement agencies.
“There would be a Klan mee
ting with ten people there, and six of them would be reporting back the next day,” said the FBI’s Joseph J. Rucci, Jr. “We had a pretty effective counter-Klan going. We would also communicate with them in the mail. I remember we would send them post cards; big post cards went through the mail. I remember one in particular showed a Klansman and someone peeking up a sheet and it would say, the catch would be, ‘I wonder who is peeking under your sheet tonight.’ ”
The gung-ho mood of the FBI agents who ran WHITE HATE was remarkable, given the fact that their colleagues were fighting Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement with equal intensity.
The Communist Party COINTELPRO was focused on the movement and its white supporters among liberals and young leftists. “The Bureau was doing what it was supposed to do, keeping up with foreign influences” inside the civil rights movement, Billy Bob Williams said; the FBI had identified a significant number of civil rights activists as “trained in the Soviet Union or trained in Cuba, and all they were interested in was civil unrest.”
“IT MAKES ME SCARED BY GOD TO EVEN TALK BACK TO MY WIFE!”
LBJ’s newly declassified diaries and telephone logs show he was in constant contact with Hoover during 1964 and 1965, sometimes two and three times a day, seeking political intelligence on many matters, most of them far from the field of law enforcement.
Hoover lived for such moments.
When simmering racial tensions flared up in the streets of New York in September 1964, LBJ sent Hoover to investigate. Hoover made a quick trip to the city and reported to the president that “the race riots … have not been initiated by communists” but that “communists have appeared immediately” to reap political hay from them. As an aside, Hoover gave the president a report on the fortunes of his Republican rival in the upcoming election, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, among New York Jews. “A lot of these Jews that were going to vote for Goldwater—thinking that he was a Jew, you know—have now decided that they’re going to vote for you,” Hoover told LBJ. The two men chuckled together.
