A Treasury of Great American Scandals (27 page)

“In a very real sense there was no greater crime in Mr. Hoover's eyes than public criticism of the Bureau,” recalled former Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach. “All public critics of the Bureau, if they persisted,” were treated as enemies. “The only thing unique about Dr. King was the intensity of the feeling and the apparent extremes to which the Bureau went in seeking to destroy the critic.”

Hoover's wrath was evident just before the famous 1963 March on Washington at which King delivered his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech. The FBI's domestic intelligence division had prepared a lengthy and detailed report on the Communist Party's efforts to infiltrate the civil rights movement, concluding that such efforts had been a failure. But with a vendetta against Martin Luther King to pursue, Hoover was not satisfied with the benign contents of the report.

“This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” the director wrote on the report's cover letter. “You contended then that Castro & his cohorts were not Communists & not influenced by Communists. Time alone has proved you wrong. I for one can't ignore the memos re King . . . et al. as having only an infinitesimal effect on the efforts to exploit the American Negro by the Communists.”

Hoover's underlings were smart enough to know that their jobs depended upon their interpretation of the facts meshing harmoniously with the autocratic director's. Accordingly, two days after the March on Washington, Assistant Director William C. Sullivan—no doubt fearing Hoover's wrath—prepared a new memo that completely reversed the position taken in the one sent a week earlier. “The Director is correct,” Sullivan wrote in humble response to Hoover's critique. “We were completely wrong about believing the evidence was not sufficient to determine some years ago that Fidel Castro was not a communist or under communist influence. On investigating and writing about communism and the American Negro, we had better remember this and profit by the lesson it should teach us.” Sullivan went on to characterize King's “I Have a Dream” oration as a “powerful demagogic speech,” and warned that “We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”

With the menace of Martin Luther King now fabricated to Hoover's specifications, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was confronted with the “evidence” of King's continuing Communist connections. Fearing the effect a public disclosure of this might have on the pending civil rights legislation backed by his brother's administration, Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King's home, as well as the SCLC's offices in Atlanta and New York. On its own initiative, the FBI planted bugs in his hotel rooms. A new phase of official harassment was beginning. It would drive King to the edge of despair.

Much of what the bugs picked up was useless noise, but the juice that did seep through was enough to send J. Edgar Hoover pirouetting across his office with glee. There was King laughing at the Kennedys. King telling raunchy stories. King cheating on his wife. It was a bonanza—dirt both to destroy the sinful minister and to satisfy the voyeuristic pleasure the director derived from hearing about the sex lives of others. Of course, Hoover's public reaction was moral outrage, a posture dutifully emulated by the FBI rank and file. “King must, at some propitious point in the future, be revealed to the people of this country and to his Negro followers as being what he actually is—a fraud, demagogue and moral scoundrel,” Assistant Director Sullivan wrote in a memo. “When the true facts concerning his activities are presented, such should be enough, if handled properly, to take him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence so that he will no longer be a security problem and no longer will be deceiving and misleading the Negro people.” Hoover put it more succinctly: “[This] will destroy the burrhead.”

The director was stunned and angered, therefore, when it became obvious that the derogatory information the FBI had so painstakingly gathered was having little effect. When King went to Europe in 1964, for example, the bureau learned that he wanted to meet Pope Paul VI. Anxious to prevent such a credibility-building encounter, an agent alerted Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, shared the dirt on King, and encouraged him to pass it on to the Vatican. The meeting took place anyway, and Hoover was shocked. “I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate,” he scrawled on a news clipping of the event.

A month later, something even worse happened. King won the Nobel Peace Prize. This was just too much for the director. “King could well qualify for the ‘top alley cat' prize,” he wrote on a news clipping of the announcement. In light of this latest outrage, fresh accounts of King's behavior behind closed doors were sent to the White House, the attorney general's office, and all the government offices, including the State Department, which would play a part in King's trip to Oslo to accept the prize. Hoover's fury was unsated, however, and in a rare meeting with a group of female reporters, he went on a rampage. Martin Luther King was “the most notorious liar in the country,” he informed the reporters—a response to King's criticism of the FBI two years earlier. Ignoring the frantic notes of an aide imploring him to keep his comments off the record, Hoover continued to rant, calling King “one of the lowest characters in the country.” The blistering attack became front page news.

King's public response was restrained. “I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure,” he said in a statement. “He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office. Therefore, I cannot engage in a public debate with him. I have nothing but sympathy for this man who has served his country so well.” Behind the scenes, though, King was preparing for battle. He instructed his aides to ask other public figures and organizations to speak out against Hoover's outburst. In a phone conversation with one SCLC staffer—taped by the FBI, of course—King said that the director “is old and getting senile” and should be “hit from all sides” in order to force President Johnson to censure Hoover publicly.

The war was escalating, but King's arsenal was sorely limited next to Hoover's. This was a man who demanded results and had all the resources to get them. When Hoover complained in one memo that “we are never taking the aggressive,” he had an army below him that got the message. Assistant Director William Sullivan was no doubt inspired by the boss when he ordered the “highlights” of King's taped misdeeds assembled into a sort of “greatest hits” recording and sent to King himself. To accompany this damning package, Sullivan, posing as a black person, wrote the following anonymous letter:

 

KING,

 

“They are out to break me,” King said in despair after receiving the package—a reaction that must have delighted Hoover when it was caught on a wiretap. Though King was able to rally and continue his mission, the FBI's harassment campaign continued until his assassination in 1968, and even beyond. Hoover approved the following proposal by his aide Cartha DeLoach after Martin Luther King's murder: “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 [King's widow and his close associate, respectively] 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.”

Although many of the FBI's shameful secrets were exposed after Hoover's death in 1972, including the ones involving Martin Luther King, the bureau's headquarters in Washington still bears the director's name. Until the American Hall of Shame is erected, that building remains his monument.

Richard Nixon: Say
What!?

 

 

Ah, Tricky Dick. So much has already been said and written about the disgraced thirty-seventh president. There's almost nothing left of Nixon to kick around anymore. Perhaps, then, it's time to let the man speak for himself. All the president's rants were captured on recording equipment installed at the White House, reminding us, as Gene Weingarten of the
Washington Post
notes, “that the leader of the free world was buggier than a flophouse blanket.”

 

“Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags!”

 

“The Jews are [an] irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”

 

To National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger: “You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I don't give a damn. I don't care.”

“What about the rich Jews? The IRS is full of Jews. . . . Go after them like a son of a bitch. The Jews, you know, are stealing in every direction.”

 

“An all-out dove and a vicious bastard.”

 

“I'd really like to get Teddy taped.”

 

“The only way they learn how is to watch other pandas mate, you see.”

 

“Most Jews are disloyal, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on you.”

 

“
Newsweek
is totally—it's all run by Jews and dominated by them in their editorial pages. The
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
totally Jewish, too.”

 

To White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman: “Keep after 'em. . . . Maybe we can get a scandal on any, any of the leading Democrats.”

 

“The reaction is going to be primarily in Washington and not the country because I think the country doesn't give much of a shit about bugging. . . . Most people around the country think it's probably routine, [that] everybody's trying to bug everybody else—it's politics.”

“Aren't the Chicago Seven all Jews?”

 

“We have no discipline in this bureaucracy. . . . We never fire anybody. We never reprimand anybody. We never demote anybody. We always promote the sons of bitches that kick us in the ass. That's true in the State Department. It's true in HEW. It's true in OMB, and true for ourselves, and it's just got to stop.”

 

“We have to do it artfully so that we don't create an issue by abusing the IRS politically. And, there are ways to do it. Goddamn it, sneak in in the middle of the night.”

 

“You've got a senile old bastard in [Justice Hugo] Black. You've got an old fool and black fool in that [Justice] Thurgood Marshall. Then you've got [Justice William] Brennan, I mean, a jackass Catholic.”

 

“There's a hell of a lot of Jews in the District, see . . . the Gentiles have moved out.”

 

“An old bitch” and “a terrible old bag.”

 

To H. R. Haldeman: “You're to break into the place [the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank], rifle the files and bring them out. . . . Just go in and take them [the president demands, almost shouting]. Go in around 8 or 9 o'clock . . . and clean them out.”