[New documents reveal that Johnson was more of an antagonist to
King and a conspirator with Hoover than he has been portrayed. He knew
exactly what J. Edgar Hoover was doing.]
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LBJ VS. MLK  
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Jonathan Eig and Jeanne Theoharis
April 12, 2023
New York Times
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_ New documents reveal that Johnson was more of an antagonist to King
and a conspirator with Hoover than he has been portrayed. He knew
exactly what J. Edgar Hoover was doing. _

Martin Luther King Jr. with President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 at the
White House, National Archive/Newsmakers, via Getty Images

 

We have long known about the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover’s
animus toward the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover built an
extensive apparatus of surveillance and disruption designed to destroy
King and to drive a wedge between King and President Lyndon Johnson.

But historians, journalists and contemporary political leaders have
largely portrayed Hoover as a kind of uncontrollable vigilante, an all
too powerful and obsessive lawman, and Johnson as a genuine civil
rights partner until King broke with the president over the Vietnam
War. In reality, as new documents reveal, Johnson was more of an
antagonist to King and a conspirator with Hoover than he has been
portrayed.

By personalizing the F.B.I.’s assault on King, Americans cling to a
view of history that isolates a few bad actors who opposed the civil
rights movement — including Hoover, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama
and the Birmingham lawman Bull Connor. They thus fail to acknowledge
the institutionalized, well-organized resistance to change in our
society. Americans prefer a version of history in which most decent
people did the right thing in the end.

It’s time to move past that comfortable story and recognize the
power structure that supported the F.B.I.’s campaign. Many Americans
— starting with the president — thought movement activists like
King posed threats to the established order and needed to be watched
and controlled. Members of the press could have exposed the bureau’s
campaign. And many government officials who could have stopped,
curtailed or exposed the F.B.I.’s attack on King instead enabled or
encouraged it.

F.B.I. records declassified in the past several years and documents
from the Johnson archives released in 2022 force us to reconsider the
nature of Johnson’s involvement in the F.B.I.’s campaign against
King. The White House documents — part of a huge cache of F.B.I.
memos that has only begun to see daylight — suggest that Johnson,
from the beginning of his presidency in 1963 to King’s assassination
in 1968, was apprised almost weekly by Hoover himself on the
F.B.I.’s surveillance of King.

Johnson did nothing to stop or rein in the F.B.I., even after at least
one top administration official expressed concern. In all likelihood,
that was because Johnson saw strategic advantage in knowing about
King’s activities as he worked with King on civil rights
legislation, and perhaps he saw even more utility when King began to
criticize the president’s policies, especially concerning the
Vietnam War. At the same time, according to the president’s aides,
Johnson clearly enjoyed having access to the prurient details of
King’s life.

Both Johnson and Hoover seemed to take personal offense at King’s
audacity to criticize the federal government and the F.B.I. Johnson
had a close relationship with Hoover before he became president, often
using the bureau to vet his Senate staff. Both men understood the
value of gathering inside information on rivals, and Johnson, more
than most presidents, used the bureau for this. Hoover liked being of
service to the president. Hoover gave the Johnsons a beagle puppy, and
the Johnsons named the pet J. Edgar. (The dog was eventually renamed
Edgar.) Hoover was also indebted to Johnson for protecting him from
the requirement to retire at age 70.

Since last year’s release of hundreds of pages from the files of
Mildred Stegall, Johnson’s closest personal aide
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longtime administrative assistant, a more nuanced — and damaging —
picture of the partnership between Johnson and Hoover has emerged. The
sheer volume of these memos to the president — more than 250 over
five years — further demonstrates Johnson’s intimate familiarity
with the F.B.I.’s campaign.

Ms. Stegall joined Johnson’s Senate staff in 1956. In the White
House, she assumed custody of many of Johnson’s personal financial
and campaign files when another aide, Walter Jenkins, left the White
House in 1964. She later became the primary liaison between the White
House and the F.B.I. After Johnson had the opportunity to read the
pages (and he probably didn’t read them all), Ms. Stegall locked
them in a vault that also contained Johnson’s personal business
papers, as well as the tapes Johnson made of his own telephone
conversations, which were made public [[link removed]] years
ago. In other words, the president and the director of the F.B.I. had
established a protocol for private and immediate communication.

Hoover used the F.B.I. assistant director Cartha DeLoach as his
special liaison to the White House. In a memo dated Jan. 14, 1964, Mr.
DeLoach wrote to Hoover to say that Mr. Jenkins had read the most
recent report on King “word for word,” considered it “one of the
most repulsive incidents that he knew of” and planned to tell
Johnson about it later the same day. According to the memo, Mr.
Jenkins told Mr. DeLoach “that the F.B.I. could perform a good
service to the country if this matter could somehow be confidentially
given to members of the press.”

Mr. DeLoach told Mr. Jenkins that Hoover already “had this in
mind” but planned to “obtain additional information prior to
discussing it with certain friends.” The F.B.I. also fed Johnson a
steady diet of information on King’s conversations with his top
advisers, gleaned from telephone wiretaps and microphones planted in
hotel rooms, that the president could use in managing his relationship
with King.

Soon after Mr. DeLoach’s memo, journalists at many of the nation’s
biggest news outlets — including The New York Times, The Los Angeles
Times, The Chicago Daily News, Newsweek and The Atlanta Constitution
— were handed salacious files about King’s extramarital affairs
and presented with lists of questions the F.B.I. wanted reporters to
ask King. These reporters have gotten a lot of credit for not
publishing the prurient details of the F.B.I.’s surveillance, but at
the same time, none of them chose to report that the F.B.I. was
conducting a ‌massive‌ surveillance campaign against law-abiding
American citizens.

In addition to the president and the media, other officials at the
F.B.I. — acting independently of Hoover although no doubt with the
hopes of pleasing their boss — worked to ruin King. Scores of
ranking officials and agents at the F.B.I., dozens of elected
officials and several informants embedded in King’s inner circles
knew what was going on, and none, as far as the public records
indicate, blew a whistle on the campaign.

Throughout 1964, generally considered the high point of the
King-Johnson partnership, Hoover apprised Johnson of King’s travel,
his associates, the protest strategies King was considering, which
government officials had contacted King and private things King had to
say about Johnson and his administration. Hoover reported on an
administration official who wanted King to participate in a memorial
to President John Kennedy, what King planned to say to the Republican
platform committee, how the civil rights leader was considering a fast
around the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge and a host
of other pieces of political surveillance. When an F.B.I. wiretap
picked up Coretta Scott King complaining with her husband that they
had not yet received congratulations from the White House on his Nobel
Prize, Hoover reported the conversation to Johnson.

Today, many of the memos Hoover sent to Johnson might be described as
opposition research. They show that even as Johnson and King worked
together, King was still treated as an adversary to be managed and
controlled.

The surveillance continued until King’s death on April 4, 1968: On
April 1, Hoover wrote to Ms. Stegall to say the president might want
to be aware that King and his closest adviser, Stanley Levison, had
been discussing Johnson’s re-election campaign and that King said
Robert Kennedy, in his Democratic primary bid, “is the only man that
can stop President Johnson.”

Hoover believed that Communists exerted influence on King, and he
drove F.B.I. agents to find ties. But people with past Communist ties
were everywhere in the 1960s, as Hoover and Johnson knew. The issue of
Communist influence, in the end, served mostly to justify the campaign
to undermine King. Hoover, who referred to King as “the burrhead,”
hated to see King earn respect and gain influence, especially as he
learned the details of King’s personal life, and he became
determined to use those details to undercut King’s reputation.

Fundamentally, Hoover’s campaign revolved around power — making
sure King didn’t have too much of it. After witnessing King’s
success at the March on Washington in 1963, William Sullivan, the
F.B.I. assistant director responsible for the domestic intelligence
division under Hoover, made the decision to bug King’s room at the
Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. “We must mark him now,” Sullivan
wrote in a 1963 memo, “as the most dangerous Negro of the future in
this nation.” Less than two months later, Robert Kennedy, then the
attorney general, signed off on the decision to wiretap King’s home
and offices.

F.B.I. officials supplied journalists with files containing evidence
gathered from listening devices planted in King’s hotel rooms. But
no journalist at a major publication exposed what the F.B.I. was
doing. In fact, it wasn’t until March 8, 1971, when activists broke
into an F.B.I. office, took files, copied them and sent them to two
members of Congress and three newspapers that the public began to get
a sense of the extent of the bureau’s surveillance of King and other
activists. Even then, while The Washington Post_ _courageously
decided to publish the story, The New York Times, The Los Angeles
Times and both representatives sent the files back to the F.B.I.

Clearly, Hoover did not act alone. In fixating on Hoover, we ignore
the phalanx of informed government officials, from the president on
down, and let the broader American public and media off the hook. We
overlook that most Americans did not approve of the civil rights
movement while it was happening — just before the March on
Washington, a Gallup poll found
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only 23 percent of Americans had favorable opinions of the proposed
rally. Seeing the civil rights movement as dangerous was not a fringe
position.

These revelations do not diminish Hoover’s core responsibility in
one of the most troubling episodes in American law enforcement
history. Rather, they show the widespread support for and complicity
in the campaign against King, and as such they should force a
re-examination of the conditions that led so many Americans to turn
their backs on one of our great moral leaders. To take that seriously
requires a broader reckoning about how the government, the media and
the public react to those who challenge the status quo.

“The course of the civil rights movement may have been altered” by
the F.B.I.’s campaign against King, wrote Ramsey Clark, Johnson’s
third attorney general. “The prejudice may have reached men who
might otherwise have given great support — including even the
president of the United States.”

It surely did, as King understood all too well.

“Let’s face it,” King said in a phone call to Mr. Levison days
before his assassination. “We do have a great public-relations
setback where my image and leadership are concerned.” He added,
“It will put many Negroes in the position of saying, ‘Well, Martin
Luther King is at the end of his rope.’”

Tragically, we know exactly how King felt, because the F.B.I. recorded
his call.

_Jonathan Eig is the author of the forthcoming book “King: A
Life.” Jeanne Theoharis is the author of “The Rebellious Life of
Mrs. Rosa Parks,” which has been adapted for a documentary._

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* Lyndon Johnson
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* Martin Luther King
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* J. Edgar Hoover
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