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

Hoover had been convinced early in King's career that the civil rights leader was a tool of the Soviets, and in late 1963 he persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize the use of wiretaps and other surveillance to ferret out King's supposed Communist ties. Years of focused investigation and countless man-hours of surveillance failed to bear out Hoover's suspicion, however. The best evidence the FBI was able to dig up was that one of King's legal advisers, a liberal Jewish attorney from New York named Stanley Levison, had in his youth been briefly associated with the Communist Party but that he had, by all accounts, severed his ties years ago.

Hoover's agents also learned that a man affiliated with the American Communist Party who shared King's blood type had answered a public call and apparently donated blood to King in 1958 when he was stabbed during his book signing in Harlem; for a time FBI memos made much of the fact that Commie blood was thus literally coursing through King's veins.

Yet this was the sum total of the investigatory fruit gleaned from Hoover's many expensive years of watching and Red-baiting King. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a Communist, had never been one, and had no ties to China or the Soviets. The massive FBI effort spent chasing this will-o'-the-wisp was a profligate waste of public dollars. As King once put it, "There are as many Communists 81in the freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida."

All those years of spying on the civil rights leader did produce other kinds of intelligence, however--intelligence that Hoover found equally tantalizing. King, the FBI discovered, had a weakness for women. His agents found out about his several mistresses and discovered that beautiful young ladies had a way of throwing themselves at him as he moved about the country, advances the civil rights leader did little to discourage. Not only that, Hoover was shocked to learn, King used raunchy language when he talked about sex, he smoked and drank and partied into the small hours, and he told off-color jokes. The FBI had taped a garbled recording of King in a hotel in Washington supposedly having intercourse and using rather profane language during the act.

Hoover was appalled and at the same time titillated by what he read, calling King "a tom cat 82with obsessive degenerate sexual urges." One FBI official wrote that Hoover, when studying King's surveillance reports, would "narrow his eyes 83and purse his lips." The straitlaced Hoover "saw extramarital sex 84as evidence of moral degeneracy--an opinion that many Americans still shared in the 1960s, before Hollywood taught that promiscuity was ennobling."

Robert Kennedy, no stranger to sexual high jinks, said that "if the country knew 85what we know about King's goings-on, he'd be finished." Hoover certainly tried to share his growing King dossier with the nation; his FBI subordinates regularly leaked salacious details to the press, to members of Congress, to President Johnson, and even to diplomats overseas. But the media never took the bait, and the charges never stuck.

For Hoover, this was a source of powerful frustration. "I don't understand 86why we are unable to get the true facts before the public," he wrote in one memo. "We can't even get our accomplishments published. We are never taking the aggressive."

Yet finally, the FBI did take the aggressive. An FBI official, believed to have been the head of intelligence operations, William C. Sullivan, sent King an anonymous package that contained a kind of "greatest hits" compendium tape of the FBI's most lurid recordings, accompanied by a hateful note urging King to commit suicide. "King, look into your heart," 87the note began. "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. But you are done. Your 'honorary' degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done. The American public ... will know you for what you are--an evil, abnormal beast. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is ... There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

What made this package all the more disturbing for King was that Coretta opened it. Yet the note with its accompanying tape--most of which was inaudible anyway--failed to produce the desired effect. If anything, it strengthened King's marriage and his resolve to carry on in the face of what he and Coretta both now realized was a full-scale FBI effort to ruin him.

"They are out to break me," 88he said to a friend. "[But] what I do is only between me and my God." King, in his own way, was determined to fight back. "Hoover is old 89and getting senile," he said, "and should be hit from all sides."

5 DIXIE WEST

THROUGH EARLY WINTER of 1967, Martin Luther King was increasingly troubled by a new political development: an age-old nemesis was running for president--and enjoying an astonishing surge in popularity.

As a candidate for the self-styled American Independent Party, George C. Wallace had been traveling around the country almost as frenetically as King had, drumming up his blue-collar base from coast to coast. The nation's best reporters and political phrasemakers had a field day covering the Alabama demagogue's outrageous but unfailingly colorful appearances. Wallace was the Cicero of the Cabdriver, 90it was said. He was so full of bile that if he "bit himself 91he would die of blood poisoning." He was, said Marshall Frady, "the surly orphan 92of American politics ... the grim joker in the deck, whose nightrider candidacy [is] a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism."

People loved his bumptious sense of humor, the rockabilly growl in his voice, the way he shook his fist in defiance when he really got worked up. Wallace, a former Golden Gloves boxer, was battling forces no one else seemed to have the gumption to take on. At rallies around the country, he had a litany of phrases that he used over and over, lines calculated to get a lusty guffaw out of the crowds. When he won the White House, Wallace said, he was going to take all those "bearded beatnik bureaucrats" and hurl them and their briefcases into the Potomac. He railed against "liberal sob sisters" and "bleeding-heart sociologists." Wallace liked to say that whenever disturbances like the Watts riots swept the streets of America's cities, you could count on "pointy-headed intellectuals 93to explain it away, whining that the poor rioters didn't get any watermelon to eat when they were 10 years old."

Though he was careful to moderate his most incendiary racial rhetoric, Wallace continued to preach states' rights and the separation of the races and said the recent gains of the civil rights movement should be overturned. At friendlier venues he went so far as to argue that blacks should not be able to serve on juries, noting that "the nigra would still be in Africa 94in the brush if the white people of this country had not raised their standards." He called the civil rights legislation that President Johnson had pushed through Congress "an assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty."

"Let 'em call me a racist," 95he told a reporter in Cleveland. "It don't make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do. Race is what's gonna win this thing for me."

FROM THE START of his governorship, George Wallace had made white supremacy--sometimes cloaked in the more respectable veil of states' rights, but usually not--the centerpiece of his platform. In his 1962 inaugural speech, delivered in Montgomery on the gold star marking the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy, Wallace gave a stem-winder that was written by the speechwriter Asa Carter, a well-known Klansman and anti-Semite. "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth," Wallace said, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"