TO NAIL KING
Garrow, David J.
TO NAIL KING THE FBI AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. by David J. Garrow W.W.Norton. 320 pp. $15.95. In November 1963, the FBI's Domestic Intelligence chief sent off an anonymous letter to the...
...Jekyll in us...
...As Hofstadter describes it, the paranoid style ignores social and economic forces in history and fixes on demonological conspiracies...
...After the novelty of the King revelations wore off and it became evident that the press would not make the tapes public, Hoover & Company shifted to another phase, gathering intelligence about a civil rights movement it now regarded as a serious political threat...
...intelligence agencies to place an American citizen under surveillance even in the complete absence of a reason to believe he is a criminal or "an agent of a foreign power...
...King, look into your heart...
...Furthermore, Garrow provides the most cogent explanation yet of why J. Edgar Hoover's FBI set out to destroy King and circulated the defamatory tape to reporters (who refused to rely on it for stories), to top politicians, and to universities planning to confer honorary degrees upon the black leader...
...and would also permit the CIA to infiltrate domestic groups at will...
...Hyde and Dr...
...Even though Hoover was a notorious racist and often referred to King as "that burr-head," the FBI appeared favorably disposed to black leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young who were "by no means 'Toms.' " The FBI's seven-year investigation of King began with an informant's tir* that former Communist Stanley Levison was working for King, but by late 1963, according to Garrow, the FBI's interest in the Communist connection had almost disappeared, replaced by an obsession with King's secret sex-life uncovered by wiretaps...
...In the most poignant passages of his book, Garrow describes how the FBI campaign appears to have affected King's vision of himself...
...In November 1963, the FBI's Domestic Intelligence chief sent off an anonymous letter to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...
...FBI agents tapping King's phone in Atlanta overheard the civil rights leader say in despondent tones shortly thereafter, "They're out to break me...
...It was well that was within thy heart.' " Ironically enough, just as The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr...
...went to press, the Reagan Administration was drafting an executive order that would legitimize further abuses of power of the sort Garrow chronicles...
...A clinical, dispassionate rendering of detail makes this well-documented account of the campaign against King frightening and readable...
...He became increasingly tormented, convinced he was not worth the acclaim he had won, and often sat up "talking, arguing, and drinking until nearly dawn, seemingly unable to break away from the companionship of conversation...
...You are an evil, abnormal beast...
...King, in the FBI's eyes, was a carnally consumed beast...
...I want you to know this morning that I am a sinner like all God's children, but I want to be a good man, and I want to hear a voice say to me one day, 'I take you in and I bless you because you tried...
...Garrow distrusts .arguments that the FBI's grotesque crusade was motivated by racism or misguided anti-communism...
...So it was that the FBI, in true paranoid style, took Stanley Levison's presence in the King entourage as evidence that King was a Communist or "dupe" of a hostile foreign power...
...The paranoid style has its roots in nativist, xenophobic movements of the past, such as the anti-Masonic cult and (later) McCarthyism, and it is evident today in those who warn of a Moscow-directed terrorist conspiracy and of KGB control of Western journalism...
...What unified the three phases of the campaign, Garrow believes, was the FBI's compulsion to repress all perceived challenges to the dominant, conservative political culture of the country...
...This thesis relies heavily on historian Richard Hofstadter's study of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a style of thinking apparently rampant in the FBI...
...The paranoid style is apparently alive and well in Washington...
...We are engaged in the class struggle...
...There is only one thing left for you to do...
...So wrote William Sullivan to the eventual Nobel Peace Prize laureate...
...Sullivan had the package addressed to King, but it was his wife, Cor-etta, who opened it...
...Garrow contends that Sullivan's motivation for exposing that life and seeking to destroy King was rooted in an extreme Puritanism tinged with racism, while Hoover's drive was largely voyeuristic (he enjoyed titillating Lyndon Johnson with the tapes...
...Among other things, the Presidential order would allow U.S...
...Above all, King was the leader of a movement seeking profound change in the social order, and the paranoid style abhors political change...
...As David Garrow, a historian at the University of North Carolina, recounts the story in The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr., Sullivan enclosed with the letter a tape recording of "bugged" conversations that compromised King in extramarital affairs, including group sex, in hotel rooms across the country...
...Also, according to Garrow, FBI obsession with King's sex life reflects the paranoid style's vision of the dissident as a strange outsider: "a kind of amoral superman, sinister . . . sensual, luxury loving...
...You better do it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation...
...The whole structure of American life must be changed," he said in 1968...
...Christopher Hanson (Christopher Hanson is a Washington reporter...
...Four weeks before his death, King said in a sermon: "There are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr...
...This investigation continued until King's murder in Memphis on April 4,1968...
...In the last years of his life King, convinced that blacks could not achieve equality without a radical redistribution of wealth, spoke less like a reformer and more like a revolutionary...
Vol. 46 • January 1982 • No. 1
