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During the Kennedy presidency, Edgar became involved in the struggle over race whether he liked it or not. The civil rights campaign, and the violence with which southern whites responded, was the major domestic policy issue. Edgar was forced to stop stonewalling requests for help by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and to join the federal government in confronting the nation’s race problems.

FBI agents suddenly found themselves investigating police brutality and preventing abuse of black voters’ rights. The Bureau had been dragooned into taking on such duties, and Edgar resented it.

Martin Luther King, the pacifist preacher’s son from Atlanta, was a black man who did not know his place, who had won something Edgar had lost – the attentive ear of the President and the Attorney General of the United States.

Although King had been in the public eye for some five years, Edgar had lumped him together with advocates of violent struggle, such as Malcolm X. ‘We wouldn’t have any problem,’ he had once grunted over lunch with Johnson in his senatorial days, ‘if we could get those two guys fighting, if we could get them to kill one another off …’

Now King could not be laughed off. In May 1961 a sketchy FBI report had given Edgar the idea that the black leader might have links to the Communist Party – and revealed that the FBI had yet to investigate him properly. Edgar scrawled in the margin ‘Why not?’ – two words that marked the start of a seven-year vendetta.

Forty years earlier there had been a dress rehearsal for this. In 1919, as a young official, Edgar had played a leading role in hounding a black leader of an earlier generation, Marcus Garvey. A Jamaican by birth, Garvey offered American blacks a fantastic dream of a mass exodus to Africa, where he promised to establish a black Empire. Edgar strove to get Garvey jailed or deported, and achieved both.

He was obsessed, too, about the great singer and actor Paul Robeson, a political activist who spoke out for the poor and racially downtrodden. Over three decades FBI agents kept Robeson under surveillance, bugged his phone calls and spread false rumors that he was a member of the Communist Party. The harassment was such that Robeson’s son believed the Bureau ‘neutralized’ his father during the fifties by slipping him hallucinogenic drugs – a charge impossible to investigate because FBI records on Robeson were still censored on the grounds of ‘national security’ as this book was being written.

Edgar’s pursuit of Garvey and Robeson was a blueprint for the future. The attempts to establish they were Communists, the use of black stool pigeons as penetration agents, and electronic bugging to snoop on their private lives were all tactics that Edgar would use against King.

‘King is no good anyway,’ Edgar had written early in the Kennedy presidency. Then, his obsession was to convince Washington the civil rights movement was controlled by Communists – whether the evidence supported the accusation or not. In October 1963, after rejecting his own agents’ advice that there was no such control, he had embarked on a massive surveillance operation against King – phone taps for which he had extracted permission from Robert Kennedy under pressure2 and hidden microphone installations never formally sanctioned by anyone.

By late 1963 the recordings had yielded nothing to brand the black leader a Communist, but a good deal to raise questions about his private morality. The Reverend King enjoyed sex, and he did not let the fact that he was a minister of the Church, and married, cramp his style. ‘I’m away from home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month,’ he told one friend. ‘Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.’ As he traveled the country, King sought relaxation in the arms of three regular mistresses, and on occasion with prostitutes. Many of his retinue, including his close friend Reverend Ralph Abernathy, did the same.

Philandering might have