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President Johnson listened to some of the original recordings and once spent an afternoon discussing them with Edgar. Nothing Edgar said or did about King, however, deterred Johnson from his growing commitment to civil rights. Whatever his failings in other areas, it was he who rammed through a mass of new race legislation, the most radical measures since the Civil War.

A tearful Martin Luther King would telephone Johnson, overwhelmed with emotion, after the President’s 1965 address to Congress on black voting rights. Edgar sat stoically in the gallery of the Capitol as Johnson invoked the words of the Baptist hymn that was the anthem of King’s movement, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ When King opposed the Vietnam War, however, the President’s exasperation would betray what he knew. ‘Goddamnit!’ he told an aide. ‘If only you could hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually …’

Edgar used King to play on the President’s known fears. According to Richard Goodwin, the Director suggested that ‘Bobby Kennedy was hiring or paying King off to stir up trouble over the Vietnam War. It was total nonsense. If you haven’t seen those files of his, you can’t believe how flimsy the information was. Bobby did nothing to stir up King. King was against the war long before Bobby was.’

Edgar’s effort to ruin King was in high gear in the spring of 1964. The news that Marquette University in Milwaukee intended to give King an honorary degree sent an agent rushing to persuade officials to change their minds. This was especially ‘shocking’ news – the university had given Edgar the same honor in 1950. The agent received a cash award for his successful intervention.

The National Council of the Churches of Christ, briefed by William Sullivan about King’s ‘personal conduct,’ promised it would never again give King ‘one single dollar.’ On Edgar’s orders the same smear went to the Baptist World Alliance. Agents were told to thwart publication of magazine articles by King, and even a book.

Edgar’s vendetta was pursued at a time of constant racial tension and mayhem. The long-running drama of 1964 was the disappearance, presumed murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi. The first FBI response was sluggish – one agent even said ‘a thrill of joy went up my spine’ when he heard the news. This was the FBI King deplored, and it was now forced to change its ways.

President Johnson bulldozed Edgar into action. ‘There’s three sovereignties involved,’ he told a colleague. ‘There’s the United States and there’s the state of Mississippi and there’s J. Edgar Hoover.’ On this occasion, the United States prevailed. Over Edgar’s protests, agents were sent to open a large new office in Jackson, Mississippi, and Johnson dispatched Edgar by presidential jet to declare it open.

Using intelligence, lavish bribes and strong-arm tactics as tough as the Klan’s, a team of the FBI’s best agents did eventually solve the Mississippi murders and enforce federal law in the state. In Washington, Edgar went on smearing King. He supplied James Eastland, the Democratic Senator from Mississippi, with surveillance film of King walking into a hotel with a white girl. One of his officials, meanwhile, informed Berl Bernhard, staff director of the Civil Rights Commission, that King was a sexual ‘switch-hitter,’ a bisexual.

In a conversation with Carl Rowan, then Director of the U.S. Information Agency, Congressman Rooney told of listening to an FBI tape in which the black leader invited his colleague Ralph Abernathy to have sex with him. Rowan, himself black, tried to explain to Rooney that the kind of sex talk he quoted was characteristic, harmless joshing between black males. Rooney, however, spread scandal about King at every opportunity.

Using a stool pigeon to obtain access and infrared cameras, the FBI also obtained pictures of King naked in a bathtub and lying on a bed, with his associate Bayard Rustin, a known homosexual, seated