Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [198]
This aspect of Edgar’s smear operation failed to influence anyone – except, perhaps, his closest congressional supporters. It should be stressed, moreover, that no biographer has reported a homosexual relationship between King and Abernathy, or Rustin, or anyone else.3
In September 1964, when King was due to visit the Vatican, Edgar’s friend Cardinal Spellman was asked by the FBI to persuade Pope Paul VI not to grant King an audience. To Edgar’s astonishment, the Pope ignored the advice. Then came news that the civil rights leader was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. King, in the hospital suffering from exhaustion, thought it the ‘foremost of earthly honors, not for himself, but for the movement.’ Edgar was beside himself with rage.
‘The mores of this country has [sic] certainly sunken to a new low,’ he scribbled, overlooking the fact that the Nobel was awarded by foreigners. ‘He was the last one in the world who should ever have received it,’ he said. ‘I held him in utter contempt …’ King, Edgar thought, deserved only the ‘top alley cat’ prize.
Bitterness was compounded by jealousy, for Edgar had long hankered after a Nobel himself. Herbert Jenkins, the longtime police chief of Atlanta, talked with him at this time. ‘For years and years,’ Jenkins later revealed, ‘Hoover had tried unsuccessfully to win the Prize. Many prominent Americans had been asked by Hoover to write the Nobel Committee … but every year Hoover was passed over … Then along comes a Negro southerner who is awarded the Prize. It was more than Hoover could stand. It just ate away at him.’
Edgar doled out dirt on King to any officials whose duties might somehow touch on the Nobel – at the State Department, the USIA and the United Nations. In London, FBI representative Charles Bates received orders to fly to Scandinavia ‘to tell our ambassadors there what kind of guy he was. My orders came direct from Hoover.’ Bureau technicians prepared to go to Oslo to bug King when he arrived for the Nobel ceremonies, a flagrant contravention of the rules confining the FBI to operations in the United States.
In Washington, Edgar took an extraordinary step. After refusing their interview request for months, he suddenly agreed to see a group of eighteen female journalists. During a monologue lasting three hours, he told them how unfair the Warren Commission had been to the FBI, about ‘bleedingheart judges’ and how Fidel Castro was ‘trying to brainwash the Puerto Ricans.’ Then, quite coolly, he told them Martin Luther King was ‘the most notorious liar in the country.’
Hovering at his master’s side, Cartha DeLoach frantically passed Edgar notes warning him to stipulate that his last remark was off the record. ‘Mr Hoover threw the notes away,’ DeLoach recalled. ‘He told the women he wanted it on the record … and they rushed for the phones.’
Calling King a liar was front-page news. Edgar went through the motions of saying the ‘lie’ had been King’s claim that agents in trouble spots were southerners, likely to be racist themselves. That squabble, though, had occurred two years earlier. Now Edgar was hinting at something else. King, he added, was ‘one of the lowest characters in the country … I haven’t even begun to say all I could on this subject.’
Some Bureau officials felt, as one put it, that the ‘boss had flipped.’ So did King. ‘Mr Hoover has apparently faltered,’ he told a reporter, ‘under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office.’ As FBI eavesdroppers listened, he told intimates Edgar was ‘old and broken down … senile … should be hit from all sides,’ until President Johnson brought him to heel.
Edgar yearned to say something even stronger, not least when King asked to meet with him to discuss the Bureau’s failings. ‘I can’t understand why we are unable to get the