Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [199]
The men around Edgar answered the call. A week after the press conference, with the Nobel ceremonies nearing, Newsweek Bureau Chief Ben Bradlee reported a development to Attorney General Katzenbach. DeLoach, he said, had been telling Newsweek about ‘some interesting tapes involving Dr King.’
Katzenbach, greatly alarmed, flew with the head of the Civil Rights Division, Burke Marshall, to brief the President in Texas. Though Johnson acted concerned, he merely warned the Bureau that its operation was backfiring.
DeLoach has repeatedly denied Bradlee’s story. In 1975, in Senate testimony, he said he did ‘not recall’ talking to reporters about the King tapes. ‘No offer,’ he said, ‘was ever made by me, Hoover, Tolson or anybody in the Bureau to the best of my knowledge – and I would swear this on a stack of Bibles – to play those tapes.’
Bradlee, who later became editor of The Washington Post, was no less adamant. ‘DeLoach asked me if I was interested in looking at transcripts. He was making me the offer to look at them … I told him I had no interest.’
A long list of distinguished reporters had similar experiences. John Herbers of The New York Times recalls ‘a special agent … one of the people that worked for DeLoach … told me about these things that they had on King. He was holding the tapes out for me, in case I wanted to hear them. I thought they were off base.’
At the Los Angeles Times, David Kraslow listened ‘nauseated’ as an FBI man tried to read him a ‘juicy section’ of a King tape over the telephone. Transcripts were ‘made available’ to columnist Jack Anderson, who refused to publish. According to Mike Royko, of the Chicago Daily News, a former agent raised the subject after a golf game. ‘He very casually brought up King and asked if I would be interested in reading some transcripts that concerned illicit sex things … I thought, “How dumb can they be?” I was totally sympathetic to King and his movement.’4
On King’s home turf, agents tried a different tack with Eugene Patterson, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Patterson was told when King would be arriving at a Florida airport on the way to a secret meeting with a woman. ‘Why not,’ said the agent, ‘have a reporter and photographer there? Expose him to the South and the world.’
Patterson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials urging racial justice, turned the FBI down flat. ‘The agent who failed to persuade me,’ said Patterson, ‘paid the price by being transferred to New Orleans on the pretext that he was forty-one pounds overweight. I had great sympathy for him, for it had been totally out of character for him to make the approach. He did it because he was terrified of Hoover – they all were.’
Edgar himself showed photographs – purporting to link King with Communists – to Hearst’s Mark Monsky. He mentioned the sex tapes over lunch to Washington Star editor Newbold Noyes, a man DeLoach thought could be ‘led around by the nose,’ and reportedly played them to Eugene Lyons of Reader’s Digest.
Not one newspaper obliged Edgar by running the sex smear, but nor did any editor have the guts to expose him for what he was up to. Word of the FBI dirty tricks, meanwhile, soon filtered back to King himself.
Horrified at the potential damage, he now urged government contacts to arrange the meeting with Edgar he had been requesting. On December 1, 1964, just days before the trip to Oslo, Edgar, King and their aides sat down together in the Director’s office.
‘Mr Hoover was very, very cold,’ Ralph Abernathy recalled, ‘and Dr King tried to be very, very warm. Mr Hoover sat there in his blue suit and would not smile at all. He called us “boys.”…’ The black men sat perplexed as Edgar launched into a fifty-minute monologue on the FBI’s work in the South and on his efforts to hire black agents. ‘The old man,’ King was later heard saying on a Bureau wiretap, ‘talks too damned much.’
‘Mr Hoover gave Martin a