Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [200]
That was apparently the closest Edgar came to revealing he had sex dirt on King. For King, who may already have known about the suggestive pictures the FBI had of him with Rustin, the omission brought no comfort. ‘Martin responded by becoming nervous and eating his nails,’ said Abernathy. ‘He was troubled …’
King looked that way when he emerged to tell the press he and Edgar had ‘a much clearer understanding.’ Had he retracted anything he had said about Edgar? ‘No,’ he said, and ducked into an elevator. In the corridor, even as he met with Edgar, an FBI official had been trying to interest a newsman in pictures of King with a woman.
Anxiety about the FBI compounded the fatigue that had recently sent King to the hospital. On the long flight to Europe he fretted about it aloud. His wife, Coretta, who accompanied him to Oslo, remembers his deep depression. ‘It was a time when he ought to have been happy … But he was worried that the rumors might hurt the movement, and he was worried about what black people would think … Somehow he managed all the official functions …’
King returned to the United States to a tumultuous welcome, and a private jet provided by New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller to carry him on his way. Edgar, meanwhile, rushed a letter about King’s ‘personal conduct’ to Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey, because he had greeted King at a reception in the Waldorf-Astoria.
In early January 1965, at home in Atlanta, Coretta King opened a small box that had been forwarded from King’s headquarters. It contained a reel of tape, which aides assumed was a recording of one of her husband’s speeches. Her husband’s voice was indeed on the tape, but this was no speech. And with it came an unsigned, typed note that read, in part:
KING,
In view of your low grade [censored at FBI] I will not dignify your name with either a Mr or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII [censored words]. King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes …
You are no clergyman and you know it. You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that …
King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader … Your ‘honorary’ degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King I repeat you are done …
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [sic] (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant) [sic]. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudalant [sic] self is bared to the nation.
Soon King was listening to the accompanying tape with his friend Abernathy. ‘There were muffled voices,’ Abernathy recalled, ‘that seemed to come from a faraway room … I recognized Martin and then myself … Then there were other sounds … Clearly what we were hearing were whispers and sighs from a bedroom.’
The two men sat in silence when King switched off the tape. Then Abernathy said simply, ‘J. Edgar Hoover.’ He was right, as a Senate committee established a decade later. The tape was a composite, made up of several surveillance recordings and prepared in the FBI laboratory. Edgar’s aide William Sullivan had told a trusted agent, Lish Whitsun, to fly to Florida with the package and mail it to Mrs King from a post office near Miami airport.
Edgar had the satisfaction of knowing the victim’s reaction within twenty-four hours. ‘They are out to break me,’ King was overheard saying on a wiretap, ‘out to get me, harass me, break my spirit.’ According to relatives and close friends, he fell into a deep depression, tormented by insomnia.
A few days later, when Bureau agents