April 4, 1968—With a single round from his hunting rifle, James Earl Ray ended the life of civil-rights advocate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at 6 pm at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.
The assassination of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate also highlighted the multiple ironies in his relationships with his implacable foe, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and his sometimes ambivalent ally, Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
The FBI director not only had never achieved his desire to undermine King’s moral leadership, but soon found himself so on the defensive about why King’s murderer was on the loose that he was forced to launch the largest manhunt in the agency’s history to catch Ray. (He was finally apprehended in London, two months and more than 3,000 agents later.)
An Obsessive Pursuit
Hoover’s investigation of King’s alleged Communist ties, along with Southern Democrats on board to help pass the administration’s program after a razor-thin electoral victory, placed Bobby Kennedy in one uncomfortable position after another while serving as Attorney-General. He deeply frustrated both men, though his liberal tendencies placed him far closer ideologically to King than to Hoover.
The FBI’s investigation and harassment of King ranks among the worst offenses in its history. Its relentless wiretapping campaign—including sending a package of materials to his home in 1964, warning that there was “but one way out for you,” or his “filthy fraudulent self” would be exposed—is well-known, but less so is why King became the object of Hoover’s insane fixation.
One of the best accounts, it seems to me, of Hoover’s derangement on this matter comes courtesy of Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by Richard Gid Powers. The explanation here is all the more impressive for its attempt to be fair to Hoover.
According to Powers, Hoover was raised in a Washington, D.C. community of traditional values, with a “turn-of-the-century vision of America as a small community of like-minded neighbors, proud of their achievements, resentful of criticism, fiercely opposed to change.” While that vision made him a powerful opponent of both Nazi and Communist subversion, it also led him to believe in a segregated order in which elites held sway.
His racism was so entrenched that it manifested itself in ways that would appear comical if the real-life consequences weren’t so tragic. Hoover thought he was doing Attorney-General Kennedy a favor by doubling the number of black FBI agents, neglecting to consider that this still only raised the total to 10—and this at a time when the backlash against the rising civil-rights movements was at its most vicious and violent.
The FBI first noticed King in 1958, when it learned that the minister had been introduced to Benjamin Davis, a black Communist Party functionary. Three years later, King’s prominent role in the Freedom Riders movement led Hoover to order an investigation of him.
The tempo of this surveillance effort appears to have picked up in late 1962. King had charged that one reason why civil-rights workers in Albany, Ga., were receiving so little protection was that FBI offices in the South were populated with native Southerners who imbibed the mores of their communities and needed to stay friendly with the local police and forces of segregation.
As it happened, the Albany FBI contained four Northerners out of its five agents. One of Hoover’s lieutenants, Cartha DeLoach, left a message to this effect with King’s office, asking for a return call. King, whose strong suit was not organization, either never received the message or forgot about it. DeLoach and, ultimately, Hoover, interpreted this as dissing the agency.
More than 40 years earlier, Hoover had succeeded in destroying a prior charismatic black leader, Marcus Garvey, by gaining his conviction on mail-order fraud charges that led to deportation. Hoover now hoped to derail another strong leader of the civil-rights movement.
The man Hoover saw as an ideal replacement for King was Samuel R. Pierce, Jr. Does the name sound vaguely familiar? It should—this was the man that Ronald Reagan later selected as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Secretary…a man that Reagan later mistook for someone else (hard to understand, since Pierce was the only black member of the Reagan cabinet)…a man whose department became embroiled in corruption and influence-peddling.
Kennedy and King
It was Robert Kennedy’s sad lot to run interference among the racist Hoover, an activist minister who wrote a polemic characteristically titled Why We Can’t Wait, and his own cautious older brother. Kennedy and King’s different backgrounds could lead to fundamental misunderstandings, even when they were on the same side.
At the height of the Freedom Riders campaign, King complained about the lack of protection for the activists. Kennedy’s attempt to liken their lot to that of Irish Catholics in Boston a century earlier did not impress King much. An annoyed Kennedy shot back that King was being ungrateful, since without the presence of federal marshals he and the rest of the group would be “as dead as Kelsey’s nuts.” The Attorney-General’s variation on a common, even more graphic Irish-American phrase (“as tight as Kelsey’s nuts”) just bewildered King, who remarked to aides, “Who is Kelsey?”
Hoover was not above exploiting the tensions. One of his wiretaps caught King watching JFK’s funeral on TV, making an explicit raunchy joke about the President and his widow. Hoover made sure the President’s brother heard about the incident immediately.
I remember the historian Michael Beschloss remarking on C-Span that, if you found Bobby Kennedy staring angrily at you in a meeting, you’d be well-advised to send out your resume the next morning. It was not for nothing that the President’s younger brother had a reputation for ruthlessness.
But, to use Lincoln’s phrase, the “better angels of our nature” also existed in Bobby Kennedy, and these increasingly led him to embrace the cause of civil rights as time went on, and even put aside whatever resentment he may have felt for Kennedy after learning the contents of the tapes from the FBI. The prime mover behind the civil-rights bill that JFK sent up to Capitol Hill before his death (the one that LBJ later shepherded into enactment), Bobby became an even more full-throated advocate of the cause as a Senator.
As he began his own Presidential campaign, Kennedy’s past differences with King over tactics had faded into the background, and he had a realistic chance of winning the minister’s endorsement at the time King was slain. The news jolted the candidate and his staff as they prepared for a campaign stop in an inner-city area of Indianapolis. Yet, despite fears for his safety on the part of his wife Ethel and local police (there was no Secret Service protection for candidates at that point), RFK decided he had to break the news about the tragedy in Memphis.
The result was one of the most extraordinary moments of his short campaign—one that, years later, people rightly cite as evidence of the enormous potential to move a nation that was snuffed out through Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet two months later.
“Wisdom Through the Awful Grace of God”
As Kennedy addressed the crowd on that cold night, about an hour after King’s death, he began softly, “I have bad news for you, for all our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.”
The announcement set off gasps, sobbing and cries of “No!” from the crowd of approximately 1,000. But Kennedy plunged on. And now, the senator—so devastated by his brother’s assassination more than four years before that he had never publicly referred to it—bonded with an audience understandably angry over the night’s horrible events.
"For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and disgust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say," Bobby continued, "that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times."
The assassination of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate also highlighted the multiple ironies in his relationships with his implacable foe, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and his sometimes ambivalent ally, Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
The FBI director not only had never achieved his desire to undermine King’s moral leadership, but soon found himself so on the defensive about why King’s murderer was on the loose that he was forced to launch the largest manhunt in the agency’s history to catch Ray. (He was finally apprehended in London, two months and more than 3,000 agents later.)
An Obsessive Pursuit
Hoover’s investigation of King’s alleged Communist ties, along with Southern Democrats on board to help pass the administration’s program after a razor-thin electoral victory, placed Bobby Kennedy in one uncomfortable position after another while serving as Attorney-General. He deeply frustrated both men, though his liberal tendencies placed him far closer ideologically to King than to Hoover.
The FBI’s investigation and harassment of King ranks among the worst offenses in its history. Its relentless wiretapping campaign—including sending a package of materials to his home in 1964, warning that there was “but one way out for you,” or his “filthy fraudulent self” would be exposed—is well-known, but less so is why King became the object of Hoover’s insane fixation.
One of the best accounts, it seems to me, of Hoover’s derangement on this matter comes courtesy of Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by Richard Gid Powers. The explanation here is all the more impressive for its attempt to be fair to Hoover.
According to Powers, Hoover was raised in a Washington, D.C. community of traditional values, with a “turn-of-the-century vision of America as a small community of like-minded neighbors, proud of their achievements, resentful of criticism, fiercely opposed to change.” While that vision made him a powerful opponent of both Nazi and Communist subversion, it also led him to believe in a segregated order in which elites held sway.
His racism was so entrenched that it manifested itself in ways that would appear comical if the real-life consequences weren’t so tragic. Hoover thought he was doing Attorney-General Kennedy a favor by doubling the number of black FBI agents, neglecting to consider that this still only raised the total to 10—and this at a time when the backlash against the rising civil-rights movements was at its most vicious and violent.
The FBI first noticed King in 1958, when it learned that the minister had been introduced to Benjamin Davis, a black Communist Party functionary. Three years later, King’s prominent role in the Freedom Riders movement led Hoover to order an investigation of him.
The tempo of this surveillance effort appears to have picked up in late 1962. King had charged that one reason why civil-rights workers in Albany, Ga., were receiving so little protection was that FBI offices in the South were populated with native Southerners who imbibed the mores of their communities and needed to stay friendly with the local police and forces of segregation.
As it happened, the Albany FBI contained four Northerners out of its five agents. One of Hoover’s lieutenants, Cartha DeLoach, left a message to this effect with King’s office, asking for a return call. King, whose strong suit was not organization, either never received the message or forgot about it. DeLoach and, ultimately, Hoover, interpreted this as dissing the agency.
More than 40 years earlier, Hoover had succeeded in destroying a prior charismatic black leader, Marcus Garvey, by gaining his conviction on mail-order fraud charges that led to deportation. Hoover now hoped to derail another strong leader of the civil-rights movement.
The man Hoover saw as an ideal replacement for King was Samuel R. Pierce, Jr. Does the name sound vaguely familiar? It should—this was the man that Ronald Reagan later selected as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Secretary…a man that Reagan later mistook for someone else (hard to understand, since Pierce was the only black member of the Reagan cabinet)…a man whose department became embroiled in corruption and influence-peddling.
Kennedy and King
It was Robert Kennedy’s sad lot to run interference among the racist Hoover, an activist minister who wrote a polemic characteristically titled Why We Can’t Wait, and his own cautious older brother. Kennedy and King’s different backgrounds could lead to fundamental misunderstandings, even when they were on the same side.
At the height of the Freedom Riders campaign, King complained about the lack of protection for the activists. Kennedy’s attempt to liken their lot to that of Irish Catholics in Boston a century earlier did not impress King much. An annoyed Kennedy shot back that King was being ungrateful, since without the presence of federal marshals he and the rest of the group would be “as dead as Kelsey’s nuts.” The Attorney-General’s variation on a common, even more graphic Irish-American phrase (“as tight as Kelsey’s nuts”) just bewildered King, who remarked to aides, “Who is Kelsey?”
Hoover was not above exploiting the tensions. One of his wiretaps caught King watching JFK’s funeral on TV, making an explicit raunchy joke about the President and his widow. Hoover made sure the President’s brother heard about the incident immediately.
I remember the historian Michael Beschloss remarking on C-Span that, if you found Bobby Kennedy staring angrily at you in a meeting, you’d be well-advised to send out your resume the next morning. It was not for nothing that the President’s younger brother had a reputation for ruthlessness.
But, to use Lincoln’s phrase, the “better angels of our nature” also existed in Bobby Kennedy, and these increasingly led him to embrace the cause of civil rights as time went on, and even put aside whatever resentment he may have felt for Kennedy after learning the contents of the tapes from the FBI. The prime mover behind the civil-rights bill that JFK sent up to Capitol Hill before his death (the one that LBJ later shepherded into enactment), Bobby became an even more full-throated advocate of the cause as a Senator.
As he began his own Presidential campaign, Kennedy’s past differences with King over tactics had faded into the background, and he had a realistic chance of winning the minister’s endorsement at the time King was slain. The news jolted the candidate and his staff as they prepared for a campaign stop in an inner-city area of Indianapolis. Yet, despite fears for his safety on the part of his wife Ethel and local police (there was no Secret Service protection for candidates at that point), RFK decided he had to break the news about the tragedy in Memphis.
The result was one of the most extraordinary moments of his short campaign—one that, years later, people rightly cite as evidence of the enormous potential to move a nation that was snuffed out through Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet two months later.
“Wisdom Through the Awful Grace of God”
As Kennedy addressed the crowd on that cold night, about an hour after King’s death, he began softly, “I have bad news for you, for all our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.”
The announcement set off gasps, sobbing and cries of “No!” from the crowd of approximately 1,000. But Kennedy plunged on. And now, the senator—so devastated by his brother’s assassination more than four years before that he had never publicly referred to it—bonded with an audience understandably angry over the night’s horrible events.
"For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and disgust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say," Bobby continued, "that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times."
After JFK’s death, Bobby had sought solace in a copy of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way given him by the President’s widow, Jackie. Now, not worrying about whether it was speaking of the heads of many people that night who might not even have completed high school, he quoted from her translation of Aeschylus: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, 'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”
Perhaps under the pressure of the moment, Kennedy made a slight error in reciting the passage: Hamilton had used the word “despite” instead of “despair” in her translation. But Kennedy’s mistranscription only strengthened the sense of existential pain that he was sharing that night with the audience, which now fell silent as it paid rapt attention to its searing peroration:
"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or black.
"So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but most importantly to say a prayer for our country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke …
"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.
"Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."
Nearly 40 years later, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein aptly summarized why this speech was so remarkable: they “stand as an example of the substance and music of politics in its grandest form and highest purpose—to heal, to educate, to lead.” Yet he also noted, correctly, why this short, simple, impromptu address marked a watershed in modern American politics: it represented “the last moments before American public life was overwhelmed by marketing professionals, consultants and pollsters who, with the flaccid acquiescence of the politicians, have robbed public life of much of its romance and vigor.”
Kennedy had risen to the demands of the occasion, showing that he was still young enough to adapt and learn. Hoover, sadly, was not. His survival in office for the last two decades (including, most conspicuously, under the Kennedys) had depended inordinately on what one government official, quoted anonymously in Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, had referred to as “twelve drawers full of political cancer.” He would live another four years, increasingly oblivious to the lessons of tolerance and love learned by the two men he had tried unsuccessfully to put at odds with each other, Kennedy and King.
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