J. Edgar Hoover

[Peter Lemkin]

J. Edgar Hoover headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. With his death, it was disclosed that Hoover had seriously abused his power during his tenure as FBI Director. Some of the most outrageous abuses concerned Hoover's use of FBI surveillance agents to obtain defamatory information--much of it sexual--on prominent persons to be used for political and blackmail purposes.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk would later say: "Hoover passed along gossip to the President he served, and that practice could raise questions in a President's mind. What did Hoover know about him? In theoretical terms, that put Hoover in the position of a veiled blackmailer."

In the case of Martin Luther King, Jr. the blackmail was not veiled, but veritable, with Hoover threatening to make information he had on King public. In the book Official and Confidential, author Anthony Summers presents evidence that Hoover had the tables turned on him and was subjected to blackmail by both the Mafia and the CIA.







The following text is excerpted from the book, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers.



Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. "Ways could be found," he said in his memoirs, "so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn't interfere with him." The way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar [Hoover], according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.

The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar's compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year's Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell's guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde [Tolson]. At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello's associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello's, and Costello was said to be the club's real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.



Seymour Pollock, an associate of Meyer Lansky's, said in 1990 that Edgar's homosexuality was "common knowledge" and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. "I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on! . . . They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it."

Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have "turned" and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. "I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front," Fratianno recalled, "and said, 'Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it's J. Edgar Hoover.' And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, 'Ah, that J. Edgar's a punk, he's a fuckin' degenerate queer.'"

Later, when Bompensiero ran into Edgar in the men's room, the FBI Director was astonishingly meek. "Frank," he told the mobster, "that's not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me." It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and that he had absolutely no fear of Edgar.

Fratianno knew numerous other top mobsters, including Jack and Louis Dragna of Los Angeles and Johnny Roselli, the West Coast representative of the Chicago mob. All spoke of "proof" that Edgar was homosexual. Roselli spoke specifically of the occasion in the late twenties when Edgar had been arrested on charges of homosexuality in New Orleans. Edgar could hardly have chosen a worse city in which to be compromised. New Orleans police and city official were notoriously corrupt, puppets of an organized crime network run by Mafia boss Carlos Marcello and heavily influenced by Meyer Lansky. If the homosexual arrest occurred, it is likely the local mobsters quickly learned of it.

Other information suggests Meyer Lansky obtained hard proof of Edgar's homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations. The first hint came from Irving "Ash" Resnick, the Nevada representative of the Patriarcha family for New England, and an original owner-builder of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. As a high-level mob courier, he traveled extensively. In Miami Beach, his Christmas destination in the fifties, he stayed at the Gulfstream, in a bungalow next to the one used by Edgar and Clyde. "I'd sit with him on the beach ever day," Resnick remembered. "We were family."



In 1971, Resnick and an associate talked with the writer Pete Hamill in the Galeria Bar at Caesars Palace. They spoke of Meyer Lansky as a genius, the man who "put everything together,"--and as the man who "nailed J. Edgar Hoover." "When I asked what they meant," Hamill recalled, "they told me Lansky had some pictures--pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover--to lay off. That was the reason, they said, that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI."



Seymour Pollock, the criminal who saw Edgar and Clyde holding hands at the races, knew both Resnick and Lansky well. When Lansky's daughter had marital problems, it was Pollack who dealt with her husband. He and Lansky went back to the old days in pre-revolutionary Cuba, when Havana was as important to the syndicate as Las Vegas. "Meyer," said Pollock in 1990, "was closemouthed. I don't think he even discussed the details of the Hoover thing with his brother. But Ash was absolutely right. Lansky had more than information on Hoover. He had page, chapter and verse. One night, when were were sitting around in his apartment at the Rosita de Hornedo, we were talking about Hoover, and Meyer laughed and said, 'I fixed that son of a bitch, didn't I?'" Lansky's fix, according to Pollock, also involved bribery--not of Edgar himself, but men close to him.

Lansky and Edgar frequented the same watering holes in Florida. Staff at Gatti's restaurant in Miami Beach recall that the mobster would sometimes be in the restaurant, at another table, at the same time as Edgar and Clyde. One evening in the late sixties, they were seated at adjoining tables. "But they just looked at one another," recalled Edidio Crolla, the captain at Gatti's. "They never talked, not here."

If Edgar's eyes met Lansky's, though, there was surely an involuntary flicker of fear. "The homosexual thing," said Pollock, "was Hoover's Achilles' heel. Meyer found it, and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer's people. . . . Let me go way back. The time Nevada opened up, Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo. I understand Hoover helped get the okay for him to do it. Meyer Lansky was one of the partners. Hoover knew who the guys were that whacked Bugsy Siegel, but nothing was done." (Siegel was killed, reportedly on Lansky's orders, in 1947.)

According to Pollock, Lansky and Edgar cooperated in the mid-fifties, when Las Vegas casino operator Wilbur Clark moved to Cuba. "Meyer brought Clark down to Havana," Pollock said. "I was against him coming. But I understand Hoover asked Meyer to bring Clark down. He owed Clark something. I don't know what. . . . There was no serious pressure on Meyer until the Kennedys came in. And even then Hoover never hurt Meyer's people, not for a long time."

Like Frank Costello, Lansky did seem to be untouchable--a phenomenon that triggered suspicions even within the Bureau. "In 1966," noted Hank Messick, one of Lansky's biographers, "a young G-Man assigned to go through the motions of watching Meyer Lansky began to take his job seriously and develop good informers. He was abruptly transferred to a rural area in Georgia. His successor on the Lansky assignment was an older man who knew the score. When he retired a few years later, he accepted a job with a Bahamian gambling casino originally developed by Lansky."

Also in the sixties a wiretap picked up a conversation between two mobsters in which, curiously, Lansky was referred to as "a stool pigeon for the FBI." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, taping a conversation between a criminal in Canada and Lansky in the United States, were amazed to hear the mob chieftain reading from an FBI report that had been written the previous day.

There was no serious federal effort to indict Lansky until 1970, just two years before Edgar died. Then, it was the IRS rather than the FBI that spearheaded the investigation. Even the tax evasion charges collapsed, and Lansky lived on at liberty until his own death in 1983.

New information indicates that Lansky was not the only person in possession of compromising photographs of Edgar. John Weitz, a former officer in the OSS, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, recalled a curious episode at a dinner party in the fifties. "After a conversation about Hoover," he said, "our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson. . . ."

Weitz would not say who his host was on the evening he saw the picture. He implied, however, that the host also had intelligence connections. A source who has been linked to the CIA, electronics expert Gordon Novel, claimed he was shown similar pictures by another OSS veteran, CIA Counter-Intelligence chief James Angleton. [Note: In 1994, after publication of Anthony Summers' book, Official and Confidential, Weitz confirmed to Summers that his host was James Angleton.]



"What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob," said Novel. "There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover's head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they'd been taken with a fish-eye lens. They looked authentic to me. . . ."

According to Novel, the CIA Counter-Intelligence chief showed him the pictures in 1967, when Novel was involved in the furor swirling around the probe into the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. "I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I'd been told I would incur Hoover's wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I'd seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food. Hoover told me something like, 'Get the hell out of here!' And I did. . . ."

With Angleton dead, there is no way to follow up this bizarre allegation. While Novel is a controversial figure, his account of seeing compromising pictures must be considered in light of other such references--not least that of former OSS officer John Weitz. For Novel added one other significant detail, that "Angleton told me the photographs had been taken around 1946, at the time they were fighting over foreign intelligence, which Hoover wanted but never got."

During his feud with OSS chief William Donovan, dating back to 1941, Edgar had searched for compromising information, sexual lapses included, that could be used against his rival. His effort was in vain, but Donovan--who thought Edgar a "moralistic bastard"--reportedly retaliated in kind by ordering a secret investigation of Edgar's relationship with Clyde. The sex photograph in OSS hands may have been one of the results.

It may be significant, too, that compromising pictures are reported as having been in the hands of both the OSS and Meyer Lansky. The OSS and Naval Intelligence had extensive contacts with the Mafia during World War II, enlisting the help of criminals in projects including the hiring of burglars and assassins, experimentation with drugs, the protection of American ports from Nazi agents and the invasion of Sicily. Lansky helped personally with the latter two operations, meeting with Murray Gurfein, a New York Assistant District Attorney who later became one of Donovan's most trusted OSS officers.

At least once, Lansky worked alongside U.S. intelligence officers on exactly the sort of operation likely to turn up smear material on prominent public men. In 1942, he arranged for the surveillance of a homosexual brothel in Brooklyn suspected of being the target of German agents. "Clients came from all over New York and Washington," Lansky recalled, "and there were some important government people among them. . . . If you got hold of the names of the patrons you could blackmail them to death . . . take some pictures through a hole in the wall or a trick mirror and then squeeze the victim for money or information."

There is no knowing, today, whether the OSS obtained sex photographs of Edgar from Lansky, or vice versa, or whether the mobster obtained them on his own initiative. A scenario in which Lansky obtained pictures thanks to the OSS connection would suggest an irony: that Edgar had tried and failed to find smear material on General Donovan, that Donovan in turn found smear material on him and that the material found its way to a top mobster, to be used against Edgar for the rest of his life.

http://www.geocities.com/hooversecret/

UNITED STATES. Fraud artist, unindicted criminal, conspicuous non-combatant and and homosexual transvestite cum FBI Director J. Edna Hoover hires cute little Clydie Tolson as an FBI agent-in-training.

Within a year, J. Edna is insisting that her new squeeze be included on White House invitation lists. By 1930, Clydie is miraculously promoted all the way from agent-in-training to Assistant Director of the FBI, J. Edna's right hand man, as it were. Tolson will remain in that position and be the gay-bashing Hoover's lover until J. Edna's long overdue death in 1972.

Although Hoover's homosexuality is well-known in certain circles, his much propagandized and completely fictitious public persona is dead butch and, as part of the cover up and because he is a nasty old queen, Hoover persecutes homosexuals and other "sex deviates" relentlessly.

J. Edna makes rather ironic public statements about hunting for "sex deviates in government service" and orders FBI agents to "penetrate" homosexual rights groups across the U.S., collecting the names of members, photographing demonstrations and recording speeches.

The FBI's criminal spying on American citizens attempting to practice their theoretical rights of free speech and freedom of assembly will go on for at least twenty three years.

Hoover repeatedly uses homosexuality, real or fictitious, as a smear tactic against those who dare to speak out against his endless abuse of power or in order to discredit people of whom he disapproves. In addition, the threat of exposure for real or imagined homosexuality is a powerful blackmail tool in Hoover's arsenal although doubtless there are other things in his arsenal.

Hoover will misuse his position as FBI Director for half a century to persecute, oppress and blackmail homosexuals and to blackmail heterosexuals with the threat of being smeared as homosexual.

Among Hoover's victims-to-be are Franklin Roosevelt's Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, who will be entrapped in an engineered homosexual liaison and forced to resign. Hoover will also use the homosexual smear tactic in attempts to discredit Martin Luther King, Adlai Stevenson and three of Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon's gang of criminal thugs, for whom it is hard to feel sorry.

But the darkest side to Hoover's hidden homosexuality and predilection for wearing ladies' clothing is that it lays him wide open, no pun intended, to blackmail. The Mafia, CIA Director, Nazi shyster and Rockefeller minion Allen Dulles and others are quick to take advantage.

A photograph of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation performing fellatio on the Assistant Director of the FBI allegedly ends up in the hands of Mafia kingpin Meyer Lanksy. Possession of the photo ensures complete freedom of operation for the Mafia in the United States during almost forty years of Hoover's tenure. Hoover will repeatedly stymie and block investigations into the mob and claim that the Mafia simply does not exist.

No one who is a sex deviate
will ever be appointed to the FBI.:flute:
J. Edna Hoover
Homosexual transvestite and FBI Director

I regret to say that we of the FBI
are powerless to act
in cases of oral-genital intimacy
unless it has, in some way,
obstructed interstate commerce. :questionmark:
J. Edna Hoover
Homosexual transvestite and FBI Director

J. Edna gave great Hoover.
Clydie Tolson
J. Edna's main squeeze and Assistant FBI Director

That old cocksucker....
Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon

http://mtwsfh.blogspot.com/2008/08/1927-...icans.html

[Peter Lemkin]

The FBI's Vendetta
Against Martin Luther King, Jr.
excerpted from the book
The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies
by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976



p63
For the FBI, an organization seeking to register blacks in the South was clearly suspicious. Until 1962, the bureau would monitor King and SCLC under the "racial matters" category, which required agents to collect "all pertinent information" about the "proposed or actual activities of individuals and organizations in the racial field." According to the Senate Select Committee, the FBI information on King was "extensive."
The unfolding story of the civil rights protest movement and the leadership role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a most ignoble chapter in the history of FBI spying and manipulation. As the civil rights movement grew and expanded, the FBI pinpointed every group and emergent leader for intensive investigation and most for harassment and disruption, the FBl's domestic version of CIA covert action abroad. The NAACP was the subject of a COMINFIL investigation. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were listed by the FBI as "Black-Hate" type organizations and selected for covert disruption of their political activities. But the most vicious FBI attack was reserved for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All of the arbitrary power and lawless tactics that had accumulated in the bureau over the years were marshaled to destroy King's reputation and the movement he led. The FBI relied on its vague authority to investigate "subversives" to spy on King and SCLC; its vague authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping and microphonic surveillance to tap and bug him; its secrecy to conduct covert operations against him. The campaign began with his rise to leadership and grew more vicious as he reached the height of his power; it continued even after his assassination in 1968.
p77
On August 28, 250,000 persons marched on Washing- 1, ton. The march, sponsored by a cross-section of civil rights, labor, and church organizations, was designed to support the enactment of civil rights legislation. That day,

when Martin Luther King addressed the assemblage, he made his most memorable speech:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day in the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering in the heat of injustice . . freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
The speech brought the crowd to its feet, applauding, echoing the "Amens" that greet evangelical preaching, and shouting "Freedom Now!" The FBI reacted differently. In memoranda to the director, King's speech was characterized as "demagogic," and the presence of "200" Communists among the 250,000 marchers caused the Intelligence Division to state that it had underestimated Communist efforts and influence on American Negroes and the civil rights movement. King was singled out:
He stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now . . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism the Negro and national security.
More ominously, the FBI suggested that "legal" efforts to deal with King might not be enough. "It may be unrealistic," the memorandum went on, to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proofs or definitely conclusive evidence that would stand up in testimony in court or before Congressional Committees....
It was up to the FBI to "mark" King and bring him down on its own-to take the law into its own hands.
On October 1, 1963, Hoover received and then approved a combined COMINFIL-COINTELPRO plan against the civil rights movement. The approved plan called for intensifying "coverage of Communist influence on the Negro." It recommended the "use of all possible investigative techniques" and stated an "urgent need for imaginative and aggressive tactics . . . to neutralize or disrupt the Party's activities in the Negro field."
On October 10 and 21, Attorney General Kennedy gave the FBI one of those "investigative techniques" by approving the wiretaps on King.
On October 18, 1963, the FBI distributed a different kind of memorandum on King, not only to the Justice Department, but to officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Defense Department intelligence agencies. It summarized the bureau's Communist party charges against King and went much further. According to - Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, it was a personal diatribe . . . a personal attack without evidentiary support on the character, the moral character and person of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it was only peripherally related to anything substantive, like whether or not there was Communist infiltration or influence on the civil rights movement.... It was a personal attack on the man and went far afield from the charges [of possible Communist influence].
The attorney general was outraged and demanded that Hoover seek the return of the report. By October 28, all copies were returned. This was the first-and last-official action to deter Hoover's vendetta against King.
In November, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson became president and the Justice Department was in a state of confusion with the attorney general preoccupied with his personal grief. King viewed the assassination as a tragedy, and hoped it would spawn a new public concern for peace and reconciliation.
While the nation mourned, the FBI held a conference at the beginning of December to plan its campaign to destroy King and the civil rights movement. At that all-day meeting FBI officials put forward proposals that make G. Gordon Liddy's Watergate plan seem pale by comparison. Officials of the nation's number-one law enforcement agency agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggressive" newsmen, "colored" agents, Dr. King's housekeeper, and even Dr. King's wife or "placing a good looking female plant in King's office" to develop discrediting information and to take action that would lead to his disgrace.
From the nature of Burke Marshall's description of the October 18 report, it is obvious that the FBI was on to something it viewed as unsavory about King's private life. The report made the charges, but as Marshall said, there was no "evidentiary" support. Now the FBI was out to get the proof. By January, the FBI had initiated physical and photographic surveillance of King, deploying its most experienced personnel to gather information, and had placed the first of many illegal bugs in Dr. King's room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.
According to Justice Department regulations at the time, microphonic surveillance, although it necessitated a physical trespass and was more intrusive than a phone tap, did not require the approval of the attorney general. Even under its own regulations, however, the FBI could only use this technique to gather "important intelligence or evidence relating to matters connected with national security." In this case the FBI planned to use "bugs" to learn about "the [private] activities of Dr. King and his associates" so that King could be "completely discredited." It was clearly illegal.
The Willard Hotel "bug" yielded "19 reels" of tape. The FBI, at least in its own opinion, had struck pay dirt. The bug apparently picked up information about King's private extramarital and perhaps "inter-racial" sexual activities. This opened up the possibility of discrediting King as a Communist who engaged in "moral improprieties."
For J. Edgar Hoover, "immoral" behavior was a crime comparable to "subversive" activity-and of equal utility. Hoover gathered such information on prominent persons to use for political and blackmail purposes. Often he would share such "official and confidential" information with presidents when his surveillance uncovered "obscene matters" on the president's opponents or aides. Sometimes he would let people know he had such information on them, and that list includes Presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In this case, however, Hoover did not plan to let King know he had the information to gain a "political" power advantage over him; he planned to use it to destroy him politically. With the Willard Hotel tapes, the FBI campaign moved into high gear.
With Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pressing action on civil rights legislation and calling for a "War on Poverty," Martin Luther King was a man the country and the world thought worthy of honor. In December 1963, Time magazine named him "Man of the Year." In 1964, while continuing his "nonviolent" activities on behalf of civil rights in St. Augustine, Florida, and other cities, King was awarded honorary degrees by universities; he was invited by Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, to speak at a ceremony honoring the memory of President Kennedy; he had an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome; and, in October, he was named by the Nobel Prize Committee to receive the Peace Prize in December.
If for King 1964 was a year of honors and increasing public recognition, for the FBI it was a year of concerted effort to dishonor him. Learning that King had been named Man of the Year by Time, Hoover wrote across a memorandum, "They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one."
p85
In April, Hoover was quoted in the press as having testified that "Communist influence does exist in the civil rights movement." King reacted sharply:
It is very unfortunate that Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, in his claims of alleged Communist infiltration in the civil rights movement, has allowed himself to aid and abet the salacious claims of Southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements.
We challenge all who raise the "red" issue, whether they be newspaper columnists or the head of the FBI himself-to come forward and provide real evidence which contradicts this stand of the SCLC. We are confident that this cannot be done.
Going further, King repeated the charge of FBI inaction in the South that had provoked the anti-King campaign:
It is difficult to accept the word of the FBI on Communist infiltration in the civil rights movement, when they have been so completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep south.
Hoover's first response was to say that it was incumbent on the civil rights movement to prove that there was no Communist influence. Then, in November, Hoover held a press briefing. Asked to respond to King's charges, Hoover, off the record, called King "one of the lowest characters in the country." On the record, he called King the most "notorious liar" in the country. Hoover's comments were widely publicized.
King's response this time was designed to dampen the controversy. "I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this," King said, "without being under extreme pressure. He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities, and responsibilities of his office." King also sent Hoover a telegram stating that

while he had criticized the bureau, the director's response was "a mystery to me" and expressed a desire "to discuss this question with you at length."
On November 27, Roy Wilkins was told by Cartha DeLoach that if King wanted "war" the FBI was prepared to engage in one, and the two of them discussed the FBI's "derogatory" material. Wilkins told DeLoach that if the FBI made it public, it could ruin the civil rights movement. Obviously Wilkins reported this back to King, and a number of leaders, including King, agreed to take steps to set up a meeting with the director. Hoover agreed to meet with King on December 1.
According to all accounts, the meeting was exceedingly cordial. Hoover expressed support for the civil rights movement and then turned to what was on his mind criticism of the bureau. The meeting consisted of a long monologue by Hoover on the FBI's efforts to protect civil rights demonstrators, enforce the laws in the South, and prevent terrorism. At the end of the meeting, King and Hoover agreed to a public truce.
Only now do we know how close the FBI came to an all-out confrontation. Unknown to King or SCLC until later, the FBI, at the height of the public controversy, took its most distressing step. It mailed the "tapes" to the SCLC office in Atlanta with a covering letter urging King to commit suicide or face public revelation of the information on the tapes on the eve of the award ceremonies in Sweden. The letter said in part:
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 (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
It was thirty-four days before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies.
Although public scandal was averted at the last moment, the FBI's campaign continued. From 1965 until
King's death, the covert effort of the FBI to destroy King r and to topple him from "his pedestal" continued. Aside from the suicide note, there is no more graphic illustration of the mind-set and nature of this political police operation than the realization that while the campaign went on, the FBI had a parallel plan to find a "suitable replacement" for King.
The plan was simple. William Sullivan, the head of the Intelligence Division, had given it some thought and, in a January 1964 memorandum to Hoover, proposed that the FBI conduct a search to find a "suitable" successor to King. Hoover agreed. Sullivan, when asked about the memorandum by the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded in a way that speaks for itself: "I'm very proud of this memorandum, one of the best memoranda I ever wrote. I think here I was showing some concern for the country." While King was alive, the concern was shown again and
p89
The FBI had turned its arsenal of surveillance and disruption techniques on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. It was concerned not with Soviet agents nor with criminal activity, but with the political and personal activities of a man and a movement committed to nonviolence and democracy. King was not the first such target, nor the last. In the end we are all victims, as our political life is distorted and constricted by the FBI, a law enforcement agency now policing politics.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/Ve...LK_LS.html

[Peter Lemkin]

J. Edgar Hoover

[1895-1972]

Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in 1972.
"What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?" - The essay question that pissed off Hoover. It was optional question number 7 on UC's 1959 English aptitude test for high school applicants. See: Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare - a SF Chronicle Special Report
Biography
John Edgar Hoover was born on New Year's Day in 1895 in Washington, D.C. He was the youngest of the three surviving children born to Dickerson Naylor Hoover and Annie Marie Scheitlin Hoover. J. Edgar's only brother was Dickerson, Jr., fifteen years his senior and his sister Lillian who was thirteen years older. Another sister, Sadie Marguerite was born in 1890 and died of diphtheria in 1893.The Young Man ...

Is this the truth? Apparently just about everything that is known about Hoover's early life comes from a 500 word 1937 profile in the New Yorker magazine written by one Jack Alexander. See: The Mysterious Origins of J. Edgar Hoover by Edward Spannaus.
Palmer Raids
In 1919 Woodrow Wilson appointed A. Mitchell Palmer as his attorney general. Palmer recruited John Edgar Hoover as his special assistant and together they used the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) to launch a campaign against radicals and left-wing organizations. [more]

J. Edgar Hoover turned the deportation of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman into a personal crusade. In this letter he brands them as "beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country." As special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover amassed evidence against Goldman and Berkman and presented the case against them at their deportation hearing. Hoover was also present at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of December 21, 1919, when the Buford set sail for Russia carrying Goldman, Berkman, and the other deportees. Hoover and the FBI monitored Goldman's activities closely for the remainder of her life in exile from the United States. Emma Goldman Papers @ sunsite.berkeley.edu
May 10, 1924 Hoover selected to head the Bureau of Investigation. When Hoover took over, the Bureau of Investigation had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents. He immediately fired those Agents he considered unqualified and proceeded to professionalize the organization. For example, Hoover abolished the seniority rule of promotion and introduced uniform performance appraisals. Regular inspections of Headquarters and field office operations were scheduled. New Agents had to be between 25 and 35 years old. Then, in January 1928, Hoover established a formal training course for new Agents. He also returned to the earlier preference for Special Agents with law or accounting experience.

The new Director was also keenly aware that the Bureau of Investigation could not fight crime without public support. In remarks prepared for the Attorney General in 1925, he wrote, "The Agents of the Bureau of Investigation have been impressed with the fact that the real problem of law enforcement is in trying to obtain the cooperation and sympathy of the public and that they cannot hope to get such cooperation until they themselves merit the respect of the public." --THE "LAWLESS" YEARS at fbi.gov

In 1935 sensation surrounded the opening of Warner Bros.' newest film, G-Men. In the film, James Cagney did not play the "tough guy gangster" for which he was known, but rather a federal lawman. - pbs.org

One-time number three man in the FBI, William C. Sullivan, sated in his book, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI (published just after his accidental death): “. . . the Mafia is powerful, so powerful that entire police forces or even a mayor’s office can be under Mafia control. That’s why Hoover was afraid to let us tackle it. he was afraid that we’d show up poorly. Why take the risk, he reasoned, until we were forced to by public exposure of our shortcomings.” - anzwers.org
on Communism "I would have no fears if more Americans possessed the zeal, the fervor, the persistence and the industry to learn about this menace of Red fascism. I do fear for the liberal and progressive who has been hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the communists..." Testimony of J. Edgar Hoover before HUAC - March 26, 1947
on Martin Luther King, Jr.
J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with King is also well-documented in FBI files. These files show examples such as the FBI calling Marquette University in 1964 to tell them not to award an honorary degree to King. At Springfield College (Mass.) a month later, the FBI told the college that King's SCLC was "Communist affiliated". J. Edgar & Martin

Hoover's FBI mailed tapes of King's sexual affairs to his wife and tried to blackmail him politically; in an anonymous letter, encouraged him to commit suicide; and, among other disinformation successes, convinced Marquette University officials in 1964 to back out of giving King an honorary degree. [source]
Nixon and the Plumbers As the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told the journalist Andrew Tully in the days before June, 1972, "By God, he's [Nixon's] got some former CIA men working for him that I'd kick out of my office. Someday, that bunch will serve him up a fine mess." [fn 20] Chapter -XII- Chairman George in Watergate, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin --
on motorcycles 1960 ... The popularity of the motorcycle -- both in connection with its use as a sport and as a means of rapid transportation -- makes it imperative that the individual owner exercise every precaution against the possibility of theft. --Your Motorcycle And You by John Edgar Hoover, AMERICAN MOTORCYCLING - November, 1960
Hoover dies -
May 2, 1972
James Crawford came to work a little early that Tuesday morning. The Boss had ordered some rosebushes and Crawford promised him that he would be there at 8:30 to help him plant them. ... " J. Edgar Hoover, by Marilyn Bardsley, May 2, 1972

A university professor of forensic science [James Starrs], suspecting foul play in J. Edgar Hoover's death, has been granted access to the District of Columbia medical examiner's records to reinvestigate how the former FBI director died. J. Edgar Hoover death records getting another look by Kalpana Srinivasan The Associated Press, Seattle Times January 18, 1998
Books Hoover's FBI : The Inside Story by Hoover's Trusted Lieutenant, by Cartha 'Deke' Deloach (1997) @amazon.com
Official and Confidential: The Secret LIfe of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers (1993) @amazon.com
The Real J.Edgar Hoover for the Record, by Ray Wannall (2000) @amazon.com
The Union Station Massacre : The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI by Robert Unger @amazon.com
The F.B.I. Story, by Don Whitehead
Honk If You Love J. Edgar Hoover - by By Allyn Baskerville and Bill Gillespie
Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, by J. Edgar Hoover, 1958 [excerpt ]

Hoover Book Titles at amazon.com




Photos


More Hoover Photos

Japanese internment ...

My book contains data regarding Hoover's advocacy of civil rights, laced with a strong compassion for the plight of others. The "Japanese internment" issue is cited as an example of this. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and herded into concentration camps. This was demanded by numerous well-known individuals, including Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau, renowned columnist Walter Lippman, California Governor Earl Warren who later became Chief Justice of the United States, even President Franklin Roosevelt. ... Hoover described the demands as "a capitulation to public hysteria," and told Morganthau that arrests should not be made "unless there were sufficient facts (probable cause) upon which to justify the arrests." He contended the rights of American citizens should be protected, and protested the dragnet procedures. He was overridden. --From book about J. Edgar Hoover by W. Ray Wannall published by Turner Publishing Co. of Paducah, Kentucky.

"The most serious discrimination during World War II was the decision to evacuate Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese descent from the West Coast and send them to internment camps." Apparently FBI Director Hoover took the position that because it "had arrested the individuals whom it considered security threats, confining others was unnecessary." President [Franklin D. Roosevelt] overruled him. - FBI History

Hoover as a Mason ...

"Hoover was just as devoted to his Masonic Brothers. He was raised a Master Mason on November 9, 1920, in Federal Lodge No. 1, Washington, DC, just two months before his 26th birthday. During his 52 years with the Craft, he received innumerable medals, awards and decorations. In 1955, for instance, he was coroneted a Thirty-third Degree Inspector General Honorary and awarded the Scottish Rite’s highest recognition, the Grand Cross of Honour in 1965." -J. Edgar Hoover, 33, Grand Cross-Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, Chairman, Hoover Foundation

“The virtue of tolerance and the ability to respect different opinions, beliefs, and ideas have enriched the life of America. Tolerance is the eternal virtue through which good conquers evil and truth vanquishes untruth.”
Illustrious J. Edgar Hoover, 33, Grand Cross
Addressed to the Grand Lodge of New York, May 2, 1950

Other sources of information about J. Edgar Hoover ...
John Edgar Hoover @ spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk
J. Edgar Hoover [wikipedia.com]
J. Edgar Hoover - Homosexual Allegations and Mafia Blackmail
The Mysterious Origins of J. Edgar Hoover - by Edward Spannaus, American Almanac, August, 2000
J. Edgar Hoover and The Farm - by Albert Bates
Hoover, J. Edgar (1895-1972) @yahoo

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The FBI: Past, Present & Future

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