A Question Of Getting The Facts Straight

Ultra-Conservative Claims Kennedy Administration Authorized Spying of MLK

Allan H. Ryskind, an ultra-conservative associated with the ultra-conservative online magazine, Human Events: The National Conservative Weekly, writes a revisionist version of the history of FBI wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr., and others during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Ryskind's efforts to paint the warrantless NSA surveillance in a better light than the wiretapping of US citizens during this previous era fails because the facts he presents are distorted, and by the fact that it was these events, plus the events during the Nixon administration, and the increasing capability of telecommunication technologies, that led to the passing of FISA.

Ryskind: The Kennedy Administration engaged in an unforgivable act of government intrusion when it wiretapped Dr. Martin Luther King. That view is baked into the history books, and Jimmy Carter was just reprising this theme in his eulogy to Coretta Scott King. But the truth is that the famous civil rights leader brought those wiretaps on himself. This is not an untold story, as much as it is a forgotten one.

Well, technically, yes, it was the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, on Bobby Kennedy's watch as US Attorney General, that conducted the secret surveillance. However, according to all reliable historical references, the surveillance was authorized by J. Edgar Hoover, often without any clearance or authorization from either JFK, RFK or LBJ.

In fact, the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, often referred to as "The Director,: is one of racism, political vendetta, paranoia and kinky transvetism:

"Hoover is seen as a shrewd bureaucratic genius who cared less about crime than about perpetuating his crime-busting image. With his acute public relations sense, he managed to obscure his bureau's failings while magnifying its sometime successes. Even his fervent anti-Communism has been cast into doubt; some former aides insist that he knew the party was never a genuine internal threat to the nation but a useful, popular target to ensure financial and public support for the FBI.

Even more serious flaws in the Hoover character and official performance have come to light: Instead of insulating his bureau from politically sensitive Presidents, Hoover eagerly complied with improper requests from the men in the White House for information on potential opponents. If a President failed to ask for such information, the Director often volunteered it. He tapped the telephones of Government officials on request, perused files of politicians unasked, volunteered tidbits of gossip.

He was a petty man of towering personal hates. There was more than a tinge of racism in his vicious vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. He had to be pushed into hiring black agents for the bureau.

His informers, infiltrators and wiretappers delved into the activities of even the most innocuous and nonviolent civil rights and antiwar groups, trampling on the rights of citizens to express grievances against their Government. His spies within potentially dangerous extremist groups sometimes provoked more violence than they prevented.

As an administrator, he was an erratic, unchallengeable czar, banishing agents to Siberian posts on whimsy, terrorizing
them with torrents of implausible rules, insisting on conformity of thought as well as dress. The fact that such a man could acquire and keep that kind of power raises disturbing questions not merely about the role of a national police in a democracy, but also about the political system that tolerated him for so long. The revelations show too that those political dissidents in years past who complained they were being harassed and spied upon were not so paranoid after all." - J. Edgar Hoover. Wiretaps (Sunday, 22 January 2006) - Contributed by TIME.com

"The Cold War was in full swing in late 1963 when Bobby Kennedy authorized the first King wiretap. On JFK's watch, Khrushchev had put up the Berlin Wall and had almost provoked a nuclear exchange by introducing atomic-armed missiles into Cuba. "Wars of National Liberation" were being fully stoked by the shoe-pounder in the Kremlin. Yet King, already a powerful civil rights figure, had surrounded himself with several radical advisers, including at least two long-time members of the Communist Party."

There are reports that Hoover had already initiated surveillance of MLK prior to the authorization by RFK. Indeed, some reports have Bobby Kennedy authorizing the taps based on bogus information presented to Kennedy as a way of manipulating RFK into a compromising situation. During the LBJ terms in the White House, Bobby Kennedy was a target of Hoover's pettiness and attempts to discredit Kennedy's standing in LBJ's administration, which was fueled by LBJ's own fear of RFK's influence in the White House and among cabinet members.

"The Director's dealings with Presidents, as detailed two weeks ago by a Senate committee report (TIME, Dec. 15), were just as self-serving. Clearly the worst offender in demanding political information from Hoover was President Lyndon Johnson. Both men loved gossip and this type of intrigue. Hoover ingratiated himself with L.B.J. during the Justice Department's investigation of Johnson's congressional protégé and crony, Bobby Baker. Asked by Attorney General
Robert Kennedy to "wire" someone to talk to a Baker friend, Hoover not only refused but reported the request to Johnson. The Justice Department lawyers went to Treasury agents instead and got the help they sought. That infuriated Johnson, who asked Hoover to check out Treasury for the men who helped Kennedy.

Always worried about Kennedy supporters in his midst, Johnson kept asking Hoover to investigate White House personnel. TIME has learned that Presidential Speechwriter Richard Goodwin resigned as the result of one such probe. Johnson also ordered FBI name checks on high officials in the Democratic National Committee for the same purpose. L.B.J. was so phobic about the Kennedys that when the Washington Star attacked him editorially, he asked Hoover to find out if there was any Kennedy money behind the paper. Since the FBI also had its own "enemies list" of newspapers critical of Hoover, the Director was sympathetic to such appeals. Time

The animosity between Hoover and Kennedy is well established. In fact, Hoover despised RFK for the audacity of reminding "The Director" that he worked for the Department of Justice headed by the US Attorney General... Bobby Kennedy. The Kennedy brothers, as well as Eisenhower before them, did not always indulge Hoover's paranoid endeavors and political machinations:

"Hoover seems to have had little more success in foisting political intelligence on Dwight Eisenhower. Although Jack Kennedy and his brother Robert, as Attorney General, went along with some of the Hoover wiretapping, the brothers posed new difficulty for the Director. For the first time Hoover found it impossible to bypass the Attorney General. Matters were not helped when Hoover visited Bobby for the first time at the Justice Department and the shirtsleeved young Attorney General threw darts throughout their conversation. The Director was outraged at what he considered disrespect. Bobby, moreover, often missed the dartboard and ripped the wall; to Hoover this was 'a desecration of Government property.'

Bobby was the only Attorney General who dared summon Hoover by buzzer to his office. Kennedy, in fact, ordered a
direct line placed in the Director's office after discovering that this phone had been moved to the desk of Helen Gandy,
Hoover's secretary." Time

Ryskind: Stanley Levison was one of them [communists]. He may have been, as King's friendly biographer, David Garrow sometimes suggests, King's most trusted adviser from 1956 until the civil rights leader's death in 1968. Levison, an important CP {Communist Party] member, was also responsible for placing on the board of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference Hunter Pitts (Jack) O'Dell, who became a member of the national committee of the U.S. Communist Party in 1959. These were the indisputable facts that eventually impelled the Kennedy Administration to wiretap King.

It was clear, after the 1950s and the "Red Scare" of McCarthyism passed, that Hoover conducted surveillance and collected information not only on people like MLK and Levison, but anyone that might oppose "The Director" and his ideas, speak of his rumored connections to major crime figures, or criticize the FBI under his leadership.

"Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on scores of powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed deputy Attorney General in early 1974, Clarence Kelly, the then Director of the Bureau, thought they either didn't exist or had been destroyed. After The Washington Post broke a story in January 1975, Kelly searched and found them in his outer office. The House Judiciary Committee then demanded that Silberman testify about those files, which he did.

In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover's apparently cozy relations with the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors, after famed muckraker Jack Anderson exposed the immense scope of the Mafia's organized crime network, a threat Hoover had long downplayed. Hoover's retaliation and continual harassment of Anderson lasted into the 1970s. Hoover has also been accused of trying to undermine the reputations of members of the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party.

Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson each considered firing Hoover, but concluded that the political cost of doing so would be too great. Hoover maintained strong support in Congress until his death, whereupon operational command of the Bureau passed to Associate Director Mark Felt. Wikipedia Profile
Hoover was a loose cannon in almost every executive administration, investigating with and without authorization of the White House, bypassing the chain of command in all but a few administrations, and even investigating presidents along the way:

"Hoover was 'a paranoid director created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone who opposed him.

The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; and what part he played in the investigations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.'" Gentry Book Review

Hoover also was adept at blocking any efforts to call him on the carpet about his own breaches of law or protocol, even to the point that the actual files collected on MLK were sealed by court order until 2027:

"Hoover successfully neutralized demands for independent investigations of the bureau's conduct and his administration during his forty-eight-year tenure as fbi director. His power, however, moved Congress in 1968 to enact legislation requiring Senate confirmation of future fbi directors and limiting their tenure to ten years. Because Hoover's death coincided with the furor created by the Watergate affair, it marked the end of an era. Thereafter, Congress and the media became more vigilant in monitoring the powerful agency Hoover had helped forge and legitimize." - The Reader's Companion to American History: HOOVER, J. EDGAR

There are differences and similarities between the Hoover wiretaps, the Nixon wiretaps and the Bush wiretaps. The major difference is that Hoover took almost 50 years to deal with hundreds of wiretaps, did not have the technology that is currently available, while Bush wiretapped over 5000 in 5 years. Hoover and Nixon did not have a specific set of laws that specifically made such indiscriminate surveillance illegal... Bush did have FISA, ECPA, TPA, and several others laws. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, RFK, LBJ, Nixon and George W. have all breached or infringed rights of US citizens, but only Dubya and his gang had the audacity to grab at legal straws to justify the action in such a broad, vague, arbitrary and capricious manner. Wrong is wrong. We can't go back and hang the other presidents named in Ryskind's piece, but we can take steps to assure that it ceases and desists... The upcoming mid-term elections and the 2008 presidential race are going to be SO VERY INTERESTING... It may take another Supreme Court intervention to keep the ultra-conservatives in office.

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NOTES & REFERENCES
Hoover's Memo Of Records RE: LBJ
Did Hoover Wear Dresses?
Book Review - J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets by Curt Gentry
Wikipedia Article on Hoover
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Compliance with the Attorney General's Investigative Guidelines (Redacted)