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FBI investigators finally discovered the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi, although it would be difficult to prosecute the murders given the likely complicity of local police. Ironically, the FBI was at that same time surveilling and disrupting efforts by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the segregationist delegation to the Democratic National Convention, which threatened Johnson’s grip on the South. Hoover also helped Johnson to spin riots in Harlem and assure the public that they had nothing to do with civil rights, thus angering his conservative allies. A scandal then broke when the FBI’s main liaison with the White House was caught having sex with a man in a YMCA bathroom. As the Goldwater campaign denounced him as a national-security threat, Hoover did yet another favor for Johnson and absolved the agent of anything other than personal misconduct. Johnson crushed Goldwater in the 1964 election, and Hoover promised his continuing support.
With Johnson secure for at least four more years, Hoover planned an offensive against Martin Luther King Jr., whom he denounced to reporters as “the most notorious liar in the country.” Public backlash was intense, especially as King was poised to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but Hoover did not back down. An FBI agent then sent a letter to King, citing knowledge of his sexual indiscretions and strongly hinting that he should commit suicide. Even before receiving the letter, King knew that the FBI might try to destroy his reputation, and so he came to Hoover’s office to meet with him, although it did not appear to solve their underlying problems. Even so, the press was reluctant to pick up on the FBI’s rumors about King, even though public opinion polls showed Hoover far more popular than King.
While focusing much of his efforts against King, Hoover had also directed COINTELPRO against white supremacist groups like the Klan, regarding them no better than civil rights activists in their disdain for law and order. This was also noteworthy in that there was no pretense of these groups working on behalf of a foreign power or trying to overthrow the US government; they were simply dangerous American citizens. The FBI published cartoons and short letters, deliberately written poorly, assuming that Klansmen would not or could not read the complex philosophical arguments that animated communists. The FBI quickly racked up informants and bragged about how many it had, hoping this would sow further dissension within their ranks. Despite these successes, the FBI was again rebuked for its lack of action on civil rights when it did nothing to prevent police in Selma, Alabama, from brutally beating peaceful marchers on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Johnson made his most impassioned speech yet on the subject of civil rights, and the FBI played a minor but generally positive role in accompanying the famous Selma-to-Montgomery march. The limits of the FBI’s work against the Klan were exposed when a car of Klansmen, including an FBI agent, shot and killed a white mother of five. Afterward, the informant testified against his fellows, and they all received convictions, after which the Klan went into decline.
With crime seemingly on the rise in the mid-1960s, Hoover sought to reenact the role he had played in the Great Depression as the nation’s top cop defending decent men and women from the scourge of violence, which he often coded in racial terms. In response, Johnson launched a War on Crime, expanding cooperation between the FBI and local departments and increasing access to military-grade equipment. Just as he had in the 1930s, Hoover once again turned to popular culture to spread his message. The FBI premiered on ABC in September 1965 with Hoover and Tolson taking an active role in curating the show’s content. One major obstruction to Hoover’s plans for crime came from the Supreme Court, with a series of decisions favoring the rights of criminal defendants, especially against illegal surveillance. These new realities proven even more challenging as Hoover and his inner circle continued to age, losing both vigor and the capacity for adjustment. Moreover, the pop-culture outreaches that had worked well in the 1930s were not working in the 1960s, when the bureau seemed increasingly out of touch with modern life. Hoover suffered yet another setback when Clyde Tolson fell ill, but when he was awarded the Distinguished Federal Civilian Service award, Hoover accepted it on his behalf and gave it to him in the hospital.
Another way the world was changing was that the American left no longer had any affinity for the Soviet Union or communism. Groups such as Students for a Democratic Society or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee opposed American efforts in Vietnam, championed racial justice, and called for a more egalitarian social structure, but they were more interested in open political action than subversion from the underground. Regardless, Hoover continued to regard them as communists or dupes. When a series of uprisings engulfed several American cities over the summer of 1967, Hoover blamed it on an organized conspiracy of communist militants, including Martin Luther King Jr. A commission investigating the causes of the riots rejected Hoover’s thesis, blaming both crime and radicalism on unequal social structures. Undeterred, Hoover went on to create COINTELPRO-New Left.
While celebrating his 50th year at the FBI, Hoover worried about growing protests against the Vietnam War and a corresponding drop in favor for Johnson, who had drastically escalated US involvement. He had further cause for worry when Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for president and Johnson withdrew from the race. Shortly thereafter, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and when riots broke out in several American cities, Johnson insisted that Hoover stay quiet, given his reputation as King’s enemy. The FBI limited itself to pursuing King’s assassin, and in just over two weeks, it had identified James Earl Ray as the leading suspect. Hoover dreaded the prospect of another Kennedy administration, but this ended when Bobby was assassinated in early June. In the middle of Bobby’s funeral, Hoover announced that James Earl Ray had been arrested in England. This victory was tarnished by the FBI’s treatment of King and its encouraging white America to see him as a threat.
Richard Nixon mounted a political comeback in 1968, and at Hoover’s age, he needed a friend in the White House if he was going to stay on the job. Hoover’s support for Nixon also helped to shore up Nixon’s own conservative credentials, which had been weakened by his role as vice president to the comparatively moderate Eisenhower. Eager to exploit a Democratic split over civil rights and Vietnam, he branded himself the candidate of “law and order,” and Hoover returned the favor by blaming violence at the Democratic National Convention on protestors and not the police who were at least as responsible. For all the chaos in the Democratic ranks, Nixon won only a slight victory, and the president-elect reaffirmed his bond with Hoover.
With Nixon’s support, Hoover turned his focus on the New Left and Black Power movements, especially the Black Panther Party. With the eager cooperation of local police, Hoover sought to thwart the rise of a new “messiah” capable of replacing King as a leading civil rights figure, especially from a group like the Panthers that was proudly armed and spouted avowedly Marxist rhetoric. The group was already divided among factions, and they were a ripe target for FBI infiltration and disruption. Hoover was also worried that the Panthers would inspire the white admirers of the New Left to instigate violence, and here also the FBI was able to exacerbate preexisting divisions. A desultory effort by one radical offshoot of SDS called the “Weathermen” to instigate an urban revolt in Chicago proved to Hoover that the risk of revolution was imminent. To forestall it, the FBI tapped an informant within the Panthers to set a trap for Fred Hampton, the charismatic leader of the Illinois Black Panthers and a possible “messiah,” so that Chicago police officers could ambush and kill him. The murder of Hampton provoked a backlash from both the Panthers and the radical New Left, but neither could sustain a confrontation with the FBI for long.
Despite their ideological alignment, Nixon and Hoover clashed over bureaucratic procedure. Nixon’s penchant for secrecy and skullduggery rivaled Hoover’s, and Hoover feared that Nixon would either infringe on the FBI’s prerogatives or make it a scapegoat for Nixon’s own apparatus of illegal wiretapping. Whispers in the White House questioned Hoover’s continued fitness for office, and Congress restructured the office of the director in order to make another multi-decade tenure unlikely. Liberal critics who held their tongues during the Johnson years unloaded on Hoover, and his irascible replies seemed to confirm that he was losing his touch. Making matters worse, a break-in at an FBI office led to the dissemination of classified materials on COINTELPRO, which Hoover shuttered under public pressure. Democrats called for his resignation, which prompted Republicans to rally to his defense. When a RAND Corporation employee released a trove of government documents exposing the gross mismanagement of the Vietnam War, Hoover recognized his vulnerable position and called for restraint, prompting Nixon to set up his own surveillance network and look to give Hoover a dignified exit, although he proved reluctant to follow through on the threat.
Questions about Hoover’s fitness mounted as many of his friends and confidants began to die off. He affirmed that he was in good health until he died suddenly in his sleep on May 1, 1972. Hoover’s death appeared to rehabilitate his reputation, at least for the time being, as bipartisan eulogies came forth from across the country. Nixon shocked the FBI by appointing as Hoover’s successor L. Patrick Gray, a political appointee with no experience in the bureau. Many of Hoover’s personal files were destroyed, and his many reports fell into the custody of Mark Felt, who would later be revealed as the Watergate informer “Deep Throat.” When the Watergate scandal broke in 1973, Nixon mused that if Hoover had been alive, he would have been able to contain the damage.
The popular conception of the late 1960s is one of an ascendant counterculture, with assorted hippies, antiwar protestors, Black radicals, and others seizing the cultural mantle from the dull conformity of the 1950s. In this imagining, Hoover is the ultimate antagonist, the oldest of the old guard who treated Martin Luther King Jr. and antiwar protestors as enemies of the state without bothering to consider the legitimacy of their grievances regarding racial injustice and the Vietnam War. To be sure, the latter years of Hoover’s life exhibit some of his most shameful actions, and even many of his allies and supporters wondered if he was equipped to handle a changing world. But as Gage points out, Hoover retained majority public support even at this time, and upon his death was generally celebrated as a hero. While he is now roundly denounced for his actions against Martin Luther King Jr., the reputations of the two men are practically inverse to what they were then. Most white Americans regarded King as a troublemaker, and King was lucky to have enough support from politicians and the press to deter Hoover from exposing his materials on King, which would have been devastating regardless of their veracity. Likewise, the FBI’s role in orchestrating the murder of Fred Hampton is now understood as a horrific crime, as seen in the 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah. At the time, the Panthers were widely loathed, and efforts by Panthers and New Leftists to rally public support after Hampton’s murder were a complete failure. The revelation of COINTELPRO was a major blow, but an overall culture of faith int the righteousness of the federal government was still strong enough at the time that even in the wake of some of Hoover’s worst actions, there was no question of him facing accountability.
It is fitting with Hoover’s image as the ultimate G-man that he died only a few months before the event that would break the dam and precipitate a long decline in trust of federal institutions. Hoover had no direct ties to Watergate, as Nixon created the “plumbers” because he did not trust Hoover to do his dirty work. Yet Nixon could never have undertaken his own illegal surveillance without Hoover’s extensive example, and his team included former FBI agents. With the American people experiencing month after month of an agonizing scandal, it was difficult not to recognize Hoover as a root cause of Nixon’s lies, blackmail, and cover-ups. The political culture of the country would change in ways that Hoover would find unrecognizable. The experience of Vietnam largely exhausted the Democratic Party’s appetite for waging the Cold War, breaking the bipartisan consensus on anticommunism that had sustained Hoover across eight presidential administrations, four of each major party. With Nixon gone, the conservative movement would come to dominate the Republican Party, and while they shared Hoover’s ideology in many respects, they disdained how readily he sidelined ideology for the sake of bureaucratic politics. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republicans would declare the federal government to be the enemy of freedom, and while they struggled to control its continued expansion, never again would they identify a consummate bureaucrat as the hero of the Right. It is therefore doubtful that the change of Hoover’s reputation stems solely from the country liberalizing. It has in many respects, but a substantial portion of the US population is no less hostile to the political left and Black radicalism than during Hoover’s time. They have simply decided that government is the problem, and not the solution. In the end, Hoover has proved to be too conservative for the progressives and too progressive for the conservatives.
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