Throughout 1964, generally considered the high point of the King-Johnson partnership, Hoover apprised Johnson of King’s travel, his associates, the protest strategies King was considering, which government officials had contacted King and private things King had to say about Johnson and his administration. Hoover reported on an administration official who wanted King to participate in a memorial to President John Kennedy, what King planned to say to the Republican platform committee, how the civil rights leader was considering a fast around the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge and a host of other pieces of political surveillance. When an F.B.I. wiretap picked up Coretta Scott King complaining with her husband that they had not yet received congratulations from the White House on his Nobel Prize, Hoover reported the conversation to Johnson.
Today, many of the memos Hoover sent to Johnson might be described as opposition research. They show that even as Johnson and King worked together, King was still treated as an adversary to be managed and controlled.
The surveillance continued until King’s death on April 4: On April 1, 1968, Hoover wrote to Mildred Stegall to say the president might want to be aware that King and his closest adviser, Stanley Levison, had been discussing Johnson’s re-election campaign and that King said Robert Kennedy, in his Democratic primary bid, “is the only man that can stop President Johnson.”
Hoover believed that Communists exerted influence on King, and he drove F.B.I. agents to find ties. But people with past Communist ties were everywhere in the 1960s, as Hoover and Johnson knew. The issue of Communist influence, in the end, served mostly to justify the campaign to undermine King. Hoover, who referred to King as “the burrhead,” hated to see King earn respect and gain influence, especially as he learned the details of King’s personal life, and he became determined to use those details to undercut King’s reputation.
Fundamentally, Hoover’s campaign revolved around power — making sure King didn’t have too much of it. After witnessing King’s success at the March on Washington in 1963, William Sullivan, the F.B.I. assistant director responsible for the domestic intelligence division under Hoover, made the decision to bug King’s room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. “We must mark him now,” Sullivan wrote in a 1963 memo, “as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation.” Less than two months later, Robert Kennedy, then the attorney general, signed off on the decision to wiretap King’s home and offices.