Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His A

with obsessive degenerate sexual urges.' One FBI official wrote that Hoover, when studying King's surveillance reports, would 'narrow his eyes⁸³ and purse his lips.' The straitlaced Hoover 'saw extramarital sex⁸⁴ as evidence of moral degeneracy--an opinion that many Americans still shared in the 1960s, before Hollywood taught that promiscuity was ennobling.'

Robert Kennedy, no stranger to sexual high jinks, said that 'if the country knew⁸⁵ what we know about King's goings-on, he'd be finished.' Hoover certainly tried to share his growing King dossier with the nation; his FBI subordinates regularly leaked salacious details to the press, to members of Congress, to President Johnson, and even to diplomats overseas. But the media never took the bait, and the charges never stuck.

For Hoover, this was a source of powerful frustration. 'I don't understand⁸⁶ why we are unable to get the true facts before the public,' he wrote in one memo. 'We can't even get our accomplishments published. We are never taking the aggressive.'

Yet finally, the FBI did take the aggressive. An FBI official, believed to have been the head of intelligence operations, William C. Sullivan, sent King an anonymous package that contained a kind of 'greatest hits' compendium tape of the FBI's most lurid recordings, accompanied by a hateful note urging King to commit suicide. 'King, look into your heart,'⁸⁷ the note began. 'You are no clergyman and you know it ... you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. But you are done. Your 'honorary' degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done. The American public ... will know you for what you are--an evil, abnormal beast. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is ... There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.'

What made this package all the more disturbing for King was that Coretta opened it. Yet the note with its accompanying tape--most of which was inaudible anyway--failed to produce the desired effect. If anything, it strengthened King's marriage and his resolve to carry on in the face of what he and Coretta both now realized was a full-scale FBI effort to ruin him.

'They are out to break me,'⁸⁸ he said to a friend. '[But] what I do is only between me and my God.' King, in his own way, was determined to fight back. 'Hoover is old⁸⁹ and getting senile,' he said, 'and should be hit from all sides.'

5 DIXIE WEST

THROUGH EARLY WINTER of 1967, Martin Luther King was increasingly troubled by a new political development: an age-old nemesis was running for president--and enjoying an astonishing surge in popularity.

As a candidate for the self-styled American Independent Party, George C. Wallace had been traveling around the country almost as frenetically as King had, drumming up his blue-collar base from coast to coast. The nation's best reporters and political phrasemakers had a field day covering the Alabama demagogue's outrageous but unfailingly colorful appearances. Wallace was the Cicero of the Cabdriver,⁹⁰ it was said. He was so full of bile that if he 'bit himself⁹¹ he would die of blood poisoning.' He was, said Marshall Frady, 'the surly orphan⁹² of American politics ... the grim joker in the deck, whose nightrider candidacy [is] a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism.'

People loved his bumptious sense of humor, the rockabilly growl in his voice, the way he shook his fist in defiance when he really got worked up. Wallace, a former Golden Gloves boxer, was battling forces no one else seemed to have the gumption to take on. At rallies around the country, he had a litany of phrases that he used over and over, lines calculated to get a lusty guffaw out of the crowds. When he won the White House, Wallace said, he was going to take all those 'bearded beatnik bureaucrats' and hurl them and their briefcases into the Potomac. He railed against 'liberal sob sisters' and 'bleeding-heart sociologists.' Wallace liked to say that whenever disturbances like the Watts riots swept the streets of America's cities, you could count on 'pointy-headed intellectuals⁹³ to explain it away, whining that the poor rioters didn't get any watermelon to eat when they were 10 years old.'

Though he was careful to moderate his most incendiary racial rhetoric, Wallace continued to preach states' rights and the separation of the races and said the recent gains of the civil rights movement should be overturned. At friendlier venues he went so far as to argue that blacks should not be able to serve on juries, noting that 'the nigra would still be in Africa⁹⁴ in the brush if the white people of this country had not raised their standards.' He called the civil rights legislation that President Johnson had pushed through Congress 'an assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty.'

'Let 'em call me a racist,'⁹⁵ he told a reporter in Cleveland. 'It don't make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do. Race is what's gonna win this thing for me.'

FROM THE START of his governorship, George Wallace had made white supremacy--sometimes cloaked in the more respectable veil of states' rights, but usually not--the centerpiece of his platform. In his 1962 inaugural speech, delivered in Montgomery on the gold star marking the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy, Wallace gave a stem-winder that was written by the speechwriter Asa Carter, a well-known Klansman and anti-Semite. 'In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,' Wallace said, 'I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!'

If those words put Wallace on the national radar screen, his actions at the University of Alabama a few months later placed him on a historic collision course with the federal government. On June 11, 1963, flanked by state troopers, Wallace physically prevented two black students from entering an auditorium at the University of Alabama to register for classes. His 'stand in the schoolhouse door' did not work, of course--two federal marshals dispatched by the Kennedy Justice Department immediately ordered him to stand down. But in the process Wallace had made himself the civil rights movement's most vocal and visible bogeyman.

Throughout the 1960s, Wallace had repeatedly focused his ire on one figure: Martin Luther King Jr.--in no small part because King had scored his sweetest victories in Wallace's home state. Wallace had called the Nobel laureate everything but the Antichrist, but in an odd way Wallace needed King, for the governor understood that great political struggles can exist in the abstract for only so long before cooking down to the personal.

Certainly Wallace's slights and epithets cannot be faulted for their lack of energy or brio. He called King 'a communist agitator,' 'a phony,' and 'a fraud, marching and going to jail⁹⁶ and all that, and just living high on the hog.' He once said that King spent most of his time 'riding around in big Cadillacs smoking expensive cigars' and competing with other black ministers to see 'who could go to bed⁹⁷ with the most nigra women.' And yet, to Wallace's outrage and consternation, the federal government had consistently sided with King. Leaders in Washington, the governor said, 'now want us to surrender the state to him and his group of pro- Communists.'

On numerous occasions, King had lobbed invectives of his own. In a 1963 interview with Dan Rather, King called Wallace 'perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today ... I am not sure that he believes all the poison he preaches, but he is artful enough to convince others that he does.' When segregationist thugs bombed Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September 1963, killing four girls attending Sunday school, King sent the governor a withering telegram that all but accused him of the murder, saying 'the blood of our little children⁹⁸ is on your hands.' Two years later, when King marched from Selma to Montgomery and gave a triumphant oration outside the Alabama state capitol, he aimed his message right at the governor's office. Segregation was now on its deathbed, King pronounced; the only thing uncertain about it was 'how costly Wallace⁹⁹ will make the funeral.'

Still, through all his entanglements with Wallace during the 1960s, King had to confess a perverse admiration for his talents on the stump. 'He has just four [speeches],'¹⁰⁰ King once said of the governor, 'but he works on them and hones them, so that they are all little minor classics.'

Now, incredibly, this neo-Confederate was running for president--a development that King found immensely troubling. King remarked to a television reporter that he thought Wallace's candidacy 'will only strengthen the forces