and Freedom’ and Randolph was named the march’s director. Randolph
accepted the draft and named Rustin deputy director. For the first time all
major civil rights leaders and organizations set aside their squabbling to col-
laborate on a national undertaking. But the economic goals Randolph long
favored took second place to passing Kennedy’s civil rights bill and penaliz-
ing states where citizens were disfranchised.
Plans for a large civil rights demonstration repelled FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover, who hated blacks in general, despised ‘the burrhead’ Martin Luther
King as a traitor, and resented criticism of the lily-white Bureau’s record in
race cases. Believing that King was a communist stooge, Hoover convinced
attorney general Robert Kennedy, a veteran anti-communist himself, to
approve wiretaps on King’s home telephone and SCLC office. A spooked
Kennedy also might have approved the taps because Hoover could accuse a
lax president of being soft on communism and expose the president’s serial
adultery with women who represented security risks. On his own, Hoover
bugged King’s hotel bedrooms. When the unauthorized taps revealed that
King was a reckless adulterer – though not a communist – Hoover used
King’s moral failings to try to topple him and destroy the civil rights move-
ment. He passed on the salacious details, including photographs, transcripts,
and tapes, to major newspapers, white supremacists, labor leaders, founda-
tion administrators, and the president. In this pre-Watergate era, newspapers
refused to publish the damaging information about King’s personal life.
In the summer of 1963, Hoover’s vendetta against King was useful to the
administration, which feared the political costs of continued civil rights agita-
tion. FBI sources alleged that Stanley Levison, King’s longtime confidant,
was a top communist agent who smuggled gold from Moscow to finance
SCLC’s operations and roil racial waters in the United States. Armed with this
damning allegation, the president’s brother and Burke Marshall, the Justice
department’s top civil rights lawyer, demanded that King drop Levison.
Marshall explained that the civil rights bill would make president Kennedy
‘put his whole political life on the line,’ and there could be no communists
within King’s inner circle. When King laughed off the McCarthyite insinua-
tion, the president himself advised King to purge Levison and fund-raiser
Jack O’Dell, declaring flatly that ‘they’re communists.’ He warned King, ‘If
they shoot you down, they’ll shoot usdown, too.’ King reluctantly fired
O’Dell, but insisted on communicating with Levison through intermediaries.
When president Kennedy met with the entire civil rights leadership, he
attacked the idea of a march in his own backyard because he claimed that his
approval rating had dropped from 60 to 47 per cent. Surveys indicated that
his civil rights stand would cost him dearly, especially in the key indus-
trial states of Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and New Jersey. Kennedy insisted
that ‘a big show at the Capitol’ would boomerang, giving congressional88 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT