Discussion for article #230061
Hoover was sociopathic paranoid scum. Fitting buddy for Dick Nixon.
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Wow. Just Wow.
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It is worth reading Beverly Gage’s full article as she suggests that we should remember this letter when considering today’s spying on citizens:
¨The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.¨
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See, this is the tragedy of our society’s creeping secularism – I can’t read this and comfort myself that Hoover is broasting in a lake of fire, forced to watch his scene from Angels in America over and over again for all eternity…
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Once I offered a fellow teacher a copy of the film “Boycott”–Jeffrey Wright as MLK and the story of the Montgomery bus boycott–for use in class. He told me–approvingly–of the retired FBI agent who spoke of hearing King use the foulest language he’d ever heard, on a surveillance tape.
So it’s not just Hoover. It’s the myrmidon lackies who avidly carried out every order, still preaching the evangel, and their avid listeners, still out there, waiting for another dirty story or blurred picture.
Creeps.
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It shouldn’t be too difficult if anyone were interested to find who was the author of this letter. There are peculiarities in the type that could i.d. the machine. If it sat in Hoover’s home or office or in that of someone else, it could be narrowed down to a person at least a location. You would start with typed letters from Hoover, then his associates and down or other known enemies of King. Finmd them where this one was found or in other archives. Needle in a Haystack? Maybe but the payoff might be worth it.
Obviously doesn’t understand how to writ a proper fan letter.
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How is this uncensored when there has obviously been a redaction in the fourth paragraph?
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I’m certain this info was out there quite a few years back.
The story I read some years back is that Hoover went ape over one surveillance tape in which MLK was talking sex – my words – with a woman not his wife.
As others have pointed out, this demonstrates that the opportunities for blackmail and extortion by eavesdroppers are now numerous.
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It was, however, Bobby Kennedy who authorized Hoover to wiretap King. The contents of those wiretaps are used in this letter.
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I hear you, but there’s a good chance that the perpetrators are dead of old age.
The war machine has no conscience and no soul, and the FBI has a hidden dark side.
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Please, this letter to Obama is nothing more than the standard Tea Party drivel.
Either that or I think that J Edgar Hoover was channeling his own guilt and issues, trying to cast them as far away from himself as possible. He would have made a good current-day GOP senator.
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I like the drop shadow they put in the letter graphic. Very classy TPM. I also like inner glow if your graphics person is so inclined.
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Here’s what I’m wondering: what exactly happened historically “34 days” after this letter was sent? Why was that number “selected for a specific reason”?
In a few decades historians will unearth similar screeds directed against Obama. They’ll be from assorted nutcases attached to the Wingnut Wurlitzer: the RNC, Tea Party, think tanks, loose cannon Senators and Representatives, pastors, etc. The animus from The Right over a black man ascending to the Oval Office is limitless.
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This is really, really Old News. This was covered in Garrow “The FBI and Martin Luther King.”
This has been covered in subsequent books on King by Garrow and Taylor Branch.
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Are there people still alive who can be called to account for this?
Obviously he didn’t heed the warning, and even after
King’s affairs were revealed he continued to be remembered for his civil
rights legacy.
I think he did take his own life, but he did it in an elaborate way in order to frame James Earl Ray as a patsy.
It’s all tied into the Masons, the John Birch Society, the Illuminati and the New World Order. I’d say, “You can look it up!”, but you can’t, because THEY have removed all mention of it from the Internets. You know who they are.
You’ll just have to take my word for it.
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