“At a time when the nation is absorbing revelations of telephone and e-mail surveillance by the National Security Agency, the FBI’s spying on King — which had no court authorization or oversight — stands as an example of domestic security gone to excess.”
MLK’s speech attracted FBI’s intense attention – The Washington Post.
Dr. King attracted CIA spies, due to his relationship with Stanley Levison, a former CPUSA member. Documents were declassified during the Bill Clinton presidency that support this. I write about it in my upcoming alternative fiction book, The Plan.
Correction: I meant Congressman John Lewis, not Joe.
This fact about J. Edgar Hoover and his racist bigoted worldview as demonstrated here got me thinking. Those in the “denial” camp (Lone Nutters) seem to have an alternate historical view. It strikes me as too simplistic, sort of like Alex Jones’ paranoid world view on the opposite end of the spectrum. This “denialist” view paints a historical portrait that is pure, where G-Men are incorruptible, where CIA is only “looking out for the best interests of the citizens” and where no conspiracies exist, because everyone in the military and in the highest echelons of power is “basically good.” In Alex Jones’ paranoid opposite view, which I think is equally too simplistic and inaccurate, everyone in power is aligned in some sort of secret club, always out to screw the little guy in some kind of grand conspiracy.
I prefer to take a more middle-of-the-road view. I think you have corruption in the military, in intelligence, and in politics and big business. But I don’t think that everyone is corrupt, or at least not all of the time. I think evil and good exist in all of us, in varying shades, at varying times. Some of us are almost saintly, but none are incorruptible or all bad either. Take John F. Kennedy. He came to power by running a campaign that smeared one of his opponents, Hubert Humphrey, saying he was a draft dodger, a coward, in WW2. Humphrey didn’t have enough money to counter the smear, and he lost the West Virginia primary, thus sealing JFK’s momentum toward victory in Los Angles’ convention in June. Or take Hubert Humphrey: too much (I think) dependent upon Lyndon Johnson to stand up to the man as Vice President (their co-relationship however dated back to the early 1950’s in the US Senate).
I think there are forces or power structures that run for a time successfully that are more in the good or bad and so I swallow some of the bad if I think that power structure (such as JFK’s presidency) is doing mostly good things (which I think it was, sexual scandals and other minor corruption issues notwithstanding). With CIA, you have had some very competent and good people trying to serve the USA, but the overall structure is so bad (in my opinion) that I think it should have been dismantled and re-structured to serve as more of an intelligence gathering arm, subservient to the Congress and to the Executive Branch (more so than it has actually been—witness the Church Committee findings which revealed major corruption and abuse of bureaucratic power). The JFK assassination to me reveals this jarring abuse of bureaucratic agency power (and probably the military as well) which our country should openly examine and learn from. Certainly from a classical Madisonian reading of the balance of power in our government, the growth of our security state shows vast potential (and precedent) for abuse of power, an ‘imbalance’ that is not healthy to our Republic.
As with global warming, with regard to the JFK assassination, I feel it is important that we open our eyes, exercise real critical thinking, stop censoring information that is 50 years old, and find a way to change from a culture in denial to one of acceptance of the truth, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient that might be to face up to.
But exactly what does that have to do with the assassination of JFK? Global warming? Really? You left out the Koch brothers-obviously they had a hand in it. Right?
What you seem to forget is that JFK knew all about the FBI investigations of MLK and certainly didn’t discourage them. In fact, it is almost certain that he shared the FBI info on King’s moral weaknesses with his wife Jackie, who made some rather shocking negative comments about MLK which were only released within the last year.
This is unquestionably true. The general tone of the MLK speech was viewed in that recently post-McCarthy era as subversive and likely hatched by communists. MLK had been photographed by the FBI conversing with “known” communists so if drawing a huge, perhaps unprecedented crowd was not enough to attract J. Edgar’s attention, certainly the hopeful nature of the message was viewed with a slanted eye when it appeared like it could be taken the wrong way and foment violent riots. There are so many secrets from the civil rights era itself that the government still keeps secret that we need to depend on individuals like Roger Stone who’s book on the assassination will soon be released to disclose the facts while we are still alive to hear them. So many have passed on since 1963 that you might think all of these things would be disclosed but the modus operandi of the government has largely remained intact and they don’t want their dirty laundry aired. http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Who-Killed-Kennedy/dp/1626363137/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376697684&sr=8-1&keywords=roger+stone