Nov. 18, 1964 - J. Edgar Hoover, the usually taciturn director of the FBI, spoke out publicly today about the Warren Commissions report on the assassination of President Kennedy and about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In a meeting with selected Washington newswomen, Hoover let loose with a broadside of uncharacteristic public charges.
He denounced the Warren Commission’s criticism of his bureau for not warning the Secret Service that Lee Harvey Oswald was a potential threat to the President. He called the criticism “unfair and unjust” and “a classic example of Monday morning quarterbacking.”
He attacked Dr. King, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as “the most notorious liar in the country.”
Hoover said Dr. King had asserted that FBI agents in Georgia were failing to act on Negroes’ complaints because the agents were Southerners. He based his assessment of Dr. King on this reported statement.
Dr. King, who was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize last Oct. 14 as “the person who has done most for the furtherance of brotherhood among men,” was not available for comment tonight. Aides said he was vacationing in the Bahamas and would have no reply until tomorrow.
Hoover is known to have been deeply angered by the criticisms of the bureau in the Warren Commission report. His scorn was plain today.
“It is not a fair report as far as the FBI is concerned,” he declared. He specifically attacked the commission's suggestion that “an alert agency such as the FBI” should have had the foresight to list Oswald, the assassin, “as a potential threat to the safety of the President” on his fatal Dallas visit last Nov. 22.
The commission called this omission by the bureau an example of “an unduly restrictive view of its responsibilities.” The bureau itself subsequently disciplined and reassigned the two agents implicated by the commission.
The commission’s recommendation for better communications between the bureau and the Secret Service has resulted in the bureau's sending thousands of names to the White House security detail each time the President journeys out of town, Hoover said.
The Secret Service is “hopelessly undermanned and ill-equipped to do the job it is supposed to do,” he said. He asserted that the bureau’s new function had “also charged the FBI with the obligations of a psychiatrist.”
Hoover’s attack on Dr. King was based on the clergyman’s reported advice to other civil rights workers not to report acts of violence or other violations to FBI agents in Albany, Ga., because the agents there were all Southerners and would do nothing. Albany has been the scene of prolonged racial violence.
“The truth is,” Hoover declared, “that 70% of the agents in the South were born in the North and four out of five agents in Albany, Ga., are Northerners.”
A bureau spokesman said later that the four Northern agents in Albany were from Kingston, N.Y.; Auburn, Ind.; Arlington, Mass., and St. Peter, Minn., “and Dr. King knew it.”
Hoover’s wrath fell with unusual, if not equal, frankness on both sides in the civil rights struggle.
He charged that “red‐necked sheriffs” in Mississippi and members of the Ku Klux Klan had participated in racial violence. But his harshest remarks were addressed to Dr. King.
He repeatedly stressed the recurring theme that the bureau did not protect anyone. He said that included the President and “those who go down to reform the South.”
Hoover contended that in New York City alone there were 7,000 persons who would have to be picked up by the police every time the President went there if it became necessary to round up “every individual who might threaten the safety of the President.”
Hoover charged that agents investigating civil rights cases in the Mississippi swamps had been hampered because that area was “filled with water moccasins, rattlesnakes and red‐necked sheriffs, and they are all in the same category as far as I am concerned.”
On other points, Hoover declared:
On the John Birch Society — “We have never investigated the society. I have no respect for the head of the society, Robert Welch.” Hoover was the subject of a laudatory article in the society’s magazine last month.
On the Ku Klux Klan and the Minutemen — “We are looking into the activities of the Minutemen. There is nothing more like the Ku Klux Klan — and we have done a job on them.” He said that “all of the lynchings and the bombings of homes in the South” were the work of Klan members. He said, “We know pretty well who they are.”
On lie detectors — “I have always taken the position that there is no such thing as a lie detector. It has to be operated by a human being. Whenever a human being reaches conclusions, he is apt to make an error.”
On firearms control — “I think strong laws should be passed restricting the sale of guns, but when you try you run head on into collision with the National Rifle Association.”
On the American Nazi party — The bureau is watching the activities of its leader, George Lincoln Rockwell. “He is bigoted and biased, and I wouldn’t pay much attention to anything he said.”
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