Marc Aronson - Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies

FACT: In November 1964, William Sullivan, an assistant director of the FBI, set out to blackmail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

FACT: Sullivan was not only one of the highest-ranking FBI officers; he also had good reason to believe he would succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the organization if only he could overcome his terrible mistake of having once defended Dr. King.

THE INSIDE STORY: On November 24, an FBI agent boarded an airplane from Washington to Miami in order to mail a package. The box held audiotapes and an anonymous letter, probably written by Sullivan. King, the letter warned, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.... You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation. Though the letter was deliberately ambiguous about what way out Dr. King should take, King believed the note was telling him to commit suicide.

How could one of the most honored and trusted law officers in America conspire to destroy Dr. King? How could he imagine that blackmail leading to suicide was legal? Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI, was furious at King for criticizing his men. And he was certain that King was a pawn under Communist influence, which meant that he had to be exposed, marginalized, and neutralized. Stopping the reds the Communists was more important to Hoover than anything: laws, rights, even human lives. The plot against Dr. King opens a window into a dark past a time of secrets and lies, an era when Hoover both protected America and betrayed the principles that define its system of government.

The plot against King was not a strange, onetime fluke. It was the product of a time when a branch of the government our government believed that its mission to defend against revolutionaries was more important than any law. This book is a journey back into that age of war and cold war, into the time that produced J. Edgar Hoover. Whenever America faces threats, there will be those who offer us security at a price. That price may be your privacy or the freedom of a classmate or the life of a leader. We cannot know how we will react to the next crisis but we can learn by revisiting, and reliving, the last one.

The FBI released this letter twice, selecting different words and sentences to black out. It has not explained the odd logic behind the choices. The second version can be seen .

The background image here comes from the same issue of the Liberator quoted in chapter 3.

Today, Americans face intense terrorist threats and thus hard choices: Which rights and freedoms can we, must we, curtail in order to be safer in our streets and homes? Can our government tap wires without a court order? Detain suspected enemies without specific charges? Subject members of one religious group to additional scrutiny at our borders? These are precisely the sorts of decisions that J. Edgar Hoover and his successors faced in dealing with Communism for much of the twentieth century, so there should be a great deal we could learn from reading about that time. But today, Communism and anti-Communism are just terms that appear on tests, like the Whig, Greenback, or Know-Nothing parties. Flattened out into a chronology of unfamiliar names and forgettable dates, the great dramas of the twentieth century are useless to us. We can benefit from the story of Communism and anti-Communism only if we experience it as the people who lived it did with passion. Once you step inside the mind of that recent past, you will have a new tool for facing the challenges of our time.

There are two ways to tell the story of America. Heres one: Yearning to be free, courageous individuals set out from England to the New World. From the Mayflower on, the spirit of this land has been that of liberty and personal effort. No longer needing to bow to kings or obey priests, Americans set out to improve themselves and to show the world what democracy, industry, and individual effort could achieve. America is the land where anyone can make good. We see that over and over again, from the farmers of the rocky soil of New England to the settlers hitching up their wagons to go west to the immigrants flocking to our shores to the intrepid businessmen who built the shops, factories, and corporations that made this land the wealthiest place in the world. America is proof that capitalism works: every person seeking his own fortune, aiming to make it, can succeed.

Heres a second way to describe our past: As the Communists see it, what you have just read is a lie. America was settled by racists who murdered Indians, enslaved Africans, and silenced women. Every time the poor or the enslaved tried to rise up, they were either shot at or imprisoned. Worse yet, through the aid of the media, and with the cooperation of prosecutors, judges, and lawmakers, those heroes who fought for all Americans were called un-American. Americas poor are kept docile by TV, games, and fast food; they are pigs at the trough, fed slop to keep them happy on the way to the slaughterhouse. As the journalist John Reed wrote in 1918, Nothing teaches the American working class except hard times and repression. Hard times are coming, repression is organized on a grand scale. America is proof: in order for capitalists to get filthy rich, they must have a base of the divided, ignorant poor they can use. The future belongs to the people, united, working together for a future in which all share and all are equal.

It is nice to believe the first story. It feels good; you can feel proud to be an American and hopeful about the future. But if, having grown up with that patriotic tale, you began to see the holes in it the land stolen from the Indians, the endless labor of the Africans, the strikes broken by Pinkertons hired by callous bosses, the illegal wiretapping and break-ins organized by the FBI then the second story offers a thrilling clarity. It is like waking up from a dream: you suddenly understand the way America and indeed the world works. The author Arthur Koestler, who was a Communist for many years, described that moment perfectly: New light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. And you have a mission: you must bring this truth to the world; you must free your fellow Americans from their illusions. You must be the beacon of truth in a land of lies.