Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

By the end of Robert Kennedy’s first year as Hoover’s nominal boss, worn edges were beginning to show. In December, Kennedy told a British journalist that the U.S. Communist Party “couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides its membership consists largely of FBI agents.” In sharp but indirect rebuttal, Hoover told a House committee the next month that the U.S. Communist Party was “a Trojan Horse of rigidly disciplined fanatics unalterably committed to bring this free nation under the yoke of international communism.” Hoover substantiated this ringing alarm by disclosing confidentially to the congressmen, and to selected senators as well, that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison was both a secret member of the Communist Party, subject to orders from the Kremlin, and a guiding adviser to Martin Luther King. The message was clear: that the troublesome Negro revolution was Moscow’s skirmish line, and that only the omniscient Hoover knew the full details.