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

by Taylor Branch

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. “The threat from without should not blind us to the threat from within,” he wrote. More pointedly, in a January 8 classified memo to Robert Kennedy, Hoover extended the reach of suspicion. Not only did the Communists have influence upon King through Levison, he warned, but through King, in turn, Levison and the Communists had “access” to the Attorney General himself and to the White House. Because King had met personally with both Kennedy brothers—even taken a meal recently with the President—there was a specter of Communist influence at the highest levels.