The ultimate secret plan to stop King from getting the Nobel Prize was a psychological operation with a lethal goal. Scrutinizing Time’s profile of King, which called him “the unchallenged voice of the Negro people,” 60 Hoover took serious note of its assertion that King, in his preteen years, had twice attempted suicide by jumping out of a second-story window. Weeks before King was to receive the prize, Hoover ordered that an obscene surveillance tape and a scurrilous letter be sent anonymously to the minister’s Atlanta office. The thinly veiled suggestion in the error-strewn letter was that
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