On July 23, less than a month before King’s trip to New York, J. Edgar Hoover had sent a memo to Robert Kennedy, again making the case that communist forces were using Levison to influence and control King. Nothing in the hundreds of pages of memos produced by agents suggested that Levison was conducting business with communists or trying to manipulate King for the benefit of the Communist Party. Levison and King spent most of their time on the phone discussing how to make democracy work for all its citizens, talking about the courts, Congress, the media, and the powers of the presidency.
