Over a span of seventeen months, according to Sullivan, the FBI made recordings of King in fifteen hotel rooms, “and Hoover listened to all of them.” Hoover also instructed agents to make the tapes available to “some members of the press, to some select congressmen, and to President Johnson.” When the recording devices picked up King making a highly distasteful joke about John F. Kennedy’s sex life, Hoover made certain Kennedy’s brother, the attorney general, heard about it. Jackie Kennedy, the president’s widow, heard about it from Robert Kennedy and said later, in an oral history, “I just
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