By 1964, Hoover was a sixty-nine-year-old man who had devoted his life to maintaining a carefully constructed sense of order. He saw King as the ultimate disrupter of societal norms. In a way, Hoover read King correctly at a time when few others did. While Malcolm X and others criticized King for being too conservative, and high-ranking officials in the Justice Department saw King as a reasonable reformer, Hoover recognized King for the radical he was and the radicalism he would inspire, especially when he began to work beyond the American South and take on issues bigger and broader in scope
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