How the MLK assassination conspiracy began (part two: 1967-68)

AS WE SAW in part one of this story, Robert F Kennedy confronted FBI Director J Edgar Hoover over the Bureau's dossier on Martin Luther King. Kennedy demanded that Hoover recall the dossier from everyone who had received a copy. On the face of it, this was carried out. But there was a Hitchcockian touch to the final stand-off between Kennedy and Hoover on November 7, 1963.

President Kennedy and his brother had not returned their copies, and Hoover was keenly aware of this. The implication is that the Kennedys intended to use this information against Hoover, who they wished to force into retirement.

So Hoover (pictured right) now lied by omission and didn't inform RFK that the recall had already been completed. This undermined the strategic value of the Kennedys' copies.

It also suggested that the dossier could reappear from an unexpected source and implicate the brothers in the FBI's skulduggery. Hoover casually explains how he retained the upper hand, in the extract pictured below.

The Collapse of Camelot

FIFTEEN DAYS after Hoover's memo, President Kennedy was murdered (pictured above), and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was immediately sworn in as his successor (pictured below right)

Robert Kennedy lingered on as Johnson's Attorney-General for 10 months, suffering abuse and belittlement as Johnson got personal revenge for years of humiliation. In September 1964, RFK finally quit.

He then stood for election as a New York Senator -- and won. Over the next few years, he would consolidate his power-base in the Democratic Party and gather his energies for an eventual bid for the presidency.

Famously, Dr King carried on with his civil rights activism, undaunted and undiminished.

April 10, 1967

THE BUREAU'S DOSSIER on Dr King suddenly reappears on the desks of officialdom, after a four-year absence. It has been dusted down and brought up-to-date to reflect developments in Dr King's career in the meantime. But the only thing that has been toned down about it is the use of the word "negro."

(Click here to read the full memo)

And this time, the dossier was going straight to the top. Not only (in the Bureau's view) was Dr King a communist, but he was agitating against America's involvement in Vietnam in order to subvert the nation. This was a personal matter for President Johnson himself, who had staked his entire political future on winning the war. The Attorney-General would be copied in, which indicates that Johnson might be seeking confidential legal advice once he had read the dossier.

Here (extract pictured below) is the Bureau's rationale for resurrecting the MLK dossier. As you can see, it's the familiar mixture of paranoia about communist influences and "moral degeneracy". That last accusation demonstrates that the FBI's concerns had not changed much since its blackmail-suicide letter of 1964.

If you look closely, you'll notice that there's something odd going on in that extract (immediately above). The Bureau is now claiming that the original MLK dossier was circulated in November 1964. But as we saw in part one of this story, that is not true. The dossier was circulated in October 1963. This is absolutely not an FBI typographical error: the date of the dossier's creation was recorded in W C Sullivan's original memo that year, and Sullivan was among those who revised it in 1967. For some reason, the FBI has obfuscated the dossier's real creation date.

Decoding the FBI Deception

There was obviously thought to be a good reason for this chonological subterfuge. But what was that reason?

According to the FBI's falsified timeline, the creation of the dossier is supposed to have occurred in the absence of the two most important recipients of the original version. President Kennedy had been killed in 1963 and his brother Robert had quit in September 1964.

One possibility is that the Bureau was concerned the document's history might be discovered if LBJ's Attorney-General Ramsey Clark (pictured above left) decided to check back among his predecessors' files to see what the original dossier said. Clearly, he wouldn't be able to locate it with the FBI's falsified date as a reference point. (In April 1967, Clark had only been Attorney-General for a month.)

Another possibility -- and a simpler one -- is that by falsifying the date of the document's creation, its new recipients would not think to contact Robert Kennedy to discuss it with him. Since the document apparently dated from after RFK's unhappy tenure as Attorney-General under President Johnson (pictured right), such a discussion would have seemed improper and unnecessary.

Whatever the purpose of the falsified timeline, there is no trace in the FBI's files of a letter of transmittal accompanying the dossier to the White House in 1967. Which means that -- after all this time, effort, and plotting -- the FBI didn't actually send it.

But this wasn't a case of Hoover getting "cold feet" (as though that is conceivable!) It was a case of waiting for the right moment to act. And within 12 months, that moment arrived.

March 14, 1968

FINALLY, WITH DR KING MAKING public plans to march on Washington, the FBI delivers its dossier to President Johnson (pictured with Dr King, above). It is accompanied by a letter of transmittal addressed to LBJ's White House assistant Mildred Stegall. As you can see from the extract below, in the year since the dossier was first resurrected, it has been revised again. And it has been given a new title -- the pretence of general concern about the "negro movement" has been dropped and the dossier is now explicitly about Dr King himself.

(Click here to view the full letter of transmittal)

Dr King was shot to death in Memphis just 21 days after President Johnson received the Bureau's dossier. There is apparently no record of Johnson ever replying to Hoover's letter of transmittal.

The MLK Cabal, Redux

THE 1968 VERSION of the dossier would only be "news" to President Johnson. There was no real need to send it to any of the bodies who had already received the first draft in October 1963. The horrified Robert F Kennedy might have successfully ordered that draft to be recalled from all recipients, but by then the cat was already well and truly out of the bag.

From the day on which the various recipients received and read the 1963 draft, to the day Dr King died, those bodies were keeping a careful eye on MLK, the supposed "communist subversive" (pictured above right, addressing a 1967 anti-Vietnam rally).

At present, it cannot be said for sure whether President Johnson played an active role in the plot to murder Dr King. Perhaps -- by making LBJ aware of the dossier -- the FBI simply used him to set the plot in motion. President Johnson would have asked for information from the various agencies that had already received the 1963 dossier, and of course they would report back with their own versions of the FBI's smears. In any event, the FBI's letter of transmittal on March 14, 1968, is a smoking gun -- in the form of a starter's pistol.

Part one of this story was published June 21, 2018. You can read it here

You can read my story about Britain's role in the MLK cover-up here

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You can view the 1968 draft of the FBI's dossier here (PDF link)