-Caveat Lector-
Who Is Hooverizing Jesse Jackson?
by Carla Binion
In light of the recent media furor about Jesse Jackson's extramarital affair
and "love child," I am reminded of G. K. Chesterton's comment, "A puritan is
a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things." The
situation also brings to mind the widely known and clearly documented fact
that during the 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI attempted to stop Martin Luther
King's political activities by threatening to make his private sexual
escapades public.
This is not to say the Jackson story should be swept under the rug, but it
should be put into proportion and context. As happened during the Clinton
scandal, some critics: (1) are not viewing the facts in a thoughtful,
proportional way, and (2) in some cases, they are making political hay with
the information.
Jackson and some supporters say he has "sinned" and has hurt others. They
say he is trying to make amends. Of course, he should do whatever his
conscience guides him to do. Beyond that, if his political opponents turn
his private life into fodder to undermine his political work, they are
unethical -- and not just in a puritanical sense.
The puritanical folks who stole the election seem to be ones most
mouth-foamingly irate about Jackson's sex life. However, some of them have
no righteous indignation left for the G. W. Bush team's infidelity to public
health and safety.
An example of infidelity to the public's well-being is this item from The
Nation (Robert Dreyfuss, "Bush's Hammer," 1/22/01.) According to Dreyfuss,
Tom DeLay (R-Tx) "controls the single most powerful political machine in
Washington, running the Republican caucus in the House like a private fiefdom
and maintaining unparalled ties to the class of Washington lobbyists,
political action committees, law firms and money men."
Dreyfuss reports that DeLay is pushing Congress to gut public-protecting
health, safety and environmental regulations; remove limits on campaign
contributions; and privatize Social Security and Medicare. If Jackson's
private life is the wrong place to "pour righteous indigation," Tom DeLay's
public life is the right place.
However, before we veer further from the subject of the unethical nature of
puritanical, politically opportunistic sexual McCarthyism, let's take a
closer look at what Hoover's FBI did to Martin Luther King. The FBI's
harassment of King is documented in U. S. Senate Select Committee reports.
In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church led the Senate intelligence committee
in investigating earlier abuses by the FBI and other clandestine agencies.
The FBI's efforts to thwart Martin Luther King are also documented in Kathryn
S. Olmsted's "Challenging the Secret Government" (The University of North
Carolina Press, 1996), and in Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's "The
COINTELPRO Papers," (South End Press, 1990.)
At the time of her book's publication, Olmsted was a lecturer in history at
the University of California at Davis. Churchill and Vander Wall are
researchers, and their book is described by author, linguist and political
critic Noam Chomsky as an "extensively documented study [that] lends much
credibility to their supposition that 'COINTELPRO lives on,' and efforts to
organize poor and oppressed people and dissident movements will be targeted
for destruction by state power."
Kathryn Olmsted cites a U. S. Senate Select Committee report ("Intelligence
Activities, vol. 2, Huston Plan, 23 September 1975, p. 31) as her reference
source for the following. Olmstead writes:
"The most egregious example of the FBI's abuse of authority was its
harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Not only had the bureau bugged and
wiretapped the civil rights leader, but it had also engaged in a concerted
program to knock him [and this is a direct quote from the Senate Select
Committe report] 'off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in
influence.'"
Olmsted writes that the FBI gossiped to congressmen, university officials and
others about King, claiming he was dangerous and immoral. Olmsted notes
that shortly before King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he
received an anonymous tape in the mail -- a tape that "purportedly recorded
him engaged in extramarital affairs."
A letter was sent along with the tape. It was eventually revealed that the
letter was written by assistant FBI director William Sullivan. Again, based
on the Senate Select Committe's report ("Intelligence Activites, vol. 2,
Huston Plan, 23 September 1975, p. 33.) Sullivan's letter read: "King,
there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have
just 34 days in which to do it." King assumed this was a suggestion he
commit suicide, says Olmsted.
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall refer to a memorandum from William
Sullivan to an Alan H. Belmont. The memo is quoted in full in U. S.
Congress, Joint Committee on Assassinations, Hearings on the Investigation of
the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vol. 6, 95th Congress, , 2nd
Session, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978, pp.
143-44. Here is a portion of the memo:
"We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro
in the future of this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and
national security...it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King]
to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional
Committees."
Marks and Vander Wall say the FBI wanted to discredit King by keeping up "a
drumbeat of mass media-distributed propaganda concerning his supposed
'communist influences' and sexual proclivities....When this strategy failed
to the extent that it was announced on October 14 of that year that King
would receive a Nobel Peace Prize as a reward for his work in behalf of the
rights of American blacks, the Bureau -- exhibiting a certain sense of
desperation by this juncture -- dramatically escalated its efforts to
neutralize him."
Both Olmsted and "The COINTELPRO Papers" authors cite Senate Select Committee
and House Committee reports stating that the FBI also sought to infiltrate
liberal groups. Olmsted writes that FBI informants would pose as friends of
the organizations and then "report on their movements, disrupt their plans
and often attempt to discredit the organizations' members -- even, in some
cases, to the extent of encouraging them to kill one another or destroying
their personal lives."
Olmsed reports that a white male FBI agent posing as a "disgruntled black
woman" tried to break up the marriage of a white woman involved in a black
activist group. Using what he imagined was "black English," the agent wrote
regarding the wife: "All she wants to integrate is the bedroom, and us black
sisters ain't gonna take no second best from our men." (The quote appeared
in U. S. Senate Select Committee, "Intelligence Activities," Vol. 6, "Federal
Bureau of Investigation," 18 November, 1975, p. 26.)
Churchill and Vander Wall cite a Senate document exposing an FBI infiltrator
who urged the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panthers to "print a racist and
violence oriented coloring book for children." When the organization's
leaders learned about the book, it was ordered destroyed.
However, the FBI mailed copies to various corporations which had been
donating food to the party's Breakfast for Children program, in order to
cause the companies to stop the donations. (The Senate document on the
infiltrators that distributed the book is: "Final Report: Supplementary
Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of
Americans, Book III.)
Olmsted, Chuchill and Vander Wall give many additional examples regarding
infiltrators. Dear readers, I ask you, which would be more unethical --
Martin Luther King's having sexual affairs, or the FBI's effort to
"neutralize" him with personal threats and a propaganda campaign?
This is not to say the revelation of Jesse Jackson's sexual affair originated
from the FBI or amounts to any sort of focused effort to undercut his
influence. Some news reports say members of Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH
organization brought the story to the forefront. At this time, we have no way
of knowing for certain why the information was published only two days before
Jackson was to lead protests in Tallahassee against the Bush inaugural.
Jackson has a number of political detractors, and today's FBI may be highly
ethical and may not be anything like Hoover's version of the agency. In
addition, this is not to imply Jackson bears no responsiblity for attracting
the unwanted attention. He must have known his political enemies might use
the information against him.
However, this is to say that any of Jackson's political enemies (or friends
for that matter) who grind this ax indefinitely only make themselves look bad
in the process. The same is true of any Jackson detractors who repeatedly
propagandize the opinion that the affair completely neutralizes Jackson's
"moral authority." The sexual affair is one subject, and the repetitious
propaganda is another.
Shenanigans such as the constant media drumbeat quack too much like the J.
Edgar Hoover versus Martin Luther King duck. If nothing else, the
repetitious sentiments are a too blatant version of what attorney Alan
Dershowitz calls "sexual McCarthyism."
Let Jackson work out his private affair with his close friends, his family
and his God. The public needs his leadership in the future too much for him
to allow this situation to Hooverize him.
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