Part Three:J . Edgar Hoover vs. Martin Luther King

By David Robb

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 3/2/08 — “The FBI” was one of Nixon’s favorite shows. President Nixon liked the ABC crime drama so much, in fact, that he wanted Hollywood to turn out several more shows just like it.

In April of 1970, Nixon convened a conference at the White House with 30 television producers and industry executives to urge them to create more programs like “The FBI,” which aired nearly every Sunday night of his presidency.

According to an FBI memo, Nixon “specifically singled out the FBI TV series as one of the shows he liked the best.”

One of those who attended the White House conference was Bernard Goodman, executive vice president of Warner Bros., the studio that co-produced and owned “The FBI” series. A few days after the conference, Goodman called FBI headquarters in Washington to tell FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that “during the conference, the President praised ‘The FBI’ TV series,” and to say that Nixon wanted more shows on the air featuring the heroic efforts of the executive branch’s other law enforcement agencies.

In a memo dated April 20, 1970, Cartha DeLoach, the Number 3 man at the FBI, told Clyde Tolson, the FBI’s Number 2 man, that Goodman had called from Los Angeles that day to say that “as a result of the tremendous success of ‘The FBI’ television series, President Nixon and Herb Klein (Nixon’s communications director) desire for Warner Bros. to do a series regarding the activities of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, as well as the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other agencies in the Justice Department.”

Nixon had put some of his top lieutenants in charge of this project, including John Erlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic advisor, and John Mitchell, the Attorney General himself, who was Hoover’s direct superior – at least in theory.

According to an FBI memo, Goodman “stated that Attorney General Mitchell was…involved in this move and that Egil Krogh, John Erlichman’s assistant at the White House, was heading up this matter.”

(Ironically, within a few years, Mitchell and Erlichman would be sent to federal prison for their Watergate crimes, and Krogh, the head of the White House “plumbers” unit – the outfit that planned the Watergate break-in – would be jailed for authorizing the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the former State Department official who released the top secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971.)

All this interest in cloning “The FBI” series was problematic for Hoover. He knew that the people Nixon would be sending over would probably want to see the contract between the FBI and Warner Bros. so they could pattern their own contracts after it. And Hoover didn’t want that. He didn’t want anyone to know what was in it – that Warner Bros. had paid him $75,000 for the rights to his book, Masters of Deceit, in return for the rights to produce a TV show based on the case files of the FBI. Such a deal might raise serious questions of conflicts of interest – and might even be illegal. So Hoover would go to great lengths to conceal the $75,000 payment – a payment that has only now been uncovered. And anyone who asked would be told that there was no contract.

It all started five years earlier on the evening of Dec. 10, 1964, when DeLoach met in Washington with Warner Bros. executive vice president Benjamin Kalmenson to finalize the terms of the contract, and to celebrate their new TV venture.

“I take this opportunity, once again,” Kalmenson wrote to DeLoach the next day, “to thank you for the kind manner in which you received us in Washington last night. As usual, it was a pleasure to meet you and your boys.”

Dec. 10, 1964, had otherwise been a terrible day for Hoover, because over in Oslo, Norway, on that very same day, his hated enemy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had received the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent leadership of the American civil rights movement.

“I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice,” Rev. King said in his acceptance speech that day.

Rev. King had stood beside Lyndon Johnson in the White House five months earlier on July 2 as the president signed the historic 1964 Civil Right Act, which banned segregation in schools and public places – a law that King had led the crusade to enact. But even on that great day in Oslo, Rev. King knew that freedom was still only a dream in America.

“I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death,” King said that day in Oslo. “I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeing to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.”

Still, it was an historic day for Rev. King and the civil rights movement. And as King and his wife, Coretta, went to bed that cold winter night at the regal Oslo Hotel, it may have been the first time that year that he’d slept in a hotel room that hadn’t been bugged by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Hoover despised King and had been spying on him for years, believing that King – if not a communist himself – had surrounded himself with communists. Hoover had been waging a covert smear campaign against King, bugging his hotel rooms all across the country to collect evidence of King’s romantic indiscretions that Hoover would use to try to blackmail King – and failing that, to drive King to suicide.

FBI records show that in 1964 alone, King had been bugged at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5; at the Schroeder Hotel in Milwaukee on Jan. 27; at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu on Feb. 18; at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on Feb. 20; at the Hyatt House in Los Angeles on Feb. 22; at the Statler Hotel in Detroit on Mar. 19; at the Senator Motel in Sacramento on April 23; at the Hyatt House in Los Angeles from April 24-26 and July 7-9; at the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City from Aug. 22-27, and at the Manger Hotel in Savannah, Georgia, on Sept. 28.

King’s home in Atlanta had been bugged by Hoover from Nov. 8, 1963, to April 30, 1965, and his offices at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta had been bugged throughout all of 1964 and 1965.
But unlike the FBI’s real-life practices, there would be no bugging or wiretapping of any kind shown on “The FBI” TV show – not once in its nine-year run.

“References to wiretapping was barred from the outset of ‘The FBI’ series,’” an FBI memo stated.

The first person to call FBI headquarters after the 1970 White House conference asking to see the contract between the FBI and Warner Bros. was Jeff Donfeld, an assistant to Egil Krogh, who was the assistant to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Chief Domestic Advisor.

According to an FBI memo, Nixon had called Donfeld into his office after the White House conference and bluntly told him, “I want you to start a television series similar to the FBI show.”

But when Donfeld called FBI headquarters, he was told there was no contract.

“Jeff Donfeld of the White House…called me at approximately 5:30 p.m.,” DeLoach told Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man, in a memo dated April 20, 1970. “He stated that Mr. Krogh had instructed that he obtain a copy of the FBI contract with Warner Brothers so that the White House could draw up a suggested contract for other agencies of the Department of Justice to use in handling their relations with Warner Brothers.

“Mr. Donfeld was told that we had no such contract. He expressed surprise and stated that surely there must have been an agreement in writing regarding approval of scripts, etc.”

Donfeld was right to be surprised. When recently shown the contract and interviewed for this article, he said, “I had just graduated from law school. I was skeptical about something not being in writing. My instincts were correct.”

DeLoach, in fact, knew that there was a contract because he’d signed it on behalf of Hoover and the FBI five years earlier.

DeLoach, however, told Donfeld that the FBI only had an “informal understanding” with Warner Bros.

“I told him there had been a very firm understanding with Warner Brothers regarding FBI approval of scripts, actors, actresses, etc., and that Warner Brothers well understood the fact that we would terminate the show any time they violated the terms of our informal understanding,” DeLoach wrote in a memo to Tolson. “I stated that under the circumstances, this arrangement worked quite satisfactorily.”

Donfeld asked if he could come see DeLoach personally the next day, and DeLoach said okay. A few minutes after they hung up, Myles Ambrose, a commissioner at the Bureau of Customs, called DeLoach and asked if he could see the contract the FBI had with Warner Bros.

“(Ambrose) stated that the White House had instructed him to contact the FBI inasmuch as his agency would additionally be involved in the new television series,” DeLoach wrote in his memo to Tolson. “He asked similar questions as those asked by Donfeld. I gave him the same answers.”

DeLoach had good reason to hide the contract from outsiders. The contact, which has never been made public before, stated that Warner Bros. “will purchase the worldwide motion picture, television and other allied rights in a book entitled Masters of Deceit, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., for the sum of seventy-five thousand dollars ($75,000),” the contract stated. “In addition, we will pay, in accordance with your direction, $500 for each original TV episode produced for television telecasting during the second and each subsequent year thereafter.

“We will have the right to distribute such TV series for network TV syndication worldwide and theatrical if possible.

“You in turn agree and the Federal Bureau of Investigation consents and authorizes us, on an exclusive basis, to produce such television series and the title ‘The FBI Story’ or other title or titles that we can mutually agree upon. It is also agreed that we will mutually cooperate in the production of the series and in the publicity and advertising as parties to all of its phases.”

The contract was signed on Dec. 11, 1964, by DeLoach on behalf of the FBI, and by Kalmenson on behalf of Warner Bros.

De Loach, now 87, said in a December 2006 telephone interview from his home in Hilton Head, South Carolina, that he didn’t remember meeting with Donfeld in 1970 or telling him that there was no contract.

“Well, if I wrote that, it must be true,” he said. “But that was 36 years ago.”

When told that there was a contract – and that he had signed it in 1964, he said, “Well, I may have, but I do not recall it. That was 42 years ago.”

But he did recall, very clearly, making the deal with Warner Bros. at the direction of Hoover and Tolson.

“I arranged the matters after Mr. Hoover and Clyde Tolson gave me the go ahead,” he said in his distinctive and gentlemanly Southern accent. “I dealt with Jack Warner and Kalmenson, president of WB.” (Actually, Kalmenson was executive vice president.)

“I dealt with Quinn Martin (the show’s executive producer) a great deal,” he recalled. “He was an excellent man to work with. Tolson read the scripts after I read them and he would either approve them or disprove them. Mr. Hoover read a lot of the memoranda I wrote. Clyde Tolson read the scripts for him.”

Of the $75,000 that Warner Bros. paid for Hoover’s book in return for the right to do a TV show about the FBI, DeLoach remembered quite clearly that Hoover and Tolson had told him that the money was given to the FBI Recreation Association, a tax-exempt organization that assisted active and retired FBI agents.

“He gave the $75,000 to the Association,” DeLoach said. “All the money went there. That’s what I was told by Clyde Tolson and Mr. Hoover.”

Hoover and Tolson, however, were not telling the truth.

Detailed financial statements of the FBI Recreation Association for the years 1964, 1965 and 1966 – obtained under the Freedom of Information Act – reveal that no such payments were made to the fund – not by Hoover and not by Warner Bros. – not by anybody.

“In accordance with the instructions of Assistant Director Nicholas P. Callahan, an audit was made of the books and records of the FBI Recreation Association for the year ended 12/31/64,” said a report of the auditor, Edward J. Armbruster – who made similar reports for 1965 and 1966.

These audits recorded receipts for as little as 25 cents – as was the case of a “bank refund” in 1964 – and $3.90 for a “refund on T.V. rental” – as was the case in the 1965 audit. But nowhere is there any mention of the Association receiving $75,000 for the purchase of Hoover’s book.

After concealing the existence of the contract from the White House, Hoover later lied to two reporters from the Los Angeles Times who’d asked if the producers of the show had ever paid anyone at the FBI.

In December of 1970, Los Angeles Times reporters Jack Nelson and Ronald Ostrow, who had apparently been tipped off that something was fishy about the show’s origins, sent Hoover a list of questions about “The FBI” and the FBI Recreation Association.

“Does FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover receive payments or gifts from either the producer of the show or from the FBI Recreation Association Fund?” the reporters asked. “Do any FBI officials or agents receive payments or gifts from either the producer of the show or from the FBI Recreation Association fund?”

“No FBI personnel receive payments from either the producer of the show or from the FBI Association in connection with ‘The FBI’ television series,” the FBI told the reporters. “Mr. Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson exchange Christmas gifts with Executive Producer Quinn Martin. Furthermore, through his Production Manager, this Christmas, Mr. Martin gave a minor gift item to a Special Agent of the Los Angeles FBI Office who furnishes technical assistance to the staff of ‘The FBI’ television show. This same minor gift item was given by Mr. Martin to approximately 64 other persons affiliated with the production of ‘The FBI’ show – none of whom are employed by the FBI.”

So here the FBI tells the reporters about the minutia of exchanging Christmas cards with the show’s producers, but fails to disclose that Hoover received $75,000 for the rights to make “The FBI.”

In December of 1964, as DeLoach and Hoover were celebrating their new TV deal, they were also scheming to sabotage Rev. King’s Pulitzer Prize homecoming celebrations.

“The FBI campaign to discredit and destroy Dr. King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness,” concluded the report of a 1976 investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations. “Information about Dr. King’s private life was…made available to United Nations representatives Adlai Stevenson and Ralph Bunche, who the Bureau had learned were being considered as possible participants at the December 1964 ‘welcome home’ reception for Dr. King. Three days after Vice President-elect Humphrey participated in one of the “welcome home” receptions for Dr. King in New York, the Bureau sent him a copy of the updated King monograph and a separate memorandum entitled ‘Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Personal Conduct.’ On December 8, 1964, the Bureau decided to brief Governor Nelson Rockefeller about Dr. King’s private life and alleged Communist associations, apparently to dissuade the Governor from taking part in ceremonies commending Dr. King for having received the Nobel Prize.”

Rev. King first appears to have landed on the FBI’s hit list in November of 1962 when he publicly criticized the Bureau for siding with the segregationists during the civil rights struggle.

“One of the great problems we face with the FBI in the South,” Dr. King said, “is that the agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation.”

DeLoach, a white Southerner, took extreme umbrage to this remark, and called King’s office in Atlanta to straighten him out. King wasn’t in, so he left a message, and when King didn’t return his call, DeLoach wrote a memo to Hoover. “It would appear obvious that Rev. King does not desire to be told the true facts. He obviously used deceit, lies, and treachery as propaganda to further his own causes … I see no further need to contacting Rev. King as he obviously does not desire to be given the truth. The fact that he is a vicious liar is amply demonstrated in the fact he constantly associate’s with and takes instructions from [a] … member of the Communist Party.”

Two years later, just a few weeks before King’s trip abroad to receive the Peace Prize, Hoover’s hatred of King boiled up into the public’s view, when Hoover told a group of women reporters at the National Capitol Press Club that King was the “most notorious liar” in the country.

When Rev. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, riots erupted in more than 100 cities across the country. Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. were among the hardest hit, and Hoover could probably still see smoke rising from burned out buildings on April 8 as he sat down at his desk in the Justice Department and signed a letter to a viewer from Globe, Arizona, who had written in to praise “The FBI” TV show.

“I have received your letter of March 30^th and very much appreciate your comments regarding the FBI television program,” Hoover wrote. “It was most kind of you to furnish me your views. I hope the activities of this Bureau continue to merit your support. Sincerely yours, J. Edgar Hoover.”

The next day, April 9, 1968, Martin Luther King was buried in his hometown of Atlanta.

After Martin Luther King’s assassination, Cartha DeLoach led the team that captured James Earl Ray, who confessed to the killing, only to recant his confession later. He was convicted of assassinating King, however, when he accepted a plea deal that spared him from the death penalty. And in 1995, Ray accused DeLoach of being involved in King’s assassination.

“Cartha DeLoach was involved in the MLK murder – prior to the shooting, DeLoach played a major role in the FBI harassment of MLK,” Ray scrawled in a handwritten note from his jail cell in 1995, three years before he died in prison.

DeLoach, who in an interview for this article said that he was unaware that Ray had accused him of being involved in King’s murder, angrily said: “It’s a lie; an impossible lie; an outright fabrication. The evidence against him was overwhelming and he admitted it, and then tried to change his plea. He blamed other people, too. He was a cunning, but bumbling, criminal.”

Indeed, there is no evidence at all to support such a claim.

DeLoach, however, was involved in the FBI’s investigation and harassment of King, but he insists that he was not involved in the wiretapping and bugging.

“I had nothing to do with placing wiretaps on him,” DeLoach said. “That started long before I became the Number 3 man. The Domestic Intelligence Division was in charge of all that.”

Two years after Ray’s capture, DeLoach left the FBI to take a job as vice president of the Pepsi Cola Company.

In 1975, several years after Hoover fired him, William Sullivan, who had been the head of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division and who had led the FBI’s wiretapping and harassment campaign against King, told a Senate committee that “King, on a number of occasions soundly criticized the Director…Mr. Hoover was very distraught over these criticisms…I think behind it all was the racial bias, the dislike of Negroes, the dislike of the civil rights movement…I do not think he could rise above that.”

Which may explain why “The FBI” TV series never once dealt with civil rights issues during the nine years it was on the air – much of which coincided with the height of the civil rights movement.

David Rintels, who had written four episodes of the show in the 1960s – and who would later go on to be elected president of the Writers Guild of America – testified about this in 1972 during hearings on censorship in the TV industry before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which was chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, who would later chair the Senate Watergate Hearings.
“I was asked to write another episode of ‘The FBI’ on a subject of my choice,” Rintels testified, “at about the same time, five or six years ago, when four little black girls were killed by a bomb in a Birmingham church. It had been announced that the FBI was involving itself in the case and I told the producer I wanted to write a fictionalized account of it.”

Rintels said that he was told “that they would be delighted to have me write about a church bombing – subject only to these stipulations: The church must be in the North, there could be no Negroes involved, and the bombing could have nothing at all to do with civil rights.”

A few weeks later, Hoover had Rintels blackballed.

An FBI memo dated March 8, 1972, states that “In accordance with instructions approved by the Director (Hoover), Special Agent (name redacted) has made it clear to the production staff that Rintels is never to be used on the television series again.”

And at the bottom of this memo, right under the recommendation to blackball Rintels, one of the FBI’s top officials signed off with his characteristically flamboyant initial – a stylized letter ‘F’ – standing for Mark Felt, who would later come to be known as Watergate’s “Deep Throat.”

Next: Part 4 of The Secret Files of ‘The FBI’: The Other Secret Life of Watergate’s Deep Throat

David Robb is a former labor, legal and investigative reporter at The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety. This series is a follow-up to his 2004 book Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies.

Michael Ravnitzky uncovered the documents and provided research for this series.