Coretta Scott King and the Eavesdropping Debate

Feb. 7, 2006 — -- The death of Coretta Scott King has reopened discussion of many important topics. But largely overlooked is the connection between the enduring legacy of the King marriage and the hearings held this week by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.

Perhaps no American could relate more to the dangers of domestic eavesdropping run amok than Coretta Scott King.

In October 1963, three months after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech propelled him and his wife to greater national prominence, the Kings moved into the cross hairs of the man who would become perhaps their greatest enemy: J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover, at the time, was a living legend. He had created the FBI and led it for nearly 40 years. He had unparalleled and nearly unchecked power. And, for a variety of reasons, he had it out for Martin Luther King Jr.

That month Hoover asked Attorney General Robert Kennedy for permission to place wiretaps on King's home and office telephones. Hoover based his request on his claim that King's inner circle included known communists. With the Cold War at its height, Kennedy did not want to be on the wrong side of this issue, and he approved the request.

But Robert Kennedy knew not the torrent his approval of these wiretaps would unleash. Hoover's surveillance of King would quickly expand beyond wiretapping, and his investigation of King's communist ties would become a personal vendetta.

Hoover -- a Southern conservative who was at best suspicious of the civil rights movement -- was stung by King's frequent criticism of the FBI and indignant over the positive media coverage King received. For almost two years, the FBI recorded King's telephone conversations on both public and private topics.

But Hoover went even further than Kennedy's authorization allowed. He ordered that bugs be placed in King's hotel rooms across the country, later claiming that a previous attorney general had authorized such surveillance for "national security."