Word: hooverness
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...murky business, trying to specify the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans, boll weevils and gypsy moths; even the traditional differences between liberals and conservatives get cloudy when people call themselves moderates, pragmatists, middle-of-the-roaders. Thomas Sowell, an economic historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, would like to start all over again. He has divided people according to two different views of human nature: the "constrained vision" and the "unconstrained vision." "Conflicts of interests dominate the short run," he says, "but conflicts of visions dominate history...
...sheds a revealing new light on King's human side and on the vicious secret pressures he faced from the FBI. The complex and convincing portrait drawn by David Garrow, associate professor of political science at New York's City College, describes how the bureau under J. Edgar Hoover tried to blackmail and intimidate King with tapes of his sexual encounters and how it attempted to discredit him by spreading reports about his love life after he refused to break off his friendship with a suspected Communist agent...
...life. The FBI stumbled upon them in the course of investigating King's links to New York Attorney Stanley Levison, a former Communist who had become one of the civil rights leader's most trusted friends. Suspecting that Levison was part of a Communist plot to infiltrate the movement, Hoover persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize a tap on Levison's phones. Alarmed by the discovery that Levison had recommended another former Communist to King for a job, President John Kennedy warned King as they walked in the White House Rose Garden that his association with...
When King kept indirect contacts with Levison despite this advice, Robert Kennedy "reluctantly" acceded to Hoover's plea to bug King's hotel rooms. That failed to prove that King was under the influence of Communists but provided a lode of scandalous data about King's philandering. The FBI wasted no time in circulating gamy samples of the recordings to Government officials, friendly journalists and even King's wife in an attempt to persuade King to withdraw from an active role in the movement...
Sepehr Zabih is a research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He has written six books on Iranian politics, the latest of which is The Left in Contemporary Iran, published by The Hoover Press...