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156 NUMBER ONE ON J. EDGAR HOOVER’S SHIT LIST i came up from atlanta on my own. My three teenage children adamantly refused to move; the boys even threatened to run away if I tried to force them to part with their friends. Virginia didn’t want to move either. The truth is, our marriage was badly frayed by then. How could it have been otherwise when I was often putting in as many as twenty-five days a month on the road. Nevertheless, she and I remained married for four more years, and I continued to send home most of my earnings. This meant that I was living on pretty short rations. I recall attending a lot of cocktail parties and receptions on the Hill where I could stoke up on the free food and booze. For company, I hung out nearly every night at Tammany Hall, a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue frequented by newspaper people and politicians and where an unknown singer named Emmylou Harris used to perform. When Tammany closed, we all migrated to the Class Reunion, a convivial place on H Street, not far from the White House. I often shut the place down and no doubt drank more than was good for me. But I was always sitting at my desk at 9 a.m. in suit and tie, hard at work no matter how much I’d had to drink the night before. (A line about the Class Reunion eventually made its way onto the TV show Lou Grant. Seems one of the writers had heard the story, which actually happened , about Times managing editor Frank Haven looking at my expense account one day and loudly complaining, “Why in the hell are we always paying for Nelson to go to his class reunions?” ) I was still moving into my new apartment in Washington when the Meridian story ran on February 13, 1970. My six-thousand-word account was splashed across the front page of the L.A. Times, while the Washington Post ran it as a series of three front-page articles. In an eloquent lead editorial, the Times described the events in Meridian as “most painful Chapter 24 number one on j. edgar hoover's shit list 157 and disturbing,” declaring that the authorities had stretched the law to unacceptable limits. “No matter how great the provocation, the police can never take it on themselves to decide who is guilty, who is innocent; who is to live, and who to die.” Although the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Friends Service Committee both called for an official investigation, the affair was quickly forgotten outside of Mississippi , mainly because of the tsunami of competing news events. The FBI did not forget. I was already unpopular with the bureau and Hoover because of an episode that occurred in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, when Nick Chriss and I managed to get to some of the witnesses before the FBI did. Life magazine mentioned it, causing embarrassment at the bureau. When my colleague Ron Ostrow called the FBI for comment on another matter, he was told by Tom Bishop, who headed up the PR shop, that Chriss and I had been going around with liquor on our breaths questioning witnesses and fouling up the FBI’s investigation. The Meridian story launched a fusillade of derogatory memos within the FBI, which I would later obtain, in heavily edited form, under the Freedom of Information Act. In response to a memo from Roy Moore, Hoover scrawled on it, “Our Jackson Office should be more circumspect with Nelson as any representative of the L.A. Times can’t be trusted. H.” (Hoover used to write brusque comments on memos and sign them “H.”) On another internal memo he scribbled, “It is obvious now that Nelson played Moore for a sucker.” He got more apoplectic as time went by, giving instructions at the bottom of another memo: “This jackal Nelson is to be given nothing.” On another he called me “a lice-covered ferret.” The FBI flatly denied playing a part in setting up the ambush or investigating the shootings. So did the ADL. In a statement, the Jewish organization maintained it had no part “in the disbursement of funds nor any contact with informants nor any participation in the police activity.” Bee Botnick, not surprisingly, was furious with me. It got back to me that he was saying I was...

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