Attorney General Robert Kennedy officially authorized the F.B.I to wiretap the telephones of Martin Luther King Jr. on October 10th, 1963.
Kennedy reportedly supported the wiretapping reluctantly but did authorize it. The wiretapping was officially due to King possibly having connections to a member of the Communist Party. It is rarely remembered today but the Kennedy’s were ardent anti communists and it is reported that JFK strongly defended Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin’s “anti communist” efforts in private.

King was rather closely connected to a lawyer from New York named Stanley Levison who had once been a major donor to the Communist Party, one of its top two financiers. The FBI used this as a reason to monitor King and Bobby Kennedy reluctantly went along with it. The FBI soon took the investigation quite far; they would delve into MLK’s sexual life and encourage him to commit suicide.

The wiretapping would go on to haunt Kennedy later in his political career, especially during his 1968 presidential campaign. Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and his supporters, RFK’s main primary opponent, used it to attack RFK from the left and from a libertarian position apropos of civil liberties, and it is even often used against Kennedy today.