A few minutes before this call, Sen. James O. “Jim” Eastland [D–Mississippi] told President Johnson that the disappearance of three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—was a “publicity stunt.” Johnson then took a call from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and learned that the Bureau had found the activists’ burned-out car. Hoover speculated that “these men have been killed.”