Observance of the national holiday in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is finally over. That means we will get at least a one-week reprieve before again being bombarded with recordings of King's "I Have a Dream" speech. In February, celebrated as Black History Month, we'll be hearing the speech ad infinitum, as was the case Monday.

Frankly, I am tired of hearing it. It is played so often that one can be forgiven for believing that all King ever did was sleep. Listeners often become so mesmerized by the dream that they forget the substance that preceded that section of the speech.

Of course, it's more comforting to focus on a largely unfulfilled dream than to address King's observation that "one hundred years" after the Emancipation Proclamation, "the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."

Given the choice between focusing on a dream or dealing with reality, we opt for the dream.

The period between the King holiday and the beginning of Black History Month is an ideal time to focus on the messenger as much as his message. Forty years ago this year, King was assassinated in Memphis. But long before his death, the great project of character assassination was under way against him, and by a surprising source: his own government.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover harassed King with the explicit approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. David J. Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross, a Pulitzer-winning biography of King, said Hoover suspected that Stanley Levison, a close King adviser, was a communist and used that as a pretext to wiretap King.

Garrow wrote: "Ever since the wiretaps on King's own home and office were added in November, the supervisors of the King-Levison investigation had been turning their attention more and more to King's private life and away from their previous fixation on his supposed communist ties."

In another book, The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies, the authors - Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage and Christine Marwick - said top FBI officials met in December 1963, shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, to plot a campaign against King.

The book states: "Officials of the nation's number one law enforcement agency agreed to use 'all available investigative techniques' to develop information for use 'to discredit' King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, 'disgruntled' acquaintances, 'aggressive' newsmen, 'colored' agents, Dr. King's housekeeper, and even Dr. King's wife, or 'placing a good-looking female plant in King's office' to develop discrediting information and to take action that would lead to his disgrace."

In addition to recording King's telephone calls, the FBI also taped what it said were King's extramarital sexual encounters.

The Lawless State continues: "Unknown to King or [the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose first president King had been] until later, the FBI, at the height of the public controversy, took its most distressing step. It mailed the tapes to the SCLC office in Atlanta with a covering letter urging King to commit suicide or face public revelation of the information on the tapes on the eve of the [Nobel Peace Prize] award ceremonies in Sweden."

Upset that King had criticized FBI agents for failing to make arrests in civil-rights cases, Hoover held a news conference and called King the most "notorious liar" in the country. Upon learning that certain universities were planning to honor King with an honorary doctorate, the FBI was successful in some instances in getting institutions to reverse their decision.

In the days shortly before his death, King was still being dogged by the FBI.

A memo from one G.C. Moore of the FBI's counterintelligence program to W.C. Sullivan, chief of domestic intelligence, dated March 29, 1968, six days before King's assassination, stated: "Martin Luther King has urged Negroes in Memphis, Tennessee, to boycott white merchants in order to force compliance with Negro demands in the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis.

"When violence broke out during the march King led in Memphis on 3-28-68, King disappeared. There is a first-class Negro hotel in Memphis, the Hotel Lorraine, but King chose to hide out at the white-owned and -operated Holiday Inn Motel."

The memo ended with this: "Recommendation: The above facts have been included in the attached blind memorandum, and it is recommended it be furnished to a cooperative news media source by the Crime Records Division for an item showing King is a hypocrite. This will be done on a highly confidential basis."

King later moved to the Lorraine Hotel, where he was killed.

Taking a broad view of the FBI's activities during that period, Harris Wofford, a former civil-rights adviser to President Kennedy, stated that under Hoover's leadership, the FBI helped "create the climate that invited King's assassination."