
·S1 E12
Campaign To Destroy King [12]
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the MLK Tapes, a production of iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author for individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees.
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2Hl Hunt was a Illinois farm boy who came down the Mississippi River as a gambler and became the world's richest man in oil and along the way.
He had three families, two of which he started in secret.
Well he was still living with and married to his first wife.
Speaker 3We're talking to author Harry Hurt, whose book Texas Rich is an in depth portrait of hl Hunt, a man whose extraordinary fortune came out of the ground, liquid and black.
Hunt was an unusual person in that he was happy to spend his wealth on political goals, but he didn't feel the need to spend it on himself.
Speaker 2He drove an old car.
He drove himself to work as he posed having a chauffeur.
He took his lunch to work in a brown paper bag.
He didn't adorn himself with jewelry and fancy clothes.
And that sort of thing.
Speaker 3Beyond those for his families and as many female partners.
Hunt's passions extended into the social and political fabric around him.
He was against government rules of any kind and government aid of any kind.
He even opposed private charity.
Hunt didn't believe in one man, one vote.
He thought the number of votes you cast should be determined by how much you pay in taxes.
He was opposed to the United Nations, the War on poverty and social security.
He didn't like President Kennedy, and he really really didn't like Martin Luther King.
Speaker 4I call the Union Hall, I says about of life and day.
Yeah, I said, I thank these people are planning to kill doctor King.
Speaker 5The authorities were parade.
Oh, we found a gun that James o'ray bought in Birmingham that killed doctor King.
Except it wasn't the gun that killed doctor King.
Speaker 2James Lray was a pawn for the official story.
Speaker 3From My Heart Radio and Tender for TV.
Speaker 6The plan was to get King to the city because they wanted it handled in Memphis where Daddy and then could handle it.
Speaker 4And I've lived with it so long that my year, and they scared for me.
Speaker 7The Lord told me not the word.
Speaker 4I've been wanting to tell it all my life.
Speaker 3I'm Bill Clayburgh and this is the MLK tapes.
After he staked his claim and made his fortune and oil, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt moved Dallas, where he took ten acres overlooking a nearby lake.
And for whatever it said about him, he built a house that mimicked every detail of the House of George Washington.
Speaker 2His house in Dallas was made to look like a replica of Mount Vernon in Virginia to Washington, the George Washington Estate.
And that is about as lavish as a god.
And that's not a particularly ornate structure.
It looks almost like a toy house.
Speaker 3And just in case someone didn't recognize it, the place was called Mount Vernon.
And when Hunt and his wife Ruth moved in, they were approached by local charities, as were all the newly wealthy families in Dallas, and.
Speaker 7There were a good number of them.
Speaker 3The petitioners would usually come away with some easily afforded contribution, which made everyone feel good as though they had all done their part, But to their utter shock, Hunt refused to give.
Speaker 7He didn't believe in it.
Speaker 3He said, thought it made people week.
This cost him and Ruth some social standing in Dallas, but he didn't care.
People should learn to stand up on their own, as he had done.
Speaker 7He would say.
Speaker 3Author Harry Hurt found this attitude a touch hypocritical.
Speaker 2You know, I think that there are pieces of an American myth of the rugged individual who pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
And I don't need help from anybody.
And you shouldn't need help either.
And your problem if you're struggling financially or in some other ways, because you don't work hard enough.
So it's this kind of puritan work ethic sort of stuff.
There is embedded in that, of course, a great deal of hypocrisy.
I mean, for one thing, he, like everyone else in the oil business in that era, benefited from government tax structures which included the oil depletion allowance and intake right off for intangible drilling costs, so that you know, he would say, well, I don't need any help from the government.
Well, you get help from the government.
You get big tax breaks for the government.
Speaker 3Considering the wealthy, commanded Hunt led a relatively simple life, and in that respect he wasn't a phony.
He didn't own a yacht or a house on the riviera, or even a fancy car.
He didn't take vacations.
Speaker 2I guess he harkened to a simpler time in America where you didn't have those kind of luxuries commonly.
Speaker 8And he had this.
Speaker 2Sort of ethos with his third wife of being just playing folks, you know, regular people, And so that was his sort of ethos.
Speaker 3Hunt wasn't just plain folks when it came to his opposition to John F.
Speaker 7Kennedy.
Speaker 3As Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson moved toward their showdown at the nineteen sixty convention in Los Angeles, Hunt thought to put his thumb on the scale.
At that time, the largest Protestant church in America was the First Baptist Church of Dallas, with some twenty five thousand members, including Hunt and his wife Ruth.
The leader of that church was W.
A.
Criswell, a man with strident political views often referred to as the father of the religious right.
As a Democratic convention approached, Griswell gave a rousing sermon where he said that Kennedy was unfit to be president because he was a Roman Catholic.
Roman Catholicism is not a religion, he said, it's a political tyranny.
Speaker 7If John F.
Speaker 3Kennedy is elected, religious liberty will die in America.
Speaker 7Hunt liked this sermon.
Speaker 3So he had it reproduced and sent anonymously to two hundred thousand Protestant ministers and community leaders across the country with the hope that they would reject Kennedy and tell their congregations or friends to do the same.
As to its effect, this effort was too late to derail the Kennedy campaign, which won the nomination in LA on the first vote, but it did demonstrate Hunt's willingness to be a behind the scenes player in national politics again.
Speaker 7Author Harry Hurt.
Speaker 2He was for a McCarthys right wing vision of America in the fifties, and he had radio programs that got to be I think on five hundred stations between something called Fax Forum and a successor Lifeline that were basically the four runners of Fox News and Newsmax, except that you know they were privately funded by him, and they were essentially fake news.
Now, you can dismiss it on one level, but the equal fact of the matter is that people bought into it and drank the.
Speaker 3Kule In Hunt's world and in that of many others back then, the great satan in the universe was communism, which had to be fought in every venue.
For example, if you thought that the United Nations was a good thing, you were probably a communist, or at least willing to do their work they had termed for people like you.
You were a fellow traveler, or worse, a pinko Lifeline gave a daily fifteen minute talk on the evils of communism, or how certain political figures like Kennedy and King were bringing the dreaded disease to your very door.
This is what Hunt himself had to say about it, and you might notice who he says is most to blame.
Speaker 9The land should be drawn between those who love liberty and our far freedom and those who are in favor of communism.
And I am quite generally in favor of anyone that is fighting communism.
But the communication media rather is owned and controlled eighty five percent by the opposition.
The newspapers, radio, TV stations, networks are largely in the hands, we'll say the enemy.
Speaker 3As part of his crusade to fight against a press that was soft on communism, Hunt began what was called the Youth Freedom Speakers, though it never got much beyond Dallas.
In its conception, there were to be thousands of young people all across the nation who, like Paul Revere, would spread the alarm by giving fifteen minute talks to roadery clubs groups on the hidden dangers of communism.
Speaker 10Many people in the United States really don't believe that communism is a serious threat, while these people are in for a big shock because the Communists have every intention of doing exactly what they've said they'll do, and they do not hesitate to use force and violence any time they think that it will further their calls.
Speaker 3In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the red scare was on better Dead than Red, was a right wing slogan with enough true believers that it might be the acceptable subject for a debate in a high school civics class.
In the military, there was a vocal faction that wanted to launch a first strike against the Russians, and Kennedy's choices not to invade Cuba or to pull back from Vietnam were not popular with many people, including Hunt, who regularly attacked Kennedy as well as King on his Lifeline radio program.
On the fateful morning in November, when the President and First Lady would parade in an open car through downtown Dallas, the local radio station KPCN broadcast the latest from Lifeline, part of which we will read here.
Speaker 11When communism comes to America, you will not be able to celebrate Independence Day, Memorial Day, or Labor Day.
You would not be able to celebrate Thanksgiving as we know it, thanking the Lord for his blessings and fruitful harvest.
You would not be able to celebrate any holiday of freedom.
Never again would you be able to go off on a hunting trip with friends.
Private ownership and private use of firearms would be strictly forbidden.
Speaker 3Back in the nineteen sixties, Hunt and Lloyd a young lawyer named John Currington to be his right hand man what might be called a fixer.
Today, Currington is still alive, still an attorney in the state of Texas, and he is also a rancher who, at age ninety three, still rides a horse and presides over cattle.
And he has come forward to share with us his memories of things he witnessed and things he did while in the employ of H.
L.
Hunt, and particularly those relating to the murder of Martin Luther King.
Curington was an East Texas country boy.
He had a quick mind and did well at SMU, where he got his law degree.
He served in Korea during the war, where he said it was so cold that the socks froze to his feet.
When Currington got out of the army, he took his first ever paying job at the Hunt Oil Company, keeping track of the oil leases that were presiding over a river of money.
He had been on the job a couple of years when he received a message that mister Hunt wanted to see him.
Speaker 12There were several Hunts there in the company, but when the name mister Hunt was used, you knew it was h Old Hunt.
And although I had worked for a Hunt Old Company for several years, part of that call I had never met mister Hunt, never talked to him.
I immediately interpreted that call as some kind of an office prank.
I didn't want to go, but I knew I had enough sensor Oh I had to go.
Speaker 3So, not being able to imagine anything good coming out of this occasion, Carrington took the elevator up to the seventh floor, where Hunt had his office.
The first person he encountered was mister Hunt's secretary.
Speaker 12She just motioned me on end, and Miss Hunt didn't introduce himself or ask about my health or what I thought about, no political race.
He just stated that he had been told that I had a reputation of getting some things done, and he wanted me to start working directly for him.
Speaker 7And that was that.
Speaker 3Curington was instantly moved to the seventh floor of the Mercantile Bank building, where he began to work for H.
L.
Speaker 7Hunt.
Speaker 8I was given an office immediately next to his, and the door was normally open between the two of us, and if he wasn't open, he had a buzzer on his desk that he could push, and I could answer that buzzer within a matter of seconds.
Speaker 3Turington was a quick learner, and he sensed that Hunt was unlike any person he had ever met.
Speaker 7Right away.
Speaker 3He understood that he was not to speak unless spoken to.
He was not to offer an uninvited thought, ever, and that included saying good morning.
In Hunt's way of thinking, such a greeting was a waste of time.
Speaker 12I never exchanged any pleasant trees with mister Hunt.
I never asked him out his hells.
I never said good morning.
I'd never asked him if he'd enjoyed the football game.
I had no personal contact relationship with him, and I think Miss Hunt appreciated that he had no interest in my background or what I was doing.
His only interest was what he wanted to do and how he wanted it done.
Speaker 3And Hunt had a lot of things he wanted.
His mind was full of them, and many of those ideas came to him at odd hours.
Speaker 12As far as I know, he only slept for or four hours a night.
He was up late at night, up early of the morning, and he had a forever idea that I might have or you might have.
Miss Hunt would have a hundred ideas on any different subject.
I had standard orders.
I had to call him at six o'clock am every morning and at ten o'clock pm every night, and even if we'd talked at nine thirty pm at night, I'd still call him at ten pm.
Speaker 3Given those responsibilities, one might say that Carrington had a sixteen hour a day job, but it was worse than that.
He was required to have a telephone next to his bed, and most nights Hunt would call at some point with something that was on his mind.
Speaker 12I don't ever recall not receiving a telephone call from miss Hunt during the wee hours of the night, and I'm talking anywhere from eight thirty, nine, thirty ten one, or two o'clock the next morning there.
But he never made any come in as thank you for answering the phone.
I hope I didn't work you up, but I have a question.
He went directly into a question, and some of his questions just defied the interpretation of what a reasonable prudent man might know.
Speaker 3As mister Hunt's right hand, Currington would manage a wide variety of things.
He handled squabbles between the members of Hunt's three families.
He kept track of all the deals on the five hundred radio stations that carried Hunt's Lifeline program.
He might carry large amounts of cash from one city to another, seventy thousand dollars or two hundred thousand, or even a million, and then hand the money to some person for a purpose he wasn't privy to.
As diverse and strange as they were, these stories rang true to me.
But there is one piece of Currington's account that I absolutely don't believe.
Carrington says, that whenever he and mister Hunt flew in a commercial airplane, which they did from time to time, they always flew in coach, never in first class.
Hunt wouldn't spring for the extra dollars.
Remember, Hunt is the richest man in America and he flies in coach.
Carrington swears it is true.
H.
L.
Hunt didn't drink and didn't smoke.
He stayed away from white flour, white bread, and white sugar.
And the bread he did eat had to come from a certain county in Texas which had some mineral in the soil that Hunt felt was important.
But Hunt had one huge bad habit.
He loved to gambell.
He loved to bet on horses and football games, and most of all, he loved to play in high stakes poker games.
He would fly across the country with John Kirrrington and Coach.
Speaker 7We were asked to believe so that.
Speaker 3Hunt could play in a game of poker where hundreds of thousands of dollars would change hands.
Speaker 12Mister Hunt and I we normally always stay that the waldolph A story when we were there in New York, and quite frequently that's where the poker games would occur.
Speaker 3During the games Carrington would be stationed nearby, and if Hunt were losing, he would be sent downtown to pick up more money, like maybe eighty grand, which was a lot of money back then, And this happened often enough that Carrington got to know the president of the bank.
Speaker 12Miss Hunt had a bank account in New York.
I was called a Handover bank, and if my memory shirts MC correct, the fellow named Adolph Houser was the president of it.
And over the course of years I became pretty well acquainted with mister Houser.
And when Miss Hunt was in a big card game, if money was needed, I would catch a subway from the Waldorfer Story down to Wall Street, pick up the money, put it in my pockets, and go back.
But I had instruction Miss Hunt not to take a taxi to pick that money up, because taxis rides in New York in were about seventy five or eighty cents a trip, so I was instructed to take the subway as it was a little cheaper mode of transportation.
Speaker 3In nineteen sixty three, Hunt and Keirrrington would spend a hunk of time in New York.
Time that had nothing to do with poker.
It had to do with an idea that came to Hunt in the middle of the night.
One they had to do with the World's Fair, which was set to open in New York in the summer of nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 12For many years we always had a display at State Ferry there in Dallas for the State of Texas.
There every year, we had a pretty leverage set up.
We had free drinks for people of cool area chairs.
But he used it primarily to distribute material on his Lifeline program.
So he came up with the idea that if it worked in Dallas at the State Fair, then it would work in New York at the New York's Worldfare, but on a much bigger scale, and it would be used as a money making venture for amusement rides and concession stands.
Plus it would be a distribution center for his Lifeline radio program material and his Lifeline TV material.
And negotiations were made and a fellow named Robert Moses.
He lets you know very promptly when meeting him that he was a top dog and he didn't expect any conversation from anybody else.
Speaker 3For decades, Robert Moses had been the most powerful man in the state of New York.
He wasn't mayor, he wasn't governor.
He was the chairman of the Triburial Bridge and Tunnel Authority, along with a dozen other important positions, including President of the New York World's Fair.
Speaker 7When it came to building.
Speaker 3Bridges, highways, and parks, Moses had the final say.
So when the richest man in America came to him with a proposal, he let that man know who was boss.
But they did come to an agreement on a rather large deal.
Speaker 12Negotiations were made to lease a multi acre of state there at the World Fair.
We would put amusement rides throughout our area that we were going to operate, plus there would be numerous concession stands, and in theory it would have been a great money making ideal.
And immediately after we signed a contract for the land at the World's Fair, I went to Germany and bought several different kind of amusement rides, and they were expensive rides.
Most of those rides came out of Germany and they were shipped from Germany to New York.
Speaker 3So, after the deal was signed and big money had been spent on the rides and attractions, Moses called hunt and Carrington back to his office.
Speaker 12At that time, we thought we were doing a great job of what we were supposed to do, and it was sort of patting ourselves on the back.
But Robert Moses walked in and without any great fanfare, he said a decision had been made that he was going to cancel mister Hunt's contract for his amusement rides, and on the grounds that he felt like it was going to be outlet for mister propaganda material from his Lifeline program.
Speaker 3In their contract, Moses had reserved the right to cancel if he felt it was in the best interests of the fair itself, and Hunt had no legal recourse, but he correctly suspected that this was some sort of payback for the nasty campaign Hunt had run against.
Speaker 7President.
Speaker 3Hunt called Vice President Lyndon Johnson to see if he could intervene, but Johnson said that the decision had been made above him.
Speaker 7And that he could do nothing about it.
Speaker 12From that moment, Miss Trunt was pretty well aware that Lyndon Johnson was going to be dropped from the ticket in nineteen sixty four, that Lyndon Johnson was losing his power and influence.
Every day after we were kicked out of the World Fair.
We probably stated in New York another thirty days to wind up a lot of activities.
But on the way back to flying back to Dallas from New York, Miss Hunt and I shall ever engaged in personal conversations.
We would fly side beside on an airplane if he wanted to say something.
I listened, but I never volunteered any statements there.
But on this particular trip, Miss Hunt looked over and he says, John, I've just about had a belly full of the Kennedy boys.
They both need to go.
Speaker 3We will return to hl Hunt and John Currington and Currington's revelations about the murder of Martin Luther King, But for that story to make sense, we need to first visit another man with whom hl Hunt had an unusual relationship, J A.
Garhover, the lifelong director of the FBI.
Shortly after James Earl Ray was captured in London, j Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, met with Attorney General Ramsey Clark and told him quote, we are dealing with a man who is not an ordinary criminal.
Ray is a racist and detests negroes and Martin Luther King The question here is why, before Ray had even been charged with the murder, was j Edgar Hoover so eager to get give him a motive?
And how did he know that Ray detested Martin Luther King in courtroom law.
Motive is not a necessary element of murder.
If you can prove a person killed someone, you don't have to know why.
But if you're looking at an unsolved murder, motive is normally the first thing to consider.
Who might want this person dead?
Or better still, was someone already.
Speaker 7Trying to harm him?
Speaker 3Any TV cop worth his salt starts with this.
There were, of course many people who did not like doctor King, and perhaps many who wished him dead, But there was one person with great resources who was already.
Speaker 7Trying to harm him.
Speaker 3It was the director of the FBI, j Edgar Hoover, the same man who was the first to give Ray his motive.
No one, of course, dared question Hoover about this at the time, but once Hoover died in nineteen seventy two, there were calls to look into the activities of the FBI, and particularly those in.
Speaker 7Regard to Martin Luther King.
Speaker 3The Committee under Senator Frank Church made their report in nineteen seventy six, and this is what Senator Church had to say about the activities of the FBI.
Speaker 13We have seen today the dark side of those activities, where many Americans who were not even suspected of crime were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, They were discredited and at times endangered through the covert operations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 3During the nineteen fifties, Jay Agar Hoover was at the height of his power.
His g men had hunted the folk, Heiro bankroppers into extinction.
Communists hiding in the halls of government were his very reason for being, and his ghost written book, Masters of Deceit was a best seller.
Speaker 7But in nineteen sixty there.
Speaker 3Was a collision of sorts between Hoover, the newly elected President John Kennedy, and the emerging civil rights movement.
Blocks in the South were making demands, Whites were responding with violence, and public order was breaking down.
Kennedy did have a federal force to devote to the problem, the five thousand men in the FBI, but Hoover had his own ideas about how they should be used, and as Council Chris mothers described to the Church committee.
Kennedy got things off to a bad start by asking a simple question.
Speaker 14So Kennedy wrote a memorandum asking mister Hoover how many Negro special agents he had.
Mister Hoover wrote back, we don't catalog people by race, creed, or color.
Mister Kennedy came back with another very nice letter.
That's a little laudatory attitude.
You are commended to have it, but I still want to know how many Negro special agents do you have?
So we were in trouble.
It so happened at during the war he had five Negro chauffeurs, so he automatically made them special agents.
So now we wrote back and said we had five.
Speaker 3The civil rights movement posed a particular problem for Hoover.
The FBI had close relations with law enforcement, and many of the police chiefs in the South were former FBI agents.
But reports started to come in about FBI men just standing around as finally crimes were committed right in front of them.
In one incident, a plan was made to attack a bus carrying freedom writers as it arrived in Birmingham, Alabama.
Thomas Rowe, an informant for the FBI, told the Church committee that he had informed the Bureau about the attack well before it happened.
Speaker 15Sir, I gave FBI information pertanning to the Freedom Writers to so approximately three.
Speaker 16Weeks before the gird And what did you tell him?
Speaker 15I stated to him that I had been contacted by a Birmingham City detective to set a reception for the Freedom Writers.
We were promised to fifteen minutes with absolutely no intervention from any police officer whatsoever.
The information was passed on to the berread as route testified.
Speaker 3The passengers on that bus were badly beaten, and a second bus was attacked outside of Birmingham and set on fire.
In Montgomery, Alabama, Freedom Writers were viciously attacked, some sustaining life altering injuries as they were beaten on the head and face with pipes.
And what did John Patterson, the governor of Alabama, have to say about it?
Speaker 12We can't act as nurse maids to agitators.
Speaker 8I think when they learned.
Speaker 4That when they go somewhere to Creator to create a rhyme, that there's not.
Speaker 15Going to be somebody there to stand between them and they're the crowd.
Speaker 8They'll stay home.
Speaker 3J Edgar Hoover voiced a similar hands off position.
Speaker 17We certainly do not and will not get protection to civil rights workers.
In the first place, The FBI is not a police organization.
It's purely an investigated organization, and the protection of individual citizens, either natives of the state or coming into the state, is a matter.
Speaker 5For the local authorities.
Speaker 17The FBI will not participate in any such protection.
Speaker 3Almost every student of the time knows that j Edgar Hoover wanted to bring down Martin Luther King.
Speaker 7But why.
Speaker 3The perfect person to ask is Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale who has written a biography of Hoover titled g Man, to be released by Viking later this year.
We spoke a few months ago, and I asked Professor Gage what brought her to Hoover.
Speaker 18What attracted me to writing this book was not only that Hoover himself is a fascinating figure and a fascinating personality in his own right, but that the scope of his career really covers almost all of the twentieth century.
He became director of the FBI in nineteen twenty four, and he died in that job in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3When looking back on the nineteen fifties and sixties, the standard rap on Hoover was that he did not and would not vigorously investigate organized crime to keep the record balance.
Professor Gage mentioned a few modest crime programs that the FBI did initiate in the nineteen fifties.
But then there was Hoover's big embarrassment.
Speaker 18Hoover did say many times that he didn't think that there was some great cabal of organized crime figures who got together to consult with each other.
So in nineteen fifty seven, when the great cabal of organized crime figures getting together to consult with each other was found at Appalachian in New York, he was quite surprised and chagrined by that.
Speaker 3It happened in the rural town of Appalachian, New York.
In August of nineteen fifty seven, mobster Joe Barbara hosted a gathering of crime bosses from across the country at his estate.
The purpose was to keep the peace and decide who was to get what.
But so many slick cars without a state plates brought the police, who netted sixty men in silk suits, some caught hiding in the woods, who were the virtual who's who of American crime.
Of course, having a picnic with friends wasn't against the law, so none of them did any real time, But Hoover was severely embarrassed because, according to him, organized crime didn't exist.
The FBI then did initiate some anti crime programs, but many observers feel that these were nothing more than something to point to rather than real attempts to bring down organized crime.
As far as Martin Luther King, the official explanation for Hoover's abusive conduct was that he was protecting the country from communists who were supposedly infiltrating the civil rights movement.
Hoover's big claim was that an advisor to King, a man named Stanley Levinson.
Speaker 7Was said to be a communist.
In the nineteen.
Speaker 3Fifties, Levison did associate with members of the American Communist Party, a legal political organization, but this contact fell away after Levison devoted himself to helping King with such things as fundraising and speech writing.
So was Levison a genuine concern of Hoover's or just a way for him to bargain for closer surveillance of King.
Speaker 18I think it was a combination of things.
So Hoover was deeply racist in many many ways.
He was certainly seeing all of these things through a highly racialized lens.
He also tended to exaggerate quite a lot when it came to the domestic communist threat, So he had his own ideological lens through which he would have interpreted the evidence about Odell and Levison in very, very alarmist ways.
Speaker 3How alarmist consider this?
In August nineteen sixty three, Martin Luther King led a march on Washington and touched the heart of a nation with a speech that invoked dreams of love, peace, and brotherhood.
Two days later, Assistant Director of the FBI William Sullivan wrote a memo to Hoover in which he termed King the most dangerous Negro in America.
But what came next was more chilling.
It may be unrealistic.
Sullivan wrote to Hoover to limit ourselves to legalistic proofs or evidence that would stand up in court or before congressional committees.
Speaker 7What did you have in mind?
Just three months.
Speaker 3Later, President John Kennedy was murdered, and while Robert Kennedy stayed on for a time as Attorney General, his power over Hoover instantly disappeared.
Exactly one month after President Kennedy was killed, there was a secret nine hour meeting at the FBI headquarters in Washington, which involved key higher ups in the Bureau and the regional directors from Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis.
What was the meeting about, we asked Professor Gage.
Speaker 18So the main focus of that meeting was really trying to figure out how to take down Martin Luther King, how to build a apparatus that was going to destroy King personally.
That was the stated goal.
They were quite explicit about laying out a campaign to destroy King.
Speaker 3The FBI campaign against King that emerged from that all day meeting was vicious and relentless.
This is how Council Fred Schwartz described it to the members of the Church Committee in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 16After the March on Washington, there was an acceleration.
He was defined because of his speech in that demonstration in Washington as the most dangerous and effective leader in the country, and there was a paper battle between within the Bureau as to how best to attack him, and he was attacked after a Time magazine named him a Man of the Year again, the Bureau finds that reprehensible, believes it must attack and destroy it when he was given the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 5Again, they seek to discredit doctor King.
Speaker 16The FBI sought to prevent the Pope from meeting with Doctor King.
His effort went.
Speaker 7On and on and on.
Speaker 3Most FBI agents who were involved in the anti King activities have said very little about it over the years.
Speaker 7But there was.
Speaker 3One agent, Arthur Murtaw, who was assigned to the anti King squad in Atlanta, who has come forward.
This is what he had to say from the witness stand at race televised mock trial in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 19I was on a squad that was referred to as a security squad.
I would say that probably ninety eight percent of the time of the people on that squad was involved in one way or another with the investigation of doctor King.
They also were involved in counter intelligence operations which were designed to make up stories about doctor King, any kind of a story to detegrate his character and then go to what the Bureau referred to and the Bureau of Papers referred to as friendly members of the press.
I was very ambivalent about what to do.
I knew about a lot of this stuff at least by nineteen.
Speaker 11Fifty five, and it bothered me.
Speaker 20I didn't know whether to resign or stay in.
Speaker 19One of my brothers said to me, we had a big family, eight of us.
Speaker 20He said, art, if things are as bad in the FBI as you say they are, the whole system would crumble.
I said, it won't crumble because Hoover has the power to keep it from crumbling.
He has everybody scared to death.
They do exactly as they tell him.
He had everybody in his pocket with his secret files.
Speaker 3As Mirtaja said, the ongoing operations against King were referred to in the FBI as counter intelligence, as the King were some sort of Russian spy.
But once Hoover got permission to wiretap King, virtually none of the resulting reports dealt with Communist influence.
They focused instead on embarrassing material in King's private life that could be used to bring him down.
Virtually every hotel room King would occupy was bugged, and Hoover began collecting tapes that were sent to an FBI lab to be reconstructed or improved, tapes that he could share with political allies and various news outlets.
But Hoover was frustrated when no one wanted to run with his story, so, as Professor Gage tells us, he had another idea.
Speaker 18The FBI puts together an audio tape of some of what they've captured in King's hotel room, and Sullivan also writes a letter that purports to be from a former admirer of Kings who has found out about King's private and sexual life and is now rush by what he's discovered.
It's really vicious and really over the top.
It calls King a beast, a disgusting creature.
It goes into details about some of the women that he's alleged to be seeing.
It uses every kind of sexualized racial stereotype that you can imagine.
And this letter concludes by saying, you know what you have to do?
An attempt by the FBI to get him.
Speaker 7To kill himself.
Speaker 18That letter became public for the first time, or knowledge of that letter became public in the nineteen seventies, when the Church Committee were investigating what it was that the FBI had been up to in the sixties, what they have been doing against.
Speaker 3King, sending the tape in the letter to King, trying to induce suicide or at least discredit him right before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Was a vicious and highly illegal thing for the FBI to do, and it was clearly done with Hoover's blessing.
It did not deter King from continuing to lead the fight for civil rights and economic justice, but he and those close to him were deeply wounded.
Isaac Farris, King's nephew, feels particularly bitter about the government's assault on his family.
Speaker 21My aunt had been the victim of j Egar Hoover, you know, lying to her.
He actually sent a tte to my aunt and uncle's home.
It was addressed to my aunt lay and Behald.
It was a recording of someone sounding to have sex.
By this time, my aunt had had four children by my uncle's so I mean she was the expert on what he sounded like when he was having sex, and so I mean she immediately knew that it was not him, as she said, that's not my husband.
Speaker 7I mean, I know how he sounds.
Speaker 3Farris was a young boy at the time King was murdered, and the version of these events he was given may have been sanitized, But whether the tapes were genuine faked or improved.
Recording these events under the guise of looking for communists and then using these recordings to try to destroy King was a crime, a serious crime, perpetrated by j Edgar Hoover himself.
Speaker 7Next time on the MLK tapes.
Speaker 22Should the Committee take special note that the conduct of the FBI and this conspiracy of harassment of doctor King was not only unjustified as policy, it was also illegal and unconstitutional.
Speaker 12Hoover used to send in Toulson on a regular basis to meet with the Adkins family to Dixie Mafia people.
Speaker 6The plan was to get King to the city because Tolson said that they wanted it handled in Memphis where Detdie and Nim could handled.
Now from Hoover, yeah, I don't think Cloud was doing that on his own.
Speaker 12I've never heard such now language as Lenda Johnson used in describing here stealing from Martin Lusey King, and the same same with Jagor Hoover.
Speaker 23I called him and I said, mister Hoover, I just got a telex message from our Memphis office said that Martin Luther King was shot while standing on a belt gat in that city, and his immediate reaction to me was is He Dead?
Speaker 24Thanks for listening to The MLK Tapes, a production of iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV.
This podcast is not specifically endorsed by the King Family or the King of State.
The MLK Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Claper, Matt Frederick, and Alex Williams our executive producers on behalf of iHeart Radio with producers Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.
Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on half of tender Foot TV with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stedman.
Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set.
Cover art by Mister Soul two one six with photography by Artemis Jenkins.
Special thanks to Owin Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at UTA, the Nord Group, Beck Median Marketing, Envision Business Management, and Station sixteen.
If you have questions, you can visit our website, the emailktapes dot com.
We posted photos and videos related to the podcast on our social media accounts.
You can check them out at the emailk Tapes.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows