March 21, 2022 • 42 mins
On this Bonus Episode, we look at the life of Attorney Bill Pepper. We trace his early career in sports, a brush with the mob, work for Bobby Kennedy, travels in Vietnam and Cuba, and his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. Then, how he came to represent James Earl Ray's brother, Jerry, at the House Committee hearing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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 or individuals participating
in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised. I
(00:23):
went back to Saigon for a break. I was at
a party with some other journalists and friends, and the
government was increasingly suspicious because I didn't go to any
of the press free things, and I was out in
the country all of the time, not really under anyone's control.
So that's a party. A young Vietnamese woman approached me
(00:45):
and tempted to set up a conversation and become social.
I was just so angry at that point in time
by what I was seeing that I told her what
I was seeing. And the next morning I was called
down to Commander Madison's office. He was CIA, obviously, and
(01:06):
he said to me, I understand, we're a bit worried
about you. You're ound in the country a lot, you've
been injured, you probably have some severe pain. Maybe maybe
it's time for you to go home. I called the
Union Hall. I said a matter of life and death.
(01:29):
I said, I think these people are planning to kill
doctor King. The authorities would parade. Oh, we found a
gun the James L. Ray bought in Birmingham that killed
doctor King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed doctor King.
James Lvy was a pawn or the official story from
(01:50):
My Heart Radio intended for TV. The plan was to
get King to the city because they wanted it handled
in Memphis four day and named Catlet. And I've lived
with it alone. Monsieur and the base care for me.
The lawd told me to not the word. I've been
willing to tell it all my life. I'm Bill Clayburg
(02:13):
and this is the MLK tapes. At the top of
the episode, we heard Bill Pepper telling how he was
invited to leave Vietnam. Pepper did heed the warning, and
he did leave, but he took with him photographs of
horribly burned children that were published in Rampart's magazine, along
(02:35):
with Pepper's accusatory article on the American conduct of the war,
which is how we came to meet Martin Luther King.
Throughout this podcast, we've come to know of Pepper's forty
year investigation into the murder of his friend. In this episode,
we will pull the camera back a little and take
a look at his extraordinary life. Bill Pepper was the
(03:02):
only child of a pair of Irish immigrants from County Monaghan.
They settled in Yonkers, New York, where his father worked
as a repairman on the city's trolley line. Bill went
to public school and one day, when he was fifteen,
he was pitching in a game and in the stands
was a wrestling coach from the elite Trinity School in
New York City. He was impressed by Bill's curveball, which
(03:24):
for someone his age was a thing of beauty. So
we approached Bill after the game, saying that he thought
the Trinity could use a player like him. Of course,
the Pepper family didn't have the money needed for a
school like Trinity, but this man thought that something could
be worked out. He introduced me to the headmaster and
we talked, and I ended up pitching for Trinity and
(03:45):
captaining the baseball team, the basketball team, and the cross
country team at Trinity. Pepper was good at every sport,
but where he really stood out was baseball, specifically his pitching.
It wasn't overpowering stage, so I had to be able
to move the ball around, change speeds. Pepper doesn't remember
(04:05):
now his record at Trinity, but he won all his games,
and that attracted the notice of the World Telegram and Son,
an old New York daily, which each year gave an
award for the best young baseball player in the Tri
state area. Pepper won the award that year and it
was presented in a small ceremony at home plate before
the game at Yankee Stadium. And who would hand him
(04:29):
the award the Yankee star player Mickey Mantle. Mickey gave
me the award, and Mickey said to me at the
stadium when he was given he said, Bill, I understand
you're gonna be up here with us soon. I love
not on your life. You got more talent in your
little finger, got my whole body, so I've got to
(04:49):
find a day job. And he looked at it was
short of nut because all he heard was, you know,
I threw one hitters, two hitters, no hitters. I had
a batting average over five hundred most of the season.
Perhaps it was being handed an award at Yankee Stadium,
but somebody at Trinity apparently knew somebody out in Brooklyn,
and one day Bill Pepper received an invitation to go
(05:12):
out to Ebbott's field and pitch batting practice for the
Brooklyn Dodgers. Bill remembers pitching to Don Newcombe, Pee Wee Reese,
and Gil Hodges, among other legends. He called it a
lesson in humility. They had it hard. There were another level.
With his athletic abilities now out there for all to see,
(05:33):
a scholarship for college was a near certainty. But where
turns out that along with his physical prowess, Bill had smarts.
So the scholarship that he accepted brought him to Columbia University,
where he played baseball and basketball. Pepper loved basketball, and
he had modeled his game after Boston Celtics star Bob Kuzi,
(05:53):
who was the master of ball control. At that time
in college basketball, there was no such thing as a
shot clock. Teams could freeze the play and the entire
game by keeping the ball away from opponents and not shooting.
It was positively awful to watch. Like most teams, Columbia
had his own plan for freezing the ball, and it
(06:14):
required a lot of passing. But Bill had his own
ideas on how to do this, I got into a disagreement,
shall we say, with Lou Rossini, who was a coach
at the time. I was an avid student of Bobby Kozis,
and I learned how to freeze the ball myself. So
I froze in one ball game. I froze a ball
for a couple of minutes, and he got furious, pulled
(06:37):
me out of the game and said, we don't play
ball like that in the Ivy League. But the truth was,
they did play ball like that in the Ivy League.
Princeton in particular was famous for it. But Pepper didn't
much like being talked to that way, so he left
the basketball team. But come springtime he was back out
on the pitcher's mount. Usually in baseball, the catcher calls
(06:58):
the game, that is the your signals to the pitcher
what pitch he used to throw. Pepper thought that was silly.
He was the one who would throw the ball, so
why shouldn't he be the one to say what it
was going to be? So he turned to practice upside
down at Columbia. I called all my games myself. I
gave to catch a two signals what the pitcher was
(07:18):
going to be, and wherever's going to go. The kind
of success that Pepper was having didn't go unnoticed. He
began to get feelers from scouts representing major league teams,
but Pepper was good enough to know that he wasn't
good enough, and the White Shocks did want to sign me.
At one point, I realized if I took that I'd
be down in the miners, probably in c or d
(07:42):
for three four years and never make it. So I
figured I'd better find out something else to do with
my life. Pepper would go on to find many things
to do with his life, but baseball was to open
one more door. I continued to play baseball at Columbia,
and in May of nineteen fifty nine, myself and one
(08:04):
other player from the team were chosen to go to
Cuba the Cuban sports festival that Fidel Casha was running,
and so I played in Cuba in that festival. But
I used to come to all the games. He's a great,
great baseball fan, and of course a great picture. Fidel was,
in my view, far better picture than I was. So
(08:27):
I stayed in Cuba after the team left. I spoke
the language, I spent some time with Fidell and minimum
amount of time with che Guevara. He was not forthcoming
outwards the way that Fidel in particular was, but he
was a very serious guy and you had no doubt
that he was committed to the revolution. The following year,
(08:51):
Pepper went for graduate studies to the University of London.
When they found out that he could play basketball, he
was quickly put on the team. They then won most
their games and all of the important ones until the end.
We won the national championship. That year. We played in
the internationals and didn't do very well. We didn't win,
(09:11):
We lost in France. In London, Bill had occasion to
hang out with journalist Clark Mullenhoff, who would tease Bill
about coming from the most corrupt city in the country,
his hometown of Yonkers. This surprise Pepper because he was
just a kid when he lived there. So when he
got home, he went to the editor of the local
newspaper and asked if it were true. He said yes,
(09:33):
he said, this is one of the most corrupt cities
in the East Coast. Has been run by a boss,
Tommy Brogan, for about fifty years at that point, and
his alliance with organized crime is very clear. Pepper asked
if there was anything that could be done. He said, well,
(09:54):
it used to be a citizens union. If you want
to look into it. Why. He gave me all the
details and I did, and I restarted the Citizens Junior.
At the time, Pepper was attending the University of Pennsylvania
Law school and he was coming home on weekends to
work on Yonker's public life. Eventually, the politics became so
(10:15):
consuming that Pepper had to drop out of school, but
the work paid off, at least for Yonkers. I worked
on the Citizens JUNI and we eventually took control of
the city of Yonkers, and I refused to run for office.
I was able to put good people into office. I
was twenty four years old when we did that. The
(10:37):
successful fight against an entrenched political machine made people take notice.
One of those was Robert Kennedy, who had decided to
run for US Senate from the state of New York.
Bob Kennedy came to me and asked me to run
his Westchester County campaign, so I became his Citizens Chairman.
(10:58):
I have to confess I didn't like the Bob Kennedy
I knew in nineteen sixty four and was going to
break with the campaign because he was arrogant. He ended
up dealing with the local political machine that we had
overturned to take control. So Pepper told the Kennedy people
that he wanted to quit, but the campaign had a
(11:20):
good thing in him and they knew it. So they
sent in a heavy hitter, a man who had been
very close to JFK when he was president. They sent
Teddy Sorenson. They sent Teddy in to convince me to
stay in the campaign. Then sixty four I handled Bobby's
campaign in Westchester County. But I was getting at that
(11:41):
point in sixty four sixty five increasingly aware of the
Vietnam War and concerned about it. So Pepper decided to
(12:07):
go to Vietnam. He took a leave of absence from
his position teaching political science at Mercy College. He still
didn't have the money, but when he described to a
wealthy friend what he wanted to do, she offered to
pay for the journey. She was also well connected, and
on her say so, managed to get letters of endorsement
from the very Catholic Cardinal Spellman and the equally conservative
(12:30):
Dewitwallace of The Reader's Digest. Those letters provided the mona
fines Pepper would need when he arrived in Nam, I
got my credentials as a journalist that gave me access
to the entire country by means of military C one
thirty aircraft, and I would fly to various points of
(12:52):
the country that I wanted to see. I saw more
than I bargained for, farmers and rural people burned to
the ground. I was seeing children badly injured by the
napalm and the white phosphorus burning. And I was seeing
total devastation among the civilian population who themselves were not
(13:13):
involved in the war. I made a lot of tape recordings,
took a lot of photographs. At one point, Pepper was
in an army transport flying into the central Highlands town
of Plakup when his plane was hit by groundfire and
the pilots suddenly lost control of the aircraft. It made
a crash landing, and Pepper sustained injuries to his back
(13:34):
that had plagued him the rest of his life. Pepper
was in pain and went back to Saigon for a break.
And we will repeat here what he said at the
top of the episode about how he had aroused questions
about his loyalties the government was increasingly suspicious because I
didn't go to any of the press frey things, and
I was out in the country all of the time,
(13:56):
not really under anyone's control. I was at a party
with some other journalists and friends, and a young Vietnamese
woman approached me and tempted to set up a conversation
and become social. I was just so angry at that
point in time by what I was seeing that I
(14:17):
told her what I was seeing. And the next morning
I was called down to Commander Madison's office. He was CIA, obviously,
and he said to me, I understand we're a bit
worried about you. You're ound in the country a lot,
You've been injured, you probably have some severe pain. Maybe
(14:38):
it's time for you to go home. Pepper agreed it
was near time to go home, but he first wanted
to see what was happening in a certain rural province.
Could the military get him there by Chopper The answer
was no, but they would agree to achieve. Pepper said
he'd let them know. When I talked to some of
my colleagues, they said, Bill, the last guy took good
(15:02):
cheap from them, was found dead by the side of
the road. So we suggest you read the handwriting on
the wall and you get out of here, because they've
obviously worried about you. And by worried about him, they
didn't mean they were worried about his health. They were
worried about what he was doing, who he was talking to,
(15:24):
what he was taking pictures of. So Pepper decided to
heed the warning, and he left Vietnam carrying a satchel
with his trove of tape recordings and undeveloped film. But
who in the US would care to do anything with them?
Certainly not the Reader's Digest, and as it turned out,
not Cardinal Spellman either. Pepper returned to his post at
Mercy College and talked to the president of the college
(15:47):
into sponsoring a debate on the war. I pressed for
Mercy College to hold an event on Vietnam, and we
scheduled at large debate eight that involved that anti war activist,
myself and the ambassador to the United Nations from Vietnam.
(16:08):
He came up from New York, and when it was
my turn to speak, I just destroyed everything he said
about legitimacy of the effort anti communist and efforts and
all of that, and I just destroyed them. Very shortly thereafter,
(16:29):
Cardinal Spellman called the president of the college and insisted
that I be fired from my teaching post. She called
me in and she was virtually in tears. Mercy College
in those days was just beginning, and I built the
political science department, and when I handled a Kennedy campaign,
I brought the Kennedy sisters and the mother there, so
(16:51):
they had a high regard for what I was about.
She was in such a plight because she had been
directly ordered by the cardinal to fire me, and she
didn't want to do it. But she said, but Bill,
they give us eighty percent of our budget. I said, Sister,
her name was Atheldreda, said sister, Etheldreda, don't worry about it.
(17:14):
I'll just resign. After Pepper returned from Vietnam, he gave
a few lectures and did a little writing on the
war about the crimes he felt that were being committed.
But nobody, even in the alternate or progressive media, wanted
anything to do with the utter horror of what he
had witnessed and recorded in Vietnam. The stories that were
(17:35):
printed were ones that had come out of press briefings
and had to do with strategic hamlets, body counts, and
the ever hopeful light at the end of the tunnel. Finally,
Warren Hankel of Ramparts came to me and I guess
autumn of sixty six, and he asked me to do
a piece for Ramparts magazine. I was closeted for two
(18:00):
weeks at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and I
wrote that piece, and I provided them with all of
my photographs. The article that Bill Pepper wrote for Ramparts
was titled The Children of Vietnam. It was virtually the
first time that the horrors of the war had been
put on display in the United States, and the horrors
(18:21):
belonged to us because we were the ones who used
the undiscriminating weapon that would bring fire from the sky.
As reported by Pepper, the official US position was quote
napalm is used against selected targets, such as caves and
reinforced supply areas. Casualties are predominantly persons involved in Communist
military operations. But as Pepper would document in his travels
(18:49):
about Vietnam and his visitations to what hospitals were still functioning,
these terrible things did not fall upon the unlucky few,
but upon civilians in great numbers. Tens of thousands of
children were either killed or horrifically scarred. As Pepper said
in his article Napalm and its more horrible companion, white
(19:10):
phosphors liquidized young flesh and carve it into grotesque forms.
The little figures are afterwards often scarcely human in appearance,
and one can not be confronted with the monstrous effects
of the burning without being totally shaken. I never left
the tiny victims without losing composure. The initial urge to
(19:31):
reach out and soothe the hurt was restrained by the
fear that ash like skin would crumble in my fingers.
If he were not to be remembered for anything else,
Bill Pepper should be remembered and honored for sending himself
the Vietnam and coming home with the truth about what
we were doing there. But the article on Vietnam began
(19:52):
a whole new episode in Bill Pepper's life. It brought
him into the presence of another man who was wrestling
with his moral duty. So the Ramparts piece came out
in January of nineteen sixty seven. That was what Martin
King noticed as he wasn't going on a trip to photographs.
I think caught his attention, and he read the article
(20:15):
later and asked to meet with me. Pepper and King
first met in Providence, Rhode Island, where King was speaking
at the chapel of Brown University. Both men were continuing
on to Boston, so King asked Pepper to ride with him.
I rode to Boston with him. I showed him whatever
additional material that I had at that time, and he wept.
(20:39):
He literally wept in the car. He saw all of
this horror that was being done by his government. He
couldn't believe it. Because his article and photographs had finally
been published in a national magazine, Bill Pepper suddenly became
a voice for the anti war movement. And I don't
remember that date, but I then agreed in April of
(21:02):
nineteen sixty seven to be a keynote speaker at a
march that went from Central Park down to the United Nations.
It was a huge marsh quarter of a million or
so people. Pepper was also chosen to introduce Martin Luther
King at that rally, no small honor. I was there
(21:24):
that day. I don't remember Pepper's introduction but I do
remember King's booming voice, stop the bombing, Let us save
our national honor, stop the bombing, and stop the wall.
After the rally in New York, Pepper was asked by
(21:46):
King and others to become the executive director of the
National Conference for New Politics. Pepper accepted the purpose of
the NCNP was to be an umbrella group that will
unite the many peace and justice groups into a formidable
political force. Towards that end, a convention was proposed in
Chicago on Labor Day weekend. Pepper spent his entire summer
(22:09):
organizing that event. We built this convention and it took
place in Chicago over Labor Day, and doctor King agreed
to give the keynote address. We were very naive, very
naive at that time. I was barely thirty years old,
with rough and ready political experience in the from Yonkers
(22:29):
in New York, but nothing significant beyond Yonkers. And when
a Black Caucus was formed, we thought that was a
good thing because all black delegates would unite, there would
be a positive force. What we didn't realize was that
the Johnson administration, working with Richard Daley, the Mayor of Chicago,
(22:51):
would put together a very sophisticated disruptive team whose whole
purpose was to break up the convention, and they seated,
And we would learn later that many of the members
or members of the Blackstone Rangers, a gang and Chicago
who daily brought onto the scene greatly discouraged by what
(23:14):
had happened in Chicago. Pepper would continue with his anti
war activities, and so did King, but he also began
to plan for Poor People's March on Washington to be
held the following summer. King wanted economic justice to take
its place alongside of civil rights, and the energy that
was building around the sanitation workers strike in Memphis was
(23:35):
the kind of force that King hoped to harness for
his march. But Martin King was murdered, and for Bill Pepper,
that was the day the music died. I heard on
the radio that he had been assassinated. I went down
to Memphis with Benjamin Spock. We went for the purpose
(23:55):
of the memorial and also trying to keep the torch
alive for a movement that was going to try to
go on without him. Pepper and Spock followed the fallen
King to Atlanta, where he would be buried. There he
ran into Bobby Kennedy, on whose Senate campaign he had
worked four years earlier. Bobby asked me and others to
(24:18):
come up to this hotel to discuss his presidential campaign,
and I said, no, I'm through his politics. So after
turning a baseball into an IVY league, education, cleaning up
the city of Yonkers, working for Bobby Kennedy, hanging out
(24:40):
with Fidel Castro, sending himself to Vietnam, pissing off Cardinal Spellman,
and working for Martin Luther King, Bill Pepper decided to
leave politics, sit back, and devote himself to education. But
even in that he couldn't keep from stirring the pot.
In nineteen seventy three, he wrote a book on education
titled The Self Managed Child that was published in hardcover
(25:03):
by Harper and Rowe. In the book, Pepper joined the
schooling debates at that time by warning about what he
saw as education's most common mistake, it's suffocating feeling of
self importance. And Pepper had some learning of his own
to continue for. As you may remember, he had dropped
out of law school at the University of Pennsylvania in
(25:23):
nineteen sixty one to devote himself full time to the
political fight in Yonkers. So in nineteen seventy five he
went back to law school, this time at Boston College,
where he graduated with honors a year later. So he
had barely become a licensed attorney when he got the
phone call from Ralph Abernathy asking if he would join
him in meeting with James ol Ray, the convicted killer
(25:47):
of his friend Martin Luther King. Pepper said he would,
but only after he had read up on the case.
(26:11):
When Pepper and n Abernathy traveled to Brushy Mountain State
Prison in the summer of seventy eight, they were joined
by Mark Lane, Ray's attorney at the time. Lane, in
his book Rushed to Judgment, had been one of the
very first to stand up and say that the murder
of President Kennedy had been a high level conspiracy, and
Lane was just as convinced that Ray had been set
(26:32):
up to take the blame for the murder of King,
and he appreciated the intelligence that Pepper had brought to
his meeting with Ray. Soon Lane would call Pepper and
ask for a favor. Mark Lane called me and asked
me if I would represent Jerry Ray before the House
Select Committee on assassinations, and Mark was James ol Ray's
(26:55):
lawyer and just fighting a very difficult battle for James,
and he also fell in to be Jerry's lawyer, and
I asked him why he couldn't continue, and he said
that Bob Blakey wouldn't allow him to represent both James
and Jerry, and so Jerry needed separate counsel and he
thought I would be an ideal guy to do that.
(27:19):
At the time, the House Select Committee was plotting his
way through its version of the murders of John Kennedy
and Martin Luther King. When originally formed, its director was
to be Dick Sprague, a tough criminal prosecutor out of Philadelphia,
but Sprague made it clear that he wanted the committee
to have access to all government files, including those of
(27:40):
the FBI and the CIA. Suddenly there was an orchestrated
smear campaign to get rid of Sprague, and it worked.
Bob Blakey replaced Dick Sprague from Philadelphia because Sprague had
made the point that he was going after all government documentation,
including CIA documents, with respect to the killing of Martin King,
(28:04):
and that was something that they were not going to allow.
So they put Blakey in who came from Cornell. I
believe at that time Blakey was much more compliant. Pepper
thought about Lane's proposal to represent james brother Jerry, and
after talking to a few colleagues, he decided to accept.
So I agreed to represent Jerry Ray on the condition
(28:27):
that I could bring Floe Kennedy, my black human rights lawyer.
Many people may not remember Florence Kennedy. I think she
was the first black graduate of Columbia University Law School.
She was a remarkable woman, totally committed to human rights,
and I worked with Flow on a number of matters.
So I went down to Washington represented Jerry with Flow Kennedy.
(28:51):
We represented Jerry, and it became very evident to us
early on as they were only there for the purpose
of incriminating James and trying to use Jerry without purpose.
From their questions, one can deduce that the House Select
Committee was attempting to connect Jerry Ray to the murder
of Martin Luther King, either as a direct participant or
(29:14):
as an accessory. There were series of questions seeking to
connect Jerry with James's successful escape from Jefferson City Penitentiary.
We have searched and only been able to come up
with the recording of a small piece of Jerry Ray's
testimony before the committee when he was represented by Bill
Pepper and Flo Kennedy. We are going to play a
slice from that recording, not for its procedural content, but
(29:36):
so that we may hear the voices of both of
these volunteer attorneys and what would be Bill Pepper's first
public appearance in his forty year investigation of the murder
of his friend Martin King. We are going to object
to the inclusion of any of author McMillan's notes out
of context. If the author's notes are to be admitted
(29:57):
into the record of the proceedings of this committee, we
will request that the entire vestige of his work to
be admitted, that nothing be taken out of context, and
we will request to see all of those notes ourselves.
Not to do otherwise. To take an author or an
investigator's partial research and to put it in is highly prejudicial,
(30:19):
particularly in light of the total scope of mister McMillan's work. Sir,
on the same point, I really am not trying to
be tendentious, but it is extremely important to note that
where you have a committee hearing which relies so heavily
on hearsay people who no one has an opportunity to
cross examine. There must be some effort on the part
(30:42):
of this committee to establish the authenticity, the bias, the
political conflict of interests that might obtain between a writer,
a journalist, a witness. In this circumstance, we have no
opportunity to confront this witness. We have no opportunity. And
this is a part of the nature of this one survey.
(31:05):
In this inquiry, besides trying to tie Jerry to the
escape from prison by brother James, the committee set out
to substantiate the charge that James had not gotten his
money from some mysterious fellow named Raoul, but had instead
gotten that move around money from a bank robbery. Around
(31:25):
that same time, the page one column ward article in
the New York Times by a journalist called Wendell Rawls
Junior appeared, which set that whole hsc a scenario out
how James got his money from the Alton, Illinois bank robbery.
When the Times article came out about their special investigation
(31:48):
into the Alton robbery, Bill Pepper was already on for
representing Jerry Ray. So the day before he went down
to Washington, he made a couple of phone calls well
prior to my appearance before that committee. I called the
president of the bank that was robbed, and I called
the chief of police in Alton, and both of them
(32:11):
indicated to me that the Ray brothers had never been
suspects in that case, as they knew who the perpetrators were,
they just didn't have enough evidence to prosecute them. And
they said, not only had they not been contacted by
law enforcement or House Select Committee investigators, but they also
had not been contacted by Wendell Rowles Junior, or the
(32:34):
New York Times or anyone from the New York Times.
What follows is an interchange concerning the Alton bank robbery
between James Spicer, counsel for the House Committee, and Bill Pepper,
representing Jerry Ray. We don't have the recording, but we
do have the transcript, and it goes like this, mister Spicer.
(32:56):
One of the areas that is puzzling the American public
concerning James ol Ray is how he funded himself during
that period when he was a fugitive immediately following his
escape from Jefferson City, State prison, And we would like
to question Jerry Ray concerning the Bank of Alton robbery
for the reason that there is strong suspicion that this
(33:16):
robbery may have been the source of funding for James Olray. Pepper,
mister Chairman. Point of clarification, on whose part is their
strong suspicion? Spicer, based on evidence provided to this committee, Pepper,
mister Chairman, on behalf of the witness and the committee
(33:38):
search for truth? Is the Committee aware of the fact
that the witness recently surrendered himself personally to the authorities
in Alton, offered to waive the statute of limitations, offered
to have himself available for prosecution at this time for
that crime, and was informed that he was not then
and never had been, a suspect in the Alton bank robbery.
(34:00):
And as late as yesterday the Chief of Police in
conversation with me, indicated that the witness, Jerry Ray, is
not and never has been a suspect in the bank robbery.
Is the Committee aware of that? Bill Pepper today is
still angry about how the House Committee tried to dodge
(34:22):
and bury his revelations about the robbery. So when that
was raised at the hearing, I told him as about
of a point of order, that what I had done
and what I had uncovered, and that not only was
the article false, but they're pointing to the Ray brothers
as perpetrators of that crime was false, and that was
(34:46):
convincing enough for them to immediately drop it. So they
didn't proceed with it. But if you read the hc
A report to this day, you will see that they
still take that line at the This is where James
got his money. When the House Select Committee was being
formed and the idea was put forward that it should
(35:07):
include not just the murder of John Kennedy but also
that of Martin Luther King, certain people in the Memphis
Police Department began to wonder if their secret intelligence files
might be subpoenaed by the committee, so they decided to
burn them. Mark Lane, raised attorney at the time, caught
wind of it and the ACLU filed a petition to
(35:28):
the court to stop the burning, but it was too late.
Scores of boxes of files of the Intelligence Division of
the Memphis Police were incinerated, but the Memphis Police need
not have worried. The committee under Bob Blakey didn't want
to look at government files When I asked Pepper, as
someone who had seen the committee work firsthand, up close,
(35:49):
what he thought, he didn't hesitate. They never did a
thorough investigation, and they discredited information I was highly incredible
and should have been a part of their report and
their conclusions. They discredited Johnny McFerrin, for example, who overheard
Loberto and in his place of business talking about shooting King.
(36:14):
They also denied Liberto's connection with organized crime, the fact
that the rooming house bathroom was empty and the door
was opened minutes before the shooting, as evident in a
taxi driver who would come to pick up Charlie Stevens.
The fact that doctor King's room was changed from protected
one two o two to an exposed balcony room three
(36:38):
oh six, and failure to perform to form all black
security unit which always protected doctor King in Memphis. All
of these facts and more were ignored by the House
Select Committee. It was not a serious investigation. It was
investigation designed to cover up the truth that this kind
(36:59):
of evidence. While a great deal of what the House
Committee did and how they went about it was worthy
of disdain, it didn't mean that everyone on the committee
was in on a cover up, It's just that its
ultimate conclusions seemed already baked into the cake. For example,
when investigators from the Committee began to look into the
(37:21):
stories about rays supposed hatred of blacks in general and
King in particular, they discovered that most of these stories,
which were thin to begin with, were either unreliable or exaggerated,
so much so that the Committee had to conclude that
Ray's given motive of hatred, which had been blindly accepted
for ten years, was not in any way supported by
(37:43):
the evidence. Did that make them wonder if Ray had
really killed King? No, they just gave him a new motive,
that he killed King to collect a reward, something for
which there was no evidence at all. When the Committee
was finished questioning rays attorney or Foreman, they came to
the remarkable conclusion that nothing that Foreman said could be trusted.
(38:06):
Did they then wonder, perhaps if Foreman was working for
someone other than Ray when he pushed his way into
the case. No, they just shrugged it off. When the
Committee looked at Ray's exchange of one gun for another,
they concluded correctly that the exchange almost certainly signaled the
involvement of another person. Could that person have been the
(38:27):
handler Raoul, As Ray said, it was no because they
were set to find that Ray, acting alone, had killed King,
So when evidence of another person appears, the next best
thing was that maybe he had help from his brother
that would keep it all in the family. Did they
consider that the gun exchange might have been needed because
the weapon was not to kill King, but merely needed
(38:50):
to be the same caliber of the rifle that would
kill King, so that Ray could then be tied to
the murder. That was never considered. So even when they
stumbled upon the truth, they couldn't see it for what
it was because they were already married to the idea
of Ray killing King. When the House Select Committee was formed,
its stated purpose was to use the power and authority
(39:13):
of the Congress to look into these crimes so that
they could assure the American people that they had been
properly investigated and that the citizens had been told the truth.
So if that's the case, what is the need for
executive sessions and secret files? Sessions and files that will
only be opened after sixty years have passed since the murder.
(39:35):
If then, because without a reliable inventory as to what
is in the files, they can easily be cleansed before
they are opened. The simple truth is, if James Earl Ray,
acting alone had really murdered Martin Luther King, there would
be no need for secret files coming up. On the
(40:03):
final two episodes of the MLK tapes, mister Hut looked
over and he says, John, I've just about had a
bellyfull of the Kennedy boys. They both needed to go.
He was for a McCarthys right wing vision of America.
My aunt had been the victim of ja Egger Hoover,
(40:24):
you know, lying to her. So the main focus of
that meeting was really trying to figure out how to
take down Martin Luther King. Hoover used to send in
Tulson on a regular basis to meet with odkindy Odkin's
family to Dixie Mafia people, the plan was to get
King to the city because Tulson said that they wanted
(40:46):
it handled in Memphis for dead and inm caate Hamlet.
So apparently come now Mover. You know, I don't think
why I was doing that on his own. I 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 Kenny in
that city, and his immediate reaction to me was is
(41:08):
he dead? Thanks for listening to The MLK Tapes, a
production of iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This podcast is not
specifically endorsed by the King Family or the King of State.
The Email Ka Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Klaper.
Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf
(41:31):
of iHeartRadio with producers Trevor Young and Jesse Fonk. Donald
Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on behalf of
Tenderfoot TV with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Steadman. Original
music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by Mister
Soul two one six with photography by Artemis Jenkins. Special
thanks to Owen Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at Uta, the
(41:55):
Nor Group, Beck Median Marketing, Envisioned Business Management, and Station sixteen.
If you have questions, you can visit our website, The
email katapes dot com. We posted photos and videos related
to the podcast on our social media accounts. You can
check them out at the email K Tapes For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(42:17):
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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 or individuals participating
in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised. I
(00:23):
went back to Saigon for a break. I was at
a party with some other journalists and friends, and the
government was increasingly suspicious because I didn't go to any
of the press free things, and I was out in
the country all of the time, not really under anyone's control.
So that's a party. A young Vietnamese woman approached me
(00:45):
and tempted to set up a conversation and become social.
I was just so angry at that point in time
by what I was seeing that I told her what
I was seeing. And the next morning I was called
down to Commander Madison's office. He was CIA, obviously, and
(01:06):
he said to me, I understand, we're a bit worried
about you. You're ound in the country a lot, you've
been injured, you probably have some severe pain. Maybe maybe
it's time for you to go home. I called the
Union Hall. I said a matter of life and death.
(01:29):
I said, I think these people are planning to kill
doctor King. The authorities would parade. Oh, we found a
gun the James L. Ray bought in Birmingham that killed
doctor King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed doctor King.
James Lvy was a pawn or the official story from
(01:50):
My Heart Radio intended for TV. The plan was to
get King to the city because they wanted it handled
in Memphis four day and named Catlet. And I've lived
with it alone. Monsieur and the base care for me.
The lawd told me to not the word. I've been
willing to tell it all my life. I'm Bill Clayburg
(02:13):
and this is the MLK tapes. At the top of
the episode, we heard Bill Pepper telling how he was
invited to leave Vietnam. Pepper did heed the warning, and
he did leave, but he took with him photographs of
horribly burned children that were published in Rampart's magazine, along
(02:35):
with Pepper's accusatory article on the American conduct of the war,
which is how we came to meet Martin Luther King.
Throughout this podcast, we've come to know of Pepper's forty
year investigation into the murder of his friend. In this episode,
we will pull the camera back a little and take
a look at his extraordinary life. Bill Pepper was the
(03:02):
only child of a pair of Irish immigrants from County Monaghan.
They settled in Yonkers, New York, where his father worked
as a repairman on the city's trolley line. Bill went
to public school and one day, when he was fifteen,
he was pitching in a game and in the stands
was a wrestling coach from the elite Trinity School in
New York City. He was impressed by Bill's curveball, which
(03:24):
for someone his age was a thing of beauty. So
we approached Bill after the game, saying that he thought
the Trinity could use a player like him. Of course,
the Pepper family didn't have the money needed for a
school like Trinity, but this man thought that something could
be worked out. He introduced me to the headmaster and
we talked, and I ended up pitching for Trinity and
(03:45):
captaining the baseball team, the basketball team, and the cross
country team at Trinity. Pepper was good at every sport,
but where he really stood out was baseball, specifically his pitching.
It wasn't overpowering stage, so I had to be able
to move the ball around, change speeds. Pepper doesn't remember
(04:05):
now his record at Trinity, but he won all his games,
and that attracted the notice of the World Telegram and Son,
an old New York daily, which each year gave an
award for the best young baseball player in the Tri
state area. Pepper won the award that year and it
was presented in a small ceremony at home plate before
the game at Yankee Stadium. And who would hand him
(04:29):
the award the Yankee star player Mickey Mantle. Mickey gave
me the award, and Mickey said to me at the
stadium when he was given he said, Bill, I understand
you're gonna be up here with us soon. I love
not on your life. You got more talent in your
little finger, got my whole body, so I've got to
(04:49):
find a day job. And he looked at it was
short of nut because all he heard was, you know,
I threw one hitters, two hitters, no hitters. I had
a batting average over five hundred most of the season.
Perhaps it was being handed an award at Yankee Stadium,
but somebody at Trinity apparently knew somebody out in Brooklyn,
and one day Bill Pepper received an invitation to go
(05:12):
out to Ebbott's field and pitch batting practice for the
Brooklyn Dodgers. Bill remembers pitching to Don Newcombe, Pee Wee Reese,
and Gil Hodges, among other legends. He called it a
lesson in humility. They had it hard. There were another level.
With his athletic abilities now out there for all to see,
(05:33):
a scholarship for college was a near certainty. But where
turns out that along with his physical prowess, Bill had smarts.
So the scholarship that he accepted brought him to Columbia University,
where he played baseball and basketball. Pepper loved basketball, and
he had modeled his game after Boston Celtics star Bob Kuzi,
(05:53):
who was the master of ball control. At that time
in college basketball, there was no such thing as a
shot clock. Teams could freeze the play and the entire
game by keeping the ball away from opponents and not shooting.
It was positively awful to watch. Like most teams, Columbia
had his own plan for freezing the ball, and it
(06:14):
required a lot of passing. But Bill had his own
ideas on how to do this, I got into a disagreement,
shall we say, with Lou Rossini, who was a coach
at the time. I was an avid student of Bobby Kozis,
and I learned how to freeze the ball myself. So
I froze in one ball game. I froze a ball
for a couple of minutes, and he got furious, pulled
(06:37):
me out of the game and said, we don't play
ball like that in the Ivy League. But the truth was,
they did play ball like that in the Ivy League.
Princeton in particular was famous for it. But Pepper didn't
much like being talked to that way, so he left
the basketball team. But come springtime he was back out
on the pitcher's mount. Usually in baseball, the catcher calls
(06:58):
the game, that is the your signals to the pitcher
what pitch he used to throw. Pepper thought that was silly.
He was the one who would throw the ball, so
why shouldn't he be the one to say what it
was going to be? So he turned to practice upside
down at Columbia. I called all my games myself. I
gave to catch a two signals what the pitcher was
(07:18):
going to be, and wherever's going to go. The kind
of success that Pepper was having didn't go unnoticed. He
began to get feelers from scouts representing major league teams,
but Pepper was good enough to know that he wasn't
good enough, and the White Shocks did want to sign me.
At one point, I realized if I took that I'd
be down in the miners, probably in c or d
(07:42):
for three four years and never make it. So I
figured I'd better find out something else to do with
my life. Pepper would go on to find many things
to do with his life, but baseball was to open
one more door. I continued to play baseball at Columbia,
and in May of nineteen fifty nine, myself and one
(08:04):
other player from the team were chosen to go to
Cuba the Cuban sports festival that Fidel Casha was running,
and so I played in Cuba in that festival. But
I used to come to all the games. He's a great,
great baseball fan, and of course a great picture. Fidel was,
in my view, far better picture than I was. So
(08:27):
I stayed in Cuba after the team left. I spoke
the language, I spent some time with Fidell and minimum
amount of time with che Guevara. He was not forthcoming
outwards the way that Fidel in particular was, but he
was a very serious guy and you had no doubt
that he was committed to the revolution. The following year,
(08:51):
Pepper went for graduate studies to the University of London.
When they found out that he could play basketball, he
was quickly put on the team. They then won most
their games and all of the important ones until the end.
We won the national championship. That year. We played in
the internationals and didn't do very well. We didn't win,
(09:11):
We lost in France. In London, Bill had occasion to
hang out with journalist Clark Mullenhoff, who would tease Bill
about coming from the most corrupt city in the country,
his hometown of Yonkers. This surprise Pepper because he was
just a kid when he lived there. So when he
got home, he went to the editor of the local
newspaper and asked if it were true. He said yes,
(09:33):
he said, this is one of the most corrupt cities
in the East Coast. Has been run by a boss,
Tommy Brogan, for about fifty years at that point, and
his alliance with organized crime is very clear. Pepper asked
if there was anything that could be done. He said, well,
(09:54):
it used to be a citizens union. If you want
to look into it. Why. He gave me all the
details and I did, and I restarted the Citizens Junior.
At the time, Pepper was attending the University of Pennsylvania
Law school and he was coming home on weekends to
work on Yonker's public life. Eventually, the politics became so
(10:15):
consuming that Pepper had to drop out of school, but
the work paid off, at least for Yonkers. I worked
on the Citizens JUNI and we eventually took control of
the city of Yonkers, and I refused to run for office.
I was able to put good people into office. I
was twenty four years old when we did that. The
(10:37):
successful fight against an entrenched political machine made people take notice.
One of those was Robert Kennedy, who had decided to
run for US Senate from the state of New York.
Bob Kennedy came to me and asked me to run
his Westchester County campaign, so I became his Citizens Chairman.
(10:58):
I have to confess I didn't like the Bob Kennedy
I knew in nineteen sixty four and was going to
break with the campaign because he was arrogant. He ended
up dealing with the local political machine that we had
overturned to take control. So Pepper told the Kennedy people
that he wanted to quit, but the campaign had a
(11:20):
good thing in him and they knew it. So they
sent in a heavy hitter, a man who had been
very close to JFK when he was president. They sent
Teddy Sorenson. They sent Teddy in to convince me to
stay in the campaign. Then sixty four I handled Bobby's
campaign in Westchester County. But I was getting at that
(11:41):
point in sixty four sixty five increasingly aware of the
Vietnam War and concerned about it. So Pepper decided to
(12:07):
go to Vietnam. He took a leave of absence from
his position teaching political science at Mercy College. He still
didn't have the money, but when he described to a
wealthy friend what he wanted to do, she offered to
pay for the journey. She was also well connected, and
on her say so, managed to get letters of endorsement
from the very Catholic Cardinal Spellman and the equally conservative
(12:30):
Dewitwallace of The Reader's Digest. Those letters provided the mona
fines Pepper would need when he arrived in Nam, I
got my credentials as a journalist that gave me access
to the entire country by means of military C one
thirty aircraft, and I would fly to various points of
(12:52):
the country that I wanted to see. I saw more
than I bargained for, farmers and rural people burned to
the ground. I was seeing children badly injured by the
napalm and the white phosphorus burning. And I was seeing
total devastation among the civilian population who themselves were not
(13:13):
involved in the war. I made a lot of tape recordings,
took a lot of photographs. At one point, Pepper was
in an army transport flying into the central Highlands town
of Plakup when his plane was hit by groundfire and
the pilots suddenly lost control of the aircraft. It made
a crash landing, and Pepper sustained injuries to his back
(13:34):
that had plagued him the rest of his life. Pepper
was in pain and went back to Saigon for a break.
And we will repeat here what he said at the
top of the episode about how he had aroused questions
about his loyalties the government was increasingly suspicious because I
didn't go to any of the press frey things, and
I was out in the country all of the time,
(13:56):
not really under anyone's control. I was at a party
with some other journalists and friends, and a young Vietnamese
woman approached me and tempted to set up a conversation
and become social. I was just so angry at that
point in time by what I was seeing that I
(14:17):
told her what I was seeing. And the next morning
I was called down to Commander Madison's office. He was CIA, obviously,
and he said to me, I understand we're a bit
worried about you. You're ound in the country a lot,
You've been injured, you probably have some severe pain. Maybe
(14:38):
it's time for you to go home. Pepper agreed it
was near time to go home, but he first wanted
to see what was happening in a certain rural province.
Could the military get him there by Chopper The answer
was no, but they would agree to achieve. Pepper said
he'd let them know. When I talked to some of
my colleagues, they said, Bill, the last guy took good
(15:02):
cheap from them, was found dead by the side of
the road. So we suggest you read the handwriting on
the wall and you get out of here, because they've
obviously worried about you. And by worried about him, they
didn't mean they were worried about his health. They were
worried about what he was doing, who he was talking to,
(15:24):
what he was taking pictures of. So Pepper decided to
heed the warning, and he left Vietnam carrying a satchel
with his trove of tape recordings and undeveloped film. But
who in the US would care to do anything with them?
Certainly not the Reader's Digest, and as it turned out,
not Cardinal Spellman either. Pepper returned to his post at
Mercy College and talked to the president of the college
(15:47):
into sponsoring a debate on the war. I pressed for
Mercy College to hold an event on Vietnam, and we
scheduled at large debate eight that involved that anti war activist,
myself and the ambassador to the United Nations from Vietnam.
(16:08):
He came up from New York, and when it was
my turn to speak, I just destroyed everything he said
about legitimacy of the effort anti communist and efforts and
all of that, and I just destroyed them. Very shortly thereafter,
(16:29):
Cardinal Spellman called the president of the college and insisted
that I be fired from my teaching post. She called
me in and she was virtually in tears. Mercy College
in those days was just beginning, and I built the
political science department, and when I handled a Kennedy campaign,
I brought the Kennedy sisters and the mother there, so
(16:51):
they had a high regard for what I was about.
She was in such a plight because she had been
directly ordered by the cardinal to fire me, and she
didn't want to do it. But she said, but Bill,
they give us eighty percent of our budget. I said, Sister,
her name was Atheldreda, said sister, Etheldreda, don't worry about it.
(17:14):
I'll just resign. After Pepper returned from Vietnam, he gave
a few lectures and did a little writing on the
war about the crimes he felt that were being committed.
But nobody, even in the alternate or progressive media, wanted
anything to do with the utter horror of what he
had witnessed and recorded in Vietnam. The stories that were
(17:35):
printed were ones that had come out of press briefings
and had to do with strategic hamlets, body counts, and
the ever hopeful light at the end of the tunnel. Finally,
Warren Hankel of Ramparts came to me and I guess
autumn of sixty six, and he asked me to do
a piece for Ramparts magazine. I was closeted for two
(18:00):
weeks at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and I
wrote that piece, and I provided them with all of
my photographs. The article that Bill Pepper wrote for Ramparts
was titled The Children of Vietnam. It was virtually the
first time that the horrors of the war had been
put on display in the United States, and the horrors
(18:21):
belonged to us because we were the ones who used
the undiscriminating weapon that would bring fire from the sky.
As reported by Pepper, the official US position was quote
napalm is used against selected targets, such as caves and
reinforced supply areas. Casualties are predominantly persons involved in Communist
military operations. But as Pepper would document in his travels
(18:49):
about Vietnam and his visitations to what hospitals were still functioning,
these terrible things did not fall upon the unlucky few,
but upon civilians in great numbers. Tens of thousands of
children were either killed or horrifically scarred. As Pepper said
in his article Napalm and its more horrible companion, white
(19:10):
phosphors liquidized young flesh and carve it into grotesque forms.
The little figures are afterwards often scarcely human in appearance,
and one can not be confronted with the monstrous effects
of the burning without being totally shaken. I never left
the tiny victims without losing composure. The initial urge to
(19:31):
reach out and soothe the hurt was restrained by the
fear that ash like skin would crumble in my fingers.
If he were not to be remembered for anything else,
Bill Pepper should be remembered and honored for sending himself
the Vietnam and coming home with the truth about what
we were doing there. But the article on Vietnam began
(19:52):
a whole new episode in Bill Pepper's life. It brought
him into the presence of another man who was wrestling
with his moral duty. So the Ramparts piece came out
in January of nineteen sixty seven. That was what Martin
King noticed as he wasn't going on a trip to photographs.
I think caught his attention, and he read the article
(20:15):
later and asked to meet with me. Pepper and King
first met in Providence, Rhode Island, where King was speaking
at the chapel of Brown University. Both men were continuing
on to Boston, so King asked Pepper to ride with him.
I rode to Boston with him. I showed him whatever
additional material that I had at that time, and he wept.
(20:39):
He literally wept in the car. He saw all of
this horror that was being done by his government. He
couldn't believe it. Because his article and photographs had finally
been published in a national magazine, Bill Pepper suddenly became
a voice for the anti war movement. And I don't
remember that date, but I then agreed in April of
(21:02):
nineteen sixty seven to be a keynote speaker at a
march that went from Central Park down to the United Nations.
It was a huge marsh quarter of a million or
so people. Pepper was also chosen to introduce Martin Luther
King at that rally, no small honor. I was there
(21:24):
that day. I don't remember Pepper's introduction but I do
remember King's booming voice, stop the bombing, Let us save
our national honor, stop the bombing, and stop the wall.
After the rally in New York, Pepper was asked by
(21:46):
King and others to become the executive director of the
National Conference for New Politics. Pepper accepted the purpose of
the NCNP was to be an umbrella group that will
unite the many peace and justice groups into a formidable
political force. Towards that end, a convention was proposed in
Chicago on Labor Day weekend. Pepper spent his entire summer
(22:09):
organizing that event. We built this convention and it took
place in Chicago over Labor Day, and doctor King agreed
to give the keynote address. We were very naive, very
naive at that time. I was barely thirty years old,
with rough and ready political experience in the from Yonkers
(22:29):
in New York, but nothing significant beyond Yonkers. And when
a Black Caucus was formed, we thought that was a
good thing because all black delegates would unite, there would
be a positive force. What we didn't realize was that
the Johnson administration, working with Richard Daley, the Mayor of Chicago,
(22:51):
would put together a very sophisticated disruptive team whose whole
purpose was to break up the convention, and they seated,
And we would learn later that many of the members
or members of the Blackstone Rangers, a gang and Chicago
who daily brought onto the scene greatly discouraged by what
(23:14):
had happened in Chicago. Pepper would continue with his anti
war activities, and so did King, but he also began
to plan for Poor People's March on Washington to be
held the following summer. King wanted economic justice to take
its place alongside of civil rights, and the energy that
was building around the sanitation workers strike in Memphis was
(23:35):
the kind of force that King hoped to harness for
his march. But Martin King was murdered, and for Bill Pepper,
that was the day the music died. I heard on
the radio that he had been assassinated. I went down
to Memphis with Benjamin Spock. We went for the purpose
(23:55):
of the memorial and also trying to keep the torch
alive for a movement that was going to try to
go on without him. Pepper and Spock followed the fallen
King to Atlanta, where he would be buried. There he
ran into Bobby Kennedy, on whose Senate campaign he had
worked four years earlier. Bobby asked me and others to
(24:18):
come up to this hotel to discuss his presidential campaign,
and I said, no, I'm through his politics. So after
turning a baseball into an IVY league, education, cleaning up
the city of Yonkers, working for Bobby Kennedy, hanging out
(24:40):
with Fidel Castro, sending himself to Vietnam, pissing off Cardinal Spellman,
and working for Martin Luther King, Bill Pepper decided to
leave politics, sit back, and devote himself to education. But
even in that he couldn't keep from stirring the pot.
In nineteen seventy three, he wrote a book on education
titled The Self Managed Child that was published in hardcover
(25:03):
by Harper and Rowe. In the book, Pepper joined the
schooling debates at that time by warning about what he
saw as education's most common mistake, it's suffocating feeling of
self importance. And Pepper had some learning of his own
to continue for. As you may remember, he had dropped
out of law school at the University of Pennsylvania in
(25:23):
nineteen sixty one to devote himself full time to the
political fight in Yonkers. So in nineteen seventy five he
went back to law school, this time at Boston College,
where he graduated with honors a year later. So he
had barely become a licensed attorney when he got the
phone call from Ralph Abernathy asking if he would join
him in meeting with James ol Ray, the convicted killer
(25:47):
of his friend Martin Luther King. Pepper said he would,
but only after he had read up on the case.
(26:11):
When Pepper and n Abernathy traveled to Brushy Mountain State
Prison in the summer of seventy eight, they were joined
by Mark Lane, Ray's attorney at the time. Lane, in
his book Rushed to Judgment, had been one of the
very first to stand up and say that the murder
of President Kennedy had been a high level conspiracy, and
Lane was just as convinced that Ray had been set
(26:32):
up to take the blame for the murder of King,
and he appreciated the intelligence that Pepper had brought to
his meeting with Ray. Soon Lane would call Pepper and
ask for a favor. Mark Lane called me and asked
me if I would represent Jerry Ray before the House
Select Committee on assassinations, and Mark was James ol Ray's
(26:55):
lawyer and just fighting a very difficult battle for James,
and he also fell in to be Jerry's lawyer, and
I asked him why he couldn't continue, and he said
that Bob Blakey wouldn't allow him to represent both James
and Jerry, and so Jerry needed separate counsel and he
thought I would be an ideal guy to do that.
(27:19):
At the time, the House Select Committee was plotting his
way through its version of the murders of John Kennedy
and Martin Luther King. When originally formed, its director was
to be Dick Sprague, a tough criminal prosecutor out of Philadelphia,
but Sprague made it clear that he wanted the committee
to have access to all government files, including those of
(27:40):
the FBI and the CIA. Suddenly there was an orchestrated
smear campaign to get rid of Sprague, and it worked.
Bob Blakey replaced Dick Sprague from Philadelphia because Sprague had
made the point that he was going after all government documentation,
including CIA documents, with respect to the killing of Martin King,
(28:04):
and that was something that they were not going to allow.
So they put Blakey in who came from Cornell. I
believe at that time Blakey was much more compliant. Pepper
thought about Lane's proposal to represent james brother Jerry, and
after talking to a few colleagues, he decided to accept.
So I agreed to represent Jerry Ray on the condition
(28:27):
that I could bring Floe Kennedy, my black human rights lawyer.
Many people may not remember Florence Kennedy. I think she
was the first black graduate of Columbia University Law School.
She was a remarkable woman, totally committed to human rights,
and I worked with Flow on a number of matters.
So I went down to Washington represented Jerry with Flow Kennedy.
(28:51):
We represented Jerry, and it became very evident to us
early on as they were only there for the purpose
of incriminating James and trying to use Jerry without purpose.
From their questions, one can deduce that the House Select
Committee was attempting to connect Jerry Ray to the murder
of Martin Luther King, either as a direct participant or
(29:14):
as an accessory. There were series of questions seeking to
connect Jerry with James's successful escape from Jefferson City Penitentiary.
We have searched and only been able to come up
with the recording of a small piece of Jerry Ray's
testimony before the committee when he was represented by Bill
Pepper and Flo Kennedy. We are going to play a
slice from that recording, not for its procedural content, but
(29:36):
so that we may hear the voices of both of
these volunteer attorneys and what would be Bill Pepper's first
public appearance in his forty year investigation of the murder
of his friend Martin King. We are going to object
to the inclusion of any of author McMillan's notes out
of context. If the author's notes are to be admitted
(29:57):
into the record of the proceedings of this committee, we
will request that the entire vestige of his work to
be admitted, that nothing be taken out of context, and
we will request to see all of those notes ourselves.
Not to do otherwise. To take an author or an
investigator's partial research and to put it in is highly prejudicial,
(30:19):
particularly in light of the total scope of mister McMillan's work. Sir,
on the same point, I really am not trying to
be tendentious, but it is extremely important to note that
where you have a committee hearing which relies so heavily
on hearsay people who no one has an opportunity to
cross examine. There must be some effort on the part
(30:42):
of this committee to establish the authenticity, the bias, the
political conflict of interests that might obtain between a writer,
a journalist, a witness. In this circumstance, we have no
opportunity to confront this witness. We have no opportunity. And
this is a part of the nature of this one survey.
(31:05):
In this inquiry, besides trying to tie Jerry to the
escape from prison by brother James, the committee set out
to substantiate the charge that James had not gotten his
money from some mysterious fellow named Raoul, but had instead
gotten that move around money from a bank robbery. Around
(31:25):
that same time, the page one column ward article in
the New York Times by a journalist called Wendell Rawls
Junior appeared, which set that whole hsc a scenario out
how James got his money from the Alton, Illinois bank robbery.
When the Times article came out about their special investigation
(31:48):
into the Alton robbery, Bill Pepper was already on for
representing Jerry Ray. So the day before he went down
to Washington, he made a couple of phone calls well
prior to my appearance before that committee. I called the
president of the bank that was robbed, and I called
the chief of police in Alton, and both of them
(32:11):
indicated to me that the Ray brothers had never been
suspects in that case, as they knew who the perpetrators were,
they just didn't have enough evidence to prosecute them. And
they said, not only had they not been contacted by
law enforcement or House Select Committee investigators, but they also
had not been contacted by Wendell Rowles Junior, or the
(32:34):
New York Times or anyone from the New York Times.
What follows is an interchange concerning the Alton bank robbery
between James Spicer, counsel for the House Committee, and Bill Pepper,
representing Jerry Ray. We don't have the recording, but we
do have the transcript, and it goes like this, mister Spicer.
(32:56):
One of the areas that is puzzling the American public
concerning James ol Ray is how he funded himself during
that period when he was a fugitive immediately following his
escape from Jefferson City, State prison, And we would like
to question Jerry Ray concerning the Bank of Alton robbery
for the reason that there is strong suspicion that this
(33:16):
robbery may have been the source of funding for James Olray. Pepper,
mister Chairman. Point of clarification, on whose part is their
strong suspicion? Spicer, based on evidence provided to this committee, Pepper,
mister Chairman, on behalf of the witness and the committee
(33:38):
search for truth? Is the Committee aware of the fact
that the witness recently surrendered himself personally to the authorities
in Alton, offered to waive the statute of limitations, offered
to have himself available for prosecution at this time for
that crime, and was informed that he was not then
and never had been, a suspect in the Alton bank robbery.
(34:00):
And as late as yesterday the Chief of Police in
conversation with me, indicated that the witness, Jerry Ray, is
not and never has been a suspect in the bank robbery.
Is the Committee aware of that? Bill Pepper today is
still angry about how the House Committee tried to dodge
(34:22):
and bury his revelations about the robbery. So when that
was raised at the hearing, I told him as about
of a point of order, that what I had done
and what I had uncovered, and that not only was
the article false, but they're pointing to the Ray brothers
as perpetrators of that crime was false, and that was
(34:46):
convincing enough for them to immediately drop it. So they
didn't proceed with it. But if you read the hc
A report to this day, you will see that they
still take that line at the This is where James
got his money. When the House Select Committee was being
formed and the idea was put forward that it should
(35:07):
include not just the murder of John Kennedy but also
that of Martin Luther King, certain people in the Memphis
Police Department began to wonder if their secret intelligence files
might be subpoenaed by the committee, so they decided to
burn them. Mark Lane, raised attorney at the time, caught
wind of it and the ACLU filed a petition to
(35:28):
the court to stop the burning, but it was too late.
Scores of boxes of files of the Intelligence Division of
the Memphis Police were incinerated, but the Memphis Police need
not have worried. The committee under Bob Blakey didn't want
to look at government files When I asked Pepper, as
someone who had seen the committee work firsthand, up close,
(35:49):
what he thought, he didn't hesitate. They never did a
thorough investigation, and they discredited information I was highly incredible
and should have been a part of their report and
their conclusions. They discredited Johnny McFerrin, for example, who overheard
Loberto and in his place of business talking about shooting King.
(36:14):
They also denied Liberto's connection with organized crime, the fact
that the rooming house bathroom was empty and the door
was opened minutes before the shooting, as evident in a
taxi driver who would come to pick up Charlie Stevens.
The fact that doctor King's room was changed from protected
one two o two to an exposed balcony room three
(36:38):
oh six, and failure to perform to form all black
security unit which always protected doctor King in Memphis. All
of these facts and more were ignored by the House
Select Committee. It was not a serious investigation. It was
investigation designed to cover up the truth that this kind
(36:59):
of evidence. While a great deal of what the House
Committee did and how they went about it was worthy
of disdain, it didn't mean that everyone on the committee
was in on a cover up, It's just that its
ultimate conclusions seemed already baked into the cake. For example,
when investigators from the Committee began to look into the
(37:21):
stories about rays supposed hatred of blacks in general and
King in particular, they discovered that most of these stories,
which were thin to begin with, were either unreliable or exaggerated,
so much so that the Committee had to conclude that
Ray's given motive of hatred, which had been blindly accepted
for ten years, was not in any way supported by
(37:43):
the evidence. Did that make them wonder if Ray had
really killed King? No, they just gave him a new motive,
that he killed King to collect a reward, something for
which there was no evidence at all. When the Committee
was finished questioning rays attorney or Foreman, they came to
the remarkable conclusion that nothing that Foreman said could be trusted.
(38:06):
Did they then wonder, perhaps if Foreman was working for
someone other than Ray when he pushed his way into
the case. No, they just shrugged it off. When the
Committee looked at Ray's exchange of one gun for another,
they concluded correctly that the exchange almost certainly signaled the
involvement of another person. Could that person have been the
(38:27):
handler Raoul, As Ray said, it was no because they
were set to find that Ray, acting alone, had killed King,
So when evidence of another person appears, the next best
thing was that maybe he had help from his brother
that would keep it all in the family. Did they
consider that the gun exchange might have been needed because
the weapon was not to kill King, but merely needed
(38:50):
to be the same caliber of the rifle that would
kill King, so that Ray could then be tied to
the murder. That was never considered. So even when they
stumbled upon the truth, they couldn't see it for what
it was because they were already married to the idea
of Ray killing King. When the House Select Committee was formed,
its stated purpose was to use the power and authority
(39:13):
of the Congress to look into these crimes so that
they could assure the American people that they had been
properly investigated and that the citizens had been told the truth.
So if that's the case, what is the need for
executive sessions and secret files? Sessions and files that will
only be opened after sixty years have passed since the murder.
(39:35):
If then, because without a reliable inventory as to what
is in the files, they can easily be cleansed before
they are opened. The simple truth is, if James Earl Ray,
acting alone had really murdered Martin Luther King, there would
be no need for secret files coming up. On the
(40:03):
final two episodes of the MLK tapes, mister Hut looked
over and he says, John, I've just about had a
bellyfull of the Kennedy boys. They both needed to go.
He was for a McCarthys right wing vision of America.
My aunt had been the victim of ja Egger Hoover,
(40:24):
you know, lying to her. So the main focus of
that meeting was really trying to figure out how to
take down Martin Luther King. Hoover used to send in
Tulson on a regular basis to meet with odkindy Odkin's
family to Dixie Mafia people, the plan was to get
King to the city because Tulson said that they wanted
(40:46):
it handled in Memphis for dead and inm caate Hamlet.
So apparently come now Mover. You know, I don't think
why I was doing that on his own. I 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 Kenny in
that city, and his immediate reaction to me was is
(41:08):
he dead? Thanks for listening to The MLK Tapes, a
production of iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This podcast is not
specifically endorsed by the King Family or the King of State.
The Email Ka Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Klaper.
Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf
(41:31):
of iHeartRadio with producers Trevor Young and Jesse Fonk. Donald
Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on behalf of
Tenderfoot TV with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Steadman. Original
music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by Mister
Soul two one six with photography by Artemis Jenkins. Special
thanks to Owen Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at Uta, the
(41:55):
Nor Group, Beck Median Marketing, Envisioned Business Management, and Station sixteen.
If you have questions, you can visit our website, The
email katapes dot com. We posted photos and videos related
to the podcast on our social media accounts. You can
check them out at the email K Tapes For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(42:17):
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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