March 28, 2022 • 43 mins
Dallas oilman H.L. Hunt hated communists, and in his mind this included Martin Luther King. He attacked King regularly on his program Life Line, carried daily on 500 radio stations across the country. Hunt believed this would be enough to destroy King, but J. Edgar Hoover had other ideas.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the MLK Tapes, a production of I Heart
Radio 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 I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. H L. Hunt was a Illinois farm
(00:25):
boy who came down the Mississippi River as a gambler
and became the world's richest man in the oil and
along the way. He had three families, to which he
started in secret. While here he was still living with
and married to his first wife. We're talking to author
Harry Hurt, whose book Texas Rich is an in depth
(00:48):
portrait of H. L. Hunt, a man whose extraordinary fortune
came out of the ground, liquid and black. Hunt was
an unusual person and that he was happy to spend
his wealth on political goals, but he didn't feel the
need to spend it on himself. He drove an old car.
He drove himself to work as he posed, having his chauffeur.
He took his lunch to work in a brown paper bag.
(01:12):
He didn't adorn himself with jewelry and fantasy clothes and
that sort of thing beyond 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
(01:33):
even opposed private charity. Hunt didn't believe in one man,
one vote. He thought the number of votes you can't
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. I call
(01:57):
the Union how as his mad life, And I said,
I think these people are planning to kill Dr King.
The authorities were parade. Oh, we found a gun the
James ol Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr King.
Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr King. James
Lvey was upon for the official story from My Heart
(02:22):
radio intender for TV. The plan was to get King
to the city because they wanted it handled. In Memphis
were dead and in cat Hamon and I've lived with
it so long, my sire, and they scared for me.
The Lord told me to not the word I've been
wanting to tell it all my life. I'm Bill Claiburg,
(02:44):
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 the nearby lake.
And for whatever it said about him, he built a
(03:06):
house that mimicked every detail of the House of George Washington.
His house in Dallas was made to look like a
replica of Mount Vernon in Virginia to Washington to George
Washington estate. And that was about as lavish as a god.
And that's not a particularly ornate structure. It looks almost
(03:30):
like a toy house. And 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 there were a good number of them.
The petitioners would usually come away with some easily afforded contribution,
(03:50):
which made everyone feel good as though they had all
done their part, But to their utter shock, Hunt refused
to give. He didn't believe in it. He said, I
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. He would say. Author Harry Hurt found this
(04:12):
attitude a touch hypocritical. You know, I think that there
are pieces of 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.
(04:32):
And your problem if you're struggling financially or in some
other ways, because you don't work hard enough. So it's
just 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
(04:54):
the oil business in that era, benefited from government tax
structures which included the oil depletion Allowance and intent 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
(05:16):
tax breaks for the government. Considering the wealth he 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. I guess he hearkened to a
(05:37):
simpler time in America where you didn't have those kind
of luxuries commonly. And he had this sort of ethos
with his third wife of being just playing folks, you know,
regular people, and so that was his sort of ethos.
(05:59):
But Hunt wasn't just playing folks when it came to
his opposition to John F. Kennedy. As 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.
(06:22):
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 Democrat convention approach,
Briswell 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
(06:43):
political tyranny. If John F. Kennedy is elected, religious liberty
will die in America. Hunt liked this sermon, so 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
(07:03):
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 l A on the first vote,
but it did demonstrate Hunt's willingness to be a behind
the scenes player in national politics again. Author Harry Hurt
he was for McCarthys right wing vision of America in
(07:30):
the fifties, and he had radio programs that got to
be I think on five hundred stations between something called
Facts Forum and its successor Lifeline that we're basically the
four runners of Fox News and Newsmax, except that you
(07:53):
know they were privately funded by him, and they were
essentially fake news. Now, you can dismiss it on one level,
but the the equal fact of the matter is that
people bought into it and drank the Koula. In Hunt's
world and in that of many others back then, the
(08:13):
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
(08:33):
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. The land
should be drawn between those who love liberty and are
(08:57):
far freedom and those who are in favor of communism.
And I am quite generally in favor of anyone that
is fighting communism. But they communication media rather is owned
(09:18):
and controlled eighty eight percent by the opposition. They newspapers, radio,
TV stations, networks are largely in the hands we'll say
the enemy. As part of his crusade to fight against
(09:42):
the press that was soft on communism, Hunt began what
was called the Youth Freedom Speakers, but 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 rotary clubs or groups on the hidden dangers
of communism. Many people in the United States really don't
(10:06):
believe that communism is a serious threat. Well, these people
are in for a big shock because the Communists have
every intention of doing exactly what they said they'll do,
and they do not hesitate to use force and violence
any time they think that it will further their calls.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the red scare was
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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 kpc N broadcast
the latest from Lifeline, part of which we will read here.
(11:11):
When 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
(11:34):
of firearms would be strictly forbidden. Back in the nineteen sixties,
(11:59):
Hunt and Lloyd a young lawyer named John Curington 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
(12:22):
in the employe of HL Hunt, and particularly those relating
to the murder of Martin Luther King. Currington was an
East Texas country boy. He had a quick mind and
did well at s m U, 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,
(12:44):
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 Mr Hunt wanted to see him. There were
several Hunts there in the company, but when the name
Mr Hunt was used, you knew it was h Old Hunt.
(13:08):
And although I had worked for a Hunter Old Company
for several years part of that call, I had never
met Mr Hunt ever talked to him. Immediately interpreted that
call as some kind of an office prank. I didn't
want to go, but I do. I had enough cession, No,
I had to go. So, not being able to imagine
(13:29):
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 Mr Hunt's secretary. She
just motioned me on end, and Miss Hunt didn't introduce
himself or ask about my health or what I thought
about the political race. He just stated that he had
(13:53):
been told that I had a reputation of getting some
things done, and he wanted me to start working directly
for him. And that was that. Currington was instantly moved
to the seventh floor of the Mercantile Bank building, where
he began to work for H. L. Hunt. I was
given an offer immediately nextra Hairs, and the door was
(14:16):
normally open between the two others, and if it wasn't open,
he had a bugging her own Hair's death that he
could push, and I could answer that buggle within a
matter of second. Turrington was a quick learner, and he
sensed that Hunt was unlike any person he had ever met.
Right away. He understood that he was not to speak
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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. I had
never exchanged any pleasant trees with restaur Hunt. I'd never
asked a rut, as heals, I never said good morning.
I'd never asked him if he enjoyed the football game.
(14:58):
I had no personal contract relationship with him, and I
think Miss run to appreciate it that he had no
interest in my background or what I was doing. His
only interest was what he wanted to do, and Horry
wanted it done. And 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. As
(15:21):
far as I know, he only slept for four hours
a night. He was up late at night, up early
over morning, and he had a forever idea that I
might have, or you might have, Miss Hunter have a
hundred ideas on any different subject. I had standard orders.
I had to call him at six o'clock am every
(15:42):
morning and at ten o'clock pm every night, and even
if we talked at nine thirty pm at night, I'd
still call him at ten pm. Given those responsibilities, one
might say that Currington 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
(16:02):
Hunt would call at some point. Was something that was
on his mind. I don't ever recall not receiving a
telephone call from Mesh Hunt during the wee hours of
the night, and I'm tolding anywhere from eight thirty, nine
thirty or ten one or two o'clock the next morning there.
But he never made any comment as thank you for
(16:23):
answering your phone. I hope I didn't wake you up,
But I have a question. He went directly into a question,
and some of his questions just defined the interpretation of
what a reasonable prudent man might know. As Mr Hunt's
right hand, Currington would manage a wide variety of things.
(16:43):
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 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
(17:07):
they were, these stories rang true to me. But there
was one piece of Currington's account that I absolutely don't believe.
Currington 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
Wooden spring for the extra dollars. Remember, Hunt is the
(17:30):
richest man in America and he flies in coach. Currington
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.
(17:52):
But Hunt had one huge bad habit. He loved the gamble,
He loved the bed on horses and football games, and
most of all, he loved to play in high stakes
potter games. He would fly across the country with John
Currington and Coach. We were asked to believe so that
Hunt could play in the game of poker where hundreds
(18:12):
of thousands of dollars would change hands. Mr. Hunt and
I we normally always say that the Walt Offer story
when we were there in New York, and quite frequently
that's where the poker games would occur. During the games,
Currington would be stationed nearby, and if Hunt were losing,
(18:33):
he would be sent downtown to pick up more money,
like maybe eighty grant, which was a lot of money
back then. And this happened often enough that Currington got
to know the president of the bank, Misha had a
bank account in New York. I beg He's called a
Hanover Bank. And if my memory church vicorrector fell and
I Madeolf Hauser was a president of it. And over
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the course of years I became pretty well acquainted with
Mr Hauser. And when Mrs Hunt was in a big
card game, if money was needed, I would catch a
subway from the Walt Offer Story down to Wall Street,
pick up the money, put it in my pockets, and
go back. But I had instruction Mrs Hunt not to
(19:18):
take a taxi to pick that money up, because taxies
rides in New York then or about seventy or eighty
cents a trip, So I was instructed to take the
subway as it was a little cheaper mode of transportation.
In ninety Hunt and Carrington would spend a hunk of
time in New York time that had nothing to do
(19:39):
with poker. It had to do with an idea that
came to hunt in the middle of the night when
they had to do with the World's Fair which was
set to open to New York in the summer of
nineteen sixty. For many years we always had a display
at State Fairy there in Dallas for the State of Texas.
(20:00):
There every year we had a pretty elaborage set up,
had free drinks for people, a cool area of 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,
(20:21):
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.
(20:44):
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. For 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 Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority, along with a
(21:07):
dozen other important positions, including president of the New York
World's Fair. When it came to building bridges, 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. Negoties were
(21:29):
made to lease a multi acre or state there at
the World's 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 act we
signed a contract for the land at the World's Fair.
(21:52):
I went to Germany and bought several different kinds of
amusement rides, and they were expensive rides. Most of the
old ride came out of Germany and they were shipped
from Germany to New York. So after the deal was
signed and big money had been spent on the rides
and attractions, Moses called Hunt and Currington back to his office.
(22:15):
At that time, we thought we were doing a great
job of what we were supposed to do, and it
was starter patting ourselves on the back. But Robert Moses
walked in and without any greater fanfare, he said this
Yearson had been made that he was going to cancel
Mr Hunt's contract for his amusement rides and on the
(22:36):
grounds that he felt like it was on to be
an outlet for Mr god propaganda material from his Lifeline program.
In 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
(22:57):
for the nasty campaign Hunt had run against President Kill.
Hunt called Vice President Lyndon Johnson to see if he
could intervene, but Johnson said that the decision had been
made above him and that he could do nothing about it.
From that moment, Mr Hunt was pretty well aware that
Lyndon Johnson was going to be dropped from the ticket
(23:17):
in the nineteen sixty four that Lyndon Johnson was losing
his power and influence. Every day after we were kicked
out of the World's 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, and Mr Hunt and I sl Ever
(23:38):
engaged in personal conversations. We would fly aside beside on
an airplane. If he wanted to say something, I listened,
but I never volunteered any statements there. But on this
particular trip, Mr Hunt looked over and he says, John,
I've just about had a bellyful of the Kennedy boys.
They both need to go. We will return to H. L.
(24:02):
Hunt and John Curington and Curington'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 H. L.
Hunt had an unusual relationship, Jedger Hoover, the lifelong director
of the FBI. Shortly after James Earl Ray was captured
(24:36):
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 was not an ordinary criminal.
Ray is a racist and to test Negroes and Martin
Luther King. The question here is why, before Ray had
even been charged with the murder, was j Edgar Hoover
(24:59):
so eager to 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
(25:21):
want this person dead, or, better still, with someone already
trying to harm him. Any TV cop worth his salt
starts with this. There were, of course many people who
did not like Dr King, and perhaps many who wished
him dead, But there was one person with great resources
who was already trying to harm him. It was the
(25:42):
director of the FBI, jed Grew 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 two there were calls to
look into the activities of the FBI, and particularly those
in regard to Martin Luther King. The committee under Senator
(26:03):
Frank Church made their report in nineteen seventy six, and
this is what Senator Church had to say about the
activities of the FBI. We have seen today the dark
side of those activities, where many Americans who were not
even suspected of crime, we're not only spied upon, but
they were harassed, they were discredited, and at times endangered
(26:29):
through the covert operations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
During the nineteen fifties, j Edgar Hoover was at the
height of his power. His g men had hunted the
folk Carol bankroppers into extinction. Communists hiding in the halls
of government was very reason for being, and his ghost
written book Masters of Deceit was a bestseller. But in
(26:52):
nineteen sixty there was 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
(27:13):
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. 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. Mr
(27:35):
Kennedy came back with another very nice letter. That's a
little auditory 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 that during the war he had five Negro chauffeurs,
so he automatically made them special agents. So now we
(27:56):
wrote back and said we had five. The 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 violent crimes were committed right in front of them.
(28:19):
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. Sir, I gave him FBI information
pertending to the Freedom Writers. So approximately three weeks before
(28:42):
the and what did you tell him? I stated to
him that I had been contacted by a Birmingham City
detective to set a reception for the Freedom Writers. We
were promised a fifteen minutes with absolutely no intervention from
any police officers whatsoever. The information was passed on to
the bread. As Rude testified, the passengers on that bus
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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? We game active nurse maids to agitators.
(29:30):
I think when they learned that that when they will
somewhere the creator to create a ride, that there's not
going to be somebody there to stand between them and
there the crowd, they're stay home. Jared Hoover voiced a
similar hands off position. Certain they do not and will
not give protection to civil rights workers. In the first place.
(29:54):
The FBI is not a police organizations, purely an investigated organization.
The protection of individual citizens, either natives of the state
or coming into the state, is a matter for the
local authorities. The FBI will not participate in any such protection.
Almost every student of the time knows that j Edgar
(30:15):
Hoover wanted to bring down Martin Luther King. But why.
The perfect person to ask is Beverly Gauge, 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 Gauge what brought her to Hoover, what attracted
(30:36):
me to writing this book. He 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 ninety four, and he
died in that job in two When looking back on
(31:01):
the nineteen fifties and sixties, the standard wrap 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.
(31:21):
Hoover 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 a consult with each other was found
at Appalachian in New York, he was he was quite
surprised and chagrined by that it happened in the rural
(31:45):
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 needed sixty men in silk suits, some
(32:05):
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
(32:26):
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 adviser to King, a man named
(32:48):
Stanley Levinson, was said to be a communist. In the
nineteen fifties, 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
(33:08):
genuine concern of Hoover's or just a way for him
to bargain for closer surveillance of King. I 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
(33:30):
domestic communist threat. So he had his own ideological lens
through which he would have interpreted the evidence about about
Odell and Levison in very, very alarmist ways. How alarmist
consider this? In August ninety three, Martin Luther King led
(33:51):
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
(34:14):
wrote to Hoover to limit ourselves to legalistic proofs or
evidence that would stand up in court or before congressional committees.
What do you have in mind? Just three months later,
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.
(34:38):
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. So
the main focus that meeting was really trying to figure
out how to take down Martin Luther King, how to
(35:01):
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. The FBI campaign
against King that emerged from that old day meeting was
vicious and relentless. This is how counsel Fred Schwartz described
(35:23):
it to the members of the Church Committee in ninety six.
After 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
(35:44):
was to how best to attack him. That he was
attacked after Time magazine named him a Man of the Year.
Again the Bureau finds that reprehensible, believes it must attack
and destroy. When he was given the Nobel Prize, again
they seek to discredit Dr King. The FBI sought to
prevent the Pope for meeting with Dr King. His effort
(36:07):
went on and on and on. Most FBI agents who
were involved in the anti King activities have said very
little about it over the years. But there was one agent,
Arthur Murtaugh, 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. I was on a squad that was referred
(36:35):
to as a security squad. I would say that probably
of the time of the people on that squad was
involved in one way or another with the investigation of
Dr King. They also were involved in counter intelligence operations
which were designed to make up stories about Dr King,
(37:00):
any kind of a story to denigrate his character and
then go to what the Bureau referred to in the
Bureau 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
fifty five, and it bothered me. I didn't know whether
(37:24):
to resign or stay in. One of my brothers said
to me, we had a big family. He 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
(37:46):
his pocket with his secret files. As Mertasa said, the
ongoing operations against King were referred to in the FBI
as counter intelligence, as though King were some sort of
Russian spy. But once Hoover got permission to wire tap King,
virtually none of the resulting reports dealt with Communist influence.
(38:08):
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
(38:30):
when no one wanted to run with his story, So,
as Professor Gag tells us, he had another idea. The
FBI puts together in 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
(38:54):
of Kings who has found out about kings private and
sexual life and is now Russia. 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.
(39:16):
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 to kill himself. That letter became public
for the first time. A knowledge of that letter became
public in the nineties seventies when the Church Committee were
(39:39):
investigating what it was that the FBI had been up
to in the sixties, what they have been doing against King.
Sending the tape in the letter to King trying to
and do 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 did not
(40:00):
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. My aunt
had been the victim of Jaeger Hoover, you know, lying
to her. He actually said, it's hey to my aunt
(40:24):
and uncle's home. It was addressed to my aunt, Lord Behald.
It was a recording of someone sounding to have sex.
By this time, my aunt had had four children by
my uncle, 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,
(40:47):
as she said, that's not my husband. I mean, I
know how he sounds. Faris 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,
(41:11):
A serious crime perpetrated by j Edgar Hoover himself next
time on the email K tapes. Should the Committee take
special note that the conduct of the FBI and this
conspiracy of harassment of Dr King was not only unjustified
(41:35):
as policy, it was also illegal and unconstitutional. Oover used
to send in Tulson on a regular basis to meet
without Kendey Adkins family to Dixie Mafia people. The plan
was to get King to the city because Tunson said
(41:55):
that they wanted it handled in Memphis for Daddy and
named cat Hamlet, so like, come help mover. You know,
I don't think Lyoud was doing that on his own.
I've never heard such down the language as Lenda Johnson
used and describing here sailing from Martin Lucy King, and
the same same with younger Hoover. I called them and
(42:16):
I said, Mr Hoover, I just got a telex message
from our Memphis office said that Martin Luther King was
shot while standing on a belt conty in that city,
and his immediate reaction to me was is he dead?
(42:37):
Thanks for listening to the m l K tapes. A
production of I Heart Radio intended for TV. This podcast
is not specifically endorsed by the King family or The
King of State. Dmail k Tapes is written and hosted
by Bill Claiper. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive
producers on behalf of I Heart Radio with producers Trevor
Young and Jesse phonk Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are
(42:58):
executive producers on half of tender Foot TV with producers
Jamie Albright and Meredith Steadman. Original music by Makeup and
Vanity Said. Cover art by Mr Soul to six with
photography by Artemus Jenkins. Special thanks to Owen Rosenbaum and
Grace Royer at U t A, The Nord Group, back
Median Marketing, Envisioned Business Management, and Station sixteen. If you
(43:21):
have questions, you can visit our website, the Email k
Tapes 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. From more podcasts
from I Heart Radio and tender Foot TV, please visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the MLK Tapes, a production of I Heart
Radio 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 I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. H L. Hunt was a Illinois farm
(00:25):
boy who came down the Mississippi River as a gambler
and became the world's richest man in the oil and
along the way. He had three families, to which he
started in secret. While here he was still living with
and married to his first wife. We're talking to author
Harry Hurt, whose book Texas Rich is an in depth
(00:48):
portrait of H. L. Hunt, a man whose extraordinary fortune
came out of the ground, liquid and black. Hunt was
an unusual person and that he was happy to spend
his wealth on political goals, but he didn't feel the
need to spend it on himself. He drove an old car.
He drove himself to work as he posed, having his chauffeur.
He took his lunch to work in a brown paper bag.
(01:12):
He didn't adorn himself with jewelry and fantasy clothes and
that sort of thing beyond 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
(01:33):
even opposed private charity. Hunt didn't believe in one man,
one vote. He thought the number of votes you can't
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. I call
(01:57):
the Union how as his mad life, And I said,
I think these people are planning to kill Dr King.
The authorities were parade. Oh, we found a gun the
James ol Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr King.
Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr King. James
Lvey was upon for the official story from My Heart
(02:22):
radio intender for TV. The plan was to get King
to the city because they wanted it handled. In Memphis
were dead and in cat Hamon and I've lived with
it so long, my sire, and they scared for me.
The Lord told me to not the word I've been
wanting to tell it all my life. I'm Bill Claiburg,
(02:44):
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 the nearby lake.
And for whatever it said about him, he built a
(03:06):
house that mimicked every detail of the House of George Washington.
His house in Dallas was made to look like a
replica of Mount Vernon in Virginia to Washington to George
Washington estate. And that was about as lavish as a god.
And that's not a particularly ornate structure. It looks almost
(03:30):
like a toy house. And 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 there were a good number of them.
The petitioners would usually come away with some easily afforded contribution,
(03:50):
which made everyone feel good as though they had all
done their part, But to their utter shock, Hunt refused
to give. He didn't believe in it. He said, I
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. He would say. Author Harry Hurt found this
(04:12):
attitude a touch hypocritical. You know, I think that there
are pieces of 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.
(04:32):
And your problem if you're struggling financially or in some
other ways, because you don't work hard enough. So it's
just 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
(04:54):
the oil business in that era, benefited from government tax
structures which included the oil depletion Allowance and intent 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
(05:16):
tax breaks for the government. Considering the wealth he 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. I guess he hearkened to a
(05:37):
simpler time in America where you didn't have those kind
of luxuries commonly. And he had this sort of ethos
with his third wife of being just playing folks, you know,
regular people, and so that was his sort of ethos.
(05:59):
But Hunt wasn't just playing folks when it came to
his opposition to John F. Kennedy. As 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.
(06:22):
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 Democrat convention approach,
Briswell 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
(06:43):
political tyranny. If John F. Kennedy is elected, religious liberty
will die in America. Hunt liked this sermon, so 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
(07:03):
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 l A on the first vote,
but it did demonstrate Hunt's willingness to be a behind
the scenes player in national politics again. Author Harry Hurt
he was for McCarthys right wing vision of America in
(07:30):
the fifties, and he had radio programs that got to
be I think on five hundred stations between something called
Facts Forum and its successor Lifeline that we're basically the
four runners of Fox News and Newsmax, except that you
(07:53):
know they were privately funded by him, and they were
essentially fake news. Now, you can dismiss it on one level,
but the the equal fact of the matter is that
people bought into it and drank the Koula. In Hunt's
world and in that of many others back then, the
(08:13):
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
(08:33):
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. The land
should be drawn between those who love liberty and are
(08:57):
far freedom and those who are in favor of communism.
And I am quite generally in favor of anyone that
is fighting communism. But they communication media rather is owned
(09:18):
and controlled eighty eight percent by the opposition. They newspapers, radio,
TV stations, networks are largely in the hands we'll say
the enemy. As part of his crusade to fight against
(09:42):
the press that was soft on communism, Hunt began what
was called the Youth Freedom Speakers, but 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 rotary clubs or groups on the hidden dangers
of communism. Many people in the United States really don't
(10:06):
believe that communism is a serious threat. Well, these people
are in for a big shock because the Communists have
every intention of doing exactly what they said they'll do,
and they do not hesitate to use force and violence
any time they think that it will further their calls.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the red scare was
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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 kpc N broadcast
the latest from Lifeline, part of which we will read here.
(11:11):
When 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
(11:34):
of firearms would be strictly forbidden. Back in the nineteen sixties,
(11:59):
Hunt and Lloyd a young lawyer named John Curington 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
(12:22):
in the employe of HL Hunt, and particularly those relating
to the murder of Martin Luther King. Currington was an
East Texas country boy. He had a quick mind and
did well at s m U, 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,
(12:44):
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 Mr Hunt wanted to see him. There were
several Hunts there in the company, but when the name
Mr Hunt was used, you knew it was h Old Hunt.
(13:08):
And although I had worked for a Hunter Old Company
for several years part of that call, I had never
met Mr Hunt ever talked to him. Immediately interpreted that
call as some kind of an office prank. I didn't
want to go, but I do. I had enough cession, No,
I had to go. So, not being able to imagine
(13:29):
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 Mr Hunt's secretary. She
just motioned me on end, and Miss Hunt didn't introduce
himself or ask about my health or what I thought
about the political race. He just stated that he had
(13:53):
been told that I had a reputation of getting some
things done, and he wanted me to start working directly
for him. And that was that. Currington was instantly moved
to the seventh floor of the Mercantile Bank building, where
he began to work for H. L. Hunt. I was
given an offer immediately nextra Hairs, and the door was
(14:16):
normally open between the two others, and if it wasn't open,
he had a bugging her own Hair's death that he
could push, and I could answer that buggle within a
matter of second. Turrington was a quick learner, and he
sensed that Hunt was unlike any person he had ever met.
Right away. He understood that he was not to speak
(14:37):
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. I had
never exchanged any pleasant trees with restaur Hunt. I'd never
asked a rut, as heals, I never said good morning.
I'd never asked him if he enjoyed the football game.
(14:58):
I had no personal contract relationship with him, and I
think Miss run to appreciate it that he had no
interest in my background or what I was doing. His
only interest was what he wanted to do, and Horry
wanted it done. And 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. As
(15:21):
far as I know, he only slept for four hours
a night. He was up late at night, up early
over morning, and he had a forever idea that I
might have, or you might have, Miss Hunter have a
hundred ideas on any different subject. I had standard orders.
I had to call him at six o'clock am every
(15:42):
morning and at ten o'clock pm every night, and even
if we talked at nine thirty pm at night, I'd
still call him at ten pm. Given those responsibilities, one
might say that Currington 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
(16:02):
Hunt would call at some point. Was something that was
on his mind. I don't ever recall not receiving a
telephone call from Mesh Hunt during the wee hours of
the night, and I'm tolding anywhere from eight thirty, nine
thirty or ten one or two o'clock the next morning there.
But he never made any comment as thank you for
(16:23):
answering your phone. I hope I didn't wake you up,
But I have a question. He went directly into a question,
and some of his questions just defined the interpretation of
what a reasonable prudent man might know. As Mr Hunt's
right hand, Currington would manage a wide variety of things.
(16:43):
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 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
(17:07):
they were, these stories rang true to me. But there
was one piece of Currington's account that I absolutely don't believe.
Currington 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
Wooden spring for the extra dollars. Remember, Hunt is the
(17:30):
richest man in America and he flies in coach. Currington
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.
(17:52):
But Hunt had one huge bad habit. He loved the gamble,
He loved the bed on horses and football games, and
most of all, he loved to play in high stakes
potter games. He would fly across the country with John
Currington and Coach. We were asked to believe so that
Hunt could play in the game of poker where hundreds
(18:12):
of thousands of dollars would change hands. Mr. Hunt and
I we normally always say that the Walt Offer story
when we were there in New York, and quite frequently
that's where the poker games would occur. During the games,
Currington would be stationed nearby, and if Hunt were losing,
(18:33):
he would be sent downtown to pick up more money,
like maybe eighty grant, which was a lot of money
back then. And this happened often enough that Currington got
to know the president of the bank, Misha had a
bank account in New York. I beg He's called a
Hanover Bank. And if my memory church vicorrector fell and
I Madeolf Hauser was a president of it. And over
(18:56):
the course of years I became pretty well acquainted with
Mr Hauser. And when Mrs Hunt was in a big
card game, if money was needed, I would catch a
subway from the Walt Offer Story down to Wall Street,
pick up the money, put it in my pockets, and
go back. But I had instruction Mrs Hunt not to
(19:18):
take a taxi to pick that money up, because taxies
rides in New York then or about seventy or eighty
cents a trip, So I was instructed to take the
subway as it was a little cheaper mode of transportation.
In ninety Hunt and Carrington would spend a hunk of
time in New York time that had nothing to do
(19:39):
with poker. It had to do with an idea that
came to hunt in the middle of the night when
they had to do with the World's Fair which was
set to open to New York in the summer of
nineteen sixty. For many years we always had a display
at State Fairy there in Dallas for the State of Texas.
(20:00):
There every year we had a pretty elaborage set up,
had free drinks for people, a cool area of 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,
(20:21):
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.
(20:44):
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. For 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 Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority, along with a
(21:07):
dozen other important positions, including president of the New York
World's Fair. When it came to building bridges, 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. Negoties were
(21:29):
made to lease a multi acre or state there at
the World's 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 act we
signed a contract for the land at the World's Fair.
(21:52):
I went to Germany and bought several different kinds of
amusement rides, and they were expensive rides. Most of the
old ride came out of Germany and they were shipped
from Germany to New York. So after the deal was
signed and big money had been spent on the rides
and attractions, Moses called Hunt and Currington back to his office.
(22:15):
At that time, we thought we were doing a great
job of what we were supposed to do, and it
was starter patting ourselves on the back. But Robert Moses
walked in and without any greater fanfare, he said this
Yearson had been made that he was going to cancel
Mr Hunt's contract for his amusement rides and on the
(22:36):
grounds that he felt like it was on to be
an outlet for Mr god propaganda material from his Lifeline program.
In 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
(22:57):
for the nasty campaign Hunt had run against President Kill.
Hunt called Vice President Lyndon Johnson to see if he
could intervene, but Johnson said that the decision had been
made above him and that he could do nothing about it.
From that moment, Mr Hunt was pretty well aware that
Lyndon Johnson was going to be dropped from the ticket
(23:17):
in the nineteen sixty four that Lyndon Johnson was losing
his power and influence. Every day after we were kicked
out of the World's 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, and Mr Hunt and I sl Ever
(23:38):
engaged in personal conversations. We would fly aside beside on
an airplane. If he wanted to say something, I listened,
but I never volunteered any statements there. But on this
particular trip, Mr Hunt looked over and he says, John,
I've just about had a bellyful of the Kennedy boys.
They both need to go. We will return to H. L.
(24:02):
Hunt and John Curington and Curington'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 H. L.
Hunt had an unusual relationship, Jedger Hoover, the lifelong director
of the FBI. Shortly after James Earl Ray was captured
(24:36):
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 was not an ordinary criminal.
Ray is a racist and to test Negroes and Martin
Luther King. The question here is why, before Ray had
even been charged with the murder, was j Edgar Hoover
(24:59):
so eager to 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
(25:21):
want this person dead, or, better still, with someone already
trying to harm him. Any TV cop worth his salt
starts with this. There were, of course many people who
did not like Dr King, and perhaps many who wished
him dead, But there was one person with great resources
who was already trying to harm him. It was the
(25:42):
director of the FBI, jed Grew 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 two there were calls to
look into the activities of the FBI, and particularly those
in regard to Martin Luther King. The committee under Senator
(26:03):
Frank Church made their report in nineteen seventy six, and
this is what Senator Church had to say about the
activities of the FBI. We have seen today the dark
side of those activities, where many Americans who were not
even suspected of crime, we're not only spied upon, but
they were harassed, they were discredited, and at times endangered
(26:29):
through the covert operations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
During the nineteen fifties, j Edgar Hoover was at the
height of his power. His g men had hunted the
folk Carol bankroppers into extinction. Communists hiding in the halls
of government was very reason for being, and his ghost
written book Masters of Deceit was a bestseller. But in
(26:52):
nineteen sixty there was 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
(27:13):
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. 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. Mr
(27:35):
Kennedy came back with another very nice letter. That's a
little auditory 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 that during the war he had five Negro chauffeurs,
so he automatically made them special agents. So now we
(27:56):
wrote back and said we had five. The 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 violent crimes were committed right in front of them.
(28:19):
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. Sir, I gave him FBI information
pertending to the Freedom Writers. So approximately three weeks before
(28:42):
the and what did you tell him? I stated to
him that I had been contacted by a Birmingham City
detective to set a reception for the Freedom Writers. We
were promised a fifteen minutes with absolutely no intervention from
any police officers whatsoever. The information was passed on to
the bread. As Rude testified, the passengers on that bus
(29:05):
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? We game active nurse maids to agitators.
(29:30):
I think when they learned that that when they will
somewhere the creator to create a ride, that there's not
going to be somebody there to stand between them and
there the crowd, they're stay home. Jared Hoover voiced a
similar hands off position. Certain they do not and will
not give protection to civil rights workers. In the first place.
(29:54):
The FBI is not a police organizations, purely an investigated organization.
The protection of individual citizens, either natives of the state
or coming into the state, is a matter for the
local authorities. The FBI will not participate in any such protection.
Almost every student of the time knows that j Edgar
(30:15):
Hoover wanted to bring down Martin Luther King. But why.
The perfect person to ask is Beverly Gauge, 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 Gauge what brought her to Hoover, what attracted
(30:36):
me to writing this book. He 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 ninety four, and he
died in that job in two When looking back on
(31:01):
the nineteen fifties and sixties, the standard wrap 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.
(31:21):
Hoover 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 a consult with each other was found
at Appalachian in New York, he was he was quite
surprised and chagrined by that it happened in the rural
(31:45):
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 needed sixty men in silk suits, some
(32:05):
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
(32:26):
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 adviser to King, a man named
(32:48):
Stanley Levinson, was said to be a communist. In the
nineteen fifties, 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
(33:08):
genuine concern of Hoover's or just a way for him
to bargain for closer surveillance of King. I 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
(33:30):
domestic communist threat. So he had his own ideological lens
through which he would have interpreted the evidence about about
Odell and Levison in very, very alarmist ways. How alarmist
consider this? In August ninety three, Martin Luther King led
(33:51):
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
(34:14):
wrote to Hoover to limit ourselves to legalistic proofs or
evidence that would stand up in court or before congressional committees.
What do you have in mind? Just three months later,
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.
(34:38):
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. So
the main focus that meeting was really trying to figure
out how to take down Martin Luther King, how to
(35:01):
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. The FBI campaign
against King that emerged from that old day meeting was
vicious and relentless. This is how counsel Fred Schwartz described
(35:23):
it to the members of the Church Committee in ninety six.
After 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
(35:44):
was to how best to attack him. That he was
attacked after Time magazine named him a Man of the Year.
Again the Bureau finds that reprehensible, believes it must attack
and destroy. When he was given the Nobel Prize, again
they seek to discredit Dr King. The FBI sought to
prevent the Pope for meeting with Dr King. His effort
(36:07):
went on and on and on. Most FBI agents who
were involved in the anti King activities have said very
little about it over the years. But there was one agent,
Arthur Murtaugh, 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. I was on a squad that was referred
(36:35):
to as a security squad. I would say that probably
of the time of the people on that squad was
involved in one way or another with the investigation of
Dr King. They also were involved in counter intelligence operations
which were designed to make up stories about Dr King,
(37:00):
any kind of a story to denigrate his character and
then go to what the Bureau referred to in the
Bureau 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
fifty five, and it bothered me. I didn't know whether
(37:24):
to resign or stay in. One of my brothers said
to me, we had a big family. He 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
(37:46):
his pocket with his secret files. As Mertasa said, the
ongoing operations against King were referred to in the FBI
as counter intelligence, as though King were some sort of
Russian spy. But once Hoover got permission to wire tap King,
virtually none of the resulting reports dealt with Communist influence.
(38:08):
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
(38:30):
when no one wanted to run with his story, So,
as Professor Gag tells us, he had another idea. The
FBI puts together in 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
(38:54):
of Kings who has found out about kings private and
sexual life and is now Russia. 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.
(39:16):
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 to kill himself. That letter became public
for the first time. A knowledge of that letter became
public in the nineties seventies when the Church Committee were
(39:39):
investigating what it was that the FBI had been up
to in the sixties, what they have been doing against King.
Sending the tape in the letter to King trying to
and do 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 did not
(40:00):
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. My aunt
had been the victim of Jaeger Hoover, you know, lying
to her. He actually said, it's hey to my aunt
(40:24):
and uncle's home. It was addressed to my aunt, Lord Behald.
It was a recording of someone sounding to have sex.
By this time, my aunt had had four children by
my uncle, 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,
(40:47):
as she said, that's not my husband. I mean, I
know how he sounds. Faris 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,
(41:11):
A serious crime perpetrated by j Edgar Hoover himself next
time on the email K tapes. Should the Committee take
special note that the conduct of the FBI and this
conspiracy of harassment of Dr King was not only unjustified
(41:35):
as policy, it was also illegal and unconstitutional. Oover used
to send in Tulson on a regular basis to meet
without Kendey Adkins family to Dixie Mafia people. The plan
was to get King to the city because Tunson said
(41:55):
that they wanted it handled in Memphis for Daddy and
named cat Hamlet, so like, come help mover. You know,
I don't think Lyoud was doing that on his own.
I've never heard such down the language as Lenda Johnson
used and describing here sailing from Martin Lucy King, and
the same same with younger Hoover. I called them and
(42:16):
I said, Mr Hoover, I just got a telex message
from our Memphis office said that Martin Luther King was
shot while standing on a belt conty in that city,
and his immediate reaction to me was is he dead?
(42:37):
Thanks for listening to the m l K tapes. A
production of I Heart Radio intended for TV. This podcast
is not specifically endorsed by the King family or The
King of State. Dmail k Tapes is written and hosted
by Bill Claiper. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive
producers on behalf of I Heart Radio with producers Trevor
Young and Jesse phonk Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are
(42:58):
executive producers on half of tender Foot TV with producers
Jamie Albright and Meredith Steadman. Original music by Makeup and
Vanity Said. Cover art by Mr Soul to six with
photography by Artemus Jenkins. Special thanks to Owen Rosenbaum and
Grace Royer at U t A, The Nord Group, back
Median Marketing, Envisioned Business Management, and Station sixteen. If you
(43:21):
have questions, you can visit our website, the Email k
Tapes 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. From more podcasts
from I Heart Radio and tender Foot TV, please visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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