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 iHeartRadio and
Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast
are solely those of the podcast author for individuals participating
in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hl Hunt was a Illinois farm boy who came down
the Mississippi River as a gambler and became the world's
richest man in oil and along the way. He had
three families, two of which he started in secret. Well
he was still living with and married to his first wife.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
We're talking to author Harry Hurt, whose book Texas Rich
is an in depth portrait of hl Hunt, a man
whose extraordinary fortune came out of the ground, liquid and black.
Hunt was an unusual person in that he was happy
to spend his wealth on political goals, but he didn't
feel the need to spend it on himself.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
He drove an old car. He drove himself to work
as he posed having a chauffeur. He took his lunch
to work in a brown paper bag. He didn't adorn
himself with jewelry and fancy clothes. And that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
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 even opposed private charity. Hunt
didn't believe in one man, one vote. He thought the
number of votes you cast should be determined by how
(01:41):
much you pay in taxes. He was opposed to the
United Nations, the War on poverty and social security. He
didn't like President Kennedy, and he really really didn't like
Martin Luther King.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I call the Union Hall, I says about of life
and day. Yeah, I said, I thank these people are
planning to kill doctor King.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
The authorities were parade. Oh, we found a gun that
James o'ray bought in Birmingham that killed doctor King. Except
it wasn't the gun that killed doctor King.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
James Lray was a pawn for the official story.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
From My Heart Radio and Tender for TV.
Speaker 6 (02:24):
The plan was to get King to the city because
they wanted it handled in Memphis where Daddy and then
could handle it.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
And I've lived with it so long that my year,
and they scared for me.
Speaker 7 (02:38):
The Lord told me not the word.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
I've been wanting to tell it all my life.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I'm Bill Clayburgh and this is the MLK tapes. After
he staked his claim and made his fortune and oil,
Haroldson Lafayette Hunt moved Dallas, where he took ten acres
overlooking a nearby lake. And for whatever it said about him,
(03:05):
he built a house that mimicked every detail of the
House of George Washington.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
His house in Dallas was made to look like a
replica of Mount Vernon in Virginia to Washington, the George
Washington Estate. And that is about as lavish as a god.
And that's not a particularly ornate structure. It looks almost
like a toy house.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
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.
Speaker 7 (03:44):
There were a good number of them.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
The petitioners would usually come away with some easily afforded contribution,
which made everyone feel good as though they had all
done their part, But to their utter shock, Hunt refused
to give.
Speaker 7 (03:57):
He didn't believe in it.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
He said, thought it made people week. This cost him
and Ruth some social standing in Dallas, but he didn't care.
People should learn to stand up on their own, as
he had done.
Speaker 7 (04:09):
He would say.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Author Harry Hurt found this attitude a touch hypocritical.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
You know, I think that there are pieces of an
American myth of the rugged individual who pulled himself up
by his bootstraps. And I don't need help from anybody.
And you shouldn't need help either. And your problem if
you're struggling financially or in some other ways, because you
(04:39):
don't work hard enough. So it's this kind of puritan
work ethic sort of stuff. There is embedded in that,
of course, a great deal of hypocrisy. I mean, for
one thing, he, like everyone else in the oil business
in that era, benefited from government tax structures which included
(05:03):
the oil depletion allowance and intake right off for intangible
drilling costs, so that you know, he would say, well,
I don't need any help from the government. Well, you
get help from the government. You get big tax breaks
for the government.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Considering the wealthy, commanded Hunt led a relatively simple life,
and in that respect he wasn't a phony. He didn't
own a yacht or a house on the riviera, or
even a fancy car. He didn't take vacations.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
I guess he harkened to a simpler time in America
where you didn't have those kind of luxuries commonly.
Speaker 8 (05:45):
And he had this.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Sort of ethos with his third wife of being just
playing folks, you know, regular people, And so that was
his sort of ethos.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Hunt wasn't just plain folks when it came to his
opposition to John F.
Speaker 7 (06:03):
Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
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. The leader of that church was W. A. Criswell,
(06:25):
a man with strident political views often referred to as
the father of the religious right. As a Democratic convention approached,
Griswell gave a rousing sermon where he said that Kennedy
was unfit to be president because he was a Roman Catholic.
Roman Catholicism is not a religion, he said, it's a
political tyranny.
Speaker 7 (06:44):
If John F.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Kennedy is elected, religious liberty will die in America.
Speaker 7 (06:50):
Hunt liked this sermon.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
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 or friends to do the same. As to
its effect, this effort was too late to derail the
Kennedy campaign, which won the nomination in LA on the
(07:12):
first vote, but it did demonstrate Hunt's willingness to be
a behind the scenes player in national politics again.
Speaker 7 (07:21):
Author Harry Hurt.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
He was for a McCarthys right wing vision of America
in the fifties, and he had radio programs that got
to be I think on five hundred stations between something
called Fax Forum and a successor Lifeline that were basically
(07:47):
the four runners of Fox News and Newsmax, except that
you know they were privately funded by him, and they
were essentially fake news. Now, you can dismiss it on
one level, but the equal fact of the matter is
that people bought into it and drank the.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Kule In Hunt's world and in that of many others
back then, the great satan in the universe was communism,
which had to be fought in every venue. For example,
if you thought that the United Nations was a good thing,
you were probably a communist, or at least willing to
do their work they had termed for people like you.
(08:28):
You were a fellow traveler, or worse, a pinko Lifeline
gave a daily fifteen minute talk on the evils of communism,
or how certain political figures like Kennedy and King were
bringing the dreaded disease to your very door. This is
what Hunt himself had to say about it, and you
might notice who he says is most to blame.
Speaker 9 (08:50):
The land should be drawn between those who love liberty
and our far freedom and those who are in favor
of communism. And I am quite generally in favor of
anyone that is fighting communism. But the communication media rather
(09:16):
is owned and controlled eighty five percent by the opposition.
The newspapers, radio, TV stations, networks are largely in the hands,
we'll say the enemy.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
As part of his crusade to fight against a press
that was soft on communism, Hunt began what was called
the Youth Freedom Speakers, though it never got much beyond Dallas.
In its conception, there were to be thousands of young
people all across the nation who, like Paul Revere, would
spread the alarm by giving fifteen minute talks to roadery
clubs groups on the hidden dangers of communism.
Speaker 10 (10:04):
Many people in the United States really don't believe that
communism is a serious threat, while these people are in
for a big shock because the Communists have every intention
of doing exactly what they've said they'll do, and they
do not hesitate to use force and violence any time
they think that it will further their calls.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the red scare was
on better Dead than Red, was a right wing slogan
with enough true believers that it might be the acceptable
subject for a debate in a high school civics class.
In the military, there was a vocal faction that wanted
to launch a first strike against the Russians, and Kennedy's
choices not to invade Cuba or to pull back from
(10:46):
Vietnam were not popular with many people, including Hunt, who
regularly attacked Kennedy as well as King on his Lifeline
radio program. On the fateful morning in November, when the
President and First Lady would parade in an open car
through downtown Dallas, the local radio station KPCN broadcast the
(11:07):
latest from Lifeline, part of which we will read here.
Speaker 11 (11:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Back in the nineteen sixties, Hunt and Lloyd a young
lawyer named John Currington to be his right hand man
what might be called a fixer. Today, Currington is still alive,
still an attorney in the state of Texas, and he
is also a rancher who, at age ninety three, still
rides a horse and presides over cattle. And he has
come forward to share with us his memories of things
(12:19):
he witnessed and things he did while in the employ
of H. L. Hunt, and particularly those relating to the
murder of Martin Luther King. Curington was an East Texas
country boy. He had a quick mind and did well
at SMU, where he got his law degree. He served
in Korea during the war, where he said it was
(12:40):
so cold that the socks froze to his feet. When
Currington got out of the army, he took his first
ever paying job at the Hunt Oil Company, keeping track
of the oil leases that were presiding over a river
of money. He had been on the job a couple
of years when he received a message that mister Hunt
wanted to see him.
Speaker 12 (13:00):
There were several Hunts there in the company, but when
the name mister Hunt was used, you knew it was
h Old Hunt. And although I had worked for a
Hunt Old Company for several years, part of that call
I had never met mister Hunt, never talked to him.
I immediately interpreted that call as some kind of an
office prank. I didn't want to go, but I knew
(13:24):
I had enough sensor Oh I had to go.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
So, not being able to imagine anything good coming out
of this occasion, Carrington took the elevator up to the
seventh floor, where Hunt had his office. The first person
he encountered was mister Hunt's secretary.
Speaker 12 (13:41):
She just motioned me on end, and Miss Hunt didn't
introduce himself or ask about my health or what I
thought about, no political race. He just stated that he
had been told that I had a reputation of getting
some things done, and he wanted me to start working
directly for him.
Speaker 7 (14:01):
And that was that.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Curington was instantly moved to the seventh floor of the
Mercantile Bank building, where he began to work for H. L.
Speaker 7 (14:09):
Hunt.
Speaker 8 (14:12):
I was given an office immediately next to his, and
the door was normally open between the two of us,
and if he wasn't open, he had a buzzer on
his desk that he could push, and I could answer
that buzzer within a matter of seconds.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Turington was a quick learner, and he sensed that Hunt
was unlike any person he had ever met.
Speaker 7 (14:34):
Right away.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
He understood that he was not to speak unless spoken to.
He was not to offer an uninvited thought, ever, and
that included saying good morning. In Hunt's way of thinking,
such a greeting was a waste of time.
Speaker 12 (14:48):
I never exchanged any pleasant trees with mister Hunt. I
never asked him out his hells. I never said good morning.
I'd never asked him if he'd enjoyed the football game.
I had no personal contact relationship with him, and I
think Miss Hunt appreciated that he had no interest in
my background or what I was doing. His only interest
(15:09):
was what he wanted to do and how he wanted
it done.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
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.
Speaker 12 (15:21):
As far as I know, he only slept for or
four hours a night. He was up late at night,
up early of the morning, and he had a forever
idea that I might have or you might have. Miss
Hunt would have a hundred ideas on any different subject.
I had standard orders. I had to call him at
six o'clock am every morning and at ten o'clock pm
(15:44):
every night, and even if we'd talked at nine thirty
pm at night, I'd still call him at ten pm.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Given those responsibilities, one might say that Carrington had a
sixteen hour a day job, but it was worse than that.
He was required to have a telephone next to his bed,
and most nights Hunt would call at some point with
something that was on his mind.
Speaker 12 (16:06):
I don't ever recall not receiving a telephone call from
miss Hunt during the wee hours of the night, and
I'm talking anywhere from eight thirty, nine, thirty ten one,
or two o'clock the next morning there. But he never
made any come in as thank you for answering the phone.
I hope I didn't work you up, but I have
(16:27):
a question. He went directly into a question, and some
of his questions just defied the interpretation of what a
reasonable prudent man might know.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
As mister Hunt's right hand, Currington would manage a wide
variety of things. He handled squabbles between the members of
Hunt's three families. He kept track of all the deals
on the five hundred radio stations that carried Hunt's Lifeline program.
He might carry large amounts of cash from one city
to another, seventy thousand dollars or two hundred thousand, or
(17:00):
even a million, and then hand the money to some
person for a purpose he wasn't privy to. As diverse
and strange as they were, these stories rang true to me.
But there is one piece of Currington's account that I
absolutely don't believe. Carrington says, that whenever he and mister
Hunt flew in a commercial airplane, which they did from
(17:20):
time to time, they always flew in coach, never in
first class. Hunt wouldn't spring for the extra dollars. Remember,
Hunt is the richest man in America and he flies
in coach. Carrington swears it is true. H. L. Hunt
didn't drink and didn't smoke. He stayed away from white flour,
(17:42):
white bread, and white sugar. And the bread he did
eat had to come from a certain county in Texas
which had some mineral in the soil that Hunt felt
was important. But Hunt had one huge bad habit. He
loved to gambell. He loved to bet on horses and
football games, and most of all, he loved to play
in high stakes poker games. He would fly across the
(18:05):
country with John Kirrrington and Coach.
Speaker 7 (18:07):
We were asked to believe so that.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Hunt could play in a game of poker where hundreds
of thousands of dollars would change hands.
Speaker 12 (18:17):
Mister Hunt and I we normally always stay that the
waldolph A story when we were there in New York,
and quite frequently that's where the poker games would occur.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
During the games Carrington would be stationed nearby, and if
Hunt were losing, he would be sent downtown to pick
up more money, like maybe eighty grand, which was a
lot of money back then, And this happened often enough
that Carrington got to know the president of the bank.
Speaker 12 (18:44):
Miss Hunt had a bank account in New York. I
was called a Handover bank, and if my memory shirts
MC correct, the fellow named Adolph Houser was the president
of it. And over the course of years I became
pretty well acquainted with mister Houser. And when Miss Hunt
was in a big card game, if money was needed,
(19:06):
I would catch a subway from the Waldorfer Story down
to Wall Street, pick up the money, put it in
my pockets, and go back. But I had instruction Miss
Hunt not to take a taxi to pick that money up,
because taxis rides in New York in were about seventy
five or eighty cents a trip, so I was instructed
(19:28):
to take the subway as it was a little cheaper
mode of transportation.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
In nineteen sixty three, Hunt and Keirrrington would spend a
hunk of time in New York. Time that had nothing
to do with poker. It had to do with an
idea that came to Hunt in the middle of the night.
One they had to do with the World's Fair, which
was set to open in New York in the summer
of nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 12 (19:51):
For many years we always had a display at State
Ferry there in Dallas for the State of Texas. There
every year, we had a pretty leverage set up. We
had free drinks for people of cool area chairs. But
he used it primarily to distribute material on his Lifeline program.
(20:13):
So he came up with the idea that if it
worked in Dallas at the State Fair, then it would
work in New York at the New York's Worldfare, but
on a much bigger scale, and it would be used
as a money making venture for amusement rides and concession stands.
Plus it would be a distribution center for his Lifeline
(20:35):
radio program material and his Lifeline TV material. And negotiations
were made and a fellow named Robert Moses. He lets
you know very promptly when meeting him that he was
a top dog and he didn't expect any conversation from
anybody else.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
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 Triburial Bridge
and Tunnel Authority, along with a dozen other important positions,
including President of the New York World's Fair.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
When it came to building.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
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.
Speaker 12 (21:28):
Negotiations were made to lease a multi acre of state
there at the World Fair. We would put amusement rides
throughout our area that we were going to operate, plus
there would be numerous concession stands, and in theory it
would have been a great money making ideal. And immediately
(21:48):
after we signed a contract for the land at the
World's Fair, I went to Germany and bought several different
kind of amusement rides, and they were expensive rides. Most
of those rides came out of Germany and they were
shipped from Germany to New York.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
So, after the deal was signed and big money had
been spent on the rides and attractions, Moses called hunt
and Carrington back to his office.
Speaker 12 (22:15):
At that time, we thought we were doing a great
job of what we were supposed to do, and it
was sort of patting ourselves on the back. But Robert
Moses walked in and without any great fanfare, he said
a decision had been made that he was going to
cancel mister Hunt's contract for his amusement rides, and on
(22:36):
the grounds that he felt like it was going to
be outlet for mister propaganda material from his Lifeline program.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
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
for the nasty campaign Hunt had run against.
Speaker 7 (22:59):
President.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Hunt called Vice President Lyndon Johnson to see if he
could intervene, but Johnson said that the decision had been
made above him.
Speaker 7 (23:08):
And that he could do nothing about it.
Speaker 12 (23:11):
From that moment, Miss Trunt was pretty well aware that
Lyndon Johnson was going to be dropped from the ticket
in nineteen sixty four, that Lyndon Johnson was losing his
power and influence. Every day after we were kicked out
of the World Fair. We probably stated in New York
another thirty days to wind up a lot of activities.
(23:31):
But on the way back to flying back to Dallas
from New York, Miss Hunt and I shall ever engaged
in personal conversations. We would fly side beside on an
airplane if he wanted to say something. I listened, but
I never volunteered any statements there. But on this particular trip,
Miss Hunt looked over and he says, John, I've just
(23:53):
about had a belly full of the Kennedy boys. They
both need to go.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
We will return to hl Hunt and John Currington and
Currington's revelations about the murder of Martin Luther King, But
for that story to make sense, we need to first
visit another man with whom hl Hunt had an unusual relationship,
J A. Garhover, the lifelong director of the FBI. Shortly
(24:34):
after James Earl Ray was captured in London, j Edgar Hoover,
director of the FBI, met with Attorney General Ramsey Clark
and told him quote, we are dealing with a man
who is not an ordinary criminal. Ray is a racist
and detests negroes and Martin Luther King The question here
is why, before Ray had even been charged with the murder,
(24:57):
was j Edgar Hoover so eager to get give him
a motive? And how did he know that Ray detested
Martin Luther King in courtroom law. Motive is not a
necessary element of murder. If you can prove a person
killed someone, you don't have to know why. But if
you're looking at an unsolved murder, motive is normally the
(25:19):
first thing to consider. Who might want this person dead?
Or better still, was someone already.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
Trying to harm him?
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Any TV cop worth his salt starts with this. There were,
of course many people who did not like doctor King,
and perhaps many who wished him dead, But there was
one person with great resources who was already.
Speaker 7 (25:40):
Trying to harm him.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
It was the director of the FBI, j Edgar Hoover,
the same man who was the first to give Ray
his motive. No one, of course, dared question Hoover about
this at the time, but once Hoover died in nineteen
seventy two, there were calls to look into the activities
of the FBI, and particularly those in.
Speaker 7 (25:59):
Regard to Martin Luther King.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
The Committee under Senator Frank Church made their report in
nineteen seventy six, and this is what Senator Church had
to say about the activities of the FBI.
Speaker 13 (26:12):
We have seen today the dark side of those activities,
where many Americans who were not even suspected of crime
were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, They
were discredited and at times endangered through the covert operations
(26:32):
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
During the nineteen fifties, Jay Agar Hoover was at the
height of his power. His g men had hunted the folk,
Heiro bankroppers into extinction. Communists hiding in the halls of
government were his very reason for being, and his ghost
written book, Masters of Deceit was a best seller.
Speaker 7 (26:51):
But in nineteen sixty there.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
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 his own ideas
(27:14):
about how they should be used, and as Council Chris
mothers described to the Church committee. Kennedy got things off
to a bad start by asking a simple question.
Speaker 14 (27:24):
So Kennedy wrote a memorandum asking mister Hoover how many
Negro special agents he had. Mister Hoover wrote back, we
don't catalog people by race, creed, or color. Mister Kennedy
came back with another very nice letter. That's a little
laudatory attitude. You are commended to have it, but I
still want to know how many Negro special agents do
(27:44):
you have? So we were in trouble. It so happened
at during the war he had five Negro chauffeurs, so
he automatically made them special agents. So now we wrote
back and said we had five.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
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 finally crimes were committed right in front
of them. In one incident, a plan was made to
(28:22):
attack a bus carrying freedom writers as it arrived in Birmingham, Alabama.
Thomas Rowe, an informant for the FBI, told the Church
committee that he had informed the Bureau about the attack
well before it happened.
Speaker 15 (28:36):
Sir, I gave FBI information pertanning to the Freedom Writers
to so approximately three.
Speaker 16 (28:41):
Weeks before the gird And what did you tell him?
Speaker 15 (28:44):
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 to fifteen minutes with absolutely
no intervention from any police officer whatsoever. The information was
passed on to the berread as route testified.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
The passengers on that bus were badly beaten, and a
second bus was attacked outside of Birmingham and set on fire.
In Montgomery, Alabama, Freedom Writers were viciously attacked, some sustaining
life altering injuries as they were beaten on the head
and face with pipes. And what did John Patterson, the
governor of Alabama, have to say about it?
Speaker 12 (29:26):
We can't act as nurse maids to agitators.
Speaker 8 (29:30):
I think when they learned.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
That when they go somewhere to Creator to create a rhyme,
that there's not.
Speaker 15 (29:40):
Going to be somebody there to stand between them and
they're the crowd.
Speaker 8 (29:43):
They'll stay home.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
J Edgar Hoover voiced a similar hands off position.
Speaker 17 (29:49):
We certainly do not and will not get protection to
civil rights workers. In the first place, The FBI is
not a police organization. It's purely an investigated organization, and
the protection of individual citizens, either natives of the state
or coming into the state, is a matter.
Speaker 5 (30:06):
For the local authorities.
Speaker 17 (30:07):
The FBI will not participate in any such protection.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Almost every student of the time knows that j Edgar
Hoover wanted to bring down Martin Luther King.
Speaker 7 (30:17):
But why.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
The perfect person to ask is Beverly Gage, a professor
of history at Yale who has written a biography of
Hoover titled g Man, to be released by Viking later
this year. We spoke a few months ago, and I
asked Professor Gage what brought her to Hoover.
Speaker 18 (30:36):
What attracted me to writing this book was not only
that Hoover himself is a fascinating figure and a fascinating
personality in his own right, but that the scope of
his career really covers almost all of the twentieth century.
He became director of the FBI in nineteen twenty four,
and he died in that job in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
When looking back on the nineteen fifties and sixties, the
standard rap on Hoover was that he did not and
would not vigorously investigate organized crime to keep the record balance.
Professor Gage mentioned a few modest crime programs that the
FBI did initiate in the nineteen fifties. But then there
was Hoover's big embarrassment.
Speaker 18 (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 consult with each other was found at
Appalachian in New York, he was quite surprised and chagrined
(31:42):
by that.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
It happened in the rural town of Appalachian, New York.
In August of nineteen fifty seven, mobster Joe Barbara hosted
a gathering of crime bosses from across the country at
his estate. The purpose was to keep the peace and
decide who was to get what. But so many slick
cars without a state plates brought the police, who netted
sixty men in silk suits, some caught hiding in the woods,
(32:07):
who were the virtual who's who of American crime. Of course,
having a picnic with friends wasn't against the law, so
none of them did any real time, But Hoover was
severely embarrassed because, according to him, organized crime didn't exist.
The FBI then did initiate some anti crime programs, but
many observers feel that these were nothing more than something
(32:28):
to point to rather than real attempts to bring down
organized crime. As far as Martin Luther King, the official
explanation for Hoover's abusive conduct was that he was protecting
the country from communists who were supposedly infiltrating the civil
rights movement. Hoover's big claim was that an advisor to King,
a man named Stanley Levinson.
Speaker 7 (32:50):
Was said to be a communist. In the nineteen.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
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 genuine concern
of Hoover's or just a way for him to bargain
for closer surveillance of King.
Speaker 18 (33:15):
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 domestic communist threat, So he had his
own ideological lens through which he would have interpreted the
(33:37):
evidence about Odell and Levison in very, very alarmist ways.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
How alarmist consider this? In August nineteen sixty three, Martin
Luther King led a march on Washington and touched the
heart of a nation with a speech that invoked dreams
of love, peace, and brotherhood. Two days later, Assistant Director
of the FBI William Sullivan wrote a memo to Hoover
(34:04):
in which he termed King the most dangerous Negro in America.
But what came next was more chilling. It may be unrealistic.
Sullivan wrote to Hoover to limit ourselves to legalistic proofs
or evidence that would stand up in court or before
congressional committees.
Speaker 7 (34:22):
What did you have in mind? Just three months.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
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, 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,
(34:48):
and Memphis. What was the meeting about, we asked Professor Gage.
Speaker 18 (34:54):
So the main focus of that meeting was really trying
to figure out how to take down Martin Luther King,
how to build a apparatus that was going to destroy
King personally. That was the stated goal. They were quite
explicit about laying out a campaign to destroy King.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
The FBI campaign against King that emerged from that all
day meeting was vicious and relentless. This is how Council
Fred Schwartz described it to the members of the Church
Committee in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 16 (35:28):
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
as to how best to attack him, and he was
attacked after a Time magazine named him a Man of
(35:50):
the Year again, the Bureau finds that reprehensible, believes it
must attack and destroy it when he was given the
Nobel Prize.
Speaker 5 (35:58):
Again, they seek to discredit doctor King.
Speaker 16 (36:02):
The FBI sought to prevent the Pope from meeting with
Doctor King. His effort went.
Speaker 7 (36:07):
On and on and on.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Most FBI agents who were involved in the anti King
activities have said very little about it over the years.
Speaker 7 (36:16):
But there was.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
One agent, Arthur Murtaw, who was assigned to the anti
King squad in Atlanta, who has come forward. This is
what he had to say from the witness stand at
race televised mock trial in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 19 (36:30):
I was on a squad that was referred to as
a security squad. I would say that probably ninety eight
percent of the time of the people on that squad
was involved in one way or another with the investigation
of doctor King. They also were involved in counter intelligence
(36:54):
operations which were designed to make up stories about doctor King,
any kind of a story to detegrate his character and
then go to what the Bureau referred to and the
Bureau of Papers referred to as friendly members of the press.
I was very ambivalent about what to do. I knew
(37:16):
about a lot of this stuff at least by nineteen.
Speaker 11 (37:19):
Fifty five, and it bothered me.
Speaker 20 (37:23):
I didn't know whether to resign or stay in.
Speaker 19 (37:27):
One of my brothers said to me, we had a
big family, eight of us.
Speaker 20 (37:31):
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 his pocket with his secret files.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
As Mirtaja said, the ongoing operations against King were referred
to in the FBI as counter intelligence, as the King
were some sort of Russian spy. But once Hoover got
permission to wiretap King, virtually none of the resulting reports
dealt with Communist influence. They focused instead on embarrassing material
in King's private life that could be used to bring
(38:14):
him down. Virtually every hotel room King would occupy was bugged,
and Hoover began collecting tapes that were sent to an
FBI lab to be reconstructed or improved, tapes that he
could share with political allies and various news outlets. But
Hoover was frustrated when no one wanted to run with
his story, so, as Professor Gage tells us, he had
(38:36):
another idea.
Speaker 18 (38:38):
The FBI puts together an audio tape of some of
what they've captured in King's hotel room, and Sullivan also
writes a letter that purports to be from a former
admirer of Kings who has found out about King's private
and sexual life and is now rush by what he's discovered.
(39:01):
It's really vicious and really over the top. It calls
King a beast, a disgusting creature. It goes into details
about some of the women that he's alleged to be seeing.
It uses every kind of sexualized racial stereotype that you
can imagine. And this letter concludes by saying, you know
(39:24):
what you have to do? An attempt by the FBI
to get him.
Speaker 7 (39:28):
To kill himself.
Speaker 18 (39:30):
That letter became public for the first time, or knowledge
of that letter became public in the nineteen seventies, when
the Church Committee were investigating what it was that the
FBI had been up to in the sixties, what they
have been doing against.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
King, sending the tape in the letter to King, trying
to induce suicide or at least discredit him right before
he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Was a
vicious and highly illegal thing for the FBI to do,
and it was clearly done with Hoover's blessing. It did
not deter King from continuing to lead the fight for
civil rights and economic justice, but he and those close
(40:06):
to him were deeply wounded. Isaac Farris, King's nephew, feels
particularly bitter about the government's assault on his family.
Speaker 21 (40:14):
My aunt had been the victim of j Egar Hoover,
you know, lying to her. He actually sent a tte
to my aunt and uncle's home. It was addressed to
my aunt lay and Behald. It was a recording of
someone sounding to have sex. By this time, my aunt
(40:35):
had had four children by my uncle's so I mean
she was the expert on what he sounded like when
he was having sex, and so I mean she immediately
knew that it was not him, as she said, that's
not my husband.
Speaker 7 (40:49):
I mean, I know how he sounds.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Farris was a young boy at the time King was murdered,
and the version of these events he was given may
have been sanitized, But whether the tapes were genuine faked
or improved. Recording these events under the guise of looking
for communists and then using these recordings to try to
destroy King was a crime, a serious crime, perpetrated by
(41:13):
j Edgar Hoover himself.
Speaker 7 (41:23):
Next time on the MLK tapes.
Speaker 22 (41:26):
Should the Committee take special note that the conduct of
the FBI and this conspiracy of harassment of doctor King
was not only unjustified as policy, it was also illegal
and unconstitutional.
Speaker 12 (41:40):
Hoover used to send in Toulson on a regular basis
to meet with the Adkins family to Dixie Mafia people.
Speaker 6 (41:50):
The plan was to get King to the city because
Tolson said that they wanted it handled in Memphis where
Detdie and Nim could handled. Now from Hoover, yeah, I
don't think Cloud was doing that on his own.
Speaker 12 (42:04):
I've never heard such now language as Lenda Johnson used
in describing here stealing from Martin Lusey King, and the
same same with Jagor Hoover.
Speaker 23 (42:15):
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
gat in that city, and his immediate reaction to me
was is He Dead?
Speaker 24 (42:37):
Thanks for listening to The MLK Tapes, a production of
iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This podcast is not specifically
endorsed by the King Family or the King of State.
The MLK Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Claper,
Matt Frederick, and Alex Williams our executive producers on behalf
of iHeart Radio with producers Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.
Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on half
(42:59):
of tender Foot TV with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stedman.
Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by
Mister Soul two one six with photography by Artemis Jenkins.
Special thanks to Owin Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at UTA,
the Nord Group, Beck Median Marketing, Envision Business Management, and
(43:20):
Station sixteen. If you have questions, you can visit our website,
the emailktapes dot com. We posted photos and videos related
to the podcast on our social media accounts. You can
check them out at the emailk Tapes. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to the MLK Tapes, a production of iHeartRadio and
Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast
are solely those of the podcast author for individuals participating
in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hl Hunt was a Illinois farm boy who came down
the Mississippi River as a gambler and became the world's
richest man in oil and along the way. He had
three families, two of which he started in secret. Well
he was still living with and married to his first wife.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
We're talking to author Harry Hurt, whose book Texas Rich
is an in depth portrait of hl Hunt, a man
whose extraordinary fortune came out of the ground, liquid and black.
Hunt was an unusual person in that he was happy
to spend his wealth on political goals, but he didn't
feel the need to spend it on himself.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
He drove an old car. He drove himself to work
as he posed having a chauffeur. He took his lunch
to work in a brown paper bag. He didn't adorn
himself with jewelry and fancy clothes. And that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
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 even opposed private charity. Hunt
didn't believe in one man, one vote. He thought the
number of votes you cast should be determined by how
(01:41):
much you pay in taxes. He was opposed to the
United Nations, the War on poverty and social security. He
didn't like President Kennedy, and he really really didn't like
Martin Luther King.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I call the Union Hall, I says about of life
and day. Yeah, I said, I thank these people are
planning to kill doctor King.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
The authorities were parade. Oh, we found a gun that
James o'ray bought in Birmingham that killed doctor King. Except
it wasn't the gun that killed doctor King.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
James Lray was a pawn for the official story.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
From My Heart Radio and Tender for TV.
Speaker 6 (02:24):
The plan was to get King to the city because
they wanted it handled in Memphis where Daddy and then
could handle it.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
And I've lived with it so long that my year,
and they scared for me.
Speaker 7 (02:38):
The Lord told me not the word.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
I've been wanting to tell it all my life.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I'm Bill Clayburgh and this is the MLK tapes. After
he staked his claim and made his fortune and oil,
Haroldson Lafayette Hunt moved Dallas, where he took ten acres
overlooking a nearby lake. And for whatever it said about him,
(03:05):
he built a house that mimicked every detail of the
House of George Washington.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
His house in Dallas was made to look like a
replica of Mount Vernon in Virginia to Washington, the George
Washington Estate. And that is about as lavish as a god.
And that's not a particularly ornate structure. It looks almost
like a toy house.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
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.
Speaker 7 (03:44):
There were a good number of them.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
The petitioners would usually come away with some easily afforded contribution,
which made everyone feel good as though they had all
done their part, But to their utter shock, Hunt refused
to give.
Speaker 7 (03:57):
He didn't believe in it.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
He said, thought it made people week. This cost him
and Ruth some social standing in Dallas, but he didn't care.
People should learn to stand up on their own, as
he had done.
Speaker 7 (04:09):
He would say.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Author Harry Hurt found this attitude a touch hypocritical.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
You know, I think that there are pieces of an
American myth of the rugged individual who pulled himself up
by his bootstraps. And I don't need help from anybody.
And you shouldn't need help either. And your problem if
you're struggling financially or in some other ways, because you
(04:39):
don't work hard enough. So it's this kind of puritan
work ethic sort of stuff. There is embedded in that,
of course, a great deal of hypocrisy. I mean, for
one thing, he, like everyone else in the oil business
in that era, benefited from government tax structures which included
(05:03):
the oil depletion allowance and intake right off for intangible
drilling costs, so that you know, he would say, well,
I don't need any help from the government. Well, you
get help from the government. You get big tax breaks
for the government.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Considering the wealthy, commanded Hunt led a relatively simple life,
and in that respect he wasn't a phony. He didn't
own a yacht or a house on the riviera, or
even a fancy car. He didn't take vacations.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
I guess he harkened to a simpler time in America
where you didn't have those kind of luxuries commonly.
Speaker 8 (05:45):
And he had this.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Sort of ethos with his third wife of being just
playing folks, you know, regular people, And so that was
his sort of ethos.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Hunt wasn't just plain folks when it came to his
opposition to John F.
Speaker 7 (06:03):
Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
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. The leader of that church was W. A. Criswell,
(06:25):
a man with strident political views often referred to as
the father of the religious right. As a Democratic convention approached,
Griswell gave a rousing sermon where he said that Kennedy
was unfit to be president because he was a Roman Catholic.
Roman Catholicism is not a religion, he said, it's a
political tyranny.
Speaker 7 (06:44):
If John F.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Kennedy is elected, religious liberty will die in America.
Speaker 7 (06:50):
Hunt liked this sermon.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
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 or friends to do the same. As to
its effect, this effort was too late to derail the
Kennedy campaign, which won the nomination in LA on the
(07:12):
first vote, but it did demonstrate Hunt's willingness to be
a behind the scenes player in national politics again.
Speaker 7 (07:21):
Author Harry Hurt.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
He was for a McCarthys right wing vision of America
in the fifties, and he had radio programs that got
to be I think on five hundred stations between something
called Fax Forum and a successor Lifeline that were basically
(07:47):
the four runners of Fox News and Newsmax, except that
you know they were privately funded by him, and they
were essentially fake news. Now, you can dismiss it on
one level, but the equal fact of the matter is
that people bought into it and drank the.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Kule In Hunt's world and in that of many others
back then, the great satan in the universe was communism,
which had to be fought in every venue. For example,
if you thought that the United Nations was a good thing,
you were probably a communist, or at least willing to
do their work they had termed for people like you.
(08:28):
You were a fellow traveler, or worse, a pinko Lifeline
gave a daily fifteen minute talk on the evils of communism,
or how certain political figures like Kennedy and King were
bringing the dreaded disease to your very door. This is
what Hunt himself had to say about it, and you
might notice who he says is most to blame.
Speaker 9 (08:50):
The land should be drawn between those who love liberty
and our far freedom and those who are in favor
of communism. And I am quite generally in favor of
anyone that is fighting communism. But the communication media rather
(09:16):
is owned and controlled eighty five percent by the opposition.
The newspapers, radio, TV stations, networks are largely in the hands,
we'll say the enemy.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
As part of his crusade to fight against a press
that was soft on communism, Hunt began what was called
the Youth Freedom Speakers, though it never got much beyond Dallas.
In its conception, there were to be thousands of young
people all across the nation who, like Paul Revere, would
spread the alarm by giving fifteen minute talks to roadery
clubs groups on the hidden dangers of communism.
Speaker 10 (10:04):
Many people in the United States really don't believe that
communism is a serious threat, while these people are in
for a big shock because the Communists have every intention
of doing exactly what they've said they'll do, and they
do not hesitate to use force and violence any time
they think that it will further their calls.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the red scare was
on better Dead than Red, was a right wing slogan
with enough true believers that it might be the acceptable
subject for a debate in a high school civics class.
In the military, there was a vocal faction that wanted
to launch a first strike against the Russians, and Kennedy's
choices not to invade Cuba or to pull back from
(10:46):
Vietnam were not popular with many people, including Hunt, who
regularly attacked Kennedy as well as King on his Lifeline
radio program. On the fateful morning in November, when the
President and First Lady would parade in an open car
through downtown Dallas, the local radio station KPCN broadcast the
(11:07):
latest from Lifeline, part of which we will read here.
Speaker 11 (11:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Back in the nineteen sixties, Hunt and Lloyd a young
lawyer named John Currington to be his right hand man
what might be called a fixer. Today, Currington is still alive,
still an attorney in the state of Texas, and he
is also a rancher who, at age ninety three, still
rides a horse and presides over cattle. And he has
come forward to share with us his memories of things
(12:19):
he witnessed and things he did while in the employ
of H. L. Hunt, and particularly those relating to the
murder of Martin Luther King. Curington was an East Texas
country boy. He had a quick mind and did well
at SMU, where he got his law degree. He served
in Korea during the war, where he said it was
(12:40):
so cold that the socks froze to his feet. When
Currington got out of the army, he took his first
ever paying job at the Hunt Oil Company, keeping track
of the oil leases that were presiding over a river
of money. He had been on the job a couple
of years when he received a message that mister Hunt
wanted to see him.
Speaker 12 (13:00):
There were several Hunts there in the company, but when
the name mister Hunt was used, you knew it was
h Old Hunt. And although I had worked for a
Hunt Old Company for several years, part of that call
I had never met mister Hunt, never talked to him.
I immediately interpreted that call as some kind of an
office prank. I didn't want to go, but I knew
(13:24):
I had enough sensor Oh I had to go.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
So, not being able to imagine anything good coming out
of this occasion, Carrington took the elevator up to the
seventh floor, where Hunt had his office. The first person
he encountered was mister Hunt's secretary.
Speaker 12 (13:41):
She just motioned me on end, and Miss Hunt didn't
introduce himself or ask about my health or what I
thought about, no political race. He just stated that he
had been told that I had a reputation of getting
some things done, and he wanted me to start working
directly for him.
Speaker 7 (14:01):
And that was that.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Curington was instantly moved to the seventh floor of the
Mercantile Bank building, where he began to work for H. L.
Speaker 7 (14:09):
Hunt.
Speaker 8 (14:12):
I was given an office immediately next to his, and
the door was normally open between the two of us,
and if he wasn't open, he had a buzzer on
his desk that he could push, and I could answer
that buzzer within a matter of seconds.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Turington was a quick learner, and he sensed that Hunt
was unlike any person he had ever met.
Speaker 7 (14:34):
Right away.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
He understood that he was not to speak unless spoken to.
He was not to offer an uninvited thought, ever, and
that included saying good morning. In Hunt's way of thinking,
such a greeting was a waste of time.
Speaker 12 (14:48):
I never exchanged any pleasant trees with mister Hunt. I
never asked him out his hells. I never said good morning.
I'd never asked him if he'd enjoyed the football game.
I had no personal contact relationship with him, and I
think Miss Hunt appreciated that he had no interest in
my background or what I was doing. His only interest
(15:09):
was what he wanted to do and how he wanted
it done.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
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.
Speaker 12 (15:21):
As far as I know, he only slept for or
four hours a night. He was up late at night,
up early of the morning, and he had a forever
idea that I might have or you might have. Miss
Hunt would have a hundred ideas on any different subject.
I had standard orders. I had to call him at
six o'clock am every morning and at ten o'clock pm
(15:44):
every night, and even if we'd talked at nine thirty
pm at night, I'd still call him at ten pm.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Given those responsibilities, one might say that Carrington had a
sixteen hour a day job, but it was worse than that.
He was required to have a telephone next to his bed,
and most nights Hunt would call at some point with
something that was on his mind.
Speaker 12 (16:06):
I don't ever recall not receiving a telephone call from
miss Hunt during the wee hours of the night, and
I'm talking anywhere from eight thirty, nine, thirty ten one,
or two o'clock the next morning there. But he never
made any come in as thank you for answering the phone.
I hope I didn't work you up, but I have
(16:27):
a question. He went directly into a question, and some
of his questions just defied the interpretation of what a
reasonable prudent man might know.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
As mister Hunt's right hand, Currington would manage a wide
variety of things. He handled squabbles between the members of
Hunt's three families. He kept track of all the deals
on the five hundred radio stations that carried Hunt's Lifeline program.
He might carry large amounts of cash from one city
to another, seventy thousand dollars or two hundred thousand, or
(17:00):
even a million, and then hand the money to some
person for a purpose he wasn't privy to. As diverse
and strange as they were, these stories rang true to me.
But there is one piece of Currington's account that I
absolutely don't believe. Carrington says, that whenever he and mister
Hunt flew in a commercial airplane, which they did from
(17:20):
time to time, they always flew in coach, never in
first class. Hunt wouldn't spring for the extra dollars. Remember,
Hunt is the richest man in America and he flies
in coach. Carrington swears it is true. H. L. Hunt
didn't drink and didn't smoke. He stayed away from white flour,
(17:42):
white bread, and white sugar. And the bread he did
eat had to come from a certain county in Texas
which had some mineral in the soil that Hunt felt
was important. But Hunt had one huge bad habit. He
loved to gambell. He loved to bet on horses and
football games, and most of all, he loved to play
in high stakes poker games. He would fly across the
(18:05):
country with John Kirrrington and Coach.
Speaker 7 (18:07):
We were asked to believe so that.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Hunt could play in a game of poker where hundreds
of thousands of dollars would change hands.
Speaker 12 (18:17):
Mister Hunt and I we normally always stay that the
waldolph A story when we were there in New York,
and quite frequently that's where the poker games would occur.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
During the games Carrington would be stationed nearby, and if
Hunt were losing, he would be sent downtown to pick
up more money, like maybe eighty grand, which was a
lot of money back then, And this happened often enough
that Carrington got to know the president of the bank.
Speaker 12 (18:44):
Miss Hunt had a bank account in New York. I
was called a Handover bank, and if my memory shirts
MC correct, the fellow named Adolph Houser was the president
of it. And over the course of years I became
pretty well acquainted with mister Houser. And when Miss Hunt
was in a big card game, if money was needed,
(19:06):
I would catch a subway from the Waldorfer Story down
to Wall Street, pick up the money, put it in
my pockets, and go back. But I had instruction Miss
Hunt not to take a taxi to pick that money up,
because taxis rides in New York in were about seventy
five or eighty cents a trip, so I was instructed
(19:28):
to take the subway as it was a little cheaper
mode of transportation.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
In nineteen sixty three, Hunt and Keirrrington would spend a
hunk of time in New York. Time that had nothing
to do with poker. It had to do with an
idea that came to Hunt in the middle of the night.
One they had to do with the World's Fair, which
was set to open in New York in the summer
of nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 12 (19:51):
For many years we always had a display at State
Ferry there in Dallas for the State of Texas. There
every year, we had a pretty leverage set up. We
had free drinks for people of cool area chairs. But
he used it primarily to distribute material on his Lifeline program.
(20:13):
So he came up with the idea that if it
worked in Dallas at the State Fair, then it would
work in New York at the New York's Worldfare, but
on a much bigger scale, and it would be used
as a money making venture for amusement rides and concession stands.
Plus it would be a distribution center for his Lifeline
(20:35):
radio program material and his Lifeline TV material. And negotiations
were made and a fellow named Robert Moses. He lets
you know very promptly when meeting him that he was
a top dog and he didn't expect any conversation from
anybody else.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
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 Triburial Bridge
and Tunnel Authority, along with a dozen other important positions,
including President of the New York World's Fair.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
When it came to building.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
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.
Speaker 12 (21:28):
Negotiations were made to lease a multi acre of state
there at the World Fair. We would put amusement rides
throughout our area that we were going to operate, plus
there would be numerous concession stands, and in theory it
would have been a great money making ideal. And immediately
(21:48):
after we signed a contract for the land at the
World's Fair, I went to Germany and bought several different
kind of amusement rides, and they were expensive rides. Most
of those rides came out of Germany and they were
shipped from Germany to New York.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
So, after the deal was signed and big money had
been spent on the rides and attractions, Moses called hunt
and Carrington back to his office.
Speaker 12 (22:15):
At that time, we thought we were doing a great
job of what we were supposed to do, and it
was sort of patting ourselves on the back. But Robert
Moses walked in and without any great fanfare, he said
a decision had been made that he was going to
cancel mister Hunt's contract for his amusement rides, and on
(22:36):
the grounds that he felt like it was going to
be outlet for mister propaganda material from his Lifeline program.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
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
for the nasty campaign Hunt had run against.
Speaker 7 (22:59):
President.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Hunt called Vice President Lyndon Johnson to see if he
could intervene, but Johnson said that the decision had been
made above him.
Speaker 7 (23:08):
And that he could do nothing about it.
Speaker 12 (23:11):
From that moment, Miss Trunt was pretty well aware that
Lyndon Johnson was going to be dropped from the ticket
in nineteen sixty four, that Lyndon Johnson was losing his
power and influence. Every day after we were kicked out
of the World Fair. We probably stated in New York
another thirty days to wind up a lot of activities.
(23:31):
But on the way back to flying back to Dallas
from New York, Miss Hunt and I shall ever engaged
in personal conversations. We would fly side beside on an
airplane if he wanted to say something. I listened, but
I never volunteered any statements there. But on this particular trip,
Miss Hunt looked over and he says, John, I've just
(23:53):
about had a belly full of the Kennedy boys. They
both need to go.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
We will return to hl Hunt and John Currington and
Currington's revelations about the murder of Martin Luther King, But
for that story to make sense, we need to first
visit another man with whom hl Hunt had an unusual relationship,
J A. Garhover, the lifelong director of the FBI. Shortly
(24:34):
after James Earl Ray was captured in London, j Edgar Hoover,
director of the FBI, met with Attorney General Ramsey Clark
and told him quote, we are dealing with a man
who is not an ordinary criminal. Ray is a racist
and detests negroes and Martin Luther King The question here
is why, before Ray had even been charged with the murder,
(24:57):
was j Edgar Hoover so eager to get give him
a motive? And how did he know that Ray detested
Martin Luther King in courtroom law. Motive is not a
necessary element of murder. If you can prove a person
killed someone, you don't have to know why. But if
you're looking at an unsolved murder, motive is normally the
(25:19):
first thing to consider. Who might want this person dead?
Or better still, was someone already.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
Trying to harm him?
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Any TV cop worth his salt starts with this. There were,
of course many people who did not like doctor King,
and perhaps many who wished him dead, But there was
one person with great resources who was already.
Speaker 7 (25:40):
Trying to harm him.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
It was the director of the FBI, j Edgar Hoover,
the same man who was the first to give Ray
his motive. No one, of course, dared question Hoover about
this at the time, but once Hoover died in nineteen
seventy two, there were calls to look into the activities
of the FBI, and particularly those in.
Speaker 7 (25:59):
Regard to Martin Luther King.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
The Committee under Senator Frank Church made their report in
nineteen seventy six, and this is what Senator Church had
to say about the activities of the FBI.
Speaker 13 (26:12):
We have seen today the dark side of those activities,
where many Americans who were not even suspected of crime
were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, They
were discredited and at times endangered through the covert operations
(26:32):
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
During the nineteen fifties, Jay Agar Hoover was at the
height of his power. His g men had hunted the folk,
Heiro bankroppers into extinction. Communists hiding in the halls of
government were his very reason for being, and his ghost
written book, Masters of Deceit was a best seller.
Speaker 7 (26:51):
But in nineteen sixty there.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
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 his own ideas
(27:14):
about how they should be used, and as Council Chris
mothers described to the Church committee. Kennedy got things off
to a bad start by asking a simple question.
Speaker 14 (27:24):
So Kennedy wrote a memorandum asking mister Hoover how many
Negro special agents he had. Mister Hoover wrote back, we
don't catalog people by race, creed, or color. Mister Kennedy
came back with another very nice letter. That's a little
laudatory attitude. You are commended to have it, but I
still want to know how many Negro special agents do
(27:44):
you have? So we were in trouble. It so happened
at during the war he had five Negro chauffeurs, so
he automatically made them special agents. So now we wrote
back and said we had five.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
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 finally crimes were committed right in front
of them. In one incident, a plan was made to
(28:22):
attack a bus carrying freedom writers as it arrived in Birmingham, Alabama.
Thomas Rowe, an informant for the FBI, told the Church
committee that he had informed the Bureau about the attack
well before it happened.
Speaker 15 (28:36):
Sir, I gave FBI information pertanning to the Freedom Writers
to so approximately three.
Speaker 16 (28:41):
Weeks before the gird And what did you tell him?
Speaker 15 (28:44):
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 to fifteen minutes with absolutely
no intervention from any police officer whatsoever. The information was
passed on to the berread as route testified.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
The passengers on that bus were badly beaten, and a
second bus was attacked outside of Birmingham and set on fire.
In Montgomery, Alabama, Freedom Writers were viciously attacked, some sustaining
life altering injuries as they were beaten on the head
and face with pipes. And what did John Patterson, the
governor of Alabama, have to say about it?
Speaker 12 (29:26):
We can't act as nurse maids to agitators.
Speaker 8 (29:30):
I think when they learned.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
That when they go somewhere to Creator to create a rhyme,
that there's not.
Speaker 15 (29:40):
Going to be somebody there to stand between them and
they're the crowd.
Speaker 8 (29:43):
They'll stay home.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
J Edgar Hoover voiced a similar hands off position.
Speaker 17 (29:49):
We certainly do not and will not get protection to
civil rights workers. In the first place, The FBI is
not a police organization. It's purely an investigated organization, and
the protection of individual citizens, either natives of the state
or coming into the state, is a matter.
Speaker 5 (30:06):
For the local authorities.
Speaker 17 (30:07):
The FBI will not participate in any such protection.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Almost every student of the time knows that j Edgar
Hoover wanted to bring down Martin Luther King.
Speaker 7 (30:17):
But why.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
The perfect person to ask is Beverly Gage, a professor
of history at Yale who has written a biography of
Hoover titled g Man, to be released by Viking later
this year. We spoke a few months ago, and I
asked Professor Gage what brought her to Hoover.
Speaker 18 (30:36):
What attracted me to writing this book was not only
that Hoover himself is a fascinating figure and a fascinating
personality in his own right, but that the scope of
his career really covers almost all of the twentieth century.
He became director of the FBI in nineteen twenty four,
and he died in that job in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
When looking back on the nineteen fifties and sixties, the
standard rap on Hoover was that he did not and
would not vigorously investigate organized crime to keep the record balance.
Professor Gage mentioned a few modest crime programs that the
FBI did initiate in the nineteen fifties. But then there
was Hoover's big embarrassment.
Speaker 18 (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 consult with each other was found at
Appalachian in New York, he was quite surprised and chagrined
(31:42):
by that.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
It happened in the rural town of Appalachian, New York.
In August of nineteen fifty seven, mobster Joe Barbara hosted
a gathering of crime bosses from across the country at
his estate. The purpose was to keep the peace and
decide who was to get what. But so many slick
cars without a state plates brought the police, who netted
sixty men in silk suits, some caught hiding in the woods,
(32:07):
who were the virtual who's who of American crime. Of course,
having a picnic with friends wasn't against the law, so
none of them did any real time, But Hoover was
severely embarrassed because, according to him, organized crime didn't exist.
The FBI then did initiate some anti crime programs, but
many observers feel that these were nothing more than something
(32:28):
to point to rather than real attempts to bring down
organized crime. As far as Martin Luther King, the official
explanation for Hoover's abusive conduct was that he was protecting
the country from communists who were supposedly infiltrating the civil
rights movement. Hoover's big claim was that an advisor to King,
a man named Stanley Levinson.
Speaker 7 (32:50):
Was said to be a communist. In the nineteen.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
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 genuine concern
of Hoover's or just a way for him to bargain
for closer surveillance of King.
Speaker 18 (33:15):
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 domestic communist threat, So he had his
own ideological lens through which he would have interpreted the
(33:37):
evidence about Odell and Levison in very, very alarmist ways.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
How alarmist consider this? In August nineteen sixty three, Martin
Luther King led a march on Washington and touched the
heart of a nation with a speech that invoked dreams
of love, peace, and brotherhood. Two days later, Assistant Director
of the FBI William Sullivan wrote a memo to Hoover
(34:04):
in which he termed King the most dangerous Negro in America.
But what came next was more chilling. It may be unrealistic.
Sullivan wrote to Hoover to limit ourselves to legalistic proofs
or evidence that would stand up in court or before
congressional committees.
Speaker 7 (34:22):
What did you have in mind? Just three months.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
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, 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,
(34:48):
and Memphis. What was the meeting about, we asked Professor Gage.
Speaker 18 (34:54):
So the main focus of that meeting was really trying
to figure out how to take down Martin Luther King,
how to build a apparatus that was going to destroy
King personally. That was the stated goal. They were quite
explicit about laying out a campaign to destroy King.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
The FBI campaign against King that emerged from that all
day meeting was vicious and relentless. This is how Council
Fred Schwartz described it to the members of the Church
Committee in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 16 (35:28):
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
as to how best to attack him, and he was
attacked after a Time magazine named him a Man of
(35:50):
the Year again, the Bureau finds that reprehensible, believes it
must attack and destroy it when he was given the
Nobel Prize.
Speaker 5 (35:58):
Again, they seek to discredit doctor King.
Speaker 16 (36:02):
The FBI sought to prevent the Pope from meeting with
Doctor King. His effort went.
Speaker 7 (36:07):
On and on and on.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Most FBI agents who were involved in the anti King
activities have said very little about it over the years.
Speaker 7 (36:16):
But there was.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
One agent, Arthur Murtaw, who was assigned to the anti
King squad in Atlanta, who has come forward. This is
what he had to say from the witness stand at
race televised mock trial in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 19 (36:30):
I was on a squad that was referred to as
a security squad. I would say that probably ninety eight
percent of the time of the people on that squad
was involved in one way or another with the investigation
of doctor King. They also were involved in counter intelligence
(36:54):
operations which were designed to make up stories about doctor King,
any kind of a story to detegrate his character and
then go to what the Bureau referred to and the
Bureau of Papers referred to as friendly members of the press.
I was very ambivalent about what to do. I knew
(37:16):
about a lot of this stuff at least by nineteen.
Speaker 11 (37:19):
Fifty five, and it bothered me.
Speaker 20 (37:23):
I didn't know whether to resign or stay in.
Speaker 19 (37:27):
One of my brothers said to me, we had a
big family, eight of us.
Speaker 20 (37:31):
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 his pocket with his secret files.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
As Mirtaja said, the ongoing operations against King were referred
to in the FBI as counter intelligence, as the King
were some sort of Russian spy. But once Hoover got
permission to wiretap King, virtually none of the resulting reports
dealt with Communist influence. They focused instead on embarrassing material
in King's private life that could be used to bring
(38:14):
him down. Virtually every hotel room King would occupy was bugged,
and Hoover began collecting tapes that were sent to an
FBI lab to be reconstructed or improved, tapes that he
could share with political allies and various news outlets. But
Hoover was frustrated when no one wanted to run with
his story, so, as Professor Gage tells us, he had
(38:36):
another idea.
Speaker 18 (38:38):
The FBI puts together an audio tape of some of
what they've captured in King's hotel room, and Sullivan also
writes a letter that purports to be from a former
admirer of Kings who has found out about King's private
and sexual life and is now rush by what he's discovered.
(39:01):
It's really vicious and really over the top. It calls
King a beast, a disgusting creature. It goes into details
about some of the women that he's alleged to be seeing.
It uses every kind of sexualized racial stereotype that you
can imagine. And this letter concludes by saying, you know
(39:24):
what you have to do? An attempt by the FBI
to get him.
Speaker 7 (39:28):
To kill himself.
Speaker 18 (39:30):
That letter became public for the first time, or knowledge
of that letter became public in the nineteen seventies, when
the Church Committee were investigating what it was that the
FBI had been up to in the sixties, what they
have been doing against.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
King, sending the tape in the letter to King, trying
to induce suicide or at least discredit him right before
he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Was a
vicious and highly illegal thing for the FBI to do,
and it was clearly done with Hoover's blessing. It did
not deter King from continuing to lead the fight for
civil rights and economic justice, but he and those close
(40:06):
to him were deeply wounded. Isaac Farris, King's nephew, feels
particularly bitter about the government's assault on his family.
Speaker 21 (40:14):
My aunt had been the victim of j Egar Hoover,
you know, lying to her. He actually sent a tte
to my aunt and uncle's home. It was addressed to
my aunt lay and Behald. It was a recording of
someone sounding to have sex. By this time, my aunt
(40:35):
had had four children by my uncle's so I mean
she was the expert on what he sounded like when
he was having sex, and so I mean she immediately
knew that it was not him, as she said, that's
not my husband.
Speaker 7 (40:49):
I mean, I know how he sounds.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Farris was a young boy at the time King was murdered,
and the version of these events he was given may
have been sanitized, But whether the tapes were genuine faked
or improved. Recording these events under the guise of looking
for communists and then using these recordings to try to
destroy King was a crime, a serious crime, perpetrated by
(41:13):
j Edgar Hoover himself.
Speaker 7 (41:23):
Next time on the MLK tapes.
Speaker 22 (41:26):
Should the Committee take special note that the conduct of
the FBI and this conspiracy of harassment of doctor King
was not only unjustified as policy, it was also illegal
and unconstitutional.
Speaker 12 (41:40):
Hoover used to send in Toulson on a regular basis
to meet with the Adkins family to Dixie Mafia people.
Speaker 6 (41:50):
The plan was to get King to the city because
Tolson said that they wanted it handled in Memphis where
Detdie and Nim could handled. Now from Hoover, yeah, I
don't think Cloud was doing that on his own.
Speaker 12 (42:04):
I've never heard such now language as Lenda Johnson used
in describing here stealing from Martin Lusey King, and the
same same with Jagor Hoover.
Speaker 23 (42:15):
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
gat in that city, and his immediate reaction to me
was is He Dead?
Speaker 24 (42:37):
Thanks for listening to The MLK Tapes, a production of
iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This podcast is not specifically
endorsed by the King Family or the King of State.
The MLK Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Claper,
Matt Frederick, and Alex Williams our executive producers on behalf
of iHeart Radio with producers Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.
Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on half
(42:59):
of tender Foot TV with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stedman.
Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by
Mister Soul two one six with photography by Artemis Jenkins.
Special thanks to Owin Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at UTA,
the Nord Group, Beck Median Marketing, Envision Business Management, and
(43:20):
Station sixteen. If you have questions, you can visit our website,
the emailktapes dot com. We posted photos and videos related
to the podcast on our social media accounts. You can
check them out at the emailk Tapes. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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