Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [201]
The motive for mailing the tape, had the package not been delayed by a mail pileup, had been to ‘scare King off’ from collecting his Nobel Prize – the honor Edgar himself so coveted. Sullivan said years later that the idea originated with Edgar and Clyde, and the record shows that the tape was mailed the day after a demand by Edgar for aggressive action.5
The harassment continued, and for a while King became even more depressed. Then he rallied. After an intense discussion with Abernathy, he decided not to give in to the pressure in any way. ‘We were not going to let Hoover and the FBI turn us around,’ Abernathy recalled in 1989, ‘because we were fighting a just cause.’
Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, 1968, at the age of thirty-nine, the day after making a speech anticipating his own death. Felled by a single rifle shot as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, he died within minutes. Poor black communities across the country exploded in grief and rage. The nation’s leaders joined King’s widow at a funeral attended by 150,000 people.
Edgar was not among the mourners. Although the public was told he was personally running the murder investigation, he spent the following morning having his photograph taken for public relations purposes. The next day he did what he had done after President Kennedy was killed – went to the races. In the weeks that followed, he failed to show up for meetings with the Attorney General to discuss the progress of the inquiry.
Two months later, following a manhunt, a small-time criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested in London and extradited to the United States. He pleaded guilty to King’s murder and was sent to jail for ninety-nine years.
That, however, was not the end of the story. Ray’s guilty plea was the basis of a deal between his attorney and the prosecution. He immediately recanted the plea and requested a mistrial. Then the judge died, and – in spite of repeated legal efforts – the evidence against Ray never was tested in criminal court. He died in jail in 1998.
Few believe Ray acted alone. William Sullivan, who took part in the 1968 investigation, had serious doubts. And ten years later, after a massive new inquiry, Congress’ Assassinations Committee concluded that there had indeed been a conspiracy. It suspected Ray had been hired to shoot King, and that his two brothers were also involved.
After Ray’s arrest, asked whether there was any evidence of conspiracy, Edgar said, ‘None whatsoever.’ The day after the guilty plea, he approved this proposal by DeLoach:
I would like to suggest that consideration be given to advising a friendly newspaper contact on a strictly confidential basis, that Coretta King and Reverend Abernathy are deliberately plotting to keep King’s assassination in the news by pulling the ruse of maintaining that King’s murder was definitely a conspiracy and not committed by one man. This, of course, is obviously a rank trick in order to keep the money coming in to Mrs King and Abernathy. We can do this without any attribution to the FBI and without anyone knowing that the information came from a wiretap.
Ralph Abernathy had two main suspicions at the time. His first thought was that the Ku Klux Klan was behind it. His second, he recalled, was that King had been killed ‘by someone trained or hired by the FBI and acting under orders from J. Edgar Hoover himself.’
In 1988, in a television interview from prison, Ray said he made his original confession only under pressure from the FBI. He claimed agents threatened to jail his father and one of his brothers if he did not do so. He had been framed, Ray alleged, to cover up an FBI plot to kill King.6
The Assassinations Committee did not believe the