Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [202]
Former Atlanta agent Donald Wilson remained bewildered by his superiors’ actions during the hunt for Ray, recalling as he did the strange reaction when he and a colleague spotted a man they believed to be the suspect. ‘We saw the guy when we were driving near an apartment Ray was known to have used … He was the spitting image of Ray, and we thought, you know, “This is it, this is our future. We’re golden!” We got on the radio to the control post and said we wanted to detain the man and ask for identification. But the radio came back and said we were to take no action, return to the office and sign out. We looked at each other in disbelief, but we did as we were told.
‘I’m not saying it was Ray,’ Wilson said. ‘The point is that it could well have been. He wasn’t apprehended till much later, by the police in London. Why were we stopped? The top people were calling the shots, including someone they’d sent down from Washington. I was really suspicious even then. I thought there was something wrong going on …’ Arthur Murtagh, who was also serving in Atlanta at the time, had misgivings, too. ‘I was told we weren’t to talk about conspiracy,’ Murtagh recalled. ‘I think it was a political decision.’
Murtagh recalled the depth of hatred whipped up by Edgar’s long vendetta. ‘When they announced King’s death on the radio,’ he said, ‘my colleague literally jumped in the air and said, “We finally got the son of a bitch!” I don’t know what he meant by “We got him,” but that’s what he said …’
Even if Edgar and the FBI had no part in the actual crime, they must surely bear some of the blame. ‘Among the kind of paralegal groups they did business with,’ said King’s colleague Andrew Young, ‘it is quite possible that one of those groups took it upon themselves to plan and execute Martin’s assassination – knowing that the FBI would be pleased with it and wouldn’t give them too much trouble … They created the climate in which Martin’s assassination was acceptable.’
Character assassination of King continued even while his murder was being investigated. ‘Hoover sent word through one of his appointed leaks,’ said Jack Anderson, ‘that they had a line on the assassination. They said King had been playing around with a dentist’s wife in Los Angeles, and they thought the dentist might have killed King in revenge. I couldn’t ignore the lead, so I went to see her – she was a very beautiful woman. She more or less admitted she and King had been lovers.
‘What the FBI had told me seemed to fit together, until I talked to the husband. It was obvious that he had neither the inclination nor the ability to have killed King, and that the FBI story was false. My conclusion was that Hoover was hoping I’d bite and run a story – because the effect would’ve been to discredit King. The real story he wanted out was that King had been running around with other men’s wives.’
Edgar later strove to prevent King’s birthday from being declared a national holiday, and approved a scheme to persuade members of Congress that King had been a ‘scoundrel.’ Such briefings, he stressed, should be conducted ‘very cautiously.’ The politicians were briefed, and King’s birthday was not declared a holiday until 1983.
In 1975 President Ford would declare that those responsible for the FBI smear operation against King should be brought to trial. The FBI Director who succeeded Edgar, Clarence Kelley, agreed with him. By then Edgar was dead, as was Clyde. Other officials involved were still alive, but none was ever charged.
There was no grief in Edgar’s office, two months after King’s assassination, when Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. ‘Goddamn the Kennedys!