Kennedys and King Test host626

Category: Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews of television programs and on-line videos treating the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., its historical and political context and aftermath, and the investigations conducted.

  • King in the Wilderness

    King in the Wilderness

    There were three documentaries prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination: Hope and Fury was a production of NBC; I am MLK Jr. was prepared by the Viacom network;  but perhaps the most interesting of the productions was HBO’s King in the Wilderness.

    Peter Kunhardt is an experienced filmmaker who has previously produced and directed documentaries on a wide variety of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon.  Kunhardt chose to direct this production and he collaborated with a writer he knew, Chris Chuang, who had worked with on a documentary from the previous year about Warren Buffett.

    King in the Wilderness has two defining qualities that differentiate it from the other two films and from previous King documentaries I have seen.  First, it does not deal with King’s entire career—not even close. It limits itself to the last years of his life. The focus is on the time interval from the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 until his death in Memphis and the following funeral in Atlanta in 1968.  Second, it does not feature the usual professional pundits as talking heads.  So, thankfully, we are spared pretentious gasbags like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw.

    The film begins with shots of the King home in Atlanta.  We then learn that several of King’s friends and working colleagues gathered there for the anniversary of his death.  They will be the interview subjects for the film. When they appear, we see them in close-up looking directly at the camera. Thus we listen to King’s attorney Clarence Jones, his close colleague in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Andrew Young, his friend the actor and singer Harry Belafonte, Dianne Nash of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), singer and activist Joan Baez, and SCLC Chicago representative Jesse Jackson, among others.

    I should note one other distinguishing feature.  In criticizing the documentaries of actor Tom Hanks, I have written that, aesthetically, they are purely assembly line productions.  As far as the way they are made, there is nothing at all distinguishing about them. With Hanks and his company Playtone, it is almost as if stylistically acute documentaries like The Power of Nightmares and The Kid Stays in the Picture had never been made.  Kunhardt’s film is not a cornucopia of new ideas in that respect, but it does have some visual panache and interest to it.

    In fact, it begins with the viewer going behind the scenes of a news interview with King.  Sander Vanocur, NBC’s national correspondent at the time, is seen rehearsing an interview with the civil rights leader—clapboard included.  King recalls his famous “I Have a Dream” speech made during the March on Washington in August of 1963.  That speech was made in aid of passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  He comments that in light of what has happened to America in the meantime, the dream he spoke about has now become something of a nightmare.  The reference points he is speaking about are, of course, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the recurrent rioting, and accompanying fatalities, that had become so frequent by 1967.

    The film tries to elucidate some of his chagrin by depicting both sides of a taped discussion of the 1965 Watts riot between King and President Johnson. He tells the president that unless he does something to give people in the black slum areas some hope, he fears that those areas will become tinderboxes of violence. Which, as we know, they did.  Johnson did not do very much to offer any change or hope for those living in places like Watts because of his escalation of the Vietnam War—a theme to be developed later.

    The film then sketches in another dispute that King was having in this time period.  Because of these recurrent riots, and because so many of them began with an instance of police brutality, and because of the continuing violent acts by white terrorists—for instance the shooting of James Meredith during his March Against Fear in Mississippi—King began to catch some heat from what many saw as an unlikely source.

    For instance, after Meredith was wounded and hospitalized by a white man, King’s group, the SCLC, stepped in to complete the march.  But so did other groups, like the SNCC.  By 1966, Stokely Carmichael had become the leading public figure in the SNCC.  During the completion of this march, Carmichael started to use a previously unmentioned term: “Black Power”.  This signaled the beginning of a different type of approach from King’s Gandhi-inspired civil disobedience through non-violent techniques (for example, lunch counter sit-ins).  Carmichael’s message, which he deliberately made in King’s presence, was closer to what Malcolm X had been preaching in New York, and would lead to the creation of the Black Panthers in the San Francisco/Oakland area.  King was placed on the spot by Carmichael’s provocation.  He replied that, while he supported Carmichael, he did not endorse the connotations of the message. The film depicts this colloquy with the two figures standing next to each other.  Carmichael then responds by saying that he is not as committed to non-violence as Dr. King is.

    After this point is addressed, the film takes up another pressure point on the civil rights leader.  In a taped phone call between Mayor Richard Daley and President Johnson, Daley tells the president that he knows that King is not with him on the war in Vietnam.  Daley knows this since King has now turned his civil rights demonstrations north into Daley’s city of Chicago.  This was in fact in response to an issue that Bobby Kennedy had been trying to raise awareness of for years prior to this move. As Kennedy had said at the time: What good does it do for an African-American to be able to sit at a lunch counter if he doesn’t have the money to pay for the lunch?  So King and SCLC coordinator James Bevel decided to target the city of Chicago to address a more insidious pattern of racism in the north.

    To say that King was not welcome in the north understates the antipathy that awaited him in the Windy City. During his marches he was greeted with rock throwing, loud racial slurs like “Niggers go home!”, and ugly signs. For instance, one placard said, “We Want Wallace”, meaning Alabama governor George Wallace. Another, in direct opposition to Carmichael, said “White Power”.  It got so bad that King needed police protection.  Further, Daley proved a formidable counter-puncher. Understanding his past successes, he was determined not to put King in jail. And when he heard the police had placed some of his demonstrators behind bars, he immediately ordered their release.

    As Young comments, he was not so sure that King should have taken this project on at the time.  Chicago was a huge city with a very entrenched power structure.  He did not think the SCLC had the money or manpower to manage such a crusade.  King did get an agreement after several months, concerning fair housing and integration of the city work force.  Whether or not the city abided by it afterwards has been a point of controversy among scholars and writers ever since.

    Around this time, in late 1966, King decided to meet with Carmichael to discuss precisely what he meant by the phrase “Black Power”.  Carmichael and another SNCC representative, Cleveland Sellers, countered King by asking him when he was going to come out against the war in Vietnam.  Carmichael memorably said, “No Vietnamese ever called me a Nigger.”  This was a risky step. As Johnson domestic aide Joe Califano observes, LBJ thought he had some compromising information on King, which the FBI had given him.  This referenced certain sexual activities by the civil rights leader and also presumed communist influences in his camp.  But by this time, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was in full bloom.  Consequently, J. Edgar Hoover was now using spies in King’s camp and also arranging counter-intelligence programs against these kinds of groups.

    But as the film shows, it was actually Coretta King who began to push her husband into opposing the war.  She was actually speaking out against it and demonstrating before he was.  King therefore decided to make his famous attack on Johnson’s war policy at Riverside Church in April of 1967.

    Johnson, Hoover and the MSM did not appreciate King’s stand. Newspapers openly criticized him by saying that he had now “Crossed over the Line” or he had “Bordered on Treason”, claiming this now compromised his position as a civil rights leader.  Hoover used this to play on Johnson’s feelings about King.  But in addition to these, there were people inside the civil rights movement—like Roy Wilkins—who also questioned the open attack on the White House. The break with Johnson also hurt the finances of the SCLC.  The man who had been praised for his stand on civil rights was now being attacked and vilified for his opposition to the war.

    As King had warned Johnson, the slum areas in northern cities were piles of tinder waiting to explode.  They did so in the summer of 1967. At that time, over twenty cities erupted in riots.  Some of them, for instance Newark and Detroit, were among the most deadly in American history.  The final toll was over 100 people dead.  Oddly, the film does not discuss the appointment of the Kerner Commission by Johnson. Otto Kerner was the governor of Illinois. The White House requested he form a committee to study the causes of the riots and propose solutions.  Kerner appointed a distinguished panel consisting of people like Wilkins, Mayor John Lindsay of New York, and Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma. Their report is one of the most honest and searing documents ever written on racial tensions in America at the time.  It sold over two million copies.  Its most famous line was, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”  Kerner focused on poor housing and education in the slum areas, but he also pointed criticism at the media for not devoting time or empathy to these problems.

    The important thing about this presidential report was this: Johnson ignored it.  He did not even do the customary photo opportunity with the committee once the report was done. Johnson’s reaction was defined by two parameters.  First, Hoover’s talking in his ear and supplying him dirt had estranged him from King.  And now this report concurred with what King had told him after Watts.  Secondly, what Kerner was proposing was going to be expensive.  Johnson’s escalation of the war had already caused budget deficits, which he was trying to disguise with accounting tricks and borrowing from the Social Security fund.   As many have commented, the goals of Johnson’s Great Society were run aground by the war in Vietnam.

    After Johnson’s failure to act, King decided to take Bobby Kennedy’s advice about a national demonstration against poverty. RFK had told NAACP attorney Marian Edelman that a good idea would be to have a mass demonstration in Washington as had been done with the March on Washington in 1963.  Not everyone liked the idea, but King did.  King appeared on the Tonight  Show in February of 1968.  The guest host was his friend Harry Belafonte.  He talked about this problem of poverty and how it had actually gotten worse in the last four years.  He also addressed fears of his mortality by saying it was not how long a person lived but what he did with that time—a message he would more or less repeat the night before his assassination in Memphis.

    The SCLC began to design the Poor People’s March as a coalition.  It would not include just African Americans, but also Mexican Americans, Native Americans and poor whites.  King now began to talk about a coalition of the poor and to bring back ideas from FDR’s New Deal program and the proposals of Senator Huey Long—specifically, a declaration of economic rights and a guaranteed annual income.  As King said at the time, when wealthy people or corporations get these things, it’s called a subsidy; when poor people get them, it’s called a dole.

    The film now transitions to 1968 and the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.  King was reluctant to go to Memphis, but he did.  As the film notes, King’s first appearance there ended in a riot and looting and some bad publicity from city leaders.  Because of this black eye to the SCLC, King decided he had to return. As Andrew Young comments, the Riverside Church in New York, a huge and wealthy operation, now offered him a temporary pastorship, which King turned down.  The program then shows King’s famous speech on April 3rd, the night before his assassination.

    We then cut to news stories about the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel and the national wave of assassination riots that broke out afterward. Regarding the Martin Luther King assassination, Carmichael urged it on by saying: “White America killed Dr. King. We declare war on America!”  The film underplays Bobby Kennedy’s role in the Atlanta funeral that followed.  Kennedy called Coretta King after the murder, arranged to have King’s body transferred to Atlanta, and then booked dozens of rooms for incoming dignitaries to attend. We watch a film of Jackie Kennedy walking up to the church, and there is a touching black and white picture of both widows facing each other in black dresses. Wisely, Kunhardt holds on to that phofor a few seconds to expand their loss into our loss.

    The film ends with a quite pithy remark by Young.  He says, “We were not able to stay together without him.  And the movement began to fragment.”  That comment, following the picture of Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King, sums up the loss of what should have been a great decade.

    This was the best of the three documentaries and it will be available on DVD soon.

  • Roads to Memphis (PBS)

     

    A bit more than two years ago, the Public Broadcasting System’s series The American Experience helped bring us Robert Stone’s cover – up documentary on the assassination of President Kennedy entitled Oswald’s Ghost. This was a skillfully done program that slickly recycled the Warren Commission verdict on the JFK case. While at the same time, the director got out a not so subliminal message: those who publicly doubted that verdict were actually undermining America. In my review of that program (which you can read here), I wrote that one of the more disturbing things about Oswald’s Ghost was that there was no discussion of the new evidence that the Assassination Records Review Board had declassified ten years previous. In fact, Stone seemed to have an aversion to any discussion of either the House Select Committee on Assassination’s inquiry or the ARRB’s declassification process. Because he failed to mention either in his film. The other disturbing aspect of Oswald’s Ghost was that Stone gave much more screen time to the Warren Commission advocates than he did its critics. Consequently, there was no debate on the evidence. The film essentially recycled the Commission’s caricature of Lee Harvey Oswald through the likes of prominent talking heads like Priscilla Johnson, Edward Epstein, Hugh Aynesworth and the late Norman Mailer.

    PBS and The American Experience are at it again. In May of this year, they did a historical whitewash on another major assassination of the sixties. This time it was the Martin Luther King case. The pretext for this disservice is the publication of a book by Hampton Sides called Hellhound on his Trail. After watching this documentary, Roads to Memphis, culled from his book, there is no need for anyone to read that volume. From the film, Mr. Sides has essentially taken his cue from William Bradford Huie’s earlier disinformation volume He Slew the Dreamer, which was originally published in 1970. This, of course, was right after alleged assassin James Earl Ray had been railroaded by his second lawyer Percy Foreman – with the help of Huie. Foreman had essentially told Ray that he would sabotage his case, and he would probably die in the electric chair, unless he pleaded guilty. This is something that his first legal team advised him not to do. Since they did not think that the state had anywhere near a good case against him. In fact, based on the evidence Arthur Hanes and his son had developed, the state offered a plea bargain with which Ray would have been out in ten years. Hanes advised Ray to decline, since he thought he could do better at trial. (See the book, The 13th Juror, p. 208)

    Ray made a terrible error when he decided to dismiss the Hanes team for the celebrity attorney Percy Foreman. All one needs to know about Foreman’s defense of Ray is this: after telling Ray he would hire a Memphis lawyer to do the pre – trial work, Foreman then arranged with Judge Preston Battle to get Ray a public defender. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 464) Then, even though Hanes offered Foreman the use of his case files, Foreman looked at them for all of ten minutes. And he never copied or used them. (ibid, p. 465) Although Foreman told Ray he would beat the rap, Foreman never planned on going to trial. (ibid, p. 464) Once he had the public defender in tow, he told him to begin negotiations with the DA’s office. (ibid,p. 464) The capper is this: Ray has stated that Foreman never even asked him “if he had fired the fatal shot at King or if he had been part of a conspiracy.” (ibid, p. 465)

    And this is where Huie comes in. Huie negotiated a deal with Foreman in which the attorney would share in all funds “accrued to Huie by sale of all rights to Ray’s story, including motion picture sales.” Foreman made about a hundred grand for his non – defense of Ray. (ibid) From his cooperation with the sabotaging Foreman, Huie then wrote his “Ray did it” tome. But that was not enough for the wealthy writer. For in 1977, during the initial phases of the HSCA, Huie got in contact with a representative of Ray named Jack Kershaw. They met at Thomas Nelson Publishing Company in Nashville. Huie relayed an offer to Ray through Kershaw. He said that if Ray would state in public that he had killed King, he would give him a check for $25, 0000. Kershaw then asked what good the money would do Ray if he was in prison. Huie replied he would also get him a pardon. Ray’s reply to Huie tells us a lot about both Huie and Ray’s case. When Kershaw informed him of the offer, Ray said he wanted no part of it. (The 13th Juror, p. 393)

    All one needs to know about Roads to Memphis is this: it deals with all the above events in three end titles at the finish of the program. They say that Ray pleaded guilty, that he then tried to change his plea, and that he died in jail in 1998. After covering up all I described above about what Huie and Foreman did – and more – the show essentially follows the paradigm that Huie established in his book: Ray was a piece of southern racist white trash. He had stalked King through the south, and then killed him by himself in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The guilty Ray then tried to escape through both Canada and England. But he was caught through an FBI manhunt using an alias at Heathrow Airport. It’s all cut and dried. What Huie did is similar to what the likes of Priscilla Johnson and others have done in the JFK field. Huie caricatured Ray, cut him off from any contacts except his brothers, supplied a motive which really was not there, and then concealed the actual circumstances of the crime. That is, he shoved all that rather interesting evidence under the rug. You know, the evidence that Arthur Hanes was set to go to trial on.

    And that is what Roads to Memphis does: it shoves the evidence under the rug. Except this program is even worse than Stone’s in its choice of talking heads. After beginning with a clip of Ray’s arrival in Memphis after being extradited from England, the first onscreen commentator is none other than Mr. CBS cover up himself, Dan Rather. Director Stephen Ives then tries to top himself. For the third talking head is the now disgraced plagiarist Gerald Posner. The fifth talking head is the Rev. Billy Kyles. Kyles was a Memphis pastor and a friend of King’s. At the 1999 civil trial of Loyd Jowers, Kyles was exposed to some rather strong cross examination and testimony as to some of his weird actions in Memphis on the eve of King’s assassination. (See these in section 2 of my 13th Juror review by clicking here.) So, with this source material, this attitude toward the evidence, and these commentators, the result was preordained: Huie is recycled. We get Ray the southern trash racist who stalked King.

    Let’s go over some of the things that Hampton Sides uses to try and incriminate Ray. For instance, he says that when Ray went through Atlanta in March of 1968 he happened to leave an Atlanta map behind. On the map, places like King’s office and home were marked. (He leaves out the fact that there were seven other maps found. Maps of places like California and Mexico. Only the Atlanta map was marked.) Of course, this story originated with William Bradford Huie. (Harold Weisberg, Martin Luther King: The Assassination, p. 279) Yet as Weisberg notes, this map was not found before, but after the fact. It was found by the FBI in the room Ray rented after King’s murder. (ibid) Even though the landlord, Billy Gardner, did find a note in the room at the time Ray left. (Weisberg, p. 190)

    Huie also wrote that Ray’s fingerprints were on the Atlanta map. Yet, as Weisberg notes, this is not accurate. Ray’s prints were found on a map of Mexico. (ibid) Further, if Ray had been to Atlanta to monitor these locations, why would he need to mark them on a map? Why didn’t he just write down their addresses and then dispose of the notepad?(ibid, p. 280)

    Mr. Sides also adds that, while in California, Ray asked two friends to register to vote for George Wallace in return for a ride to New Orleans. As Weisberg notes, this story – which originated with Charles Stein and his sister – surfaced after much contrary evidence, showing Ray was not a racist, appeared in the newspapers. Stein also tried to convey the impression that many people at Wallace headquarters knew Ray. (ibid, p. 360) But when Weisberg followed up on this he found out that Wallace’s California campaign coordinator stated that none of his staff knew Ray. And that a check of their files shows no one even associated with him. (ibid) In fact, Ray did not even take the brief moment required to apply his name, or any of his aliases, to any Wallace petition! (ibid) In truth, this anti – black motive was not even used by local DA Phil Canale at the mini – trial that Foreman agreed to. (ibid) And Stein was not called by the state as a witness. (ibid, p. 188) Further, there is really no serious indication to show that Ray was ever politically engaged, involved, or interested. Finally, no credible black witness who ever associated with Ray has ever stepped forward to say he was prejudiced.

    Yet, in the face of all the above, the program uses dramatizations showing Ray in a rented room watching Wallace rant on TV sets. It then juxtaposes these “broadcasts” with some of King’s speeches at the time. The unsubtle message being that Ray was admiring and agreeing with the former, and then angered and disturbed by the latter. And somehow, this drove him to murder. As Weisberg writes, this is all specious. But even if it were true, wouldn’t it describe literally hundreds of thousands of Americans at the time?

    The other technique used to ascribe a motive to Ray is the old Posnerian standby, which he also uses in the Kennedy case. Namely that Ray was such a loser with so little self – esteem that he killed King to add meaning to his existence. Presumably he would now go down in history as a “big man”. But then, after the shooting, Dan Rather tells us that Ray realized there was a slight miscalculation. He would not be hailed as a hero. Therefore he hightailed it out of Memphis. Dan the Man now comments that Ray must have breathed a sigh of relief that he was not caught. And he must have privately gloated that he had outwitted the SOB’s again. (Rather is some corner bar psychologist eh? This is what this goofball got paid seven million a year for?)

    But yet, the program is so desperate to establish a motive that it covers another base. Near the beginning of the show, when describing Ray’s stay in prison in the early sixties, Sides and Posner say that Ray probably heard of a bounty on King’s head by some Klan type groups in the south. And this may have inspired him to do what the did. But as several people have commented, if that were so, then why did Ray never even try to attempt to collect his cash reward, reportedly of about $50, 000? After all, Ray was free to do so for about two months after King’s death. King was shot on April 4th. Ray was not apprehended at Heathrow until June 8th. Further, there is no evidence that either of his two brothers, John or Jerry, attempted to collect it for him.

    Sides also adds that upon his return east from Los Angeles, Ray took out a General Delivery post office box in Atlanta. In this regard, it is appropriate to note that during the entire hour long show, there was not one mention of the name Raul. This is the man that Ray said maneuvered him from Canada into the USA from the second half of 1967 until the murder of King. This void is even more startling in light of the fact that TV producer Jack Saltman appears to have found out who Raul actually was. Further, that Ray had pointed out his picture back in 1977 and the HSCA appears to have known who he was. But further, even the Memphis Police seemed to have leads on him back in 1968! (See part 4 of my review of The 13th Juror.)

    Toward the end of the show, Sides very briefly comments on the whole conspiracy angle of the King murder. He gives it the back of his hand by saying that it is much too complicated. The implication being that such a conspiracy could not be kept straight by the perpetrators. To be fair to Sides, let us not argue that here. (See The 13th Juror for the actual details of how it worked.) But since the program unambiguously states that Ray did kill King, let us discuss that crucial point. Does the evidence actually make that case beyond a reasonable doubt? The viewer has no chance to judge for himself, since the evidence for the prosecution – let alone the defense – – is never presented. In light of that, let us present a small amount of it here.

    Is there a witness who places Ray in the bathroom at the time of the shooting? Well, sort of. His name is Charlie Stephens. Unfortunately for Sides, the man was dead drunk at the time. Though he still cooperated with the prosecution. Further, his common law wife, Grace Stephens – who would not cooperate – was sent to a mental institution for ten years. (DiEugenio and Pease pgs. 462, 466, 500 – 501)

    What about the rifle in question? What the show eliminates is that the Game Master 30.06 was not the first rifle Ray picked up. Ray picked up a different rifle first and then returned it a couple of days later. Why would one do such a thing if one was not following orders from above? Further, as Judge Joe Brown testified at the Jowers vs. King civil trial, the Game Master is a weapon that cannot be manually sited in to ensure the telescopic site is accurate. This rifle has to be machine calibrated. If not, the aim will very likely be off. (ibid, p. 469) The place where Ray bought the rifle did not have this machine.

    Third, if Ray shot King from that communal bathroom, he would have had to be standing in a bathtub. When Paris-Match tried to simulate this position, “they had to pose their model on the rim of the tub toward the back, and then contort him into a position to lift the rifle to the window.” (ibid, p. 462) I should add here, the state of Tennessee understands this problem. So today when you visit that exhibit at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the tub has been moved further away from the window.

    Fourth, if Ray did the shooting, why could the FBI never positively match up the fatal bullet to the Game Master? And when Judge Brown wanted to proceed with conclusive tests which would prove this point once and for all, he was removed from the King case. (ibid, p. 453) I should add here, one of the local DA’s involved in removing Brown at the time – John Campbell – is one of the main talking heads on this show. For PBS, Sides, Rather and Posner were not imbalance enough.

    Finally, if one is to believe the official story, one has to believe that when Ray escaped the boarding house after shooting King, he did something unbelievably stupid. He dropped a bundle of his belongings on the ground outside Canipe’s Novelty store before jumping into his white Mustang. As Mark Lane has stated, if Ray did that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. (ibid, p. 462) But it’s actually worse than that. For at the civil trial it was revealed that the owner of Canipe’s, Guy Canipe, told Arthur Hanes that the bundle of articles was deposited in front of his store ten minutes before the shooting took place. (ibid, p. 500)

    So just with these few points, we have established that the case against Ray is a weak one. Consider the following:

    1. No credible witness places Ray in the bathroom at the time.

    2. The aim of the rifle in evidence was not properly calibrated and therefore was not accurate.

    3. Ray could not have positioned himself atop the bathtub in order to get an accurate shot fired.

    4. The fatal bullet was never matched to the rifle

    5. The rifle in evidence was dropped in front of Canipe’s store before the shot was fired.

    Not one word of any of the above is mentioned in this show. Even though all of it has been proven, and most of it was presented under oath, subject to cross – examination, at the civil trial. If it had been presented, then of course, there probably would have been no show. Since the program’s thesis would have been seriously undermined.

    And this is what is most troubling about this program. Like Robert Stone’s rigged film on Oswald, there is no real debate or dissent allowed. Thus there is no opportunity to challenge the nonsensical comments of buffoons like Dan Rather.

    Yet, recall, this is not CBS. This is PBS. Which is billed as alternative broadcasting. It is supposed to be something different than the mainstream. Dan Rather is not different than the mainstream. He is the mainstream. He epitomizes everything that was wrong with broadcast journalism for the past fifty years. While he did quite well shilling for his corporate sponsors, he is one of the reasons the rest of us are not so well off today. Yet here he is, on so – called alternative TV reciting the same script he did for CBS. Repeating the same lies he did back in the sixties and seventies on another outlet in the new millennium.

    What a disgrace. PBS should be ashamed of itself. The worst part of this sorry production though is this: they aren’t. That’s how compromised American Experience is on the assassinations of the sixties.

    Don’t ask me why.

    Addendum to Roads to Memphis

    I should have added three other points to the above review. They show just how intent on ignoring the 1999 King vs. Jowers civil trial director Stephen Ives was. For from the very title, the program tries to insinuate that James Earl Ray was following King through America in the last several months of his life. As I noted, the program completely eliminates the personage of Raul, the apparent CIA contact who manipulated Ray at his time. Therefore it cuts off the reason for Ray’s maneuverings. But it’s worse than that. As Ray’s lawyer William Pepper stated at trial, when King arrived in Los Angeles, Ray left the city. (The 13th Juror, p. 741) Further, there were several places that Ray was not in at all when King visited them in those months: Selma, New York, Chicago, and Florida.

    Secondly, the program’s use of the map found by the FBI in Atlanta is even worse than Harold Weisberg described. As Pepper told the jury in Memphis, “The Atlanta map is nowhere related to Dr. King’s residence. It is three oblong circles that covered general areas, one where he was living on Peachtree.” (ibid)

    Finally, I should have noted an extraordinary stroke that director Ives used in his “recreations”. During the speech that King gave the night before he was shot-the famous “Been to the Mountaintop” speech-Ives clearly insinuates that Ray is standing outside the door of the church. The problem with this “recreation” is that there is no evidence in the record for it. Even though there were 2,000 people in attendance, there is no witness who saw Ray at the Mason Temple Church. (Philip Melanson, The Martin Luther King Assassination, p. 2) Secondly, at the civil trial, in a video taped posthumous deposition, Ray gave a complete, hour by hour chronicling of his comings and goings in Memphis once he arrived at the New Rebel Motel on April 3rd. The opposing attorney never even asked Ray if he was at the Mason Temple Church. He knew he wasn’t. (The 13th Juror pgs. 658-673) Let us recall: this is a documentary into which Ives is inserting something for which he has no factual basis. We’re in John Hankey country.

    Any serious student of the King case should ignore both this program and the book by Hampton Sides. Instead, read The 13th Juror.

  • Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination

    Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination

    On April 3rd, 2008, the evening before the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., CNN broadcast a two-hour documentary entitled Eyewitness to Murder-The King Assassination. The chief correspondent and host was CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien. Although I cannot call the production a clear and single-minded lone assassin screed, it was pretty close to that. And if you watched O’Brien question some of her interview subjects, she clearly had a four part agenda: 1.) to hammer home the case against James Earl Ray; 2.) to register as many doubts as possible about Ray’s credibility; 3.) to trumpet the testimony of the law enforcement officials involved with the case; and 4.) to conclude with that hoary chestnut about the popularity of conspiracy theories: the American public just cannot accept the fact that a great and charismatic leader could be gunned down by a small-time hoodlum like Ray.

    When I say that it was not a straight Ray-did-it production, that is a purely relative statement. The show did examine J. Edgar Hoover’s racially tinged and neurotic campaign against King. It even produced some of the famous FBI COINTELPRO memos and talked about some of the surveillance activities used by Hoover against King. O’Brien interviewed people who believed in and have written about Ray’s innocence. And she let them speak about it on camera, e.g. Jerry Ray and William Pepper. She talked about two problems in the case against Ray. She specifically stated that the bullet that killed King has never been matched to the rifle in evidence. And the fact that no person ever identified Ray either in the bathroom of the flophouse where he was supposed to have fired that rifle, or fleeing the scene.

    But remember, I said “relatively”. Because even in those instances, CNN was rather compromised. For example, they never depicted the worst of the COINTELPRO memos. And they never discussed the actual extreme practices that the Bureau initiated to achieve their goals. In that regard, one could have brought up the deadly and massive campaign against the Black Panthers. This featured the framing of innocent men like Geronimo Pratt, and the assassination of leaders like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. One could have tied that in with the presence of Marrell McCullough in Memphis plus the fact that there were actual cheers in the Atlanta FBI office when the news of King’s murder was announced. (We will return to the McCullough issue later.)

    Concerning the interviews of Ray and Pepper, although she lets them speak, she then spends a good deal of time afterwards trying to discredit what they say. For example, she repeatedly questions the existence of Raoul. This is the mysterious figure that Ray met in Canada, and who escorted him through a series of gunrunning operations in late 1967, all the way up to the assassination. Ray concluded that Raoul had set him up to take the fall for the King murder. Yet in discounting Ray on this, she ignores the fact that a man named Sid Carthew actually met Raoul in 1967. And he met him at the same bar in Montreal that Ray said he met him at. Finally, Carthew discussed the same thing–the sale of guns–that Ray and Raoul were involved in at the time. (Pepper, Orders to Kill pgs 343-344) She also ignores the strong testimony of former FBI agent Don Wilson. Wilson was one of the agents who recovered a white Mustang in Atlanta, allegedly one that Ray had abandoned there after King was killed. In an envelope in the car were two pieces of paper. They both had Raoul’s name on them. One of them contained a list of names and entities followed by dollar amounts. The word Canada is also on the document, and the phrase “Before 4/15” is at the end. (The Assassinations, Eds. James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 486) This is strong corroboration for Ray’s specific story about Raoul. To say the least, it was no fairy tale.

    In discussing the non-matching bullet evidence, she both understates it and covers things up. For instance, she says that the bullet that hit King fragmented upon impact, making it difficult to test afterwards. There are many witnesses who state that this is not what actually happened. Or could have happened. (Probe Vol. 6 No. 1 p. 25) They say that what actually occurred was that the bullet removed from King was intact. It was then sent to the FBI for analysis. It was returned in pieces. Further, when Judge Joe Brown began a rehearing on the case in 1996, he found that the photo of the originally intact bullet was missing from the case file. (Probe Vol. 5 No. 5 p. 29).

    The rest of the special was even more questionably slanted than the above. For instance, O’Brien says that, after escaping from prison in 1967, Ray was involved in a bank robbery in his hometown of Alton, Illinois. And the money that was secured from this crime helped fund his numerous activities, purchases and travels in both Canada and the United States in 1967-68.

    This, I think, is part of her aim to discredit Ray’s reliance on Raoul as a source of funds. But as Pepper found out, there is nothing of any substance to make this bank robbery charge against Ray stick. In 1978, Pepper called one of the police officers in charge in Alton. He offered to return his then client, Jerry Ray, to Alton to stand trial for the crime. The officer replied that neither Jerry Ray nor any of his brothers were suspects. Further, they had never been suspects in that crime. The Department of Justice came to the same conclusion. The FBI analyzed the fingerprint impressions at the scene and said that the prints of James Earl Ray did not match any of the prints in the Alton bank robbery file. (Pepper, pgs 107-109)

    O’Brien ignores all of this, and assumes no one knows anything about the issue. She then proceeds as if it was a given. Because she wants to use the twenty dollar denomination of stolen funds to somehow explain how Ray moved all around two countries for a year. For instance, when she mentions that Ray bought a car with cash, she adds that he paid for it in twenties. As if Raoul could not have been paying him in twenty-dollar bills. As if it was not a common denomination for large cash purchases at the time. Or today.

    She also uses this “evidence” when she mentions the purchase of the 30.06 Remington Gamemaster rifle. Ray bought this weapon at the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama on March 30, 1968. Ray made this purchase under the name of Harvey Lowmeyer. And he said it was done at the request of Raoul. But O’Brien leaves out an interesting fact about the incident. On March 29th, Ray had purchased a .243 Winchester at the same store. The next day, he returned the Winchester and purchased the Remington. Why he did this or why Raoul would ask him to do so has never been explained. But it did give the attendant, who refused to appear on camera for CNN, an opportunity to clearly recall the incident, and remember Ray’s face.

    Speaking of this rifle, O’Brien makes one of the most irresponsible, laughable statements on the show. Looking at the glass-enclosed weapon with a museum attendant next to her, she describes the 200-foot shot as so easy that either of them could have made it. This statement was completely vitiated during Judge Joe Brown’s ballistics hearings in Memphis in the late nineties. Brown, a very experienced marksman, determined that this particular rifle cannot be properly sited in manually. With this rifle, that process can only be done by a machine. A machine which Aeromarine Supply Company did not have at the time. Brown estimated that a non-practicing rifleman, which Ray was in 1968, would miss the target by twenty feet without that adjustment. (Probe Vol. 5 No. 5 p. 28) Brown also made another startling discovery about the ballistics evidence in this case. The bullet taken from King’s body is not from the same lot as the other bullets purchased, and does not match the cartridges either. (Ibid. p. 29) Our indefatigable reporter never addressed these two issues. But they do help explain why Brown was never allowed to complete his ballistics investigation.

    To further her rather superficial examination of the ballistics evidence, O’Brien interviews the Memphis Medical Examiner at the time, Jerry Francisco. He tells her that the shot could only have come from the rooming house window to end up hitting King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. It could not have come from the bushy area outside both the rooming house and Jim’s Grill. The latter is where more than one witness placed the sniper. But another study done by the Memphis City Engineers seems to contradict Francisco. They could not come to a definite conclusion on this issue. One reason for that was, shades of the JFK case, Francisco had not traced the path of the bullet through King’s body. When asked about this point, “Francisco took the curious position that he was loathe to cause further mutilation for no good reason.” (Pepper, p. 129) Another problem in solving this issue is that there is no photo that reveals King’s exact posture at the time he was hit. But while she had Francisco on, O’Brien could have asked him about the condition of the slug when he removed it from King’s body. There is a photo in the HSCA volumes apparently taken when he removed the bullet and it looks intact. (Pepper p. 221, 255) O’Brien could have asked him how it ended up in pieces, and why. She also could have asked Francisco if he tried to pilfer the King fragments from Brown’s court while the judge was testing the rifle. Which is what Brown seemed to accuse him of later. (Probe Vol. 5 No. 5 p. 29) This kind of behavior, and the bizarre evidentiary record, caused Brown to say that, “What you’ve got here in terms of the physical evidence relating to ballistics … is frightening.” (Ibid) (For a thorough critique of Francisco’s work on this case, which explains why his analysis raises so many questions, see Harold Weisberg’s Martin Luther King: The Assassination pgs. 133-138)

    Another area CNN skimps is the whole issue of Marrell McCollough. McCollough was the undercover cop who had infiltrated the radical black youth group the Invaders, prior to King’s arrival in Memphis. And it was the Invaders who had provoked a show of violence during King’s first visit to Memphis in March. They did this by disrupting a demonstration by the Sanitation Workers, who were on strike at the time. This incident actually resulted in the shooting death of a young man named Larry Payne. In turn, this caused King to make his return visit in April. McCollough’s assignment was the result of a secret program inside the Memphis Police Department. But it had been ordered by Hoover, and assisted by the CIA. (Probe Vol. 7 No. 6 p. 4) Before joining the Memphis Police Department, McCullough had been in the army as an MP. His first assignment with the police was this one. As an agent provocateur with the Invaders, his reports were forwarded to the FBI. Besides helping provoke the King riot, he also helped set up a drug bust in which many of the Invaders top leadership were entrapped. A local reporter in Memphis once wrote that McCullough was working for the FBI before the Memphis police recruited him. (Ibid. p. 5) This strongly indicates that he was part of the COINTELPRO operation against both Black Nationalist groups, and perhaps, King. He stayed within the police department until he later joined the CIA in 1974. Three years later, he testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. When asked his occupation, he said he was a Memphis policeman. Which, at the time, he was not. Further, he denied any connection to any intelligence agencies in 1968. In other words, he lied. As Doug Valentine notes, he appears to have done this because the HSCA had evidence that it was McCullough who provoked the riot that caused the death of Larry Payne. And made necessary King’s return, which resulted in his assassination. (Ibid.) All O’Brien has to say about the compelling and perhaps crucial figure of McCullough is this: he was a policeman who worked undercover against a Black Nationalist group. He ended up on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel after King was shot. Six years later he joined the CIA. That’s about it. I’m not kidding.

    The last part of the program was particularly offensive. O’Brien brought on attorney John Campbell. Campbell was the local DA in Memphis who did everything he could-and more–to obstruct Judge Brown. To the point where he eventually was removed from the case. (DiEugenio and Pease, pgs. 453-459) She allows him to critique two points: whether or not Raoul ever existed, and the testimony of Loyd Jowers. Concerning the first, he says Ray’s description of Raoul changed over time. This is false. What Campbell is comparing is Ray’s description of Raoul with a man who Pepper suspected was Raoul. It turned out not to be him. (Generally, Orders to Kill is a decent book that sometimes gets too ambitious. In those sections, Pepper’s reach exceeded his grasp.) Loyd Jowers was the owner of Jim’s Grill at the time of the assassination. In 1993, when Pepper won a mock trial on HBO acquitting Ray, Jowers went on ABC television with Sam Donaldson and confessed to a part in the murder. He said he supplied the actual sniper’s rifle to a man in the bushes outside his establishment. A man who was not Ray. The weapon was later picked up by Raoul. Campbell properly states that Jowers later altered certain elements of his story. And he then completely clammed up at the civil trial when the King family sued him in civil court — and won. (DiEugenio and Pease, pgs 492-509) But O’Brien leaves out an important reason why Jowers never got to testify in court under oath: He asked for full immunity from prosecution. He never got it from either the local DA (i.e. Campbell), or the Justice Department. (Probe, Vol. 7 No. 6 p. 3)

    At the end, O’Brien tries to explain the rather strange conduct of the accused assassin after King’s assassination. The official story says that he ran down the stairs of the flophouse and drove off in his white Mustang. But not before he left a bundle of his belongings next door, in front of Canipe’s novelty store. This included things like a pair of binoculars, a can of beer, and the 30.06 rifle. Now this is a really odd thing for an assassin to do: leave an incriminating pile of your belongings next to the building where you just shot from. And critics of the official story have pointed at this incident as being quite unbelievable. So O’Brien trots out an old defense for it. She says Ray panicked when he saw a policeman down the sidewalk. This story has taken different forms throughout the years. It used to be that he saw a police car coming down the street. One of the problems with that particular version is that there was a field of rather high brush next to Canipe’s. It would probably have blocked Ray’s view of anyone either down the street or the sidewalk. But a piece of rather bracing evidence emerged on this point at the1999 King/Jowers civil trial. One of the witnesses was Arthur Hanes Jr. He and his late father composed Ray’s first defense team. At the trial he testified that, in 1968, he interviewed Guy Canipe who was the owner of the store. Canipe told him that the bundle had been dropped about ten minutes before the assassination. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 500) Needless to say, Hanes Jr. was on the show. Needless to say, O’Brien never asked him about this startling testimony.

    All in all, a seriously disappointing effort. Not quite as bad as the network JFK specials by Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. But still, it’s pretty shabby. In light of the recent Discovery Channel’s documentary on the RFK case, I had hoped for more from a cable network. Next time, at least from CNN, I won’t.