The New JFK Show #227 MLK pt2 Phil Nelson

Video Transcript:

But in 1975, the Church Committee caused a firestorm of publicity by revealing some of the most sensitive secrets of the CIA and FBI. Among them was the CIA's heart attack gun that might explain a lot of conveniently timed heart attacks of people who posed a risk of spilling the beans or who might have stood in the way of L.B.J.'s plans. You see Frank Church there in that center photo showing that gun. Another was the FBI's then secret files about Martin Luther King's harassment and the illegal wiretapping tapes. There was a huge reaction by the black population, including Karate King, Andrew Young and others. It became convinced that James Earl Ray was innocent and that King's murder was the culmination of Hoover's Demented Campaign to Silence him. The Church Committee's revelations were the catalyst for the formation of the House Select Committee on assassinations, at least until the deep state stepped into quash it. And that respect, I would just say, that there was a lot going on in the background during the formation. And in fact, the formation of the House Select Committee was delayed by about six months because of all this infighting. Congressman Walter Fontroy who chaired the House Committee in the King's assassination investigation testified at the 1999 civil trial of King versus Jawors and explained how the House Select Committee was damaged from the start because of the strategic disagreements between divided members and certain journalists who were then being used by the CIA and FBI to help protect their interests. Fontroy explained that a six-month delay in getting started was due to disagreement between the Chairman of the full committee, Mr. Gonzalez and the Chief Council, Richard Spray. And what happened there is that Richard Spray really ticked off a lot of people in the overreaches of the government because he was just taking the job too seriously and that wouldn't do. He actually wanted access to CIA files. He wanted complete access, not just what they wanted to give him, and that was just not going to happen. So in 1976, as a result of all of this going on and the whole Washington was abuzz about all this, you re-entered the prey. In 1976, he decided to re-issue the book, and that book was re-issued exactly as it had been published before except that he added a new introduction and a new epilogue. And then there really went on the attack of this whole rumor, you know, that so many people were talking about, especially the black population. They seemed to have been convinced that the FBI was behind the whole thing because of these revelations. Okay, let's go to the next slide. In 1976, also, the same timeframe, just as George McMillan's book was about to be published. Then magazine came out with a four-page spread where they re-introduced all of the lies that had been planted and not just by Huey, but by then there were three authors who had published books. And this was a culmination. George McMillan went on to promote his new book, including such complete fabrication as that ray was a vicious, southern racist. Again, that's the same thing that Huey had planted and then had been repeated by the second author. And that he had a favorite hatred of Martin Luther King and that he had called his brother Jerry the morning of the murder to say he was going to kill the big inward that evening. The inward has spelled out in this article we will see in the next slide. That ray was a big supporter of George Wallace. That ray was a Nazi sympathizer. And here, I'm not sure if it could be seen, but the title is, I'm going to kill that man. And that was supposed to be a quote from James Earl Ray. Ray never exhibited any form of racism. And that actually is something where I'm going to mention or get into a little bit further. But let's just say that the one thing that the House Select Committee did that was productive and positive was it proved that he was not a racist. But they actually did go out and interview people who Huey had claimed made those kind of comments that they found out that that was not true at all. It was another one of Huey's lies. But anyway, McMillan had said he had gotten this information from his brothers, James's brothers Jerry and Jack Ray, writing that both brothers are ex-cons too. Well, yeah, that's true. They were small time thieves and have been in prison as well. But that destroyed the credibility of the whole family, of course, and they could say anything they wanted to. He also said that as a prisoner, Ray would watch King on TV and report to him his retirement plan. And that James Ray was a merchant in prison that he had dealt with everything from booze, groceries, cigarettes, and to hardcore drugs and asserting that Ray got high on speed. Ray never really had even drank maybe a beer here or there, but he was not a hard drinker or a drug tanker. Okay. Now, Time Magazine also doubled down on more lies. The page that you see on the right there is the diagram, well, we saw it on the previous article. This is one of four pages again, Time Magazine on January 26, 1976. And you can see Ray was shooting, we're trying to be shooting a gun out the window. The only problem was he was shooting the wrong direction. He was shooting with the left and had he been trying to aim, you can see in the first photo, the red line would have taken him off to the right. And King was at the end of that red line. And the photo in the middle of this page is something that had been published in Paris by a French magazine called Paris Match on April the 20 of 1968. And here's what Harold Weisberg had to say about that. It says, in the photo published by that magazine, we see that both the tub and the window are as close to the North wall as possible. This picture makes it apparent. The last thing the assassin could have done was to use that rifle of the required trajectory and rest it on the window sill. The postman could not stand in the tub because the sloping back keeping him too far away from the window. So he stood on the rim in the back, this raised him too high. And the wall kept him from the end of the window away from King. It was then impossible for him to even contort himself into a position which would enable him to use the rifle at all. He had to get his head almost on its right ear, his right ear, even to see the signs. So this is how Time Magazine in 1976 swissed it all around and to make it at least seemed like it was an easy shot from that bathroom. They had him shooting the wrong direction. That's the opposite of reality and the epitome, the height of arrogant deception. That drawing by the way is also pivoting the bathtub round to the wrong side. It shows it going laterally against the wall under the window. And that's not the case at all. It was, as you can see, the post shooter there in the bathroom, it was the other direction. And it removed the other wall completely. There's no reference to the other wall, the side wall behind this actor's back. And also the unrelated point, the plumbing for this figure was moved onto a nicely tiled wall. Why was that? Okay, this is the, well, that picture speaks for itself. This is the New York Times edition of June 20th, 1997, which states the son of Dr. King, Asserts LBJ had a role in the plot to kill his father. And three, it says three months ago, Dexter Scott King declared that he and his family believed that James R. Array was not guilty of the murder of his father, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tonight, and he televised interview, Mr. King, asserted that President Lyndon B. Johnson must have been part of a military and government conspiracy to kill Dr. King. Now, I wonder what whatever happened with that too, because the King family are really not going public these days with any of this. They've sort of gone into hiding as far as this goes. And I think it may be explained a lot by really what happened to Christopher Polton, and the story that we talked about a few weeks ago. Okay, so this is Dexter King confronting David Garrow in a video that, that justice has run its course and the strategy. For young and son Dexter has to find his father's death is a tragedy, which filmers in this story for him. And it has always been a feeling that there are many unanswered questions that have not been addressed. Today, Matt Lauer spoke with thought surprise when in King Biographer David Garrow. You said that the scene of James Earl Ray and Dexter King shaking hands was, quote, sad and surreal. Why? Yes, Matt. I think it's very sad that the King family and the King children are so uninformed of the history that they could be open to believing that Mr. Ray was not involved in Dr. King's assassination. Mr. Ray was someone of longstanding racist segregationist affiliations. And as the House Assassinations Committee very correctly concluded 19 years ago, Mr. Ray was probably the trigger man for a wider segregationist conspiracy to kill Dr. King. But Dexter King and his family members are not dexter good morning to you. Good morning. Mr. Garrow seems to think that you and your family members are being duped by James Earl Ray and his attorneys. What's your reaction? Well, I am very disturbed by his comments that anyone in this day and age of victim of rights would suggest that it is wrong for a family to question who killed their loved one. The fact of the matter is, I guess I'm really not surprised because Mr. Garrow, for whatever reason, is doing his job. And frankly, he is an agent for those forces, the suppression. Once you've smartwatched this truth to come forward, unfortunately, the King family has not looked at the record that the House Assassinations Committee compiled 19 years ago. But there's really no dispute among people that know this history well about Mr. Ray's deal. I have a real question that we should be pursuing and that Mr. King should be putting to Mr. Ray, our who encouraged and who funded Mr. Ray to kill Martin Luther King Jr. That should be our texture. I think what is really appalling here is that Mr. Garrow has built the platform on exploiting my father's legacy. If there were not for my family, Mr. Garrow would not have gained access to my father's papers and many other things that have given him a platform to speak out. And to now come back and say that we're missing form this totally appalling, what we have here and what people need to remember is that Mr. Ray, like other segregationist terrorists from the 1960s, did a tremendous amount of harm to the Black freedom struggle. And for Mr. King to be misled into believing in mafia conspiracies is so unfortunately ignorant of the rule. Mr. Garrow's confusion in arrogance is caused by his own ignorance. How select committee's finding that James Earl Ray was not the racist portrayed by Martin Luther King Jr. The committee was unwilling to conclude that he's in hatred and black. Mr. Ray, he is not a segregationist. I've met segregationist. This man was a little bit more born in the South as the media portrayed at the time. The fact of the matter is he was born and Illinois I met his family. They are not people who strike me as racist. The fact of the matter is this man was set up and we need to deal with this so that we can move on. The American public deserves the right to know. Certainly the family of the victims deserves the right to know what happened to their loved one. We need to stop living in denial in this country. Jackson Johnson for all face injustice. The Reverend Jesse Jackson agrees somewhat with Mr. Garrow and saying that James Earl Ray does not deserve a trial until he begins to tell the truth. Among other things saying that Raoul never existed. Would you at least agree with that that he does need to tell a little bit more of the truth before a trial is warranted? Well, first of all, Raoul has been located. As I said, there are so many people who are talking about this case as if they're informed. They are the ones that are uninformed. They do not have the up to date latest. Okay, the takeaways from that show, the 1998 show are these. So what historian doesn't know about the House Select Committee's conflicts and failures? Now Garrow's comments in the video where he integrates the King family as being ignorant by his own ignorance about the most important research into the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Almost as worse is how he unequivocally asserts that the House Select Committee report is supposed to be the final word on the Martin Luther King assassination as though it contains only pure truth. When the majority of it is merely a repeat of the FBI's original contaminated report filled with the same lies that has contaminated much of their work on all of the assassinations. Garrow keeps citing the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which conducted a so-called investigation back in 1977 and 1978. But what he doesn't say here, though he must surely have known, was that the House Select Committee was designed to fail when the FBI and CIA both joined forces to undermine and subvert the committee and practically every way possible. It didn't start out that way, but when the FBI and CIA, the deep state, realized that the original senior counsel and staff director Richard Spray was taking a job too seriously, they decided that he had to go. He was soon replaced by the more malleable Robert Plaky who didn't want to shake the bushes so much. Instead of doing a thorough investigation of real facts, they merely attempted to re-evaluate the existing FBI documents from 10 years before. Much of them, based upon the untainted work of the novelist William Bradford Hewitt. As I detailed in the book, both agencies had contacts in Congress who were on the take to warn or more agencies and they let others to keep the investigation to a minimum. They spent an enormous amount of time and money pursuing what the FBI had started. One of those items was attempting to prove that James and his few brothers assisted him in robbing a bank in Alton, Illinois of $27,000. This was in about July of early July of 1967, just a few months after he had broken out of prison. If they had gotten $27,000 split at three ways, they would have $9,000 each. So that begs the question, why did he go out just days later and buy a $200 joker to drive the 1,100 mile drive from there to Montreal? By the way, despite the fact that the police chief and the bank president had never considered them as suspects. The House-select committee also brought in a very incredible Scotland yard inspector, Alexander East, who had been charged with corruption and forced to retire two years before that. So he shows up there to try to portray Ray as again as a vicious racist. And the he, ICE claimed that Ray had confided to him that he hated blacks and so much is admitted that he was the murderer. The entire charade was done through the FBI, knowing that they could bring this guy in from England, let him testify, and then he wouldn't be charged with lying to the Congress, because he was a foreigner, I guess. I mean, I guess that's the reason. The committee did succeed in tracking down other people who had met Ray during his travels, all of whom emphatically denied that he had made any racist comments to them. And that was a pack of lies cleverly invented by author William Bradford Huey and put into his look in the scene articles and book, and that somehow became the meme that was accepted throughout the country and the world like it. In fact, the only productive thing the House Select Committee did was to announce as a result of interviewing all these people. And it included prisoners he had done time with during the prison, but it also included two women that he had gotten to know. One who was Canadian and the other one was the Mexican woman and plus another guy who was a bartender type in Los Angeles when he was out there. And they all said, no, you had never said anything like what Huey had reported. But by then it was all in the books. I mean, they probably wasn't a racist, but they didn't go back and uncouple all the other stuff that he hated before he hated Martin Luther King, and therefore he stalked him and wound up murdering him. It all started with him being a racist, but he wasn't a racist. So anyway, the point is, although they acknowledged that he wasn't a racist, it was a very quiet thing that they sort of kept to themselves, didn't publicize it. And here David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize winning Martin Luther King biographer, didn't get that memo. He still married to all the lies that came out of that committee. Okay, that takes us to the rooming house that I visited in 2017 and found that it had just been renovated a couple of years before that. In fact, in 2012 to 2014, the Lorraine Motel and the two buildings that originally housed the rooming house and Jim's grill on the lower level were renovated at a cost of $27.5 million, creating the national civil rights memorial. The entire structures were completely gutted and rebuilt with steel framework and concrete floors, supposedly for the purpose of enhancing it for the public to see what it was like, but everything other than the bedroom and the bath was eliminated, creating large open areas for the exhibits. In the photos shown here, you can see how the exterior brickwork was renovated. The new concrete floor supporting the upper level also appears on a walkway glassed in. And that was all new as a result of the renovation because they gutted the building completely. Everything, all the wood structure within the brick outer walls, everything was taken out and rebuilt with steel, structure, and then concrete floor laid over that. In 1968, there was nothing between those walls other than the stair steps at the front of the building leading to the upper floors of both buildings with the rooming house that was located. In the interior foot on the left, note the thickness of the exterior wall, which would have made it nearly impossible for anyone inside the window to look out that window to observe the balcony where Dr. King was shot without leaning out with one's entire upper body. Yet that's what all the novelist type authors wrote is exactly what he and he picked out that room for that purpose, even though he didn't say anything to the proprietor of the rooming house about wanting a particular room. The only thing he did is just state that he didn't need one with a kitchen because he didn't plan to do any cooking. So he wanted to save a few bucks. So he put him in this room. And again, I've determined that Ray was completely oblivious. He had no idea what Martin Luther King was at any point in time. So to say that this is all a surprise to him as an understatement. Now the room, as I said before, the floor was taken out. They did preserve the furnishings for the bathroom and the bedroom and the walls and so forth. And they rebuilt that on the concrete floor. As of the only two rooms that were reconstructed to be as they were in 1968, everything else is just a huge open area with plenty of room for exhibits. And they do have a crowd going through there every day. So it was done for that purpose as desirable. But the problem is they didn't rebuild it the same way that it was built in the first place. And it made a material difference, and especially the bathroom, because when they rebuilt it with the floor a foot higher than it had been, that raised the bathtub accordingly. And you can see in the left photo what it looked like in 1968, what it looked like today. The space between the bathtub and the windowsill is about a half what it used to be. That means it was a foot higher. Everything in there is a foot higher. And also the bathtub where it used to, but the wall at the end with the window, it does not do that. You can't see it very well in this photo, but this is as close as it wouldn't be dead because of the way they have it glassed off. I took that photo through the glass. And you can see the little signage there and those dots to keep people from trying to walk in there yet. But I'm telling you, at least a foot away from that wall. So today, people visitors can look at that and say, yeah, there's plenty of room for someone to stand back there with a gun, plenty of room to tame it. And you don't have that other problem that we saw on the other photo before. Now the other signs and the other room that the floor is higher, I just put them in there as proof positive. And I'll just point out the 1968 photo, the top of the door, door frame, comes about a foot lower than the top of that window. But if you go over there and look at the other one, they're at the same level, exact same level. The top line shows that. And all the other green lines over here show other component parts as being much higher than they had been before. For instance, above the fireplace mantle, there's some kind of a little cabinet there, mounted. And it's also a foot higher than it used to be. I think it's pretty clear that those changes became one of the major reasons for the renovation. Well, this is the same thing showing it again. And Harold Weisberg, again, said it proved a shot from that window, this magazine photo that he described made it just about impossible for someone to realistically take a rifle out there and expect it to fire at a target. OK, so that wraps it up. I'll just comment a little bit about the books and the LBJ's legacy. In my own book, as I explained, I've consolidated the King's story and told by Dr. Pepper with significant additional research by other authors and my own research of how the government's case was originally written by a series of novelists who were never tethered to actual facts, sober witnesses, and honest forensic or ballistic evidence. I've discussed some of the key points that were detailed in the Martin Luther King book. I'll explain yet not inexplicable was how LBJ's good friend, Houston Lawyer Percy Foreman was able to finagle an uninvited and highly irregular visit with James O'Reigh, timed exactly to the point at which Rey had just decided the fire his first lawyer, Arthur Haines. Perhaps that was the product of one piece of covert intelligence, yielded by the microphones, the emplaced and raised jail cell, planted there as only someone wielding a lot of political power in Tennessee could have possibly arranged. It was these times through Johnson's friends, Percy Foreman and Governor Buford Ellington that provided the insights into how the overall network function at its center was the Louisiana Texas nexus of the Gossamer Web of underground connections, created, managed, and facilitated events before and after Dr. King's assassination. It should also be clear by now that all three of the major political assassinations of the 1960s were perpetrated by essentially the same men using related resources, comparable methods of operation, and analogous motives, and they were all executed with the active provocations of the two men at the very head of the hierarchy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jay Gahuber, only the combined power wielded by them that have reasonably equipped with the eager assistance of intelligence officials from the military, the CIA, and key members of the Dixie-Mapia. The facilitators and street-level operatives with the kinds of resources and spheres of influence in the local communities involved, Dallas, Memphis, and Los Angeles, to have succeeded in accomplishing their multiple missions. The most powerful man in America, circa 1963, 1968, was Lyndon B. Johnson. That it was he who instigated all of these major crazies should now be indisputable. Phil, I think you've done a masterful work here on tremendously impressed. I think your books on LBJ pick up where Robert Carro dared not tread for whatever reason, although he knew Lyndon's character that he was ruthless, narcissistic, absolutely determined to achieve his goal of being president of all the people that he would work no opposition. He'd take any measure necessary. He couldn't bring himself to confront the desperate events of Dallas, and therefore, in spite of having accomplished a series of volumes that all historians have admired. He was unable to bring it to conclusion. I congratulate you for having performed the service that Robert Carro was unable to perform on behalf of the American people. Well, thank you for that. That's a grand compliment from the man I deeply respect, and that I appreciate it. The Garrow Dexter King exchange was fascinating for the techniques used by the mocking bird media, whereas you well know the CIA began infesting, infiltrating the media in the 1950s, so that by 1975, William Colby, then its director, testified to Congress that the agency owned everyone of any significance in the media. But at the time of the assassination of JFK, that was also true that there were key players that were presumed to be legitimate journalists who actually were on the CIA payroll, and it struck me as a very clear example that Garrow had received a Pulitzer Prize as a form of deep state endorsement of his propaganda about James Earl Ray, and were even the host. It seemed to me played an unfair role there by suggesting that Garrow was in the right, that Dexter was in the wrong, when it's unmistakably clear that Dexter was in the right. If you have documented here, James Earl Ray wasn't even in the building at the time the shooting took place because he'd gone to have the tire replaced on the car. So it's just amazing. And of course there was a role here played by Jesse Jackson that was untoward, very disappointing, where he had been instrumental in getting Martin onto that balcony, a room with a balcony. So he'd be an easier target for the assassins who were in the bushes in front of the building. And of course not at this absurd location in the rooming house, which is you have demonstrated conclusively was a preposterous location and where they had to rebuild the whole room to make it even remotely plausible. How bad is that? It's unbelievable. And we saw the photographs of the yard back in back of the rooming house, what it was in a complete state of disrepair and full of brushes and junk and so forth. And it made a perfect sniper's layer and yet they expect everyone to believe that the next morning they had the Department of Public Works come in there and clean it all up and haul it away. It's a to clean it up. I mean it's the kind of thing that you know you see and some of the other assassinations, they just did brazen things like that that were completely at odds with every you know fundamental rule of police investigations. You know you don't mess with the crime scene and the immediate aftermath, which is precisely what they did. I mean I suggest your next enterprise ought to be a book on Bobby just a tie together JFK, MLK, RFK. Bobby's actually very straightforward, Phil, as you may very well already be aware because Sir Han was clearly a distraction. Well he unloaded his pistol, not of his shots, hit Bobby. It was in fact shot from the side by the security guard escorting him. He was hit behind the right ear from about an inch and a half. And then as he was falling, the security guard continued to shoot at him. One bullet went through his jacket but two entered beneath his armpit one barely messing his heart. And as he fell he grabbed the guard's tie and the tie class wound up on the floor of the pantry where it's visible in some photographs. Fain Eugene Caesar being the man who appears to have been the actual killer of RFK. I would simply invite you to con invite Roundy now, this brilliant series of books with one on Bobby. Well I'll consider that. I'm not sure if one of my wife would think of that but I did have a complete chapter in the second book, the Colossus book chapter six is dedicated to just recapping all of the known facts at that time when it was written in 2014. And and some of those facts have already brought in the you know the whole thing about the feud between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. It's interesting that you know the world has was waiting for the Lisa Peas book on Robert Kennedy assassination for over 25 years as I understand it she was working on it. But in the end she just kind of leaves it out in the air about well it was could have been this guy or that all CIA or that's where they wanted to just move it over there and just leave it up to leave it there. And she scarcely mentioned I I did a quick read of that book and I don't even see it a mention of this huge feud between Johnson and and Robert Kennedy that he lasted for about 20 years ago. And I didn't see that mention at all I didn't see anything and here's one that Robert Carrow even had in his book but it's not in hers that that whenever Johnson had someone bring up the subject of Robert Kennedy he was just he would become you know completely frozen with with apoplectic. Yeah well he he uh Carrow said that that Ed Clark had told him that that whenever that happened he would he would take his thumb like this and draw it across his neck and as he was doing it would say I'll cut his throat if it's the last thing I'd do. And I have no doubt he had a role in doing that where the CIA was involved in with the LA police uh in Bobby's death just as the Dallas police were involved with the CIA and framing Lee in Texas. Phil I just can't commend you enough for the excellence of your work and I want to thank you for joining us on this program. We look very much to having a return for you from you at some point in the future but I must say you've been making splendid contributions to the true history of the United States for which the whole nation owes you an enormous debt. Well thank you very much Dr. Pat I appreciate it. That was a great performance by Phil Nelson you know author of LBJ Mastermind of JFK's assassination LBJ from Mastermind to the Colossus. Remember the liberty and the book which has been the subject of our program this evening who really killed Martin Luther King thank you all for watching.