King: None of that was done alone. Many people sacrificed themselves in those struggles. I still feel for those three young people in St. Augustine who spent six months in jail for just trying to order lunch. So many people, Ben. More than I could have ever imagined, who gave of themselves.
Foster: It’s not time for that.
King: For years now I have heard the word wait. It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. Wait till next year. Wait till after the election. Wait until things are calmer. Wait almost always means “never.” I will not wait any longer.
Foster: I can’t do this, Martin. I won’t.
King: Hoover is not going to stop. He hates me, you, and everyone in this movement. He has a massive force of men at his disposal, and he cares nothing about the Constitution or the law. We have to attack this problem from an angle he will not anticipate.
Foster: They make it all about communism. That’s all Jansen talks about. He wants to know anything that might point to a red influence.
King: “A drop of red dye, then another, and another, accumulating to stain the whole country.” That’s how they think. But that’s smoke, to conceal the real fire burning in their hearts. They attack us, Ben, because they hate us. They hate us because we are not like them. That’s not going to evaporate. There is only one thing that can stop them.
Foster: I still can’t do this. I won’t help you die.
King: That’s why this entire conversation is being recorded. I want the world to know that you did this because I wanted it done. In no way were you compliant. You did exactly as I asked of you, being the friend that you have been for these past years.
Foster: Martin, that doesn’t change a thing for me.
King: We started this many months ago. We agreed then on what we would ultimately have to do. To make this record complete, I want to memorialize what happened.
[PAUSE]
King: I suspected that there were people among us spying for the FBI. People close to me. I asked Ben Foster to investigate and find out if that was true. He did as I asked and discovered at least three individuals who had been recruited by an FBI agent named James Jansen. Instead of compromising those traitors, I decided to use them to our advantage. I asked Ben to make contact with Jansen and maneuver himself into being recruited as a spy, too, using the fact that he was aware of the other three yet had not reported their identity to me. The continued flow of information from those other three served as proof of his good intentions. For several months Ben provided Agent Jansen with additional information about me and our activities, all of which I knew about. Is what I’ve said, so far, true and accurate?
Foster: Every word.
King: On my insistence, Ben began to steer conversations with Agent Jansen into a darker place. We all have our flaws. Ben is plagued with the sin of debt, so convincing Jansen of his need for money presented little problem. He also led Jansen to believe that he was disloyal to both me and the movement. That he had come to resent me. My lapses with women. My drinking. He considered me a hypocrite. Someone not worthy to be in a position of leadership among the Negro people. He also convinced Jansen that there were others who felt the same way. But he emphasized that there was no way I was going to walk away from the movement. Hoover’s slander and personal intimidations would never work. Even the disgusting tapes sent to my home, which my wife heard, and the note that implied suicide was my only honorable way out, would not work. If they wanted me gone, they would have to kill me. Is that a correct statement of what occurred?
Foster: It is, with one change. They were suspicious of my motives at first, wondering why I was doing what I did. But I steadily upped the price for my cooperation, which they paid. Eventually, they came to believe that I was genuine.
King: Because they wanted to believe. No, that’s’ incorrect. They had to believe. I do want to point out that every dollar paid to you by the FBI was used to pay your debts. I approved that action. At present, that totals a little over $22,000. Doing that was necessary in order to maintain the story we created. Ben’s carelessness with money, his gambling, are facts that existed before all of this started. It was easy for them to investigate and verify their truth.
[PAUSE]
King: Starting in October of last year and continuing to now, Ben has continued to plant the seed of violence in their minds. This was all done at my insistence. None of this was hard to accomplish. These men already hated deep in their hearts. Do I have a death wish? Not in the least. But I have come to realize that in order for this movement to spring forward, to shift to another phase, I must die. Christianity itself was founded on the death of our Lord Jesus. It took his sacrifice on the cross to spur his followers ahead. I do not mean, nor do I imply, that I am similar in any way to Jesus. Quite the contrary. I am a man filled with sin. But I am determined to win the war that I seem born to wage. I cannot, and will not, allow what I’ve worked so hard to achieve to be destroyed. It is clear that I cannot accomplish this mission in life. But in death it may be possible.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Foster switched the machine off.
I sat at the table in shock.
He seemed to sense my quandary.
“Martin wanted to die,” he said. “He set the whole thing up.”
If not for the tape I would have thought him insane. But King’s distinctive voice had made clear those intentions.
“At the time I had so many reservations. You heard me resisting. It was decades later, when FBI documents finally became public, that I realized Martin had been right. In early 1968 Hoover stepped up the surveillance of Martin and again began to fan white fears with smear campaigns. What he was doing became so obvious, the Washington Post ran a story exposing it. We now know that in January of ’68 Hoover asked for more wiretap authority. But the attorney general said no. So he created another of his slanderous dossiers on Martin to try to convince his superiors of the threat Martin supposedly posed. It spoke of more sexual misconduct and possible communist influences. He circulated that document to the attorney general, the State Department, the CIA, the president, even the military. He was told no again on more wiretaps. But he went ahead anyway. Martin was correct. Hoover was never going to stop.”
“But to kill him? For King to want to die? That’s extreme on both sides, wouldn’t you say?”
“It was a different time in so many ways. A white establishment truly existed then. Hoover existed. Blacks were just beginning to come out from under the clouds of segregation and discrimination. But only baby steps had been taken. Martin’s ability to mold public opinion had diminished. The FBI wanted, using Jansen’s words, to knock him off his pedestal. Before they could succeed, though, he found a way to get ahead of them. I know now that it was the correct path.”
I continued to stare at the reel-to-reel recorder and recalled what Valdez had said about meeting with Hoover. When the kill order had been issued.
Late January 1968.
Right in the correct time frame.
“There was something else that worked in our favor,” Foster said. “By March of ’68 public opinion on the Vietnam War had gone negative. A majority no longer supported the war. That’s when LBJ lost the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy and withdrew from the presidential race. Jansen was really concerned about that. He told me Martin’s opposition to the war might no longer be an obstacle. He might even be deemed prophetic. They were scared he could have a resurgence. Martin had me use that fear to move them forward with the assassination.”
“Which makes his death wish even more puzzling. He could have weathered the PR storm.”
“He’d fought the fight for a long time. He told me the fact that white people might decide that the war was bad for them would mean nothing for the oppression of the black and the poor. He might win on one front, but lose on the other. He believed his death would cut across all of that. And it did.”
I recalled what Foster had told Coleen.
I loved Ma
rtin Luther King Jr. like a father. I admired him more than any man I’d ever known. I still do to this day. I would have never betrayed him.
“You really didn’t betray him,” I said.
“I did exactly as he wanted.”
“Why did he choose you to do it?”
Foster stayed silent a moment.
Then he explained.
“It has to be you,” King said. “Andy, Jesse, Ralph have all been with me for so long. That fact alone would never allow them to be a part of this. They also each have their own agendas, their own paths to follow. They are good, determined men. The movement will need them in the future, and they’ll make a difference. But you, Ben. You are lost, and have been for a long time.”
“I can do great things, too.”
The indignation in his voice was hard to conceal.
“I agree, but there are many different ways in which to do great things. I don’t say this with any malice in my heart, nor with any ill intent. But you are not meant to be a leader of this movement. There are captains and there are lieutenants. You are the latter, so your fate will be different from the others’. You have a talent for people, a way of sensing what they think and telling them precisely what they want to hear. But, like me, you are flawed. You’re searching, Ben, looking for something in your life. Whether that will be in the pulpit of a church remains to be seen. Maybe this will help you find what it is you are searching for. You’ve done a good job keeping me pointed in the right direction. I’ve come to depend on your watchful eye. When I decided that it was time for me to meet God, you were the only one I would want to make that happen.”
“I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or honored,” Foster said. “He essentially called me a con man. But he was right. He knew me better than I knew myself. I could con the FBI because I’d spent my life conning others. I was good at it. Ralph, Andy, Jesse—none of them ever liked me. I was tolerated because Martin liked me. The day after the assassination Ralph told me that my services, as a traveling secretary, were no longer needed. He fired me.”
“None of them had any idea what really happened?”
He shook his head. “The old proverb is true. The buyer needs a hundred eyes, the seller but one. Thankfully, Jansen never looked close enough to realize he was being played. Martin used to say I was a little bit of a lion, but more a fox.”