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I also noticed the photos of aJr So Others in the presence of a crowd A few during aforcibly taken aw

ay by police In another they were behind bars

“We were both arrested in Mobile,” Foster said “We spent three days in jail together That was 1966”

“How could you sell him out?” I asked

“Jansen paid me over twenty thousand dollars to be his spy In those days that was a lot of money”

“Nobody noticed you had that money?”

He shook his head “It all went to bookies and car dealers No one paid me any mind”

That feeling swept through ”

“Why do you say that?”

“You worked with the FBI and set King up to die I heard you on the recording Yet you keep these pictures on the wall? You say King was the man you admired the most You call him Martin Then you watched as he was shot down Either you have no conscience or ”

“Coleen challenged ht here in this room Of course, she was not aware of all that you know” He paused “She called iven the coin by someone else Which probably only propelled her to make the call to Valdez even quicker I handled the situation with her terribly I’ve decided to handle this one better”

Herooany table, four chairs, and a sideboard The s, sheathed in opaque curtains, allowed in only a halo of late-afternoon sun Atop the table sat an old reel-to-reel tape recorder I hadn’t seen one since I was a kid Cassettes and CDs were the norm now I noticed that a half-full reel was already threaded to a blank spool

“I need to explain a few things,” Foster said “Some of which we discussed in Micanopy, some we did not”

I recalled the conversation

“The years 1965 and ’66 were relatively cals sent to the King house, the FBI seeainst the Vietnaain increased their surveillance Hoover also gradually becaht unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement Jansen spoke of that to me Malcom X could have been that messiah, but he was killed Hoover was deathly afraid that Martin would abandon his obedience to nonviolence and e their messiah Of course, that would have never happened It ran contrary to everything Martin believed But Hoover didn’t know Martin Luther King Jr”

“That may explain why they wanted him dead,” I said “But it doesn’t explain why you wanted him dead”

“It actually doesn’t explain their ht to ith the federal governes were our closest allies The federal governht with state and local authorities Martin was no danger to the United States He was liberal to moderate compared with Stokely Carmichael, Malcol”

“Hoover hated King It was personal between them”

He nodded “We know that now In ’62, when Martin questioned the FBI’s credibility and hts, he made an enemy for life”

Foster pointed toward me

“But the differing sexual mores between the two men certainly came into play Hoover was either asexual or homosexual We’ll never know for sure Martin was pure heterosexual He loved women He routinely cheated on his wife, and that repulsed Hoover To him it showed a reatly conflicted by that weakness, knowing it was a contradiction to all he preached But he accepted the flaw as a human frailty”

I wondered about the point of all this but kept my mouth shut

“By the fall of 1967, Martin was in dire trouble,” Foster said “He’d been working nonstop for twelve years, and the strain had taken an enor pills al, and his criticisms of the Vietnam War cost him valuable allies, which included the president of the United States He was no longer welcome at the White House His base of support, which had once been enor its appeal, dise Wallace was running for president, and his segregationist un to take hold Martin felt frustrated, like all of his work had been in vain A great depression came over him”

I could see that thethisto the surface His expression, tone, even his posture, all signaled that he was telling the truth

“In January of ’68, Martin told Coretta about his love affairs She’d always known in her heart, even before the FBI sent those tapes to their house three years before, that he’d wandered fro apart What ressiveness on race, was that Martin was a chauvinist at ho children Coretta desired a more active role She wanted to be out on the road with hiree she resented Money was also an issue He took little salary froifts of cash from anyone He even donated the 54,000 he won for the Nobel Peace Prize to civil rights groups She wanted it kept as a college fund for their children They never took a faether His life was thehim behind”

I’d never heard these details before on King

“When we first met you asked o He liked recognition, adulation, and respect That’s all true I remember in early ’68 when a Gallup poll showed that he was no longer in the top ten of admired A was dropping because of his antiwar stance Universities began to withdraw their lecture invitations No publisher was eager to sign on with hihts movement had split into two factions One that favored civil disobedience and nonviolence, the other pushing for moreout By the time we arrived in Memphis on April 3, 1968, Martin was politically dead”

I pointed at the tape recorder “What is this?”