The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 84

Saturday, March 11, 1989 V. PECTRUM mm 84 The Sydney Morning Herald WORDS J. Edgar Hoover didn't much like Martin Luther King. He described him as a 'tomcat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges' and set out to prove it. david arrow searched hundreds of FBI documents for the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King.

him notes After I saw that thing that evening, I didn't blame him." King's sexual behaviour stood at great distance from his professed beliefs about sexuality, and the contradictions created painful and at times overwhelming guilt. Sex might indeed be anxiety-reducing, but King considered himself a sinner for being unable to ward off those needs. He told his Ebenezer congregation: "Each of us is two selves, and the great burden of life is to always try to keep that higher self in command. Don't let the lower self take over. Two days after discovering the FBI's threatening letter and embarrassing tape, King preached at Atlanta University.

He warned: "When you stand up against entrenched evil, you must be prepared to suffer a little more. I cannot promise you that if you stand up against the evils of our day, you will not have some dark and agonising moments." By Friday, January 8, King and his closest aides had decided that something must be done about the FBI's threat. He had tried resting at a private hideaway, only to have Atlanta fire trucks turn up at the door in response to a false alarm that King correctly surmised had been turned in by the FBI so as to upset him further. Andrew Young phoned Deke DeLoach to ask for a Monday appointment for himself and Ralph Abernathy. Then, Young and Bernard Lee accompanied King on a flight to New York where the three men holed up at the Park Sheraton.

Though they anticipated greater privacy in New York, FBI agents watched them arrive at Kennedy Airport. "King and his party were extremely security conscious" as they made their way to the hotel, the agents observed, where the bureau had installed listening devices in the rooms reserved for King. King summoned up the strength to carry out his public duties, giving two Sunday addresses in Boston and a Monday speech in Baltimore. While he was there. Young and Abernathy met DeLoach in Washington to ask that the FBI halt its leaks.

DeLoach denied that the FBI had any interest in SCLC's finances or King's private life. Its only value. Young explained later, was to show him how FBI executives like DeLoach "almost a kind of fascist mentality. It really scared me There really wasn't any honest conversation." Meanwhile, the bureau kept its campaign on full throttle. Assistant director Sullivan tried to derail a dinner honouring King that white Atlanta community leaders were organising and two prominent Georgia newsmen Eugene Patterson and Ralph McGill were contacted to offer them titbits on King's personal life.

One FBI letter to Attorney-General Katzenbach reported that King "has recently become emotionally upset and once became extremely Although the bureau did not mention how its anonymous package had contributed to that state of affairs, it did tell Katzenbach that "King fears public Hoover's agents continued to dog King 's campaign to the end of his life. On occasions they passed on information gleaned through wiretaps to President Johnson within the hour information that Johnson sought to disseminate through the press. By the time of King's assassination in 1968, the FBI claimed to have more than 3,000 "ghetto-type racial while the agents engaged in dirty tricks to disrupt the campaigns and with some success to fan internal dissent. The press became more hostile and King became more paranoid about the death threats he received almost daily. On April 4, 1968, he told a meeting in Memphis about a bomb threat he had received that day.

"We've got some difficult days ahead," he said. "But it really doesn't matter with me now I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. The next day he was shot dead.

From Bearing The Cross by David Carrow. Jonathan Cape. (S24) GUILTY PARTIES I A CAREFUL next Wednesday. I I Julius Caesar took do notice of Qj the soothsayer's warning, "Beware the ides of March!" 'and look what happened to him. Stabbed in the Senate, he was, by Marcus Brutus's opposition party.

If, as Shakespeare has Mark Antony assure as, Brutus was the noblest Roman of them all, can conspirators be all bad? i Certainly they are the most sinister characters we can imagine. The traditional image is of black-cloaked, hooded figures whispering in dark corners always whispering, because conspire comes from the Latin conspirare, to breathe together. The notion of plotting evil in secret prompted Mr Stuart Hansman, of Cronulla, to write to Dr VV. S. Ramson, editor of the Australian National Dictionary.

He felt that there was a huge potential for good in practising the opposite of a conspiracy, that is, a meeting of two or more people to achieve worthy objectives. He could not think of an English word to cover this. He put forward the idea of prospire, prospiracy and prospirator. Dr Ramson circulated copies of his letter as a matter of interest at a meeting of the ABCTs Standing Committee on Spoken English. But do we need a new word? The Macawme Dictionary allows as a conspiracy, down the batting order of definitions, "any concurrence in action; combination ia bringing about a given Couldn't that be a beneficial result? Yes, judging by the Oxford Dictionary.

It recites, with examples back to Wycliffe's time, the usually accepted definition "to combine privily for an evil or unlawful but it throws in "to combine, concur, co-operate as by intention (so as to effect a certain One of the examples it gives is by John Dryden in 1670: "All the advantages of mind and body, and an illustrious birth, conspire to render you aa extraordinary person." Ia spite of this I doubt that we really think of persons privy to a conspiracy as perhaps breathing together for somebody else's good, but then we get so many things wrong. Two readers wrote to me about a common misunderstanding of the phrase begging the question. One of them, Mr W. Lewis, of Carlton, NSW, wrote: "Invariably 'to beg the question' is used ia the sense of 'to raise the question', eg 'Pensioners are poor, which begs the. question, should their pensions be increased'." Not invariably.

Sometimes it is used in the sense of avoiding a straightforward aaswer, and sometimes, of course, people get it right. To beg the question is really to take for granted a matter in dispute, to base a conclusion on an argument still open to question. Another question that gets people mixed up is a leading question. A misuse you may hear is: "Where you have been for the last hour?" "Ah, that is a leading question." It is not. A leading question is commonly, but erroneously, believed to be a central or embarrassingly relevant one.

It is really a question which counsel is not allowed to ask his or her own witness because it leads a witness to a certain answer. "Did the accused say be had killed his wife?" would be a leading question. "What did the accused say to you?" would be permissible. A remark by Sherlock Holmes, "My explanation may disillusionize you" gave Mr J. W.

Bailey, of Harbord, a shock, as well it might. Surely, he thought, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would not have used such a word, but he did some checking. So did I. the Oxford Dictionary contains it. It made Fowler snort: "the first disillusion form is recommended -ize is the refuge of the destitute and should be resorted to only in real destitution." ALAN PETERSON told T.

Vivian that Hoover "is old and getting and should be "hit from all sides" with criticism in a concerted effort to get President Johnson to censure him. Lyndon Johnson, like King and his closest aides, knew that underlying Hoover's attack was the potentially damaging material about King's personal life and his relationship with Stanley Levison that the bureau had collected. The FBI could show that one of King's closest advisers, with whom he kept in contact despite many warnings, had been once intimately involved in the Communist Party's financial dealings. More important, through the hotel buggings that had continued irregularly for 10 months, and through the wiretaps on King's home and office, bureau officials knew more about King's private life than (his wife) Coretta or most of his friends did. In 1965 King became involved in the protest movement in Selma, Alabama.

The FBI continued to keep both him and his associates under minute surveillance. King flew back home from one Selma trip early in January 1966, depressed and filled with foreboding. Two days after he returned home, Coretta King found and opened a thin box containing a reel of tape that had been received at SCLC headquarters a month earlier. Staff members had assumed it was a recording of one of King's speeches and had put it aside for Coretta who collected them, but upon playing it, she realised that this was not a speech. Furthermore, the box also contained an anonymous threatening letter.

"KING, In view of your low grade I will not dignify your name with either a Mr or a Reverend or a Dr. And your last name calls to mind only the type of king such as King Henry the VIII "King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own, but I am sure they don't have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it.

I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God Clearly you don't believe in any personal moral principles. "King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age, have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile.

We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character, and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your 'honorary' degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, 1 repeat you are done. "No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself.

I repeat no person can argue successfully against facts. You are finished Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness You are done. "The American public, the church organisations that have been helping Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you.

You are done. "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what this is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant sic). You are done.

There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." Surprised and shocked, Coretta called her husband, and King summoned several confidants to listen to the tape and examine the frightening letter. Martin Luther King was assassinated 20 years ago. Three months after his "I have a dream" speech at the August 1963 rally in Washington, he was watching television when he heard the news that John Kennedy had been shot. He said to his wife: "Oh.

1 hope that he will live think if he pulls through this, it will help him to understand better what we go through. When the news came that JFK was dead, he said: "This is what is going to happen to me. This is such a sick society." Six weeks later he was back in Washington, staying at the Willard Hotel. For some time J. Edgar Hoover, notorious head of the FBI, had been taking a keen interest in King's behaviour.

With Attorney-General Robert Kennedy's permission, Hoover's agents had been enthusiastically bugging and tapping King wherever he went ARTIN Luther King's stay at Washington's Willard Hotel offered the FBI just the chance it had been looking for. Ever since the wiretaps on King's own home and office had been added in November, agents had been turning their attention more and more to King's private life and away from their previous fixation on his supposed communist ties. At a mid-December conference, bureau officials discussed in detail how they could gather further evidence of what they felt were King's serious personal and moral shortcomings, and resolved that if they could, they would use such material to expose King "as an immoral opportunist" and "clerical Domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan recommended placing surreptitious microphones, or in King's hotel rooms, and when the wiretaps revealed his planned visit to DC, agents from the FBI's Washington field office were mobilised. Listening devices were secretly planted in King's room at the Willard, and 15 full reels of tape recorded what transpired during his two-day stay. The bugs picked up a lively, drunken party involving King, several Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) colleagues, and two women from Philadelphia.

FBI personnel were immediately put to work transcribing the recording for dissemination to the White House. King was 35 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest recipient ever. Before flying to Europe to pick up the award in November 1965, he took a brief holiday in Bimini. Martin Luther King's vacation was interrupted by word that the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had labelled him the "most notorious liar" in America in an interview earlier that day with a group of journalists.

Hoover asserted that the basis for his name-calling was King's public complaint two years earlier that FBI agents in Albany had done an inadequate job investigating civil rights complaints. Hoover had said off the record that King was "one of the lowest characters in the Well-informed observers did not doubt that Hoover's outburst was based on more than an obscure two-year-old complaint. The attack and King's rebuttals received front-page coverage across the country; and FBI agents in Atlanta and New York monitored the wiretapped phones of King's aides and advisers to learn what responses King's supporters might make. They overheard King tell his secretary, Dora McDonald, that Hoover was "too old and broken down" to continue as director, and they eavesdropped on a' subsequent conversation in which King King and his aides had little doubt about the origin of the package: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

The material on the tape dirty jokes and bawdy remarks King had made a year earlier at the Willard Hotel, plus the sounds of people engaging in sex had obvi- ACTORS AND BIT-PLAYERS Ralph Abernathy: Treasurer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and King's successor. Cartka D. Deloach: FBI's White House liaison officer. James Farmer: National director of the Congress of Racial Equality, who was program director of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Michael Harrington: Activist who organised picketing.

Clarence B. Jones: New York lawyer and Gandhi Society counsel. Bernard Lee: SCLC student liaison officer and field secretary. Stanley Levison: New York lawyer and SCLC adviser. Joseph board member.

William A. Rutherford executive director. T. Vivian: SCLC affiliates director. Harry York lawyer and SCLC adviser.

Roy Wilkins: AACP executive secretary. Andrew Young: Member of SCLC, now Mayor of Atlanta. very high-level relationship we enjoyed." Unfortunately, King, as a small number of close friends knew, had certain compelling needs that could not be satisfied within a "very high-level Movement colleagues did not want to see King hurt in any way, and they were trying in some way to get him to come to grips with whatever those problems were. A friend broached the subject of his compulsive sexual athleticism with him after being prompted by worried mutual acquaintance. "I'm away from home 25 to 27 days a month," King answered.

a form of anxiety reduction." Some long-time friends viewed it as "a natural, human concomitant" of the tense, fast-paced life King had led for almost a decade. Others thought of it as standard ministerial practice in a context where intimate pastor-parishioner relationships long had been winked at, and where King and theology school classmates joshed about their success in "counselling" women. Some activists considered King's pattern typical of the overall movement. "This was not at all a sour-faced, pietistic" endeavour, Michael Harrington remembered. "Everybody was out getting laid." King's opportunities, however, were virtually limitless, as one staffer learned at a suburban New York fund-raising party.

"I watched women making passes at Martin Luther King. I could not believe what I was seeing in white Westchester women They would walk up to him and they would sort of lick their lips and hint and hand ously been acquired by bugging King's hotel rooms. Their surmise was correct: the embarrassing recording, and the threatening letter that seemed to suggest King commit suicide, had been prepared at the behest of the assistant FBI director, William Sullivan, just two days after Hoover's public attack on King in mid-November. On November 2134 days before Christmas an agent mailed, the package to King at SCLC headquarters. Neither his relatives nor his aides pressed him about the contents of the tape, but their reserve could not relieve the severe emotional tension King was experiencing.

Coretta later laughed off questions about the tape, saying, "I couldn't make much out of it, it was just a lot of mumbo jumbo," but on one occasion she revealed more clearly why she had not confronted her husband with angry questions about the tape recording. "During our whole marriage we never had one single serious discussion about either of us being involved with another person If I ever had any suspicions I never would have even mentioned them to Martin. I just wouldn't have burdened him with anything so trivial All that other business jusi. didn't have a place in the In a mass marathon race started at the gun, there is turmoil first, but the faster runners draw away. So it was that Hubble visualised the expansion of the universe.

In the past five years, it has been possible to study the flow of the galaxies in this explosion in a detailed way, as if investigating the course over which the marathon is running and seeing where the individual racers run faster on the downhill sections and slower on the upgrades. The detailed work investigating the flow of galaxies in the expansion of the universe has been carried out by a group of astronomers who became-known, as the Seven Samurai. They include my Argentinian colleague Roberto Terlevich, of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and six of his British and American friends. They travelled to virtually every large telescope in the world, determining a raction beyond the What the bsg att onus orbit" (Sydney) The timeless art of nature Astronomers have discovered a vast area in the universe towards which we are all being drawn, writes PAUL MURDIN. if years is a mass concentration that the Seven Samurai term the Great Attractor.

It gives galaxies near us an extra pull of gravity in that direction. It need not necessarily be a frighteningly massive black hole, simply an especially rich concentration of galaxies; a super-super-cluster, perhaps. Whatever it is, the Great Attractor is the biggest thing in the universe. Astronomers have been trying to confirm its existence by looking beyond 500 million light years to see whether galaxies are running uphill beyond the Great Attractor. Apart from the fascination of being able to point to the existence of the biggest thing in the universe, what is its relevance? Cosmologists, who study the origin of the whole universe, find big lumps difficult to understand.

According to the most widely-accepted theory of its origin, which builds on Hubble's discovery, the universe started 13,000 million years ago in an explosion called, facetiously, the Big Bang. The explosion, a gigantic fireball, smoothed everything to complete homogeneity. Because of this, the lumpiness of the matter in the Continued next page IMPORTED MARBLE AND GRANITE TILES COST PRICE BLUE PEARL PERLATO ROYAL ROSA PORRINO PERLATO SICILIA BIANCO PER LA RED SICILIA MULTICOLOR RED GREY SICILIA CHANDONATO SIERRA CHICA PINK CALHULA SERPEGGIANTE prices as low as $40 per sq. m. TRAVERTINO AVON A CLASS I CO OPEN 7 DAYS SAT.

8-6. SUN. 11-4 Manufacturers of custom-made kitchen and vanity tops. 31 PRINCES HIGHWAY, ST. PETERS HE universe if full of structure; to put it crudely, it is lumpy.

People and planets are two sizes of lumps which you can see if you glance up from reading this newspaper. Stars and galaxies are bigger lumps. Clusters of galaxies bigger still, super-clusters of galaxies even bigger. Astronomers have recently identified the biggest lump of all. It is called the Great Attractor, and it is pulling us and our galaxy and all the galaxies in our neighbourhood in one direction.

It is from its effect on all the nearby galaxies that it makes its presence felt. Sixty years ago, an American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, discovered that the universe was expanding. He found that the more distant a galaxy was, the faster it receded from us. He interpreted this as the consequence of a big explosion. Centaurus A galaxy one of the lumpy runners in the marathon.

fundamental data on hundreds of galaxies. They have found that all the galaxies in a huge volume of space are moving in bulk at a speed of 700 kilometres a second in the direction of the Southern Cross. Effectively, this is the downhill direction in the flow of galaxies in the nearby universe. The simplest explanation is that somewhere in that direction at a distance of some 500 million light cycas Revoluta 'sago palm Strictly limited quantities of rare majestic sago palms now available, for the connoisseur. Plants range from 1.4 to 2.6 metres high and are 60 to 1 30 years old.

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