King Martin Luther - An Act of State

First published by Verso 2003

Previous edition published by Verso 2008

Copyright William F. Pepper 2003, 2008

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Ebook ISBN: 9781510709201

Few facts are more important to the future of our country and our understanding of the nature of our species than the identities and motives of the persons responsible for the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr, President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Malcolm X. These deaths have affected more than mere events. They have torn our people between belief and disbelief. Conscious, persistent pursuit of the truth of these assassinations is essential to our character and faith.

No one has done more than Dr William F. Pepper to keep alive the quest for the truth concerning the violent death of Martin Luther King who in courageous and important words once said The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government. In An Act of State , Bill Pepper argues that very government violence was turned on Americas greatest prophet of non-violent change.

Ramsey Clark, 1 November 2002 (Ramsey Clark was appointed Assistant
Attorney General by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and was Attorney General under
Lyndon Johnson from 1967 to 1969, during which King was assassinated)

Dr Pepper, a trusted associate of my father in the anti-war movement and a dedicated follower of his teaching, has conducted exhaustive research and shed new light on all of the critical questions including the extent of the involvement of government intelligence agencies, military units and organized crime in the assassination, the motives behind it, and the individuals who ordered and participated in it.

Dexter King

William Peppers book is by far the most thorough critique of the official story of the King assassination. The result of Peppers decades of determined investigative efforts, it should be carefully read by every serious student of Kings life and his tragic death.

Professor Clayborne Carson, Director, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project

One juror, David Morphy, said after the trial, We all thought it was a cut and dried case with the evidence that Mr Pepper brought to us everyone from the CIA, military involvement, and Jowers was involved.

New York Times

In spring 1966, US carpet-bombing had systematically devastated ancient village-based rural culture in South Vietnam as napalm rained from the sky, slaughtering helpless peasants. As a freelance journalist, I had witnessed and chronicled these atrocities and in early 1967 opened my files to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize two years earlier.

At this time when I discussed the effects of the war on the civilian population and the ancient village road culture of the Vietnamese people with Dr King, he was already inclined to formally announce his position on the war. He had previously voiced his growing concern about his countrys ever greater role in what appeared to be an internal struggle for control of the nation by a nationalist movement seeking to overcome an oligarchical regime in the south, which was previously beholden to western economic interests.

It occurs to me that he would likely react in much the same way today, opposing American, unilateral opposition to nationalist revolutionary movements around the world, which ostensibly is being mounted against terrorist organizations.

In the Museum of History in Hanoi is a plaque with the following words: All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was with these words and pro-American spirit, which Ho-Chi Minh said he took from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, that he proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945.

It was not lost on Martin that Ho-Chi Minhs reverence for Jefferson, Lincoln, and American democracy, as he idealized it, made him the legitimate father of a unified Vietnam. So, on April 4 1967, Martin declared his formal opposition to the increasing barbarities in Vietnam. By July 1967, against the disastrous backdrop of the Vietnam War, America began to burn not only through enemy attack but from racial tensions and riots sparked by mounting anger over living conditions at home.

At the Spring Mobilization anti-war demonstration in New York on April 15, before 250,000 cheering and chanting citizens, after I had advanced his name as an alternative presidential candidate to Lyndon Johnson, Dr King called on the government to stop the bombing.

He was emerging as a key figurehead in a powerful coalition of the growing peace and civil rights movements, which were to form the basis of the new politics. The National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) was established to catalyze people nationwide. I was asked to be its executive director. From this platform, Dr King planned to move into mainstream politics as a potential candidate on a presidential ticket with Dr Benjamin Spock in order to highlight the anti-poverty, anti-war agenda. He called for conscientious objection, political activity, and a revolution in values to shift American society from materialism to humanism. As a result, he came under increasing attack.

During the Second World War, Ho-Chi Minh parachuted, as part of an American OSS team, behind Japanese lines to supply his nationalist Vietminh forces. Only when America turned its back on his nationalist-anti-colonialist movement against the French, did he seek help elsewhere. Eventually, of course, the Americans, whom Ho-Chi Minh saw as being an anti-colonialist republic and very different from the Europeans, replaced the French, and mounted their own effort to control and rule Vietnam.

During the years of that futile and wasted effort which resulted in a humiliating defeat for the United States, it dispatched its greatest ever land army to Vietnam, dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, forced millions of people to leave their villages and homes and by accrual bombardment used chemical agents in a way which devastated and altered the exposed environmental and genetic structures, virtually petrifying some of the most beautiful and lush lands in the world. In excess of 1,300,000 people were killed (I estimated over a million by 1967) and many others were maimed for life; of these 58,022 were American.

By 1970, Vietnamese babies were being born without eyes, with deformed hearts and stumps instead of legs. Six pounds of toxic chemicals per head of population were dumped on the people of Vietnam. President Reagan referred to this as a noble cause.