Assassination Questions

Ramsey Clark was born in Dallas, Texas, on December 18, 1927, the son of Mary Ramsey Clark and Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark. He practiced law in Dallas from 1951 to 1960.

Clark was appointed Assistant Attorney General by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. After JFK's murder in Dallas, Clark continued to serve in the Justice Department under President Lyndon B. Johnson, who nominated him Attorney General in 1967. It was while Ramsey Clark was Attorney General in 1968 that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.

In the three decades since he was the highest law enforcement officer in the United States, Ramsey Clark has supported thousands of peace and justice activists around the world as a lawyer and human rights consultant. I met him in the mid 80s when he testified as an international law expert in one of our Ground Zero trials in Seattle for civil disobedience at the nearby Trident submarine base.

Part One of the following interview with Ramsey Clark occurred on July 2, 1998, in Chicago. That morning he had been a civil liberties lawyer, and I a witness, against a federal court injunction being sought under the RICO conspiracy law against people protesting abortion. While he was being driven back to O'Hare Airport, I interviewed Ramsey on the assassinations of the 60s which he had seen from the unique perspective of the attorney general's office.

My tape recorder stuck on pause during the first few minutes of the interview. This is a summary of their content:

I began with an ironic compliment, saying I saw a similarity between the integrity of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in his investigation into JFK's murder and the integrity of Ramsey Clark in such causes as seeking the removal of the murderous sanctions against Iraq. Had that comparison ever occurred to him?

He said dryly, "Not really." He said Garrison had scapegoated defendant Clay Shaw as a homosexual. He didn't find such behavior acceptable.

In connection with Garrison, I asked Ramsey what he knew about JFK suspect Gordon Novel, whom Garrison had tried unsuccessfully to extradite from another state for the Shaw trial.

Ramsey volunteered the information that Gordon Novel had worked recently for him as an investigator in the Branch Davidian Waco case. He thought Novel was completely sincere in his outrage at what had happened at Waco.

I asked if he had considered (as Garrison obviously had) the possibility that the CIA was responsible for our major assassinations of the 60s.

He said, "Yes, I've considered it," then spoke about how the CIA had deceived him in court cases when he was Attorney General.

The tape recorder picks up the interview at this point:

Ramsey Clark: I think when you start being secretive about information, you inherently distort it. The only thing that's going to bring out the truth is the sunshine. You've got to just lay it out there. Let everybody see it. Then we can debate about it.

It's kind of like abortion. If you let people say and do their thing and show how they feel, then other people start scratching their heads: "Why do these people feel so strongly about that? Maybe there's something I don't understand. Why are they such sincere people? Why are they so religious? Why do they care so much?"

I feel the same way about the CIA. In that sense I would have abolished the CIA, as we know it today. I had said so by 1969.

If we had acquired our information from public sources, we would have known a lot more. And it would have been a lot more reliable.

When you acquire it secretly, you let people feed into you the bias that they want to present to you. That's one of the problems.

Jim Douglass: If the CIA was a murderous as well as a lying organization in the 60s, may it not be the same today in unrecognized ways? For example, should the CIA be considered a suspect for an act of domestic terrorism like the Oklahoma City bombing, perhaps done to sustain the "necessary" image of terrorism as our new enemy?

Clark: I think, of course terrorism is the big bugaboo.

But if you gave people a psychological test saying, "I'm going to say a word and you say what comes to your mind first," and they said, "Okay."

"Up." "Down."

"Black." "White."

"Palestinian." "Terrorist."

That's your reflex. But this country did not want a Gulf War veteran from our moment of glory to be responsible for killing all those defenseless people in Oklahoma City.

It teaches us many tales.

It teaches us how cruel we've been to him. We put him through that miserable experience. How cruel to put him through that, so that he's so angry.

But it's part of our glorification of violence. Our culture glorifies violence constantly ... and things.

If you want to look at the root of our problem, you have to look at our materialism and our love of violence.

Douglass: Can you speak about your investigation of the assassinations of Dr. King and Senator Kennedy? What was the process of what the FBI called "the greatest manhunt in law enforcement history" for King's presumed assassin? Can you describe that process in relation to your office -- and the FBI's, which was at least theoretically under your direction?

Clark: That's the theory, yes.

Actually no attorney general had ever said no to J. Edgar Hoover until I came along.

I told him no on his wire taps.

I told him no on wire taps on Martin Luther King, just as a single illustration. A score of times. He wouldn't give up on it. He kept coming back -- up until April 2, 1968. That was the last time I told him no.

Let me say first that I came into government by the appointment of President Kennedy. I was young, and I thought he was just incredibly wonderful. When he was murdered, I was devastated. I was really wondering whether I'd ever be happy again, living in a world where such cruelly irrational things can happen.

I'd known Dr. King well. Even then I thought he was probably the greatest human spirit that our country had produced. When he spoke at the Riverside Church in April of 67, just the year before he was murdered, and said, "The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government," I thought that was one of the most important and courageous human statements that I'd ever heard.

Douglass: You were in the church at that time?

Clark: No, he sent me a copy. I read the press reports. But I don't recall the press reports picking that up. I still have the copy. He signed it. He said he wanted me to have it.

I'd known him well three or four years before Selma and Montgomery which was in the Spring of '65.

Douglass: Did you ever hear J. Edgar Hoover comment on that same speech?

Clark: No. No, I heard him comment about Dr. King quite a bit. Because Mr. Hoover'd gotten to be old --- with some of the characteristics that come with aging.

Repetitious.

Undisciplined in the sense that he would say hateful things, when a reasoning person wouldn't. You could tell him time and time again that you disagreed, and he'd still have to say it.

He's a real human being, you know. I don't believe that Mr. Hoover's a demon any more than I believe Saddam Hussein's a demon. They're human beings.

But he was raised in the South. And he was one of the loneliest people I've ever met. He had no family. No real contacts. He wouldn't have lunch with the assistant directors. He'd eat alone. Or he'd eat with Clyde Tolson, when Clyde was around.

And to him, for a black man to have relations with a white woman was as sinful as anything he could think of.

For a preacher to do it -- because he was a church-going man, you know he was raised strictly in the church -- was awful.

Then for Dr. King to attack the bureau, it's like defying your temple.

So that made King to him one of the worst people.

But I don't remember anything sophisticated or subtle about his analysis. It came from the gut. And it had to do with profound, tragic, human prejudice that involved racism, that involved a sense of the role of a clergyman, and that involved essentially respect for the FBI.

Douglass: Now you know well about the tape that Mr. Hoover sent to Coretta King, and a copy sent to Martin King with a note on it urging him to commit suicide. What substantive difference is there between that and an effort to kill him directly?

Clark: An effort to kill him directly would be attempted murder.

I don't see how a person could reasonably believe that he could lead Martin Luther King into committing suicide, so I don't see any real relationship between the two.

I think if a guy was standing on that lamp pole up there and said he was going to jump, and I said, "Jump! Jump!" and could see the guy was unstable, and he jumped, then I would be guilty of what I would call a crime. It could be a crime.

But for me to write you a letter and say this, that, and the other and you ought to kill yourself, I don't think you're going to kill yourself. So I don't think there's a comparison there.

That doesn't mean that it's acceptable conduct morally for anybody. And for a government official, I think it was cause for dismissal.

You don't want your government doing that, do you? How can you respect your government when they do that sort of thing?

But I haven't listened to the tape. I wouldn't listen to the tape. I'd been told what it said. So I know the psychology of it.

I would compare the whole subversive activity of the FBI and other agencies to what I said about the CIA. There's no place for it in a decent government. If you want the government respected, it has to act respectably. If it does that type of activity, I'm not going to respect it. And I would see the abolition of those aspects of it that engage in that type of activity, and punishment for those who do it. Whether it's a crime or not, they can be dismissed.

Anyway, when Dr. King was shot, I was hearing from him practically every day. But the word came while I was sitting in a meeting in my office, the office of the attorney general. There were 15 or 20 people in there with me.

A half dozen of them didn't leave that office for about a week. I mean literally. That's where they'd dress. That's where they'd bathe...because we put the command post there.

I flew down to Memphis. I called...

Douglass: Do you remember a man named Jim Laue?

Clark: Jim Laue?

Douglass: Yes.

Clark: I knew Jim Laue, yes.

Douglass: I knew him also.

Clark: Jim was in St. Louis for years. He was at the University of Missouri there.

Jim was with SCLC, and he was working on his Ph.D. And he was with the Community Relations Service of the Justice Department.

Douglass: Where was he in the Lorraine Motel?

Clark: He was in the immediate area. You know, he told me a number of times, but I can't tell you exactly where he was.

He was on the second floor, as I recall, and probably within a door or two.

Douglass: So he was right there.

Clark: Yes, sure he was. I talked with him later that night, and saw him the next morning. Because I flew down that night. I contacted Mrs. King and arranged for her to get over, then got down to meet her when she got there.

Douglass: So you went down to Memphis, and you were talking with Jim Laue and other people there. What went on then?

Clark: I didn't really talk with Jim. I saw him.

Well, basically I was trying to be sure that the family was all right, that Mrs. King was all right. That she had what she needed. That she was safe.

I wanted to talk to Buford Ellington because he had called out the National Guard. He had tanks in the streets. I was afraid he was going to start shooting up the place, killing people.

And I wanted to lay some groundwork for federal, state, and local coordination on the case.

It was extremely difficult to identify a federal crime. In fact, I've been charged with improperly investigating because there was no federal crime. But we developed a couple of theories under which we thought we could investigate.

Douglass: May I ask your impression of the Memphis Police Department in your relations with them right after the assassination?

Clark: I think "relations with them" would be an overstatement.

I saw them. I had been working with police departments around the country for three or four years because they were overwhelmingly white and violent-prone. To try to prevent riots. Every riot in the 60s up to the moment of Dr. King's death arose from a police incident. So the way not to have riots is not to have police incidents.

So we'd been trying to cool it with police departments. And we'd been indicting police all over the country for violations of human rights. That became our number one civil rights enforcement priority on the theory: Who protects the people when the police violate the law?

So I had a general impression of Memphis police. You had to recognize them for what they were. They were undertrained, underpaid, drawn from poor backgrounds where levels of racism were very high.

I followed the investigation of the assassination five or six days a week from April 6, 1968, when I got back from Memphis, until January 20, 1969. That morning I had another report.

I went over to the lab a number of times and looked at stuff.

Douglass: Why do you think it took so long to find James Earl Ray in "the greatest manhunt in law enforcement history"?

Clark: There are a lot of manhunts where they've never found anyone.

One thing I thought at the time -- and I haven't really changed my mind -- is that there are some people who by personality will do the opposite of what you'd expect them to do. They'll take a left turn instead of a right turn. That sort of thing.

Ray seemed to have something that was throwing us off because we came up immediately with a lot of evidence. We had the Rebel Motel registration. We had the beer cans with prints. We had the gun, the history of the gun, and the prints on the gun. We had the car.

But we didn't know who it was. We seemed to first learn who it was from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They didn't even have an automated photograph system. But they picked him up by going through their ID files one by one. We thought we knew then who it was. We began to pick up things on him. We had his police record, conviction record.

He had a history of some racism. There was an assault case in Illinois. And there was the time in prison in Kansas when he wouldn't move to the farm because it was integrated, and he didn't want to be in...At least that's what we were told -- that sort of thing.

In Europe we seemed to be able to follow him to Lisbon, where he tried to enlist in the military to go to Angola. We followed him to Brussels, where he tried to enlist in the military to go to the Congo. Both of them turned him down.

Then we found him shortly after there had been a robbery of a little money cash stand, where this guy had come up with a note that said, "Give me your money" or something like that and stuck it under a metal grill. And the woman had given him 101 pounds, as I recall, in change. And those were his prints -- palm print, finger prints.

Then he was picked up at the airport there [Heathrow Airport in London].

Douglass: What do you think of the King family's position since February 1997, when they said they believed in James Earl Ray's innocence and supported his hope for a trial?

Clark: I represented Mrs. King for quite a while. I helped her get started on the King holiday. Griffin Bell wouldn't even meet with her, if you can believe it. The Attorney General from Atlanta, Georgia, and he wouldn't meet with Mrs. King. They didn't want it because they didn't need it. I mean they were from Georgia anyway, so they've got that all wrapped up.

The only one I've met with on it is Dexter [King].

The thing I know is that people are so emotionally torn by those things that...I think of Walt Whitman, who wrote an essay on the fifteenth anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was quite a powerful statement in which he said he, like so many of his generation, would go to their graves asking why and doubting what they were told and never satisfied because there couldn't be any satisfaction.

I haven't heard but one of them say that they think Ray is innocent. I think Dexter may say he thinks he's innocent.

But no one says he wasn't thereabouts.

I think the family may say at the most that they think other people were involved.

As far as continuing the investigation, I felt that should be done from the beginning.

I think all those investigations should never be closed. It's a disservice to close them. I've said that, written that, even proposed an independent agency that could receive evidence and continue to follow up, because history and the character of the country demand that we seek.

Having said all that, I agree with Emerson that "time dissipates the shining ether, the solid angularity of fact." It just does. Evidence dissipates, even with confessions, and even with things that seem ironclad.

There's nothing ironclad in life. You're not sure.

How many people have we got today claiming to be in the assassination of JFK? Literally hundreds.

I think a lot of them actually believe it. The fact that they believe it is the most important thing in their lives.

Douglass: Did you see the Oliver Stone film?

Clark: No, I haven't.

You know, I used to love movies, but they're too violent for me these days.

Douglass: I mean "JFK".

Clark: You mean "JFK". Yes.

I think a movie is not an investigative device. It's a polemical device, and I get enough polemics in my life.

It doesn't mean I don't like documentary movies. But all I'm seeing is old film footage.

Douglass: Before you get on an airplane here, let me move on with a quick question about Robert Kennedy's assassination. Did you ever read the RFK autopsy report by Thomas Noguchi?

Clark: You know, I'd worked daily with Bob Kennedy for four years.

That was a California investigation, we had agreed with Evelle Younger, who was the District Attorney and was supposed to have been competent. But I didn't have a very high opinion of him, then or later, because he was more interested in publicity than in the truth.

I've seen the autopsy photos on...not Malcolm but Dr. King and President Kennedy and Bob.

Douglass: But you haven't seen the Noguchi report?

Clark: I think I have, yes.

And I've watched Noguchi for a long time.

Douglass: The Noguchi report astounded me because, as he says in his autobiography, he established conclusively that all the bullets that entered Robert Kennedy came from behind him within an inch of his body. Yet all the witnesses said that Sirhan Sirhan was out in front of Robert Kennedy and never got closer than one-and-a-half to six feet. Those are dozens of witnesses.

Clark: Well, a lot of the people were right there: Rosie Greer and others.

Douglass: Right. There is no question that Sirhan Sirhan fired a weapon.

Clark: If you'd been in a bedlam like that, you're not quite sure exactly what happened sometimes.

For instance, [Texas Governor] John Connally to the day that he died swore they were trying to assassinate him. It was just a matter of pride: "I'm more important than John Kennedy. They were trying to hit me. Don't tell me they weren't trying to hit me."

He just had to believe it. It was a matter of ego.

Douglass: Did you agree with [former Warren Commission investigator, now Pennsylania Senator] Arlen Specter's theory about how the "magic bullet" inflicted various wounds on both John Kennedy and John Connally?

Clark: I don't remember it particularly.

You know, Specter's a former D.A., and those guys always have kind of weird interpretations.

(Looking for his airline designation, as we drive up to O'Hare Airport.) Just let me out when we get to American. Here it is.

Great to be with you. I'm not going to linger.

Douglass: God bless you, Ramsey.

Clark: Great to see you. Adios.

Part Two of the interview took place at Ramsey Clark's law office on the lower East Side of Manhattan on October 12, 1998. Since it was Columbus Day, the office was deserted. Ramsey had been kind enough to meet with me this second time on the morning of a holiday, before an outing with his family.

Because I was stopping in New York on a trip to Iraq, taking medicines to hospitals, we spoke first about Iraq and the US/UN sanctions. Then I asked Ramsey if he had received my August 22 letter, with the transcript of part one of the interview, seeking his corrections. To inform him of my own position on the assassinations, I had enclosed also a copy of my talk "Compassion and the Unspeakable in the Murders of Martin, Malcolm, JFK, and RFK". He said he had received but not read these materials.

We then resumed the interview.

Douglass: The last question I asked you in Chicago, before you left the car for your plane, was: Did you agree with Arlen Specter's theory about how the "magic bullet" inflicted various wounds on both John Kennedy and John Connally?

Clark: You now, I haven't tried to systematically and fairly parse every theory. And I find most of them heavily weighted with emotional content.

For instance, Connally. I knew John Connally when I was if not a boy, a lad. I remember him when he was in the Navy in World War Two. We were never close. But of course we were in the government together, when he was Secretary of the Navy.

There was almost a psychological necessity for him that he be a target. So he had to believe that they were shooting at him. I don't mean to put him down, but my impression is it was solely because it would be demeaning to be badly injured by bullets meant for somebody else. It means he's not important enough.

My sense of it was that he just happened to be sitting in the wrong place. Anybody else sitting there at that time would have received the same wounds, not because they were aimed at the person there but because they were aimed at the President and hit the person in the proximity.

But you know, I did see the autopsy photos.

I had what at the time seemed like a very painful decision to make. I became acting Attorney General in September of '66. Congress had enacted a law that authorized, and I think directed, the Attorney General to obtain all possible evidence concerning the assassination.

Douglass: You're talking about JFK's assassination.

Clark: JFK.

And if it weren't forthcoming, to use powers of eminent domain: Just take it, and compensate the people for it.

The initial thought was the rifle, because the rifle was at that time beginning to be used commercially. People taking it to carnivals and state fairs...

Douglass: Is this the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle?

Clark: Yes. And asking two bucks, or whatever it was, for people to stand in line and come in and see the rifle that killed the President.

But I thought there was a more important reason, and that was the preservation of evidence.

From childhood I was a great lover of Abraham Lincoln. And my grandmother wouldn't even talk to me about it, because she hated Abraham Lincoln. She was born and raised in Mississippi and literally hated him. She was born right after the war, but all of her folks lived through the war.

And I know how doubt and torment followed for generations.

Walt Whitman had written a beautiful essay that he gave on several occasions as a speech, primarily on the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Lincoln. And of course Whitman loved Lincoln.

But he talked about how the doubt would always be with us. We'd never know.

So I carried that with me into this Kennedy assassination, which was as devastating as anything can be to me personally and to those immediately around me. I wasn't that terribly close to the President, but he had appointed me -- not Attorney General but Assistant Attorney General, which is where I got started.

He was just a beautiful person. I couldn't believe it had happened.

Douglass: How did he happen to appoint you Assistant Attorney General?

Clark: Actually it was on the recommendation of Bob Kennedy. It was a presidential appointment, but of course Bob was going to choose everybody in Justice.

We had a very close mutual friend, [Supreme Court Justice] William O. Douglas, who was a long-time friend of the Kennedy family. He served on the SEC with the Ambassador [Joseph Kennedy]. He had taken Bob on the hiking trip in Afghanistan where he got sick and nearly died. He'd been very close to President Kennedy.

He wrote sadly about him in his autobiography. Douglas had gone to Vietnam before Diem was assassinated, and came back and warned Jack, as he called him. And in the book he said that we killed him. "We did it," I think, is the sentence for Diem. And that Jack may not have known about it, but he was responsible -- and this is a man he loved -- responsible in the sense that he'd been warned, and he should have done more.

William O. Douglas was a guy that captured my fancy and imagination. And he liked me. So he was the main person to support my appointment.

Anyway I thought we should obtain all the evidence in the President's assassination.

Bob [Kennedy] had left office on the first of September 64. Nicholas Katzenbach and I were appointed Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General in February of '65. Then Nick went to the State Department in September of '66, and I became acting Attorney General.

Just about the first night I was acting Attorney General, a fellow named Harold Reese, who had been an Executive Assistant to Nick, came in. Reese said one immediate problem I had was that the law authorizing acquisition of materials related to the President's death would expire at the first of October.

He said that the autopsy photos had never been turned over to any examiners, that even the doctors at Bethesda [Naval Hospital, where the autopsy on President Kennedy's body was performed] had never seen them. It was because Mrs. Kennedy, Jacqueline, had sent [JFK special assistant] Kenny O'Donnell out -- I think that's a characterization, I think he was out or was going out anyway -- but had asked him to get the autopsy photos because, as it was put, she didn't want the President seen or remembered with his head blown open like that. Which is a very human and understandable thing.

Douglass: Who told you this?

Clark: Harold Reese.

There's no question about it, as you'll see when...

So O'Donnell brings them back. Nobody's quite sure where they are now, or who actually possesses them, but they're possessed under the control of Mrs. Kennedy.

And you've got days to decide whether to obtain them or wait until the family does something with them, whether they destroy them.

There were some other things there, too, I think, some plastic... They have a way of enveloping an organ or forensic matter from bodies in plastic, which is kind of a permanent seal. There was some brain tissue and other stuff in there, which I thought at the time probably related primarily to Addison's Disease and some desire to let private family matters remain private family matters.

But I knew immediately that the people had to possess the autopsy photos.

The examining doctors hadn't seen them. Obviously the photos couldn't show anything they couldn't have seen. But they could show something they might not have seen. And they could permanently record things that their memories might not remember accurately.

The X rays could show things you couldn't see -- bone fragmentations -- and provide quite a bit of evidence about trajectory and other things.

So at that moment I called a fellow named Burke Marshall, who was the former Assistant Attorney General. We worked together. We were close friends. He was acting as one of Mrs. Kennedy's confidants in personal-type orders. And he was a natural entrée for me because I knew him.

I called him and told him that I understood Mrs. Kennedy had the autopsy photos and X rays, and that I had to have them. That there wasn't much time -- no time for negotiation. That if they weren't forthcoming, I'd have to sue, as much as I'd hate to have the United States government sue the widow of the President. I saw no choice.

He said he didn't know, but he'd check into it and get back to me. And he got back and said that she didn't want to give them up. She understood that she could be compelled to, that she was anxious that they not be made public during the lives of Caroline and John. I mean obviously she didn't want them to have to live with the head of their father pictured on the cover of Life Magazine, repeated thousands of times whenever people talk about the assassination, with half the back of his head blown off. Which is something most people would like to spare their children, quite understandably.

So we quickly analyzed what could be done and reached an agreement that said roughly, as I recall, that they would be immediately available for examination by anyone investigating the assassination on an authorized basis and to the scientific community -- the medical community -- on an agreement that they wouldn't be copied. They would be used only for their examination and finding and report but not portrayal during the lifetimes of Caroline and John.

Actually somebody later got hold of one somehow or other.

They turned them over. I was anxious that rumor not get ahead of review and that anticipation not distort observation.

Douglass: Can you give me a date as to exactly when this was happening?

Clark: Late September of '66.

I planned, first, to call in immediately all of the doctors at Bethesda that participated in the autopsy. There were three or four of them. I remember [Dr. Pierre] Finck was in Vietnam at the time. This would still have been within, let's say, 48 hours of the time we got the materials.

It turned out that they were in the Archives, the building right next door, in a special area that had been set aside for Mrs. Kennedy, and that [President Kennedy's private secretary] Evelyn Lincoln was the person who was administering that space. She had a little space and office there.

So we flew in all the doctors. I didn't tell people what it was about. I just said I had to have these people right away. They all came in.

I told them what we had, and that we had brought equipment into the Archives for viewing X rays. But I wanted them to look at it and decide whether it affected anything they said in any of their reporting on what they saw and determined in the autopsy efforts. If they needed anything, needed any consultation, needed any laboratory instrumentation, just let me know.

This was everything that we had. I can't remember what all it was.

My recollection is, though, that it didn't include the shirt and coat and stuff like that. I think it may have been otherwise possessed. I think it just included these slides of the X rays and autopsy photos.

They came in, looked at them, said they'd like to look at them again within a day or so. They wanted to do something in between.

You see, even the Warren Commission hadn't seen these. The Chief Justice knew they existed and talked to Mrs. Kennedy about them. He was a compassionate sort of man, and he just said that if she didn't want us to have them, we're not going to have them.

That's the way he was built. I was in charge at one time of the relocation of the government to bomb shelters in case of a nuclear attack. They were going to have a test. So I was supposed to get the Chief Justice out there. (Laughs) I loved the man. I felt very close to him. I said, 'Well, you're supposed to go out to this bomb shelter so we can continue the government in case of a missile test." He said, "No, Ramsey. If it comes, I'm going to be right here at home with my family where I ought to be. I'm not going to go hide in some bomb shelter." I said, "But you're supposed to do it. We have to continue the government. So I'll come get you and take you out there." He said, "No, no thank you. I'm not going to do it." (Chuckles)

I say that just to show the kind of man he was about things like this, important or simply human.

Then we asked a bunch of people that were medical and radiological experts to determine who would be the best people to review these materials. We didn't say what they were going to do. I just said, "I can't pay you for it, but I need the best minds and judgment that you can get."

They came up with professors at different medical schools: Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Stanford...

And I asked the president of the American Bar Association to designate independent counsel of stature for an important assignment, so they'd have their own legal advisor.

They all came in. This was now probably a couple of months later.

Douglass: Fall of '66?

Clark: Yes.

They came in. I told them what it was about, that we wanted to maintain confidentiality until the review was done because we wanted to be able to say what experts had seen before word was out.

So they agreed. It was something I'm not sure could happen now. No one ever leaked a thing. No one ever asked for a dime. They came at their own expense and time.

They examined the stuff. They then wanted to go away. They came back several weeks later, as I recall, and examined it again. Then they issued a prepared report. Bruce Bromley, who was famous for it at the time, very establishment, was the lawyer.

Now [New Orleans District Attorney Jim] Garrison got into the act there at some time, demanding, I guess, access to the materials or something like that. I don't know what it was.

Douglass: Were the doctors from Parkland Hospital in Dallas involved in any of this?

Clark: No, they weren't.

We were told that they didn't have...You know, that everything was so rushed there that...And of course, they didn't have...These photos and X rays were taken at Bethesda. They didn't have time to look at...

I think they reviewed them. They weren't involved in this process. I think they reviewed them later.

Douglass: I think they did, too. And I don't think they agreed that those corresponded to what they saw in Dallas.

Clark: I don't know what they said at this time.

You know it's not clear what that would mean.

There's no question that the photos were of...At least I don't think there's any question that they were of President Kennedy, and that they were the photos taken at Bethesda.

Douglass: Why do you say there's no question?

Clark: Because the people who were there and who were responsible for their being taken said they were the photos. The same with the X-rays.

Douglass: Let's take a question here about a conflict of perception, because the doctors and nurses who looked at President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital -- the first people who saw him when he came in after being shot -- saw a huge wound in his head.

Clark: There was a huge wound.

Douglass: Right. But when a number of them saw, many years later, this autopsy material, they said, "This is not what we saw in Parkland Hospital." And they had no particular explanation. They didn't have a theory about it. They just said, "This does not correspond to what we saw."

What does one do with that kind of a conflict?

Clark: Well, one uses common sense.

A body of a president is brought into a hospital in Dallas, to be seen by people who never thought they'd see a president of the United States. And the body has fresh and major wounds. The body's still clothed when it comes in. There's blood all over the place and the hair is matted. There are bone fragments sticking around.

So you see what you see. And it has, even though you may have been working in emergency for twenty years, the impact of the freshness of this ... God, this is an awful wound! People don't have photographic memories.

By the time the autopsy photos were made, the head was cleaned up. It was cleaned up some in Dallas before it came up. Then there are photos through the process, but not too many as I recall. But it's pretty clean when you start. The head's shaved back, so you can see more clearly and all the rest.

But to suggest that...I mean pictures can lie in the sense that they can portray something other than as it actually was. But it's still a technological process.

Douglass: Yes.

Clark: But to suggest that these were pictures of somebody else, or that they've been rearranged somehow or other, is pretty far-fetched. It's hard to see how it could happen. It would also make profound liars of those who were there and who were responsible for the taking of the X rays and autopsy photos.

Douglass: Or of somebody over them. That was a military command at Bethesda.

Clark: Bethesda's a naval hospital.

Douglass: Yes.

Clark: They weren't all Navy. I think Finck was Army, for instance.

But a naval commander can't tell you what you saw, unless you're willing to lie.

But it makes no sense. The people in Dallas didn't see X rays. So you can't look at an X ray and say, "That's not what I saw," because you don't see with X ray vision.

Anyway that would seem to me to be one of the more solid pieces of factual evidence.

I think it's pretty extreme to have to question whether these X rays or autopsy photos are authentic. The probability that they're authentic seems overwhelmingly high.

But if they're not, then you have something of a magnitude beyond common experience that would reflect so devastatingly on our society as a whole and its corruptibility that you don't know how to deal with it.

Just the chance half the people there would all be willing to become part of, and never speak out against, something that would be fabricating autopsy photos and X rays is pretty extreme.

But it never occurred to me. And I don't think there's any real likelihood of it at all.

Douglass: It's occurred to other people who've written very extensively about it.

Clark: It's occurred to them that these are fake?

Douglass: Exactly. There's been a recent book on that whole thesis by a number of doctors and scientific minds.

Clark: Well, I think they're science fiction then.

Douglass: Would you be willing to read their book?

Clark: I'll tell you, you know I've lived with this all these years, and I get pretty tired of this stuff.

A fellow like [James Earl Ray's attorney] Bill Pepper I've known many years, long before any...long before he got into this. And I had drafts of his book [Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.] long before it came out.

Bill is just stretching beyond any reason, absolutely stretching beyond any reason.

Douglass: Well, let's go on to the King assassination then.

Mariann Laue, Jim's widow, sent me an article from Time ["The Mysteries of James Earl Ray" by Jack White, February 17, 1997, page 73] about Dr. King's murder.

I want to quote you a piece of it, and ask you a couple of questions about it, because it relates to incidents you were describing in our Chicago interview.

The article says: "...only a few hours after the shooting FBI agents were spreading the word that King's killer had been a single gunman acting alone. Roger Wilkins, then head of the CRS [Community Relations Service of the Justice Department], recalls that when he and Attorney General Ramsey Clark were flying to Memphis from Washington the day after the killing, FBI Assistant Director Cartha D. (Deke) DeLoach 'was pushing us hard' on the FBI's lone-gunman theory. How the agency could have been so sure of that so soon is a mystery."

Does your memory agree with Roger Wilkins's concerning that flight to Memphis, in that Cartha DeLoach "'was pushing us hard' on the FBI's lone-gunman theory"?

If so, why do you think that was the case?

Clark: Roger [Wilkins] was with us at a staff meeting, Thursday afternoon, as I recall, in my office in Washington. The call came in from the FBI that Dr. King was shot. Of all the people that could have called, it was the FBI that called first to say that he had been shot.

Douglass: Do you remember who called you? Was it Hoover?

Clark: No. I don't remember.

Douglass: Go ahead.

Clark: But it was the FBI. And it was from Washington. It wasn't from Memphis.

Dr. King was alive and on his way to the hospital, as I recall. So our meeting broke up, and we remained on the phone to other contacts that we had. I think we had a call from Jim [Laue] pretty quickly.

When we heard of the death, I contacted the family and said I was going down and asked them if there was anything I could do. Over the next several hours it developed that they were going to go over. I think Rockefeller had provided a private plane. We agreed to meet at the airport that morning.

So I decided to take Roger, also a fellow named Cliff Alexander, who had been chairman of the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] .

I was not going to go without [someone from the FBI]. Our ability to function with the FBI was very difficult because of psychological peculiarities. I'll put it that way.

Bob Kennedy hadn't been able to function with them at all. When he was the Attorney General, he had great difficulty relating to Mr. Hoover. After a year or so, he couldn't talk with Mr. Hoover or meet with him.

He used finally a man named Courtney Evans for all of their negotiations. Courtney Evans was the Assistant Director [of the FBI]. He had to talk to the Director. When he had to talk to the Attorney General. He was caught in between, a terrible position to be in. Dysfunctional. I mean, you can't function that way.

But I knew their capacity for leaks and comments. And I knew if I went down and said something, and they said something else, they'd create a big furor about who struck John -- that sort of thing.

So I called Mr. Hoover, which was very rare. He was at home. I told him that I was going down, and I wanted to take Deke DeLoach, who at that time was his second-in-command.

DeLoach was a guy I didn't respect or trust. He was very close to the White House, as was the Director, very close to President Johnson. Which made it equally important that I have him with me, to tie him down on what we were doing and seeing, so I wouldn't have stuff coming in the back door.

And later, right after Bob Kennedy's assassination, we finally blew up because of a petty thing they did that illustrates the sort of problem we had.

After Bob was murdered, I'd come up to stand vigil [beside his coffin] at St. Patrick's [Cathedral in New York.]

When we came out of St. Patrick's that morning after the service, there was an FBI agent at the door. He said, "Mr. Attorney General, I have a message for you. James Earl Ray has been arrested in London."

I immediately thought something was wrong. So I called DeLoach from a telephone on the street. I said, "Why'd you put this press release out now?" The FBI guy had told me they had to put a press release out.

And he said, well, they thought the word would get out, and they had to go ahead and put it out.

I said, "When did you get it?"

He said, "Oh, we just got it."

They'd had it for 48 hours. They'd held it until this time.

On the day that Bob Kennedy was being mourned and remembered, the FBI wanted to show that they were still on the job. Not that they had arrested Ray [who was seized in London's Heathrow Airport by Scotland Yard detectives], but that they had had him where they were going to get him.

That's the sort of manipulation that you'd be involved in.

So DeLoach went with us to Memphis.

My recollection is he wanted to bet that they would have an arrest within a certain period of time. It wasn't quick. But it was a certain period of time, like a week or a month.

The painful example that we had as a precedent was the arrest of people charged with the murder of [Detroit housewife] Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered on a Friday night [just after the Selma March]. And President Johnson and Mr. Hoover announced the arrest the next day, and of course blew it all over the press about how great they were, when in fact they had an informer in the car.

So here they were pulling that kind of publicity and manipulation.

Anyway DeLoach went with us to Memphis. We got on a Jet Star, a little Army plane, and flew down.

Douglass: Now this is the time when Wilkins says, "DeLoach 'was pushing us hard' on the FBI's lone-gunman theory." Do you remember that?

Clark: I think the idea of the lone-gunman theory is something that is at least a characterization that was imposed later.

But it certainly is consistent with what I just said, that is, that on that flight he wanted to wager.

I mean, that to me was very offensive because we had just had our greatest American murdered. And it's kind of light. It's treating it like their work's more important than this loss.

I wasn't about to wager on any dumb thing like that. I was torn up about Dr. King's death and what it meant for the country.

But his wanting to make that wager would imply that it was a simple case to break -- maybe one person.

By the next day I would be sure that they were saying, though, that all of the evidence involved a single person who was on the run.

I don't remember the dates, but say this was a Friday. Then by Saturday I'd be sure that's what they were saying, because by that time they had beer cans and the rifle and Rebel Hotel registration and all this other stuff.

Douglass: Did you ever consider that the beer cans and the rifle and all that stuff, which was all in one place, had been planted?

Clark: I don't know that I considered that at that time. I was receiving statements of what they were finding.

We had great difficulties with the FBI in all of our civil rights cases, to the extent that we would take cases away from them because we couldn't rely on them.

In part because of their resident agent policy. They would use people in a place like South Carolina who were born and raised there and were school buddies of the sheriff who's accused of beating and killing a prisoner.

The special agent in charge for the whole State of South Carolina was with the head of the state police at the Orangeburg Massacre. They shared a motel room. That sort of problem.

But I'm sure I was taking what they were saying at that time in Memphis as what they were finding regarding the matter. You always wonder about your evidence. But there was a lot of stuff that was coming together rather quickly.

And then for months, I remember all kinds of strange things would happen. There'd be a body found buried in the sand on the Mexican coast. And they would think it was James Earl Ray.

This is considerably later but before he was found, of course.

But the fingers would be puffed up. So they had to go through some process to get them down, where you could get the kind of print that would be best for comparison. We waited rather anxiously for 24 or 48 hours while that process took place. We then found it wasn't James Earl Ray.

That sort of thing went on and on and on.

The early business about Eric Starvo Galt was pure FBI ideology. They were so into Cold War, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet thinking that the perfect answer would be the Russians did it.

So here's this guy who's supposed to be a Russian who got off a ship, a Russian ship in Mobile. Eric Starvo Galt [an alias of James Earl Ray].

So obviously you look at all that stuff with great skepticism, which is the only way to look at any criminal investigation anyway, I think, with skepticism and doubt. You're going to make all kinds of mistakes in any criminal investigation.

Douglass: Do you know anything about Donald Wilson? He's the former FBI agent in Atlanta who came to James Earl Ray's abandoned Mustang opened the door of the car, and discovered some papers. Because he had been disillusioned by the FBI's racism, he put the papers away, kept them for 29 years, and showed them then to Coretta Scott King when she appealed for a trial for Ray.

Do you know his story?

Clark: I just know about it from the newspaper. I never heard of him, as far as I can remember.

If it's true, it's unforgivable that the man didn't come forward if not immediately at least sooner.

It is unforgivable, you know. I mean, this is an important thing. You don't just stick papers in your pocket, and 29 years later come back with them. How can there be any hope for finding the truth if people do that sort of thing?

He had the highest duty at whatever cost to present what he had, and if he didn't trust the FBI, then to present it independently of the FBI -- either by himself or with some organization.

It's that sort of thing that makes the unfolding of history so painful, because sometimes you just don't find things for awhile.

Douglass: I want to ask you a question that Robert Aldridge raised. Do you remember Bob Aldridge? He's the writer and peacemaker who resigned his Lockheed job after helping to design the Trident missile.

Clark: He's testified at a lot of the trials.

Douglass: Yes, you and he have been expert witnesses at the same civil disobedience trials.

Something that has puzzled me, that I wrote Bob about, is how important journalists have failed to print exposés of what I regard as cover-ups of assassination evidence.

This is what Bob said in response, which I'd like your comments on: "I think I understand how that may be. A threat to a loved one if a certain bit of knowledge became known -- no further discussion, no explanations, nothing. If certain information became known, the threat would automatically and certainly happen."

He knew I was going to be interviewing you. He wrote: "It might be interesting to pose the question to Ramsey Clark why certain journalists at one time refused to publish information about a cover-up, although they had a reputation for publishing such information."

Clark: We don't have an independent press. The benefits we seek from a free press are not attainable because the press is owned and controlled by very purposeful economic and political interests. And I have to go a little bit further than that unfortunately and say, [controlled] by national mores.

A glaring example would be the effect of the sanctions in Iraq. Why isn't there a firestorm among the famous, independent investigative journalists?

It's the easiest thing in the world. You go in there, you go to the hospitals, and you see the children dying, for God's sake. It's as simple as that -- open and notorious.

Yet getting something on TV or in the newspapers about it is worth your life. You can't get them to acknowledge it. Whenever they do, it's turned around by a statement that we've just discovered new evidence of preparation for a nuclear warhead or nerve gas.

Even the best reporters know when they won't get published. They have to choose.

Watch how [CNN corespondent] Peter Arnett works. I like Peter Arnett. He's a gutsy guy. But he's compromised.

I remember one time, during the bombing of Iraq, we drove into Baghdad.

Douglass: In the Gulf War?

Clark: In the Gulf War, yes. It wasn't a war. It was a slaughter. The assault on Iraq.

We pulled in at daybreak and walked into the hotel. It was the third of February '91. And Peter Arnett's in the lobby. He said, "Let's do an interview."

I said, "Peter, I just got here. What can I tell you? I'm going to Basra [in the heavily bombed South of Iraq]. I'll be back the day after tomorrow, and we'll do an interview."

So I come back from Basra. We've seen the whole thing. We've got thousands of feet of videotape. And Peter Arnett says, "Terrific."

So [at his CNN air time] I come down the hotel stairs in the dark. And he's standing there and says, "Well, there's a problem. They will only give one minute for your interview."

"So," he says, "I'll ask you one question, 'Ramsey Clark, you just returned from Basra. What'd you see?' And you talk as fast as you can."

Here he's got an eyewitness who's just come back from Basra, who can describe what's going on down there. He's got air time. It's a story that hasn't been told from any independent source. There wasn't any available. So it's a scoop. And he's restricted to one minute.

And he lives with it.

What's he to do? If he doesn't live with it, he doesn't get one minute anymore. So that was his decision.

We saw what was done to him on the story about the nerve gas against the US deserters in Cambodia.

Here's the family. I've got to go.

Douglass: Okay.

Clark: Let me just finish that up. They walked over him on it. Took the story away. Put it down as if there isn't anything there.

Douglass: So it's clear from what you've said that you put the question of any media cover-up in relation to assassinations in a context of: "They just don't do their job." And there are enormous pressures to keep them from doing it.

Clark: Yes. Suppose a reporter had immediately started asking those questions. How long would he be employed?

That's a profound problem for our whole society.

Douglass: But in the case of a highly inquisitive reporter or a person of great integrity, Bob is suggesting what I've also read occurred in the case of Jacqueline Kennedy -- that they were threatened, and that the lives of their children were threatened.

Clark: I don't believe that for a minute. I mean, I just tell you my point of view.

I knew Bob Kennedy very well. I worked with him daily for four years. I knew Mrs. Kennedy pretty well. I liked her. She always liked me.

The idea that they were threatened and silenced is so demeaning to their character that it makes me want to weep.

Are they worthless people?

Are they such cowards?

That's so contrary to everything that I know about Bob Kennedy. Say what you want to about Bob Kennedy, he had guts, plenty of guts.

Douglass: I agree with that.

Clark: And he loved his brother. His greatest failing was he loved his brother more than anything. He was absolutely wiped out when the President was killed. He was a zombie.

I flew up here with him...

I'll be with you in three minutes. (Said to his family who were waiting outside the door.)

...on the first of September in '64.

You had to kind of carry him along. You know he was a Kennedy. He spoke and did this. But nothing matters any more.

And finally he saw poverty in rural Mississippi. And he saw suffering in South Africa. And his passion came back. And he became himself, not his brother's keeper.

I'll tell you. If they could be bullied into that, then there's no character that's worth anything in humanity. They're not worthless people. They're courageous people, strong people.

Douglass: The suggestion was not simply that it was a threat to them. It was to their children.

Clark: Same thing.

Douglass: Same thing you think?

Clark: Sure. It's the same thing.

You either stand up or you don't.

How do you live with yourself?

How do you carry on?

How do you look at yourself in the mirror?

How do you go out and make a speech?

You're just corrupt all inside. You're rotten to the core.

I think it is so demeaning of human integrity and character, so wanting in understanding that there are good people that have the courage to try to speak the truth but that sometimes you have no choice, you know...

You're going to let the story of your brother's murder be untold because you're threatened? Unthinkable. I can't...I've got to go.

Douglass: Okay. Thank you.

Clark: Wonderful to see you. Have a great trip.