The Alabama Experience; I'm in the Truth Business: William Bradford Huie

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and money made him. In 1955, Huey came to this Mississippi town who investigates one of the most notorious hate crimes of the century, the murder of a black teenager, Emmett Till. Determined to find the truth, Huey invented the controversial practice of checkbook journalism when he paid four thousand dollars to two white men who admitted they had shot Till in the head, tied a cotton gin fan to his neck,

and thrown him in the Tallahassee River. Whenever two men take a third man out at night, midnight and kill him, there are no innocent bystanders to tell you what happened. The victim is dead. The only people who can tell you how and why that murder was committed are murderers. And I believe he was the finest investigative reporter I've ever met. And that was before there was such a term as investigative reporter. I think anyone who was a historian of that period is very fortunate if they happen to come across a moment where we in Bradford, Huey, is at work because then you really get a window into the human drama of the situation. Not just dealing with dry facts and sort of historical accounts of what happened and who went where and who said what. William Bradford, Huey's name, is not as familiar as it once was. But in the course of an extraordinary career,

this gifted writer from a small Alabama town sold more than 28 million books. Seven of his works were made into films. One of them becoming the most watched television movie of its time. Fourteen of his books were bestsellers. He was present at and wrote passionately about the major historical events of his era, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement. And through it all, he claimed he was always after one thing. I want to know the truth. So I'm not in the law enforcement business. I'm just in the business of establishing truth wherever possible. And I have to believe that the truth is good. In the summer of 1955, Emmett Till, a Chicago boy, was sent by his mother to spend the summer with relatives near money Mississippi.

It was his first trip to the south. He didn't understand the code that governed relations between blacks and whites. Showing off for his country cousins, he entered a small store that catered to field hands. Depending on who tells the story, he whistled at or spoke out of turn or touched Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who was working inside. The next night, two white men, armed with a revolver, came to the house where Till was staying and asked for the boy who had done the talking. Three days later, a fisherman discovered his badly decomposed body in the Tallahatchee River. It was written about extensively in and out of the south. And it was the first occasion when reporters from outside the south came flooding in to southern community and caused the, brought about the confrontation between the outsiders and the law enforcement people.

Rory Bryant and JW Mylam admitted abducting Till, but denied killing him. In a sensational trial and Sumner, they were acquitted of murder by a jury of their peers, twelve white men. The jury deliberated just over an hour. This was a matter of considerable international attention because it in effect told a story that national and international audiences were able to, in a sense, understand in terms of the racial crisis that Americans, white Americans had been either living with or seeking to avoid for decades, if not for centuries. The courts had failed to establish the truth. The world was no closer to learning who was responsible for this notorious killing. William Bradford Huey didn't know any of the principles involved in the case, but he did know human nature. Four months after the verdict, he drove to Mississippi and made this bold proposition to the

attorney who had represented Mylam and Bryant. And he had, he tells, has told me about leaving his home in heart so early, early, early in the morning, driving down to Mississippi on the way and stopping on the side of the road and throwing up that he was so afraid and that he was sick and that he turned around and started back more than once and turned back around and went on. And he told me, he said, what you have to do in a situation like this is to set up the deal. You know who you have to get and you make just a straight out proposal too. And so I'm willing to buy what we call portrayal rights and I'm willing to pay about $4,000

for that portrayal rights. If you're coming in and tell me the truth. Now you tell them that they must tell me the truth, they must give me ways so that in the daytime I can go out and verify that they tell me the truth and if I find them telling me a lie, I won't pay them a damn thing. You know, he told more than once that he was a great believer in a $50 bill because it made twice as high a stack as a $100 bill would make and if you went into a little town in Mississippi where people hadn't very little money and you had a big stack of $50 bills that tended to impress them. I would be pretty confident in saying that in the till case, Milam and Bryant would not have talked except for money. He had thought about it. He had it down to a science that way. He said, because these people are greedy, it's the first of all you know they're sorry, no good, some bitches to begin with. You go in there and in some cases like this they're murders

but he said they're greedy and you open it up and say they're poor white trash red necks. You open up that suitcase and there are these piles of $20 bill. I said they can't stand it. I got to have it. Protected from further prosecution, Milam and Bryant agreed to tell their story. Well J.W. did the killing. J.W. killed fired the shots. It killed when they took when they took him down on the river and killed him. Now as I have written they did not intend to kill him when they went and got him and they killed him because he boasted that they have in the white girl and showed them the pictures of the white girl in Chicago. Here we met with the killers in secret every night for a week. Each day he retraced their steps to check the accuracy of their story.

Young Till never realized the danger. I'm quite sure that he never thought these two men were killing and or maybe he's just in such a strange environment. He doesn't really just doesn't know what he's up against. Emma Till's mother had shocked the world when she opened the casket at her son's funeral revealing his grotesque figure. I want the world to see what these people have done she said. Now Huey in print was telling the world how and why the murder was committed. He exposed for the first time fully and effectively and immediately the minds and motives of killers to see not only blacks as victims but to understand why they had been victimized by men who were themselves not at all repentant not at all remorseful. But J.W.M. Adam looked up at me and said well when he told me about this white girl he had he says my friend that's what this

boy is about to end now so that's where we got the fight to protect. And he says I just looked at him and I said boy you ain't going to never see the sun come up again. Huey's story of the murder was published in Look magazine and later in his book Wolf Whistle. This was something that really brought home the depths to which an extremist defense of racial segregation would go and it was certainly a contributing factor that built up into the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Huey might have been regarded as a champion of the civil rights movement if he had not decided to tell something else he learned through a fantastic coincidence. Emmett Till's father had been killed in the Second World War. Life magazine made much of the irony that the son of a soldier fighting the Nazis overseas would be murdered by racists at home. A year earlier in 1954 Huey had published the execution of Private Slavic, his account

of the only U.S. service man in World War II shot for desertion. 96 Americans were executed during the Second World War, 95 Island per murder and rape and Slavic was executed for desertion. And all 96 of those men are buried in the secret plot in a year or a joining American cemetery in northern France. The executed soldiers rest in unmarked graves, but Huey knew who was buried where. He had secretly copied the cemetery diagram when he was briefly left alone in a Pentagon office. I'm the only man outside somewhere in the depths of the Pentagon that's got that key. And after I read this piece in life I world around picked up that key and I looked just three graves to make it Slavic and I saw Private Lewis Till. Now this only means that the man

has been executed for rape and or murder. And I said oh no this can't be the same man. Huey's revelations about the execution of Lewis Till cost the burgeoning civil rights movement support some liberals said. Some newspaper men attacked Huey saying his checkbook journalism discredited his reporting. Most reporters of Maya Quentin's think checkbook journalism is bad business and I think they sincerely resented that bill did it. But here's the thing about checkbook journalism and the great danger and the reason that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal don't practice it is simply that it might invite people to invent stories at the worst or at the margin distort stories. So that suddenly stories become more dramatic or their role and it becomes more central so that their story is worth more and you're willing to pay more to get their story.

We the consumers of stories that are generated by that transaction have to be satisfied that the truth is being told. If the truth is independently corroborated or if we have every reason to believe that what is true has been told the fact that it has been fetched up by paying the person either for his time or even something beyond his time that it doesn't shock me. Damn right. I think it's worth 5,000, 10,000 whatever it needs to be paid for if that's what it takes to get that story. He'd scoop those other people and he was operating outside the main stream and I think a lot of reporters resented him. The checkbook journalism was only part of it. QE's graphic dramatic account in Look magazine and then of course subsequently in the paperback edition entitled Wolfwistle was really among the most searing moments I think in the period of the 1950s that made clear the extent to which some southern whites would go in defense of racial

segregation. Nine years later in 1964 racial violence exploded in Mississippi again. It was freedom summer. Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Mickey Schwerner working to register black voters were missing. The FBI found their car abandoned and burned but the FBI could not find the young men all their bodies. The New York Herald Tribune sent QE to Philadelphia, Mississippi to find the truth. QE believed there was only one way to get the story. A lot of people resent informers. They resent paying informers. I don't recommend it. I just don't know any other better plan. I myself think that there's a pretty good case for using informers even for paying informers. 44 days after the workers disappeared their bodies were discovered buried in an earthen dam. Four months later federal authorities indicted 21 men for conspiring to violate the civil rights

of Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney. Statements from paid informants were crucial to the FBI's investigation. I urged the FBI to pay for the bodies earlier than they did. I had I was working and by July the 15th or 16th I was working with a plan to buy the bodies because I knew the bodies would never be found in any other way. Huey's book Three Lives for Mississippi was published less than four months after the indictments and more than three years before the case came to court. In it Huey wrote that the clans sponsored the murders in a conspiracy that involved top local law enforcement officials. And again he was criticized for his methods. Certainly it is not an ideal situation. Certainly it is a situation that invites cynicism but I just don't know any other way. Yes ma'am. I think that book probably had more conjecture

than anything he did of that nature because that was so sensational that he relied on paid informants who really weren't knowledgeable as much as the FBI's sources. Now the FBI we now know pretty much had a handle on their key suspects within 24 hours. As I believe to this moment Huey was very instrumental in helping to really get the truth out about what was happening and passing tips on to people in terms of the inner workings of the minds and truths of that story until you finally get of course the the big break that reveals where the boys are buried. It took somebody with Bill's own southern accent to get in there and meet people and yes I think he had to pay off some of those people in order for them to risk putting their lives on the line with the client.

The national media had descended on Mississippi to cover these two sensational murder stories. They reported the news and then left but to explain why these events happened it would take an unusual southerner. Alabama's rich black belt of flat land created a powerful plantation society but in the northern part of the state the Appalachian foothills created a different culture. People of Scott's Irish descent scratched out a living, kending small stands of corn. The farms were so small there was little need for slave labor. Well William Faulkner makes makes that distinction in Absalom. He says that upcountry people, hill people and mountain south people tend to judge a man more on his abilities whether he keeps his

word his personal dignity and Faulkner says in the in the black belt in the tide water they're much more concerned with race and property, the plantation, money, the big house, family. There's a difference between the two souths. When you look at the north Alabama counties and particularly the mountain counties these were not slave holding counties and they didn't have the burden of racism that applied to the south Alabama counties and they didn't have the attitude of defiance toward the federal government. William Bradford Huey was born in Hartsel, Alabama in 1910. His grandfather charged with picket at Gettysburg but regretted joining the Confederacy saying it was a poor man's fight and a rich man's war. Huey's father was a farmer and a railroad man. He was an adorable little child and obviously was very bright from the beginning. Bill Huey was every teacher's favorite student. He was double promoted to the second grade.

By the third grade he was a writer exchanging love notes with Ruth his sweetheart to whom he would be married for 39 years. He was an Eagle Scout high school valedictorian. Bill was very well educated and very disciplined by his mother. Huey's people were shaped by the land. He was shaped by his mother. I had the feeling that his mother wanted him to rise above his father which is why she pushed him. Well I think she was very very much a critical factor, the critical factor. Huey was the first person in his family to go to college to save the University of Alabama in the Depression. Its president advertised for students in the New York papers. Thousands of Yankee parents found a bargain when they sent their children to Tuscaloosa. Well up until the time Bill Huey came to school, University had been, as they say,

built for planter's sons and he might have expected to go to school with mainly the sons of South Alabama. But in fact the student body at that point was composed of socialists from Chicago and a great percentage of Jewish students from New York and New Jersey. And there was Bill Huey, an open-minded young man, prepared to meet these people, talk with them, learn from them. I think it affected him for the rest of his life. Huey had to earn money to stay in school and send home to his struggling family. He graded papers for a professor. He typed papers for students. He'd even write them. Huey entered the University intending to become a writer or lawyer, but in his freshman year he sold a story to True magazine and nothing would stop him from becoming a writer. He was a dynamo graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Now he would take the same energy and drive and attack his literary apprenticeship. He was short and compact and he would let somebody know

by his, like he like talking about by the seat of his pants, his own personal audacity to let them know where he was and where he came from and what he was all about. As a reporter for the Birmingham post, Huey covered violent strikes, crime and the controversial trial of the Scottsboro Boys. He saw how graft fueled a political machine in the state capital. He witnessed the execution of a black man he knew to be innocent of rape. He published his own newspaper and his own magazine. Well, Huey published his first novel, Mud on the Stars. Novel he'd been writing in the late 30s and in that novel he put all of those experiences. Working as a newspaper reporter, covering labor unrest, it's an autobiographical novel. Mud on the Stars is about the education of a young cynical journalist from the North Alabama Hill Country. Growth of favor is fiercely proud of

the Tennessee River land that has been in his family for generations, but the river must be tamed. The family land is flooded and lost when the TVA builds the dams that bring power and prosperity to the valley. The book would later be the basis for Ilya Kazan's movie Wild River, starring Lee Remick and Montgomery Cliff. Well, even in that first novel, Huey is coming to his major subject, which is the relationship between the individual and society. Individuals just have to adjust. Often for the greater good. Mud on the Stars ends with the protagonist going off to war, a witness to the most calamitous event of the century. Huey went to war, too. Like most men of his generation, it would be the most important event of his life. It would provide him with his best material for 20 years.

The Navy put Huey's talents as a journalist to good use. He worked to make sure that the Navy's exploits wouldn't be overshadowed by the armies. Well, he was commissioned. He didn't take ROTC. I don't think he was commissioned directly into the Navy to go work for this admiral

on the basis of his experience as a journalist. It was common. Huey's orders had him island hopping the Pacific with the sea bees to publicize the accomplishments of the Navy's construction battalion in a book called Can Do. He was right beside the sea bees as they built roads and runways under enemy fire at Guadalcanal, Tinian, Saipan, and Iwojima. Well, I think some of that was written as an aid. There was sort of an element of propaganda in that. For a good cause. He worked for the admiral of the land to sea bees. In 1944, Huey and the admiral he served were in England as the world's largest naval armada was being assembled. And just like his hero in the Americanization of Emily, Huey wanted sure at D-Day. I know he was on the beach on D-Day. Now, how we got there, I don't know. I've always suspected. He was a modest man talking about things like this. I don't think he was forced there in the way that Garner was in the movie by an insane admiral.

Your limping commander. The old wound acting up? Well, where have you been? We expected you back a week ago yesterday. I'm sorry I had to go to France for a few days. It's how to season this time of year. No one left. No, he was there. I'm sure. Very rough element going to France these days. Lieutenant Madison is really Bill Huey because Bill was a little bit of an operator the way Madison was. And if you recall, Madison was not a war lover and neither was Bill. Well, some writers are luckier than other writers. And they have experiences that translate easily into fiction. Huey was one of those lucky writers. Now, the author of four books accustomed to working with admirals and generals,

having traveled from Omaha Beach to Okinawa. Huey was ready for the media capital of the world. Full of energy, he plunged into the world of publishing, television, lecturing, and political commentary. He could take such a risk. Muddle the stars had made him a rich man. In fact, it earned $161,000 in royalties. And when I was paid that, I was quite certain I was going to be rich the rest of my life. And because that was in today's dollars, that was more than a million dollars. He was definitely a little way around and was really at home. He knew everybody. He was very handsome, dashing, beautiful smile, prematurely white hair with black brows and black lashes and blue eyes. He was really stunning and very sharp, funny.

He was extremely a southern, very courteous, very pronounced in his ability, very small, a great deal. He had kind of a simian smile. He was almost a completely, completely bald and he spoke with a great intensity and yet he was conventionally relaxed by, you know, as one expects sadness to be. In 1951, Huey published The Revolt of Mamie Stover, just one of the books that came from his experiences in the war. The novel sold five million copies. Jane Russell started in the movie playing Mamie, a southern girl in wartime Honolulu who incorporated Henry Ford's mass production techniques into the world's oldest profession. It's very funny book, really. I mean, he is a woman who mass produced prostitution. That's what she did. She had all these

cribs as they called them and she'd go to bed with one guy and she'd run to the next crib and there'd be a guy waiting there and then she'd run to the next one. It was all very funny and Bill managed to be fun. Mamie Stover stood for all of the people who profited from World War II and who made something of themselves. He wrote a very lascivious novel, The Revolt of Mamie Stover and as I remember, published a part of it in the American book, it was a pretty daring thing to do in those days. William Faulkner once told me he said, you know, I just remember one thing. He told me that I had to think in terms of money, that that was one of his mistakes and he never made any money except about the one book he wrote about a whore. So he says, us southerners, if we're going to have money out of writing, we've got to write at least one book about a whore.

Well, I remember that. Huey wrote articles for news magazines about important issues which enhanced his reputation as a serious journalist, but he was never reluctant to write titillating risque stories for other popular magazines that would sell in the hundreds of thousands. Saga magazine called him the Boswell of the Bulldog. There was one I remember about the reason that Governor Earl Long and his romance with Blaze Star, the stripper. I could be cynical and say he wrote about sex because it's sold, but I don't really believe that. I think in the same way that I said I like to write about the engines of the human heart, I think he liked to write about what makes people who they are and sex was part of that. Huey used to say that he held a sales record on three major magazines,

and that was a setting new post, callers and look. He was an energetic, sort of a romantic view of things, wrote with extraordinary speed, and knew how to write a copy of it instantly, a track of attention, whether it was fiction or non-fiction. Huey parlayed his successes with his books and magazines into lucrative lecture tours. His political commentaries were widely published and led to a relationship with the American Mercury magazine, which he eventually owned. Soon, his reputation as a journalist enabled him to become the host of a nationally televised interview program. It's time for the Longine Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour. Good evening. This is Frank's Life. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Longine Chronoscope. Mr. William Brad

Pratthealy, editor of the American Mercury. First time I ever saw Huey, I was a kid. It was a television show called Longine Chronoscope. He was the moderator, so that was the first I ever knew that Huey existed. I expect many Americans were in the same boat. Now where do you stand politically? You are a Democrat. Are you a conservative or a liberal Democrat? Are you a new dealer? How do you define your own position in democratic politics? Well, I define myself as a Democrat who supports the policies of the administration in cases of social legislation and quite substantially. Best-selling author, a lecturer in constant demand, a network television personality, one popular magazine, Lioney Chewy. He was truly a national figure. Well, the question to be answered here, the mystery here, is why a man who was at the peak of his

career television, journalism, a man who was doing very well would leave the Northeast and return to Hartzell, Alabama. But Ruth was never happy. She didn't fit in in New York. I mean, her manners were lovely, but she never opened her mouth at a party. She just sat there and was terribly ill at ease. Well, I remember being shocked on more than one occasion by how Hartzell he spoke to her. He would almost explode over the most trivial problem. He didn't bring the sugar or she didn't close the door or whatever. And from here, I simply assumed that it was a domestic situation, a full of static. Well, his mother was there. That had a lot to do with him. You have that many generations of your family buried in church yards up there. It's in your genes, I would think. I love that country and many good things about it.

Here we had moved to New York to further his career and wrote about the war, the great crusade. Remarkably, his return to Alabama placed here at the center of America's next crusade. Because of his compelling account of Emmett Till's death in 1955, and perhaps because he was a southerner, editors and readers alike were beginning to think of Huey as someone who would speak with honesty about the south. I think you have to stop and see that through their eyes, they're seeing Huey as a southern storyteller. They're seeing somebody who's on the ground this south who has connections, knows the landscape, knows the players and is going to be able to get in there and get into the story with some feeling and some depth. In 1956, off of Zora Neal Hurston and listed Huey's help to cover a controversial trial in Florida. Hurston, a contributor to Huey's American Mercury, was not allowed access to the jail

suspect. Huey investigated the case and wrote Rubin McCullum, the story of the murder of a white physician in a rural Florida town. Huey not only revealed that the suspect, a black woman, was the physician's lover, but his account also exposed the corrupt local government that wanted to keep the story quiet and keep blacks in their place. A judge jailed Huey in an unsuccessful effort to get him off the case. So when Bill wrote this story, it wasn't just about a scandalous love affair or anything. It was much more. They symbolized the problems, the social problems, and the racial problems, and the economic problems of the south. Well, four years ago, I passed my 50th birthday and the last case, after writing the till story for Luke and Rita's died, yes, and others, and dealing with murderers in 1955, I became involved in the Rubin McCullum case

in North Florida where I was put in jail and charged with contempt of court and it cost me $22,000 to get out of, get free of the Florida courts. Despite his frustrations with this story, he realized that race was a huge subject that attracted many readers. Indeed, three lives from Mississippi, his next book on the subject, gave Huey an international audience when it was published in 1965. Dr. King wrote, and I think it's in three lives from Mississippi, the good and mature Chinese book, and he never wrote a preface for any other book. Now in authority on race relations, Huey in his fifth novel put the spotlight on the KKK. The Klansman was a sensation and a best seller, Richard Burton and Lee Marvin, starred in the film. In the novel, Huey unmasked the Klan and showed its inner workings, and the Klan retaliated. And he also had run-ins with the local

Klan up in Hart's Soul. He stood out in his driveway one night with a shotgun and a hired armed guard while these people went tearing around his street, threatening him. So I, no, I don't have any doubts of his courage. Well, it isn't a matter of courage or anything like that. It's just that I live in Alabama. I live there for a long time, and so, and I can afford to take the risk. I can afford to hire guards from my house. He would do whatever was necessary to get a story. And I included in offending the law or offending gangsters. He did what he did. I've always thought he was a courageous man and a champion of investigative journalism. And besides my people, that's not new for me. My people for generations have fought the Kube Love Plan and fought the terrorists. My people have never believed that racially inhumanity was

a part of the Southern way of life, chasing the James Earl Ray story was potentially dangerous. But he was a man of great personal courage. Well, in the James Earl Ray case, it isn't a matter of physical courage. It isn't the same thing as with the Emmett Till case where Huey had to meet in a room with men he knew to be murderers. He never actually met James Earl Ray during this period. But it still takes a lot of nerve to defy a federal judge, risk a lawsuit, risk contempt of court charges, risk going to jail. On the evening of April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Investigators recovered a rifle and determined that the assassin had fired from the window of a boarding house across the street. 66 days later after one of the most extensive manhunts in history, James Earl Ray was arrested

in London and charged with the murder. With King's death, the nation had been rocked by the third political assassination of the decade. Everyone wondered, was Ray Guilty, had he, alone, fired the shots from the boarding house, or was he part of a conspiracy? It would be months until the trial. Huey wouldn't wait. After the arrest, he paid Ray $40,000 for his story. You could always expect him to gravitate to those big stories like the James Earl Ray story. And often to be there first, which is what happened in that case. Ray professed his innocence in a series of letters to Huey from his prison cell. He recounted the year of his life as an escaped convict before the assassination. Huey investigated every move the career criminal had made and wrote about it in Look magazine. His conclusions didn't satisfy anyone.

Well, yes, what I think the truth is that James Earl Ray decided to kill Dr. King on March 17, 1968 and that he came to Memphis and did indeed slay Martin Luther King. Ray, whom I have interviewed in prison, says that he was framed, that he did not commit this crime. He says that he didn't even know this crime was about to be committed. Millions of readers followed Huey's account in Look. But a year after the assassination, Ray pleaded guilty to the murder, though now he maintains his innocence. The worst thing that could happen to any book was for Ray to plead guilty, that what I needed to ever break even in the case was a trial. Therefore, that the worst thing that could happen was to plead guilty. Therefore, Ray gets up and says, I had to preform and

Huey made me plead guilty in order to protect the book they were in. It is not only a lie, it's a 180 degree lie, all of which has been established. Huey ended up saying that James Earl Ray by himself, without the aid of others, conspired to indeed, in fact, assassinate Martin Luther King, that night when we were sitting here in the house shortly before he died, we were talking about the various aspects of that case. Well, Huey continued to believe that James Earl Ray acted alone. I do say, though, that I think given his understanding of that case, I'd have to agree with him without any great debate that he concluded James Earl Ray acted alone, and he's convinced me, and nothing Ray has ever said from his prison cells or anything else has changed that. Huey originally believed that Ray was part of a conspiracy, and he thought that story would be

one of the best-selling books of all time, but Huey's extensive investigations uncovered no conspiracies. That was his argument. That's what he said in my phone interview with him. Why in the world would I say there's not a conspiracy here when having one would have made me a lot more money? I'm keeping this thing going, would have made me a lot more money. I then had to tell my good friends at Luke, and I had to tell six other foreign publishers who paid me lots of money over the years, that the Ray story was dead. There was no money to be made because only Ray was involved in the murder. Now, why didn't I prevent all of that? Why didn't I go ahead and make money for Ray and his lawyers and break me from myself and above all make money for Luke? My good friends there and other people. Why did not do it? The reason I didn't do it was that it wasn't true, and there are two things that I have sworn I would never do. I will never

believe something just because I want to bleed it, and I will never believe something because it is profitable for me to bleed it. He slew the dreamer was the zenith of Huey's career as an investigative journalist, and the last of his books on race. He had devoted much of his career to the subject, but why? His motivation for doing all this. I don't know. I really don't. It would have been one of the questions I would have loved to ask him. What are you up to? Why did you do this? Well, I think you have to understand Huey was not an advocate in any way. Huey was not someone that the civil rights movement could rely on as a friend in moments of need. He wasn't an antagonist, but he was sort of out there as an impartial observer. He would say, you know what he said now, I haven't done anything for some civil rights. I've just shown the truth that it's not working

for civil rights. He's written that the one thing that moved him to action most often was hypocrisy. He couldn't stand hypocrisy. Also, I just think he was a damn good guy when it came to the racist race question. He was born a Baptist and born a Democrat, but that unmeaning went to church every Sunday or any Sunday necessarily. I don't think he was anything. I think he was an independent journalist number one. Certainly he was considered a liberal by the Wallace administration. No, I don't think he was a flaming liberal at all. I think with all his rambunctiousness, he reflected his upbringing and his surroundings, and although he did not support racism,

I think he supported many of the ideals that the people of hearts allow Obama stood for. I used to think of myself as a political conservative. Now conservatism in the south there has something to do with racism. The Wallace's and others have taken over the term conservative. I'm embarrassed when I try to think of myself as a conservative because it now connotes the racism in the south. He was rarely and in his best work never wrote about big important people, politicians, generals, and presidents. He wrote about ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations. Ira Hayes, a full-blooded Pima Indian, was a gung-home marine at the outbreak of World War II.

He played a small part in raising the flag on Mount Surabachi at Iwo Jima and a government insisted he become a hero, a shy and private man. He was overwhelmed by the celebrity that was thrust upon him at one bond rally after another. In the hero of Iwo Jima, Huey writes about the anguish Hayes felt on his plush assignment while his buddies were dying on the beaches. The book sympathetically tells how the reluctant heroes succumbed to alcoholism and died shortly after the war. Americans thought Ira Hayes was a hero, no one ever said that of Eddie Slovik, the only GI to be executed for desertion in World War II. But Huey had to find out why the army needed to make an example of Slovik. Martin Sheen starred in the TV movie. I remember the day Slovik came back after his court, Marshall. He wasn't so happy. He and

those kids around figured he might be stuck in jail for two or three years. Of course, it never occurred to him even after he got the sentence that he'd actually be shot. Darling, I'm in a little trouble. Please don't worry about me because I'm all right. And Bill maintained that this boy, and he was a boy, he was an immature and not very bright young man, who couldn't take the stress of war, who begged to be relieved, you see, was deliberately chosen for execution because he was a nobody who didn't come from a particularly strong ethnic group or constituency. And this was the whole point of Bill's story about it and exposing this was that he was unfairly and unjustly treated because he was poor, because he was uneducated, because he had no connections,

because he was scared to death. If able-bodied soldiers know they can avoid hazardous duty, how do you fight a war? Come on, Frank, able-bodied men have been avoiding hazardous duty for years. We haven't shot any of them. Maybe it's time we started. Well, I suppose it makes it easier the fact that he's a confirmed felon. He isn't. He was a petty criminal, bad boy type. Lots of them make good soldiers. Would you ask him to please shoot straight so I don't have to suffer? And father, I want you to tell the fellas in the regiment that he slowly was in the car. At least not today. Order, arm!

I think execution of private-slavic until maybe in cold blood was the best non-fiction book of reported that we've ever had. And I think it's still in one of the top two or three. It shows a magnificent piece of work, a detection. There might have been 50 writers who could've seen that. Oh, guy got executed. Yeah, so what? Bill saw it and he wrote this note to himself that said, the only man in such a situation deserves to be known. I've got to dig him up. He was the first of an investigative reporter. And that's what this shows. I mean, this guy went in and investigated it, found the truth, and then wrote one hell of a book about it. The execution of private-slavic was the most watched television movie ever when it aired in 1974.

For another kind of writer, it might have served as a capstone to a career that had lasted six decades. Huey was determined to match its success. But there was little interest in his subjects. The civil rights movement was languishing. America was obsessed with Vietnam, not Huey's war. Once he had been close to the action in the south. Now, he was an isolated, small town southern writer. He did a book about forestall, which should have been a stunning book. But he couldn't cope dealing with a New York publisher from Alabama. In the hours of night, which Bill really invested, a big part of his soul in writing, was not a successful book. Huey's writing had made millions of dollars,

but now most of it had been spent. And his wife Ruth, his childhood sweetheart, was ill. Before I came along, his wife Ruth had died of a 13-month battle with cancer. And Bill spent all kinds of money on that. At an age when most people retire, Huey kept working. He felt he had no choice. Bill had to earn a lot of money. He had a wife who's not well. And he built this beautiful home in heart cell across the... First, he built his mother's home, then he built his own home. And they were across the street from each other. Bill has made a lot of money in his time. He also spent a lot of money. And just about all of it went right back into writing. He was at his desk in 1986 when he died at the age of 76. He was survived by his second wife. There were no children in either marriage.

Sometimes in investigating his stories, William Bradford Huey paid for information. Many journalists resented that and still think it's unethical. He returned to the south, just as one of the great stories in this century was unfolding there. But as moved, isolated him from the media capital of New York. His spirited independence enabled him to find stories where others never thought of looking. But that independence meant he was always a loner who struggled to keep his journalistic enterprise going. Even to this day, this controversy about his Czech book journalism. And because he was a loner, there are no colleagues to champion his memory. Huey's books were out of print when he died. How could a man do that much and be so little remembered for it? What I feel about Bill was he was a genius. But his genius did not lay in his or lie in his

pro-style. He was a genius, as I said earlier, about what to write, how to market it, all of that. He was a conspicuous figure in the world of journalism in the early 50s. And at his best, a wonderful writer. I think any serious historian of the American past, I think any conscientious scholar who wishes to look at the struggle for racial justice in the period of the 1950s and 1960s, must acknowledge Huey's role. Here, through Huey's eyes, you get the workings of the human heart, and it's truly, truly a telling wonderful emotional story. That's, I think, the mark hallmark of William Bradford Huey's work. And all of his writing, what you'd Bradford do, he makes himself part of man's continuing struggle for freedom. He writes as a great reporter, but also as an

impassioned man. He writes with clinical detail, but not with detachment. Those aren't my words. Martin Luther King Jr. said that about William Bradford Huey. Paying respect to William Bradford Huey, journalist, editor, officer, novelist is not hard. Saying goodbye, dear Bill, is what's tough. I'm not in the law enforcement business. I'm just in the business of establishing truth wherever possible, and I have to believe that the truth is good. I'm not in the law enforcement business. I'm not in the law enforcement business. Production of I'm in the truth business, William Bradford Huey was made possible in part by a

grant from the Alabama Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. If you have a question or a comment about this program, please call 1-800-463-8825.