Huie wrote several books about controversial topics related to World War II and the Civil Rights Movement.
In January 1956 he published an interview in Look magazine in which two of the six white men who killed Emmett Till admitted their guilt and described their crime.
[3] In late 1938, Huie was in Los Angeles and worked independently as an undercover reporter to gather information on gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel.
He reported on his experiences in the Los Angeles Times and later in the December 1950 issue of The American Mercury, a literary magazine.
While chronicling the wartime activity of the Seabees, Lieutenant Huie had special permission to continue his own writing projects, both fiction and nonfiction.
Before the war, Huie had been writing for The American Mercury, a literary magazine founded by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.
Ryan and editor Huie wanted to develop the magazine as a journal of the fledgling American conservative movement, introducing mass-appeal writers such as evangelist Billy Graham, former communist Max Eastman, and long-time Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover.
Young William F. Buckley Jr., future National Review founder and editor, was one of Huie's early staffers.
By the mid-1950s, however, Huie and Ryan were unable to overcome financial difficulties and were forced to sell the magazine to Russell Maguire, one of its investors.
After Huie's departure, Maguire and other owners drove the new American Mercury, in author William A. Rusher's phrase, "toward the fever swamps of anti-Semitism."
During the same period, he became well-known through his appearances on the weekly television current events program Longines Chronoscope, produced in New York City.
As a co-editor of the hour-long talk show, he interviewed newsmakers John F. Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, and Clare Boothe Luce as well as international figures, politicians, scientists, and economists.
Domestic issues, Congressional activity, military defense, the Olympics, and foreign policy were all topics discussed on the program.
Huie attended the appeal and second trial in 1954 of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy, married black woman in Florida who had shot and killed her white paramour, physician and state senator-elect Dr. Leroy Adams.
Huie had been contacted about the case by writer Zora Neale Hurston, who had worked with him earlier at The American Mercury and had covered the first McCollum trial in Live Oak, Florida for the Pittsburgh Courier.
[11] Huie also reported on various Ku Klux Klan activities, including the 1964 killing of "Freedom Summer" workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), wrote the Introduction for the second edition of Huie's Three Lives for Mississippi.
Huie's book The Execution of Private Slovik (1954) related the historic account of World War II G.I.
After the book revealed Slovik's story, Huie and others tried for years to get the government to pay his widow a pension, but had no success.
Sinatra dropped it in 1960 due to objections to his choice of screenwriter, a man who was one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted after refusing to testify to HUAC.
Huie met Martha Hunt Robertson of Guntersville, Alabama, an art instructor at a local college.