On October 19, 2022, a lawsuit was filed by the Mary Ferrell Foundation against President Joseph R. Biden and the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) to enforce the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The lawsuit seeks to compel the President and NARA to finally perform their duties under the federal law that governs the final declassification of JFK assassination records.
Some historical context is important. The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Records Act”) was unanimously passed by Congress in 1992. President Biden, a Senator at the time, voted in favor of the JFK Records Act. The JFK Records Act was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. One can read the JFK Records Act in its entirety by searching “Public Law 102-526, 102d Congress, President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.”
The JFK Records Act is extremely favorable to the American public in terms of transparency and declassification of assassination records. On reading the JFK Records Act one does not have to go past the first page of the statute to see what Congress intended and how strong of an impact it was meant to have. For example:
Section 2(a)(2), JFK Records Act: “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should carry a presumption of immediate disclosure, and all records should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.”
Section 2(a)(3), JFK Records Act: “legislation is necessary to create an enforceable, independent, and accountable process for the public disclosure of such records.”
Section 2(a)(4), JFK Records Act: “legislation is necessary because congressional records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy would not otherwise be subject to public disclosure until at least the year 2029.”
Section 2(a)(7): “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”
This is what your Congress declared in 1992, 30 years ago, and with the strongest of language. Congress declared that records pertaining to the JFK assassination had already been unreasonably withheld from the public for 30 years. Even the CIA felt the JFK Records Act was a different breed of declassification law, that had the teeth to go much further than FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) or any previous effort to shed light on deep government secrets. In a 1998 internal CIA Memorandum titled JFK Records Review – Lessons Learned, the CIA stated that, “The level of evidence required by the Board [the Assassination Records Review Board or ARRB] to postpone what was generally considered protectable information was extremely high and usually required documentation of ‘current harm’. Defenses based on general principles such as official cover or sources and methods were not acceptable.”
The Board closed down in 1998. In 2022, after another 30 years, and in spite of the strongest possible legislation, the President and responsible agencies are still withholding almost 15,000 records that are relevant to the JFK Assassination. Many records are still withheld in full. Others have been “released” with significant redactions. The point of this article is not to analyze which specific records have been withheld in full, which records still have significant redactions, or which records have not been turned over to NARA for inspection and preservation. The point of this article is to explain why legal action was necessary and also unfortunately for the American public, the last and only choice.
The JFK Records Act established and created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Upon creation of the JFK Records Act, agencies and government offices were ordered to deliver all assassination records to NARA. An assassination record is defined as any record related to the assassination of President Kennedy that was “created or made available for use by, obtained by, otherwise came into the possession of” (i) the Warren Commission; (ii) the Rockefeller Commission; (iii) the Church Committee; (iv) the Pike Committee; (v) the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA); (vi) any executive agency; and (vii) and other office of the Federal Government, or any state or local law enforcement office that performed work in connection with the federal inquiry in the Kennedy assassination. For anyone looking to understand the full scope of the JFK Records Act and the work of the ARRB, the ARRB’s Final Report is essential reading.
The above-defined assassination records became known as the JFK Records Collection, or the “Collection”. It was then the job of the ARRB, an independent body, to review the Collection and make legal determinations on which records might still qualify for classification under the standards of the JFK Records Act. What are those standards? For an agency or government office to request continued classification, section 6 of the JFK Records Act put the burden of proof on the objecting agencies. The burden of proof is not on researchers and the American public to demonstrate why an assassination record(s) should be released. For agencies and government offices to make a proper legal case for continued classification and secrecy, they were required to provide the ARRB with clear and convincing evidence that:
the threat to the military defense, intelligence operations, or conduct of foreign relations posed by the public disclosure of the assassination (record) is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest, and such public disclosure would reveal (i) an intelligence agent whose identify currently requires protection; (ii) an intelligence source or method; or (iii) any other matter currently relating to the military defense or intelligence operations, the disclosure of which would demonstrably impair national security.
the disclosure of the record would reveal the identity of a living person who provided confidential information to the United States;
the disclosure of the record could constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy;
the disclosure of the record would compromise the existence of a confidentiality agreement between a U.S. government agent and a cooperating individual or foreign government; or
the disclosure would reveal a security or protective procedure currently utilized by the Secret Service or other agency responsible for protecting government officials.[1]
In other words, an agency still seeking classification (the CIA, FBI or Secret Service, to name a few) were required to provide the ARRB with demonstrably clear and convincing evidence based on the above standards from the JFK Records Act. If they did not, the ARRB had the legal authority to order the declassification of the assassination record. If there was some evidence warranting continued classification, the ARRB issued a final order recommending a date for final declassification. These Final Orders from the ARRB were contained in a form document called a “Final Determination Notification, under its statutory authority. These documents provided the unclassified reasons for postponement for each assassination record that disclosure was postponed in whole or in part, along with the ARRB’s recommended date or triggering event for the release of said record.
To its credit, the ARRB did a tremendous amount of work from 1994 to 1998, releasing more than 2 million pages of assassination records. In 1998, however, the ARRB’s authority had run its course according to its Congressional mandate and the ARRB was dissolved in late September of that year. NARA, and the American public, were then left with a Collection that still contained tens of thousands of classified records, totaling hundreds of thousands of pages. Agencies were required under the JFK Records Act to perform periodic review pursuant to the recommendations and Final Determinations of the ARRB in order to ensure timely declassification and release of the assassination records.
What happened after 1998? Virtually nothing. Without the independent ARRB to ensure that agencies and government offices continued their periodic review obligation, it was up to NARA to hope that agencies and government offices would finish the work on declassification. The intent of Congress is that maybe 1% (or less) of the Collection could plausibly still require classification as of 2017. Refer again to the declaration of Congress in the JFK Records Act: “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.” That declaration was made in 1992! Reflect on that for a moment.
October 26, 2017 was in fact the deadline for final declassification. Section 5(g)(2)(d) of the JFK Records Act required the President (Trump at the time) to take specific action to ensure that Congress’s mandate to release all assassination records by the deadline was completed. We are all aware of Trump’s tweets in which he committed to the final release of all assassination records on the eve of this deadline in 2017.
The President only has power to authorize continued classification of an assassination record if he certifies that “each” specific record continues to pose an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, as required by the Act; and that such identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. In other words, the President is required to make decisions with regard to each assassination record under the same constraints and authority as the ARRB. The President was therefore required to finish the ARRB’s job by October 26, 2017, or provide published unclassified reasons, based on clear and convincing evidence for each assassination record withheld under the criteria set out in section 6 of the JFK Records Act, as outlined in detail above.
What happened instead? President Trump initially issued an order Executive Memorandum on October 26, 2017 delaying the release of assassination records. Plain and simple: This order was illegal and did not comply with the clear standards of the JFK Records Act. Trump’s first order in October 2017 authorized a 6-month delay for agencies and governments to continue their review of assassination records and make recommendations to Trump by April, 2018. Then it got worse. On April 26, 2018, President Trump issued another order Executive Memorandum authorizing another delay of over three (3) years.
In October of 2021, President Biden declassified about ten per cent of the outstanding documents. He then continued the trend of his predecessor, which is extremely troubling. President Biden issued another order Executive Memorandum giving agencies and government offices until December 15, 2022 to make final decisions on the release of assassination records. Let me say that again. President Biden has now empowered agencies and government offices to make their own decisions on declassification. This is exactly the opposite of how the JFK Records Act was intended to work. Like both of President Trump’s Memoranda, President Biden’s Executive Memorandum is simply unlawful.
Congress was abundantly clear that the purpose of the JFK Records Act was to publicly disclose all records related to the assassination of President Kennedy through an enforceable process of downgrading and declassification. In all but the “rarest of cases” was any assassination record to be kept secret beyond the final deadline for release on October 26, 2017. It therefore defies both reason and Congress that two Presidents, the Archivist, NARA, and a number of executive agencies have determined that the standards for continuing postponement of the withheld assassination records have somehow become less onerous now after that deadline for release and after 60 years have passed.
There is no reasonable expectation that President Biden will take appropriate action by December 15, 2022. If anything, he has empowered agencies and government offices to act with more secrecy in regard to the withheld assassination records. Thus the necessity of the legal action.
The government continues to operate under the findings of the Warren Commission, which is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination and with no confederates. That Commission also concluded that Jack Ruby assassinated Oswald on his own and with no associates. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (“HSCA”) concluded in 1978 that there was a probable conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination and referred the matter to the U.S. Justice Department for further investigation. However, the Justice Department has done nothing to further investigate the murder of the 35th President of the United States. If Oswald did act alone, or even if he acted with other alleged “pro-Castro sympathizers”, why the continued secrecy? One can only assume that the thousands of withheld records will show a U.S. Intelligence connection to Oswald, which was covered up immediately after the assassination and is still being covered up. That is an article for another day, but it is the only logical conclusion at this time.
Only time will tell, and hopefully a Court will finally declare that there is no reasonable or legal reason to continue the sixty years of government secrecy.
_________
[1] The term “current” is a prevailing theme in section 6 of the JFK Records Act. It is absurd to think that, after what happened to President Kennedy in Dallas, that a current security or protective procedure utilized by the Secret Service in 1963 could be compromised by the release of assassination records. Anyone who has studied this subject is aware that the Secret Service actively destroyed its records pertaining to presidential security in 1963, despite the mandate of the ARRB.
Say this about Mel Ayton, he will not give up. Seven years ago, Martin Hay reviewed his book Beyond Reasonable Doubt—co-written with David Von Pein. Martin left the authors without a leg to stand on and made a mockery of their bombastic title. (Click here for that review)
The subtitle of his new book is “Debunking the Conspiracy Theories.” In his preface, Ayton says that the bogus revelations in the John F. Kennedy case were put to rest by the late Vincent Bugliosi in Reclaiming History and the late John McAdams in JFK Assassination Logic.
This author spent 458 pages of analysis and evaluation in taking apart Bugliosi’s mammoth book. There is no other way to say this: Bugliosi lied in his introduction when he said he would present the critics’ arguments the way they wanted them presented. He then doubled down on this by saying “I will not knowingly omit or distort anything.” (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The EvidenceToday, pp XII-XIII)
What was so shocking about the former prosecutor’s initial claim was how easy it was to show it was utterly and, in fact, knowingly false. For a prime example, see how Bugliosi dealt with Jack Ruby’s polygraph. (DiEugenio, pp. 267-70) It seemed to me that, with that book, Bugliosi was simply playing to the crowd. In this case, the MSM. A perfect example of this was his treatment of Doug Horne on the paradox of Kennedy’s brain, which had disappeared. Horne tried to prove that the surviving pictures of Kennedy’s brain cannot really be his. And in Oliver Stone’s documentary, JFK:Destiny Betrayed, we proved this along three evidentiary lines. Horne was on camera elucidating one of those lines: the testimony of autopsy photographer John Stringer. (DiEugenio, pp.160-65)
The book by John McAdams was reviewed by four different authors: Pat Speer, Gary Aguilar, Frank Cassano and David Mantik. The last three were on this site. (Click here to read them.) The remarkable thing about those four critiques is that there is very little overlap between them. Which confirms there was a lot of objectionable material in the book.
II
This book is an anthology of essays Ayton has written and published, many of them updated. Before the five essays on the JFK case and six on the RFK case, Mel leads off with his Introduction, entitled “Conspiracy Thinking”. This is his way of branding any author who disagrees with him as a heretic who does not abide by the rules of evidence and logic. To any knowledgeable person, it’s quite the opposite. Let us just take a few examples.
Ayton says that the guilt of James Earl Ray in the Martin Luther King case is overwhelming (p. 8). Then why did Bill Pepper win the very accurate and detailed mock trial for Ray? Why did he also win the civil suit in Memphis against Lloyd Jowers for his culpability in the conspiracy. (The Assassinations, Edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 492-509)
He then adds this: “The post-Watergate United States became intensely susceptible to conspiracy arguments.” (p. 2) Well that would happen, if the American public was to finally see the evidence in the Zapruder film, as it was allowed to do in 1975—for the first time, after 12 years. The shocking sight of President Kennedy’s body rocketing backwards with terrific force, when Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to be behind him—well that might do the trick Mel. Especially after trusted newsman Dan Rather misrepresented what happened in the film back in 1963.
One last example: Ayton quotes historian Henry Steele Commager as saying in the new millennium, that ”There has come in recent years something that might be called a conspiracy psychology: a feeling that great events can’t be explained by ordinary processes.” (p. 11) That old Priscilla Johnson, recycled by Michael Shermer, chestnut. The idea that Oswald did not shoot Kennedy was propagated way back in 1967 by the first wave of Warren Commission critics: works by Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher, Edward Epstein, and Harold Weisberg, among others. In December of 1967, Josiah Thompson’s book, Six Seconds in Dallas, actually made the cover of a large circulation magazine, Saturday Evening Post. Lane’s book Rush To Judgment was a number one bestseller.
These books did what the MSM did not do. As Barry Ernest says in Oliver Stone’s documentary, they compared the Commission’s 26 volumes of evidence and testimony with the original 888 page Warren Report. They found, quite often, the evidence did not line up with the conclusions in that report. The Commisioners were banking on the premise that no one would ever read those 26 volumes. Not only did some intelligent people read them, they were so outraged they felt compelled to write about the difference, at length.
But in spite of that, Ayton titles his first essay, originally published in 2004, “The Warren Commission Report: 40 Years later, it Still Stands Up.” Could anyone truly think such was the case? One of his opening sentences is that Oswald was a self-appointed champion of Castro. (p. 18) If there is one thing we know about Oswald today is that he was not in any way under the influence of Castro. As Jeff Morley has shown, that was simply the first cover story put out by the Cuban exiles in New Orleans, and paid for by the CIA. (Click here for more.) Ayton does not mention this important essay at any point in his book.
On the next page, Ayton writes something even worse. He says that if the FBI and CIA had been more forthcoming with the HSCA, some of the mysteries about Oswald would have been cleared up. (p. 19) This is ridiculous. It was the CIA that would not allow the HSCA’s report on Oswald in Mexico City to be released to the public back in 1979. Commonly called the Lopez Report, Mr. Ed Lopez—a co-author–told this writer that the CIA made so many objections to the report that it took them 6 hours to get through the first two pages. That report strongly suggests that someone impersonated Oswald in Mexico City. (DiEugenio, pp.284-300) Also, the HSCA did not include, and the ARRB did not declassify during their active years, the work of Betsy Wolf. That work indicates that someone at CIA rigged Oswald’s file from the time he defected to Moscow in 1959.(Read more.) Why would that happen? And why would Oswald be impersonated in Mexico City? And did the Warren Commission report on these events? No, they did not. Further, as Jeff Morley has written-and stated in Oliver Stone’s film JFK Revisited— HSCA Chief Counsel Bob Blakey did not know the CIA lied to him about what George Johannides was doing in 1963 with the Cuban exiles in New Orleans. Blakey did not know that Johannides was supervising those exiles before he accepted him as a liaison to the committee. Why did the CIA lie about this?
III
His next essay tries to say that the mystery of the assassination can be solved by exploring the life of Lee Oswald. It would have been a breath of fresh air if Ayton had written something outside of the Warren Commission tripe. Nope. According to Mel, nothing new has been discovered about Oswald since 1964. He was a misfit, embraced by radical ideology and he took a shot at General Edwin Walker.
I hate to tell Mel, but Oswald did not take a shot at Walker. (DiEugenio, pp. 100-102) Not unless bullets can change their color and caliber. And if Oswald wanted to be an important political figure, why did he never take credit for killing Kennedy? (Ayton, p. 43)
Next up is an essay on Jack Ruby. More of the same. In this chapter there is no mention of Dr. Louis J. West and his treatment of Ruby in prison. If you don’t mention West then you do not have to reveal he worked for the CIA in their MK/Ultra program. (Tom O’Neill, Chaos, pp. 377-88)
He also writes that Ruby left his apartment at 11 AM on Sunday morning and walked down the Main Street ramp. (Ayton, pp. 48-49) First, there is plentiful evidence that Ruby left his apartment earlier that morning and was seen at the DPD headquarters. In fact, he asked three witnesses, “Has Oswald been brought down yet?” (DiEugenio, p. 224) In addition a church minister said he was on an elevator with Ruby at 9:30 AM. Further, when his cleaning lady called Ruby early that morning, she did not think it was him who answered the phone. (Ibid)
As per Ruby walking down the Main Street ramp as the Warren Commission held, that was seriously vitiated by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Sgt. Don Flusche did not testify before the Commission. But he told the HSCA that he was in perfect position to view the ramp at that time. Because he had parked his car diagonally across the street and was leaning on it. Flusche knew Ruby and watched the entire episode; before and after the shooting. He said, “There was no doubt in his mind that Ruby did not walk down the ramp; and further, did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the ramp.” (DiEugenio, pp. 227-28). This is one of the reasons why the HSCA differed on this point with the Warren Commission. They thought it was more likely that Ruby came in through an unsecured door thought an alley. (HSCA Vol. 9, p. 139)
Now that he has—unjustifiably– denied any kind of plot through Ruby, he goes after Mark Lane and the possibility of a CIA conspiracy. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone like Ayton says that the reason Lane prospered was because the public could not accept a misfit like Oswald could change the course of history alone. (Ayton, p. 66)
Utter nonsense. The reason Lane was successful was because he mounted powerful arguments in his book Rush to Judgment, debated his opponents in public venues, and secured both radio and TV time since he was a cogent speaker who worked tirelessly to get his message out. (Click here for more.)
Incredibly, in discussing Lane’s trial against Howard Hunt in Florida, he does not mention the Hunt memorandum. (Ayton, pp. 72-73) This was a document written by James Angleton which reporter Joseph Trento saw. Its intent was to provide a cover story for Hunt being in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated. It was shown to Trento by Angleton himself. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 195) Ayton implies that the whole story began with someone thinking Hunt was one of the 3 tramps. The legal proceedings began when former CIA officer Victor Marchetti wrote about the document, but he had not seen it, just heard of it. Angleton told Trento that Hunt was in Dallas that day. But further, Trento came to understand the following: “Angleton was trying to protect his own connections to Hunt’s being in Dallas.” And further, that, “It was Angleton himself who sent Hunt to Dallas because he didn’t want to use anybody from his own shop. Hunt was still considered a hand-holder for the Cuban exiles, sort of [Richard] Helms’ ‘unbroken pet.’” (ibid, p. 196). Can one imagine leaving all of the above out in any discussion of that civil trial?
His last chapter in the JFK section is entitled, “Did Castro Kill JFK?” The premise is so goofy, its not worth reviewing this part. But I must point out a school boy whopper by Ayton. He writes that Joan Mellen relies on the testimony of Madeleine Brown in her book A Farewell to Justice. (Ayton, p. 77) If one checks the detailed index of Mellen’s book, Brown’s name does not appear. How can a writer rely on a witness that he or she does not mention?
IV
As bad as Ayton’s work on JFK is, his section on the Bobby Kennedy case might be worse. What can one say about a man who writes over 100 pages on that case and somehow leaves out the name of Dr. Thomas Noguchi? A man who, in those hundred pages, mentions the name of DeWayne Wolfer only in passing–and that is while he is quoting someone else. An author who does not describe the discoveries of Judge Robert Wenke’s Panel, which almost broke open the case. To anyone who knows the case, this is all simply inexcusable. There is no logical or evidentiary reason for these kinds of scholarly lacunae. Because those two men and that proceeding are central to the RFK case.
What does Ayton give us instead? He uses authors like Godfrey Jansen, Robert Blair Kaiser, Ron Kessler, and men like Michael McCowan and LAPD Detective Chief Bob Houghton to both smear Sirhan’s character and simplistically skew the facts of the shooting. Back in 1970, Jansen wrote a book called Why Robert Kennedy was Killed: The Story of Two Victims. Anyone who picks up the book, as I did many years ago, can easily see what kind of volume it is. It is not in any way a study or examination of the assassination. It is, plain and simple, a political tract. Jansen had lived for years in the Middle East. He was pro-Arab and anti-Israel and he built the book around those two poles. Even the New York Times could not stomach the book. The late Anthony Lukas concluded that Jansen had turned “Sirhan’s act into an object lesson in Middle East politics. Perhaps that makes good politics; it makes a bad book.” (NY Times, May 2, 1971.) If an official story book will not pass muster for the NY Times, who will it satisfy? Well, maybe Mel Ayton?
I thought no author in the RFK field would ever use McCowan again after I wrote a long review of Dan Moldea’s RFK book in the anthology The Assassinations. (Edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 610-31) Moldea did not inform the reader of very much about McCowan, except he was a member of Sirhan’s defense team. To describe that team as inept, does not begin to describe how bad they were. Suffice it to say that they never considered the possibility that their client was innocent. Which, in light of Noguchi’s autopsy—which we will get to later–is almost incredible. And for Moldea and Ayton to not sketch in the background of McCowen is, again, inexcusable.
McCowan had been drawn up on charges of theft and mail fraud. According to a girlfriend of his, he was also possibly dealing in the black market of arms. Because of all this, he was suspended from LAPD. At the time of his entrance into the case he was on probation and had appealed his sentence. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 629) A bit fishy perhaps? Important for the reader to know? Obviously.
Then there was the fact that he offered to work without compensation. Plus the distinct possibility he had recruited an informant into the camp of leftist writer Don Freed when he was entrapped by the police on a phony explosives charge. (ibid) He tried once to categorize Sirhan as a communist. He told Sirhan he had to follow his lawyers’ disastrous trial strategy, or he was finished. This is the same McCowan who wrote a memo discouraging his legal team from calling Sandy Serrano as a witness for the defense. Serrano had seen a young woman and man running down the exterior stairs after the shooting; and the girl was shouting “We shot him! We shot him!” When asked by Serrano who they shot, the girl replied, “We shot Senator Kennedy.” (ibid, p. 586) Is this not a bit exculpatory? But McCowan’s reports were pretty much like this one: reliant on LAPD spin and lacking in insight and context. Despite all this, Moldea–and now Ayton—refuse to even consider the fact the man could have been a plant. And they do not want the reader to suspect that, so they dim the lights around him.
It is easy to see why. Moldea wrote that SIrhan confessed to McCowan. He told him that as he was looking right at him, RFK turned his head. And that is when he shot him. Neither Moldea nor Ayton explain the problems with this scenario. Noguchi’s autopsy report states that all the projectiles that hit RFK came in at close range, from behind, and at extreme upward angles. The witness reports say that Sirhan’s arm was extended horizontally. Did Sirhan stoop down and then jump forward to shoot RFK? No one saw that. Also, what about the bullets that hit RFK in the back? After shooting him in the head, did Sirhan run around the senator and then fire his Iver Johnson 3 times into Robert Kennedy’s back? No one saw that either.
V
In backing McCowan and Moldea, Ayton does not disclose that Moldea broke an agreement which he prints in his book. He said that he would give everyone a chance to see what he would print about them beforehand. The McCowan exchange was not tendered to either Sirhan or his late brother Adel prior to publication. (ibid, p. 630) Ayton does not inform the reader about that important piece of information. Or that Moldea wrote a letter to RFK investigator Lynn Mangan saying he would take that quote out of the paperback version due to this problem. But he didn’t. Nor does he disclose that Sirhan vehemently denies the exchange ever took place. Or that the story McCowan told to Moldea about the shooting was at odds with what Moldea had earlier said in his book was his solution to how the crime actually happened. (ibid, p. 631) How and why Ayton could not detect this—it was quite obvious—is a bit surprising. And why, without revealing any of this, he would want to introduce new materials by McCowan, praised by Moldea, is a bit startling.
Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy of Robert Kennedy has been praised by no less than Dr. Cyril Wecht as one of the finest medicolegal examinations he has read. As authors like Philip Melanson have written, that study states that all the bullets that came into Kennedy entered from behind, at very close range, and came in at rather extreme upward angles. Since Sirhan was in front of Kennedy, this has led witnesses like maître d Karl Uecker to declare that “There’s no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun…Sirhan never got close enough for a point bank shot. Never!” (Philip Melanson, TheRobert F. Kennedy Assassination, p. 33; see also Lisa Pease, A Lie too Big to Fail, pp. 275-76) In fact, before the grand jury, Noguchi said the fatal shot, behind the right ear, was at most no more than 2-3 inches from the skull. (Pease, p. 68)
This creates a problem for Ayton, in both distance and direction. So he employs Vince DiPierro to say that, yes I saw Sirhan and he was that close to RFK. As this writer discovered years ago, there was pressure placed on DiPierro to amend his story. If one compares Vince’s early statements to those which Ayton uses, one can make that argument. (Pease,p. 49, pp. 72-74) Before the grand jury, Vince had said that Sirhan was somewhere between 4-6 feet in front of Kennedy. And he was behind Uecker, who was a large, thick man. Ayton also tries to use photographer Boris Yaro to deny this spatial fact. But as Pease wrote years earlier, Yaro was looking through a camera viewfinder in a foreshortened sightline, and told the FBI that Sirhan and Kennedy were “little more than silhouettes.” (LAPD Case Summary, p. 25).
There are two other evidentiary arguments which Ayton either slights or simply avoids. Those deal with the number of bullet holes in the walls and ceiling of the Ambassador Hotel pantry—the crime scene—and the chain of custody issues dealing with both the handgun allegedly used and the bullets in evidence today. Concerning the former, Pease did a sterling job illustrating this serious problem, and she did it with documents and photos. She concluded there were 13 bullet holes. (Pease, pp. 257-64) As per DeWayne Wolfer’s handling of the gun and the projectiles, well the fact that, in 100 pages, Ayton pretty much avoids the man and this issue tells you all you need to know about Wolfer’s actions. (For the prurient reader I suggest Pease’s book pp. 81-84 and 91-97)
Ayton goes beyond the norm in trying to discredit the idea of Sirhan as a programmed Manchurian Candidate. Yet he leaves out the name of Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas. Kallas was one of Sirhan’s psychologists while imprisoned. He came to the conclusion that Sirhan was not mentally afflicted, but that he may have been hypnotized into committing the crime. And he attacked Sirhan’s defense team for their pleadings on this issue. He also criticized them by saying it was not possible for a person to hypnotize himself into such a deep trance. There must have been an external programmer. He was so disgusted with Sirhan’s defense that he called it the “psychiatric blunder of the century.” (Pease pp. 381-82)
Ayton also tries to neutralize the famous Bjorn Neilson/Palle Hardrup Danish Manchurian Candidate case by saying that Hardrup later said that when the police suggested he may have been hypnotized, he used that excuse as a way of escaping liability for his crimes. (Ayton, p. 165) Again, this is dubious. Because all one has to do is read Wikipedia to see that Hardrup told several witnesses that Neilson hypnotized him several times in prison, before the crimes had been committed. (See also Pease, p. 392) Secondly, Lisa Pease traces a case in her book from Sebenico, Yugoslavia in 1923. A hypnotist placed a policeman in a trance and gave him a block of wood. He told him to fire into the crowd. Once the wood did not work, the cop pulled out his gun. He killed three people. The hypnotist was jailed, the policeman was placed in an asylum. (Pease, p. 394)
In his endless attempt to discredit Sirhan, Ayton even uses Carmen Falzone. And he bills him as a friend of Sirhan’s at California’s Soledad Prison. (Ayton, pp. 196). Falzone said that Sirhan was in a waking state during the shooting of RFK and he killed Bobby Kennedy for the Arab cause. This one is really beyond the pale. As Lisa Pease and myself wrote, Falzone was first an informant on Sirhan and then was used by the DA’s office to spy on Sirhan’s family. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 630) He was supposed to implicate Sirhan and his family in a plot that was allegedly being run by Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. But Falzone got details of his story screwed up, like the hand which SIrhan used to fire the gun. (For the whole tawdry episode about Falzone, see Melanson, pp. 116-26)
This is an aspect of the story that Ayton wants to avoid. That is the extent which the authorities went to in order to smear, manipulate and convict Sirhan. For example, he leaves out the roles of Hank Hernandez and Manny Pena on the initial Special Unit Senator inquiry into the RFK murder. What Hernandez did to witness Sandy Serrano has become infamous in the RFK literature. She saw the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress running down the stairs after the shooting. DiPierro had seen that girl inside the pantry next to Sirhan. Serrano had to be negated since she told her story on TV with newsman Sandy Vanocur. I should not have to tell the reader how Hernandez broke every protocol in the book in conducting Serrano’s polygraph examination. (Pease, pp. 104-16). And as hostile as Hernandez was to witnesses who tended to exonerate SIrhan, he played softball with those people who should have been suspects in the case e.g. Michael Wayne. When Hernandez asked if he had been arrested, Wayne said yes. Hernandez said he could say not since he was a youth at the time.
As I have seen for myself, Pena actually wrote on lead sheets about the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, “Do not follow.” In my opinion, there was no more important lead to follow in the RFK case. The fact that it was not shows us that LAPD was not interested in solving the case. That this goes unreported and uncommented on in this book tells us all we need to know about it.
The literature on the JFK assassination is rife with dishonest books that endorse, defend, and/or excuse the findings of the Warren Commission. Nothing new about that: this has been true since publication of the Warren Report in 1964, and has carried on through a long line of apologist nonsense.
One Commissioner and several WC attorneys cashed in on their experiences. A host of lesser, pseudo-serious WC advocates have contributed to this worthless tripe, and profitably. At the time of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, Vince Salandria called it a mountain of trash. All of this propaganda is meant to bury the obvious.
Jean Stafford’s A Mother in History (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966) was an early entry into this disgraceful body of work. I have written about it before, most recently on this Kennedys and King site. What more could I possibly have to say? Do I have an unhealthy preoccupation with this slender book, ostensibly an unbiased profile of the mother of the alleged presidential assassin?
If you Google “Jean Stafford A Mother In History” you are likely to find available copies on used book sites, along with reviews and reader opinions. Most of the opinions I found are favorable. All of them, it is safe to assume, are based solely on reading Jean Stafford’s published text. Almost certainly, none of the writers of these favorable judgments had access to some of the book’s raw material, in particular the tape-recorded Stafford-Oswald interviews. I did. Once it has been appraised, and contrasted with the published work, it is difficult to see A Mother in History as anything but a hatchet job intended to destroy Marguerite Oswald.
•
The raw material to which I refer is in the Jean Stafford collection at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder, part of the Norlin Library’s Rare and Distinctive Collections.
Stafford, who was from Boulder, left her papers to CU. Since she primarily wrote fiction, the source material for A Mother in History is only a small portion of that archive. This small portion includes typescripts, notes, and an interview transcript, all of which reside in one small box. Not included in the box are the interview tape recordings, which have long since been digitized.
A Mother In History was published in three sections, simply titled I, II, and III (plus an Epilogue and appendices). A breathless jacket blurb touts Stafford’s “three incredible days” with Marguerite Oswald. That, and other indicators, clearly imply each of those three book sections correspond to one day of conversation between the author and her subject.
There may have been three days of interviews, incredible or otherwise, but I am highly suspicious of the published chronology. An exchange on the book’s p. 36, as that purported first-day section nears its end, first got my attention. Here Stafford writes that she asked Mrs. Oswald if it would be okay to bring a tape recorder the next day. Marguerite agreed. Stafford does not say so explicitly, but the clear message is that the first day was not tape recorded.
The audio at CU consists of six undated .mp3 files. A CU archivist told me last summer that the original reel-to-reel tapes were transferred to audio cassette in the 1970s. They were digitized sometime in the 1980s, or perhaps a little later.
Nowhere, in the .mp3 audio, does Stafford say the day, date, or subject of her interviews. Interviewers often do; it could even be considered a best practice. It creates a record, and helps keep things in order.
The .mp3 files at CU may be undated, but they do have sequential filenames. The first is stafford-interview-with-mrs.-oswald_-part-1-a.mp3. This particular audio begins with Stafford asking, “Tell me about your early life, Mrs. Oswald. You were born in New Orleans, weren’t you?” The transcript begins the same way. It’s an amiable first question, a likely starting point, and I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this was, in fact, the very first of the interviews: that is, the first day, which Stafford implied was not recorded.
As I described in my previous article, I had grown curious about a quote in the first section of the book – an unrecorded first day, readers are led to believe. Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite said, “spoke Russian, he wrote Russian, and he read Russian. Why? Because my boy was being trained as an agent, that’s why.”
In Stafford’s book there was no follow-up question. This baffled me. Even an amateur journalist, like Stafford, should have enough sense to explore such an explosive statement. Surely the audio would clarify things. Instead, it revealed that Marguerite Oswald didn’t say what Stafford quoted her as saying. It is a manufactured quote.
It’s a little complicated, so bear with me. Most of the words in that quote were, in fact, spoken by Marguerite Oswald. They were also tape recorded; I have heard the audio. But it’s a false quote, because Stafford pieced together several phrases – some of them separated by as much as three minutes. Placing it all within quotation marks implies it is verbatim – but it is not, and is thus a deception.
I can only speculate on Stafford’s motives. That false quote does not support the lone gunman thesis. Given the magnitude of surrounding events, I cannot believe creating it was innocent. I think Stafford floated the idea of Oswald-as-agent – not a common view at the time – to characterize Marguerite Oswald as paranoid, and out of her mind.
•
There are other false and manufactured quotes in A Mother In History. I have not itemized them all and don’t intend to; it would be a huge undertaking. The more I studied the source material, the more dishonesty I found.
On page 23 of A Mother In History is the following statement, attributed to Marguerite:
Lee purely loved animals! With his very first pay he bought a bird and a cage, and I have a picture of it. He bought this bird with a cage that had a planter for ivy, and he took care of that bird and he made the ivy grow. Now, you see, there could be many nice things written about this boy. But, oh, no, no, this boy is supposed to be the assassin of the President of the United States, so he has to be a louse. Sometimes I am very sad.
This is a rather inconsequential matter, but it is still false. Marguerite Oswald didn’t really say it. Here is what she did say, in answer to Stafford’s question, “Did he ever have any pets?”
Oh yes, Lee had a dog, and with his first pay he bought a bird and a cage – I have pictures of it, with ivy in it and all the food for the bird. Yes, sir. With his first pay. He had a collie shepherd dog that I had gotten for him when it was a little [bitty] puppy. And he had it all those years until we went to New York. And that dog had puppies. He gave one to his school teacher. She wrote a nice article for the newspaper saying Lee loving animals and giving her a pet.
True, the published quote roughly parallels what she really said. But it is still false. “Lee purely loved animals” does not appear in any of the audio. There is no mention of dogs in the published quote, let alone puppies, or giving one to a school teacher.
Nor does Marguerite say, “Sometimes I am very sad.” In fact, elsewhere in the recorded interviews, she said quite the opposite: “I’m not unhappy, Jean. You can see I’m not.”
As I write these words, I feel like I’m in attack mode. I have listened to all the audio that is available. Can I be certain that every last recorded word from the Stafford-Oswald interviews wound up in the CU archive? Of course not. All that CU has is what Stafford gave them. She also wrote, in her book, that when Mrs. Oswald agreed to be tape recorded, she stipulated that there be two recorders so she could have a copy.
•
The example about animals and pets is minor, compared to a false quote on pages 12-13 of A Mother In History. This one is presented as dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, and Jean Stafford goes in for the kill. It is intended, I am convinced, to make Marguerite Oswald appear nuts – to use a non-clinical term.
Marguerite spoke first:
“And as we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.”
“I had not heard that President Kennedy was dying,” I said, staggered by this cluster of fictions stated as irrefutable fact. Some mercy killing! The methods used in this instance must surely be unique in the annals of euthanasia.
This exchange is not found anywhere in the interview audio or the transcript. Marguerite does not make the statement, and Jean Stafford does not make that stunned reply.
There is something similar to this in the interviews. Unfortunately, the digitized version of the tape recording at CU ends partway through the quote. Did the original tape end there, too? No, because the corresponding transcript, which I have found to be consistently accurate, continues for several more pages. It is convoluted, but this is what Marguerite Oswald really said.
That President Kennedy was killed by – a mercy killing – by some of his own men that thought it was the thing to do and this is not impossible and since I blame the secret service from what I saw and what I thought it could have been that my son and the secret service were all involved in a mercy killing.
A minute or so before her “mercy killing” remark, Marguerite did say “a dying President,” but “As we all know” is an invention. She says JFK was dying because he had Addison’s disease, which he did. She also called it a kidney disorder, which it is not. Addison’s can be life-threatening, but Stafford correctly points out that it is a manageable adrenal condition. And Kennedy managed his.
But Stafford can’t let this go without having some fun, falsely quoting Marguerite calling it Atkinson’s disease. In the audio, there is no doubt: Marguerite says Addison’s. It is rendered as Atkinson’s in the transcript. Maybe Stafford didn’t remember what Mrs. Oswald actually said, and later on trusted the error of the unknown transcriber. While accurate overall, the transcript does, in fact, garble certain words here and there; in places it reminds me of the sometimes-strange voicemail transcripts my Smartphone makes. The ethical thing would have been double-checking Marguerite’s presumed mistake, before putting it to print.
But the point is that Marguerite Oswald did not say her son was chosen to shoot a terminally ill JFK in a mercy killing. Jean Stafford created that illusion.
According to biographer David Roberts (Jean Stafford: A Biography, 1988) Jean Stafford later “held parties at which she played the Oswald tapes for her friends.” Roberts cites Stafford’s “fascination” with Marguerite Oswald’s voice.
It sounds more like arrogance to me. One imagines a bunch of cocktail-quaffing intelligentsia howling with laughter over Marguerite’s unschooled chatter. But maybe not. Maybe Stafford just wanted to give some of her pals a front-row seat to history. Whatever: the image this conjures is, to me, thoroughly repulsive.
•
The Stafford-Oswald interviews took place in May 1965. This is approximately ten months after Marguerite met with Harold Feldman and Vince Salandria, after which Feldman wrote “The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald,” published in September 1964 (available online).
If Jean Stafford had done her homework, she might have answered a question she puzzled over in her book’s Appendix III. How, she wondered, was an undereducated Marguerite Oswald able to paraphrase an obscure quote from Sigmund Freud? “Without persecution,” she told Stafford, “there would not be a persecution complex.”
In his article Harold Feldman, a lay psychologist, said that the media consistently portrayed Marguerite Oswald “as a self-centered, domineering, paranoiac showoff with frequent delusions of persecution. It reminds me of Freud’s remark that there would be no such thing as a persecution complex if there were not real persecution.”
Feldman, whose writing often appeared in psychoanalytic journals, wrote about Marguerite with the deference and sympathy Jean Stafford failed to summon. He observed:
She has devoted every day since November 22, 1963, to uncovering what she believes and millions believe is a real conspiracy in which her youngest son was the fall guy. As a result, she is held up to scorn as a bitter old woman who sees snares and plots everywhere.
And he added: “… if Ibsen is right and the strongest is the one who stands alone for integrity and honor, then Marguerite Oswald is the strongest woman in America.”
Marguerite Oswald was an ordinary woman thrust, quite against her will, into extraordinary circumstances. In spite of tremendous obstacles, she defended her son against the Warren Commission and the mainstream media. She had few allies. Even family members, she told Jean Stafford, distanced themselves from her. “I’m alone in my fight, with no help.”
Marguerite Oswald may have struck Stafford as eccentric, but who doesn’t have personality quirks? Jean Stafford exploited Marguerite’s to the hilt, and did so ruthlessly, in exchange for money. I could cite many more examples of the dishonesty in A Mother In History, but life is too short.
Stafford shuffled the truth like a deck of cards, manufacturing quotes and manipulating chronology, all to create the false impression – the lie – that her subject was divorced from reality. Suffice it to say A Mother In History is even worse than I imagined when I visited the Jean Stafford archive at CU.
But it’s been more than fifty years since publication, so the damage is done.
Dale Myers has made a career out of giving the MSM what it wants concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This includes proffering a truly dubious witness, Jack Tatum, to incriminate Lee Oswald as the murderer of J. D. Tippit. Jack Myers exposed the man Myers foisted on the public via PBS in 1993. (Click here for details).
But that was not enough for Myers. Not by a long shot. On the 40th anniversary of JFK’s murder ABC’s Peter Jennings wanted to do a program supporting the Warren Report. Somehow, he knew where to go. Jennings hired Myers’ buddy Gus Russo as lead reporter. Russo turned to his PBS chum Dale. Myers went to work on two main areas. These were the acoustics evidence, and his Rube Goldberg “computer simulation” of the Zapruder film: an animation that is supposed to reveal the forensic truth about the last few seconds of Kennedy’s life as it was extinguished in Dealey Plaza.
The problem with both of these is that they turned out to be about as reliable as Myers’ PBS work on the murder of Tippit. Concerning the acoustics evidence, Myers tried to proffer that by relating the movement of the DPD motorcycle driven by H. B McLain in the Hughes film, and then drawing a parallel with the same rider in the famous Zapruder film, he could discredit the acoustics evidence as being inaccurate about the shot sequence in Dealey Plaza. Myers attested that by his mathematical comparison, McLain would have had to have been riding at 200 mph to be in the correct spot to capture the sounds of the bullets in Dealey Plaza on his radio. (Donald Thomas, Hear No Evil, p. 676).
The problem with Myer’s statement was that the general public only saw the computations it was based on three years later. When informed people finally did, it turned out that Dale had done some MSM like slicing and dicing in order to come out with that 200 mph number, e. g. the timing of the first shot, assuming the grassy knoll shot missed, the placement of Robert Hughes etc. (Thomas, pp 677-680). After a long and detailed analysis, Don Thomas concluded that not only was Myers wrong, but “The ABC documentary’s “concrete evidence” had feet of clay. The producers had relied on an expert whose only credential was a bias against conspiracy theories.” (ibid, p. 684; we will go into the Myers “simulation” shortly.)
On July 24th, Myers wrote a piece that was his way of getting back at Oliver Stone’s two new documentaries JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed. He bases this critique on his viewing of the two films in the DVD package plus the release of the accompanying book JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which contains the annotated scripts, and interview excerpts.
He starts off on the wrong foot by saying the DVD package contains almost ten hours of material. Since the long version of the film is four hours and the short version is two hours, and there is overlap between the two, I guess we will have to wait about another three years to figure out how Dale came to that number. (Even if one throws in the commentary track version, it is not ten hours.)
Myers now slips up again. He wants to criticize the film for something that it does not include. Namely the murder of Tippit. He then acknowledges that some might think this is not fair, but he brushes this off with another of his patently bombastic pronouncements: “I think this is the heart of why the film comes off like a stacked-deck.”
This is the guy who used Jack Tatum as his chief witness in the Tippit case, and who then based his 200 mph motorcycle speed on invisible calculations. He now works his way into the mind of Oliver Stone and his screenwriter—namely me—and says imperiously, ”Oliver Stone and James DiEugenio won’t deal with the Tippit murder because it is the snare that entrapped Lee Harvey Oswald. It was Tippit’s murder that made Oswald a prime suspect in the JFK assassination.” Now that is a rhetorical trick worthy of a card sharp. For the simple matter that the film shows that Oswald not only did not shoot Kennedy, he could not have shot Kennedy. Therefore why would he be involved in the Tippit murder? As Bob Tanenbaum, who Stone and I met with numerous times while planning the film, says on screen: With the Warren Report’s evidence you could not convict Oswald in any court in the country. As an Assistant New York County District Attorney in Manhattan Tanenbaum never lost a murder case in seven years. I think those credentials outdo Myers’. Don’t you?
The book accompanying the DVD contains annotated scripts to both films: the short and long version. It also has excerpts from interviews that largely did not make it into the film due to time issues. Myers refers to that over four hundred page book as being “semi-annotated”. In reality, the pages dealing with the film scripts contain over 500 footnotes. Every statement of factual evidence is sourced.
Interestingly, Stone’s lawyer actually started that process when, upon seeing the rough cut of the film, she wanted us to prove the things we were saying about the pathologists in the film. She thought they were quite startling and might be hard to comprehend to a general audience. Much of that evidence was produced by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), and this is why we enlisted three members of the Board to appear on the program. The reader may want to ask Myers if, in any of the shows he has worked on, he talked about the existence of that body or revealed any of the new or declassified results of its work. One example: that autopsy photographer John Stringer denied he took the pictures of Kennedy’s brain in the National Archives. After all, JFK Revisited has ARRB employee Doug Horne relating this evidence. He was in the room when Stringer said it under oath. That disturbing testimony leaves us with these questions:
Who did take the pictures?
Why did someone else have to shoot them?
This evidence, as presented in the film, is the kind of material that one could have taken into a court room to adjudicate an acquittal for Oswald. Because the presentation of fraudulent evidence in a felony case can be grounds for having the proceeding thrown out. Stone’s film actually has a practicing neurologist, Michael Chesser, talking about this evidentiary issue.
JFK Revisited, the film and the book, attempted to gather professionals in the field of legal procedure and forensics. I have named two, Tanenbaum and Chesser, and I wish to introduce a third, namely Dr. Henry Lee. Why? Because Myers said that our film included an animated reconstruction of the shooting. No it does not. If we had done so, we would have had to include scale models of the figures in the car, close ups of where the bullets struck the two bodies, and some kind of time sequence also. We chose not to do that. And this is where Dr. Lee comes in to play.
As screenwriter, I did a pre-interview with Lee when he was in Los Angeles testifying in a case. I asked him about this whole issue of doing computer reconstructions for trajectory analysis purposes in the JFK case. He said simply and pointedly: You cannot do that in the Kennedy case. He added that this is due to the basic reason that neither wound in the president was dissected. Therefore, any trajectory analysis amounts to guesswork. Unless a wound track is dissected, you cannot present a trajectory with any real authority. This from the man who many consider the best crime scene reconstruction professional in the business. I decided he was, in all probability, correct and we did not do that sort of thing.
Why did I conclude that? Because Lee has worked on 8,000 felony cases, and about 1,000 of them have been death by gunshot. He has written over 30 books about true crime cases and some of those are used as textbooks in forensic science classes. He has been approved to testify in almost every state of the union, and also 42 countries. As with Bob Tanenbaum, I would like to ask Mr. Myers: “How many states have you been approved in to testify as a forensic crime scene reconstruction expert? How many countries?”
Concerning Lee’s statement, in Myers’ ABC “simulation’ I don’t recall him telling the audience that there was no dissection of the back wound in President Kennedy. Or explaining why. He surely has to know that Kennedy pathologist Pierre Finck admitted under oath at the Clay Shaw trial that there was military brass in the morgue that night and they would not allow the wound to be tracked. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 302). This was rather important information. But I don’t think that Russo or Jennings would have allowed that in the show; for obvious reasons.
Myers tries to neutralize the attacks on his “computer simulation” by saying the critiques I named of it, that somehow, he had crushed them all. This really makes me wonder about good ole Dale. According to Bob Harris, Myers asked You Tube to remove his critique of Myers’ simulation. To my knowledge, he never replied to Milicent Cranor. Myers said he called David Mantik, but Dave said he never got the call or any message. As for Pat Speer’s, well the reader can see how this exchange turned out himself.
Anyone who watches JFK Revisited can see that what we did was to present evidence that 1.) It is highly unlikely that a bullet could do the damage that CE 399 did and emerge in such intact condition. 2.) The chain of custody of this bullet is rather suspect. For the former we had forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht on camera along with battlefield surgeon Dr. Joseph Dolce, who worked for the Warren Commission. For the latter we had Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Henry Lee, and former police investigator Brian Edwards as witnesses. In the film, Aguilar proved that the FBI lied when they wrote that Bardwell Odum showed CE 399 to original Parkland identification witnesses O. P. Wright and Darrell Tomlinson. Odum said he never did any such thing. (The Assassinations, edited by James DIEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp.282-84) To repeat: this is the kind of fraud that can get a case thrown out of court. Again, I do not recall Myers discussing this for his ABC “reconstruction”. I think it would be relevant to that presentation. After all, if the bullet was not CE 399, what bullet trajectory was Dale “simulating”?
Myers objects to my references to the Tippit case in the book, JFK Revisited. He says the essay I wrote and reference is a mélange of work by Bill Simpich, Farris Rookstool and John Armstrong. Anyone who reads that piece can see that there are about 7 references to those three in that profusely annotated work. (Click here.) The two most often used sources are, by far, the Warren Commission volumes and the book by Joe McBride, Into the Nightmare. Myers does not want to acknowledge this, perhaps because it indicates 1.) There is material in the volumes he chose not to use and 2.) McBride’s book showed that Myers’ work on the Tippit case was, to be kind, not as comprehensive as he tried to advertise it.
For instance, it turns out that– in all the decades he says he worked on the Tippit case–he never interviewed the murdered policeman’s father. If Joe McBride found him, why couldn’t Dale? When McBride quoted Edgar Lee Tippit as stating things that would contradict the Myers/Warren Report version of the Tippit shooting, Dale did a funny thing. He now wrote that Edgar Lee was somehow mentally afflicted. As McBride points out, that information was garnered from a sister of J. D. ten days after Myers ordered McBride’s book. In other words, Myers somehow could not locate the man in some 35 years, but now—oh so conveniently– he finds out it did not matter.
Anyone can read McBride’s reply to Myers. (Click here.) Myers wants to belatedly discredit Edgar because he brings out evidence that indicates Tippit, and another officer, “Had been assigned by the police to hunt down Oswald in Oak Cliff.” Edgar then added that the other policeman did not make it to the scene since he stopped for an accident. As McBride also reveals, former DA Henry Wade seemed to corroborate Edgar. He told Joe: “Somebody reported to me that the police already knew who he [Oswald] was, and they were looking for him.” McBride goes further and states, with convincing evidence, that the other officer, who did not get to the scene, was William Duane Mentzel.
In sum, if Oliver Stone had decided to explore the Tippit case, I would have scripted that also. And I would have brought in the work of McBride, as well as authors like Henry Hurt, Jack Myers and myself. I would have chosen what I thought was the best from each of these sources and arranged it as astutely as I could. To put it mildly, it would not have comported with the Warren Report version.
Myers closes his diatribe by making some of his usual sociologically absurd comments. He first says that there is a movement to silence in America. Really Dale? In the age of Donald Trump? He then gets to his point: Somehow Oliver Stone and myself were ignoring and obfuscating what happened on the day Kennedy was killed. No we were not. We were doing what he never did. We were analyzing the newest evidence in the case with persons who are, unlike him, credentialed professionals. That is why we used people like Dr. Cyril Wecht, criminalist Henry Lee, Dr. Gary Aguilar, physicist David Mantik, neurologist Mike Chesser, former police investigator Brian Edwards, journalist Barry Ernest, ARRB investigator Douglas Horne, surgeon Donald Miller and radiologist Randy Robertson. We easily had more accredited professionals on screen than appeared in all of the programs Myers has worked on combined. In fact, the comparison is so one sided as to be kind of laughable.
This unprecedented gathering of authorities gave the public some new, evidence-backed insights into the actual circumstances concerning what happened to President Kennedy in Dallas. One example: Chesser, Mantik and Aguilar proffered a case– with House Select Committee on Assassinations advisor Larry Sturdivan’s own evidence—that a shot came from the front. Those same three, plus Horne, also showed that the brain photos, accepted by the HSCA as President Kennedy’s, cannot be his. And, as anyone can see—except Dale Myers—they did this on three evidentiary grounds. I could go on in this vein e.g. about demonstrating Oswald’s alibi, but the point is made. Questions like: What does the autopsy reveal about the true circumstances and the actual cause of death? Does the defendant have an alibi? These are what a criminal investigation of a gunshot homicide are about.
But that is what Myers, Russo, the late PBS producer Mike Sullivan, and Peter Jennings, were not going to do. It was they who were the masters of silence about really happened to JFK. And this new work helps show Dale Myers for what he was and is: a designer of sand castles in the air.
In the fall of 1977, former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison wrote a letter to Jonathan Blackmer of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. They had just met in New Orleans and were developing an informational relationship, one in which Garrison would offer any files he could dig up on a subject and often advise on its value. Blackmer had been originally appointed by Robert Tanenbaum. Tanenbaum was the New York City Chief of Homicide who had been the original Deputy Counsel for the Kennedy side of the HSCA. In this letter Garrison warned Blackmer about the perils of investigating the Kennedy case by using the usual tools of a police investigation. Garrison wrote that these methods would not be adequate in the JFK case. The main reason being that, in reality, Kennedy’s assassination was a covert operation. Which had layers of disguise around it.
That letter is still worth reading today. And I wish Charles Brandt had read it. Because his new book on the JFK case is a prime example of how a former criminal investigator can go off the rails by relying on the lessons he learned in prosecuting felonies back—in Brandt’s case—the state of Delaware. Brandt is the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, in the crime genre. He was a homicide investigator, prosecutor and finally Deputy Attorney General for Delaware. In his book on the JFK case, Suppressing the Truth in Dallas, he lets us know about his past career quite frequently. And this is a serious problem with the work.
For instance, fairly early in the book, Brandt states that Lee Oswald killed President Kennedy, wounded Governor John Connally and killed Officer J. D. Tippit. (Brandt, pp. 21-22) Brandt actually embarrasses himself with the following, “… the evidence is overwhelming that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally.” (p. 21) Which would mean that he buys the efficacy of CE 399. Very wisely, he does not actually say that. Because in explaining the Magic Bullet, the evidence would be shown to be rather underwhelming.
I will give the reader one example of what Brandt does say to justify all this. He says that Oswald fired only three shots, and these were heard by the workers on the fifth floor, below the sixth floor crime scene. (Brandt, p. 22)
I was quite disappointed when I read this. First, it ignores the evidence of Tom Alyea. Alyea was the Dallas photographer who was the first civilian on the sixth floor on November 22, 1963. He told Alan Eaglesham that when the police first found the shells, they were within a hand towel of each other. Which means they could not have been ejected by the rifle found on that floor. But Tom also said that they were then lifted up and dropped on the floor and this was the arrangement that was then photographed by the police. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 94)
As per the noise of the dropping of the shells above the workers on the fifth floor, again, this is dubious. One of those witnesses, Harold Norman, presents a problem for prosecutor Brandt. Because it appears Mr. Norman changed his story. On November 26th, in his first statement to the FBI, there is no mention at all about those three sounds he heard from above. And there is nothing in the record about Norman saying anything like that prior to that report. What makes this even more suspicious is that Norman’s new story did not appear until his Secret Service interview of December 2nd. (ibid, p. 55)
Why? Because one of the Secret Service agents who Norman changed his story for was the infamous Elmer Moore. The man who worked on Dr. Malcolm Perry to change his story and the man who pulled a gun on Church Committee witness James Gochenaur. Moore also confessed that Secret Service Chief James Rowley and Inspector General James Kelly helped to frame agent Abe Bolden for his attempt to expose the plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago. (See Oliver Stone’s film, JFK: DestinyBetrayed)
Right here, Brandt’s case would be in a world of trouble in any kind of legitimate legal proceeding. Two of his underlying evidentiary theses for Oswald’s guilt are quite questionable. But that is just the beginning of the problematic side of this book. Brandt accepts the Warren Commission tenet of Lee Oswald being a communist. He can do this since he proffers none of the new evidence from people like author John Newman, HSCA investigator Betsy Wolf, British researcher Malcolm Blunt, or journalist Jeff Morley. That sum total would indicate that Oswald was not a communist. He was, in all probability, a CIA agent provocateur and FBI informant. The evidence adduced by Morley and Newman in Stone’s film JFK Revisited would be enough to show the problems with Brandt’s ideas about Oswald.
Needless to say, Brandt also thinks that Oswald himself went to Mexico City in late September and early October of 1963. Again, there are serious problems with that belief. Many of them are put forth in the quite important, 410-page Lopez Report declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1995. For instance, the lack of a picture of Oswald entering either the Cuban or Russian consulate, and the fact that Oswald himself spoke fluent Russian and the voice on the CIA tapes portray someone who spoke poor Russian. (DiEugenio, op. cit. pp. 287-300). In fact, it was the Commission treatment of Oswald in Mexico City which Jim Garrison once referred to as being perhaps the key to the plot. Since he was one of the first to suspect Oswald had been impersonated there. (Memo from Garrison to Lou Ivon, 1/19/68)
II
As part of his case against Oswald, Brandt states that Oswald fled the scene of the crime, namely the Texas School Book Depository. He accepts the Warren Report story about Oswald descending the sixth-floor stairs, and later being found in the second-floor lunch room by supervisor Roy Truly and policeman Marrion Baker; then leaving the building and going back to his rooming house. This is what he says: “…flight is powerful evidence of guilt…” (Brandt, p.22)
We have already shown that the idea that the sixth floor was a crime scene has some questions around it. But something that shocked me about the book is that I could find no mention of the three secretaries on the fourth floor: Sandy Styles, Victoria Adams, and Dorothy Garner. This is really strange in the face of the success of Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs and Rich Negrete’s follow up film, The Killing Floor. Those two works help express strong reservations that Oswald was on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting. And if he was not there, then how can this be powerful evidence of guilt? Also, we should not forget that people like Bart Kamp have presented evidence that the second-floor lunch encounter was an event created after the fact. It may not have happened as depicted in the Warren Report. (For more detail, click here.)
But to go further than that, if Oswald was fleeing the scene of the crime, why did he then take a bus back toward the scene of the crime? (Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 159) Because, if one accepts the Warren Report, that is what he did. But then he got off that bus, walked several blocks, and hitched a ride in a taxi. But before he did that, he was about to get out of the cab and offer it to an elderly lady who asked that same driver to hail a taxi for her. (Lane, p. 165) The question is: Does a man who killed the president and wounded the governor of that state use public transportation to escape the scene of the crime? Does he then get off a bus, and then offer to give up his cab to someone he does not even know? Where is the urgency in this? How does it portray consciousness of guilt? I won’t even bring in the questions some writers have had about whether Oswald was really on that bus—the driver did not think it was him—or whether or not he was in that cab. Some believe that Oswald—or a double– was actually taken out of Dealey Plaza by a dark complected Cuban in a Rambler station wagon, as testified to by Deputy Sherriff Roger Craig. (Lane, pp. 173-74)
But one of the most arresting characteristics about Brandt is his single-mindedness. He portrays little if any doubt about what he is writing. But yet, that attitude is undermined by several mistakes he makes about the factual record. For instance, in discussing the murder of J. D. Tippit, he says “A few brave eyewitnesses followed Oswald to a movie theater and watched him sneak in.” (Brandt, p. 23) I am not aware of any witnesses who followed Oswald from 10th and Patton, the scene of the Tippit shooting, to the Texas Theater, let alone “a few”. Most people who write books about the case should know that the two witnesses who complained about Oswald sneaking into the Texas Theater were Johnny Brewer and Julia Postal. The former worked at a shoe store down the street from the theater, and Postal was the ticket taker.
To show the reader how determined Brandt is to turn Oswald into the assassin, he actually writes that Oswald tried to kill Officer McDonald inside the theater as he was being apprehended. (Brandt, p. 23) This has been pretty much demolished by Hasan Yusuf. As per the Tippit shooting, Brandt follows the Warren Report on that one also: Oswald shot Tippit. Except in this instance, he uses the testimony of the HSCA’s Jack Tatum as his signal witness. Apparently, he missed Jack Myer’s essay exposing Tatum as rather problematic.
As the reader can guess by now, Brandt also fingers Oswald in the attempted murder of General Edwin Walker. He does not explain how the projectile in that case went from a 30.06 to a 6.5 mm bullet–and also changed color, during the transfer from the Dallas Police to the FBI. Or how Oswald was never a suspect in the seven months that the police handled the case; but he quickly became the perpetrator shortly after the Commission and Bureau took over the Walker shooting. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 100-01)
Robert Tanenbaum once said about his experience as a homicide attorney, he always ended up with more questions than answers in handling a murder case. Well, Brandt seems to have nothing but answers in the JFK case. But as we have seen so far, he has not asked himself the right questions.
III
Having shown some of Brandt’s liabilities, what is his actual take on the crime? Well, in addition to saying that Oswald did what the Commission said he did, he then chalks it all up to the Mob. (Brandt references Robert Blakey several times in his book.) As I noted above, by ignoring all the latest work on Oswald, he can simply make minimal observations about the man, and then label him a tool of organized crime. Even though one of the pieces of evidence he uses–the whole connection with his uncle Dutz Murret as part of the New Orleans criminal element–was shown by the declassified record to be incorrect. Dutz Murret’s wife Lillian was examined by the House Select Committee on this point. She said that Dutz was not working for any mob connected bookie outfit in 1963. His son Eugene said the same thing to the HSCA. In fact Eugene said his father had disconnected with the Mob prior to 1959. (Interviews by HSCA with Lillian and Eugene, 11/6 and 11/7/78) So if there is any other significant evidence that Oswald was Mob associated, Brandt does not adduce it. (He does bring up an association much later, but we will deal with the problems with it in due time.)
The structural framework for Brandt’s book is one of the oddest I have ever read. In fact, in that regard it is up there with the likes of Mark Shaw and Lamar Waldron. He begins by making Earl Warren out to be a villain–not just in the JFK case, but in what he did with criminal law in general. Which is kind of odd, since many prosecutors think that what Warren did in this area was a long time coming and had prior precedents to back it e.g. the exclusionary rule was introduced in the Weeks vs United States case in 1914. Other aspects of what Warren did, ordering defendants to have attorneys in the Gideon case, and reading a suspect his rights in the Miranda case, have usually been praised as ameliorating abuses by police and prosecutors.
But incredibly, Brandt wants to put forth the idea that Warren was covering up for the Mob. (Brandt, pp. 10-11). The way Brandt does this is rather odd. Throughout the book, the author uses a phone call from Lyndon Johnson in which the president alluded to international complications in the JFK case. (Brandt, p. 41) Brandt treats this as a kind of nebulous pretext that LBJ was using. Yet, to anyone who has read say, James Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, it’s clear what Johnson was referring to. It was to the alleged appearance of Oswald at the Cuban and Russian embassy in Mexico City. (Douglass, p. 83, p. 335). Johnson attempted to intimidate Warren with the threat of atomic warfare due to Oswald’s activities at the two embassies, with the implication that Oswald killed Kennedy for the communists. And by all accounts, LBJ succeeded. For instance, after LBJ put the fear of God in him, Warren did not want the Commission to call any witnesses or have subpoena power. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: TheEvidence Today, pp. 311-12) How Brandt did not know about this, or failed to understand it, is really incomprehensible. But it was this nuclear intimidation that made Warren into a paper tiger on the Commission.
From this faulty premise, Brandt goes on to postulate another faulty premise. Namely that Warren dominated the Commission members and the legal staff. (Brandt, p. 50) This is undermined by another event the author fails to mention. Warren could not even push through the chief counsel he wanted—namely Warren Olney. By all accounts Olney was too much of a maverick for FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, and commissioners Gerald Ford, John McCloy and Allen Dulles. (DiEugenio pp. 314-15) So, quite early, Warren had been cowed twice. Unlike what Brandt writes, the real power within the Commission was what I refer to as The Troika: Gerald Ford, John McCloy and Allen Dulles. With their handpicked chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, they essentially ran the show. (DiEugenio, pp. 315-17)
IV
Brandt’s attempts at creating historical context for his structure is so unfounded and illogical that it becomes kind of an exercise in the theater of the absurd. For instance, his discussion of the Bay of Pigs invasion is one of the worst I have seen. Consider this for starters: he writes that Robert Maheu testified to the Church Committee about his actions in the Bay of Pigs. (Brandt, p. 73). I asked: What actions? As far as I can see, Maheu had nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs. The best volume I know of on the subject, Bay of Pigs Declassified, by Peter Kornbluh, never mentions Maheu.
Brandt follows this with something just as inexplicable. He writes that the Bay of Pigs led directly to Kennedy’s death. The problem with writing this is that he never comes close to proving it. If that is not bad enough, his characterization of the operation is a bit ridiculous. Consider how he regards Allen Dulles telling JFK he would have a disposal problem with the Cubans. Brandt interprets this as the Cubans badmouthing Kennedy if the operation failed. (p. 81). This is not what Dulles meant. What the CIA Director was indicating was that if Kennedy did not go through with the operation, there would be a problem in resettling the thousands of Cuban exiles the CIA had assembled.
One of the most bizarre statements the author makes is that the Bay of Pigs constituted felony murder; an invasion of Cuba by the USA. I guess Brandt never heard of the Truman Doctrine, which dates from 1947. Or how it was used—to name just one instance– in the CIA’s prior disaster in Indonesia in 1958, when Eisenhower tried to overthrow Sukarno.
Then we get to Brandt and Director of Plans Dick Bissell, the CIA’s chief architect and manger of the invasion. Brandt quotes Bissell as saying there would be an “air umbrella” accompanying the invasion. (Brandt, pp. 83-84) As many writers on this subject, like Larry Hancock and David Talbot have concluded, Bissell was a rather unreliable source about the operation. Kennedy had insisted that any further air operations after the preliminary raids—which Brandt all but ignores—were to be conducted from an air strip on the island. (Kornbluh, pp. 125-27). Since no beachhead was ever established, these launches could not be made. Two reasons that the beachheads were not secured are due to lies the CIA had told Kennedy: 1.) There was no element of surprise, and 2.) There were no defections.
Another fact that Brandt never mentions is crucial. Bissell and Director Allen Dulles both later confessed that they knew the invasion would fail. But they were banking on Kennedy intervening with direct American forces to bail out the operation rather than have it collapse. (Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, pp. 521-22) When Kennedy learned about this duplicity, he decided to fire the top level of the Agency: Dulles, Bissell, and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. I could find no trace of any of this in Brandt.
Brandt continues in his vein as a very poor historian. He says that the Bay of Pigs invasion included a top-secret plan to murder Castro. (Brandt, p. 85) This is false. There was no such plot included in the designs of the plan. That whole affair was a completely separate operation secretly initiated and managed by the CIA. Brandt makes this all the worse by writing that this plot was hatched by President Eisenhower, CIA director Dulles and Director of Plans Bissell and was then executed by President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
To say this is horse manure is an insult to horses. Any real historian would know that the CIA Inspector General Report on the plots to kill Castro was declassified back in the nineties. In two places in that report it specifically states that the CIA had no presidential approval for these plots. (For instance, see pp. 132-33) But Brandt then doubles down on this and says Operation Mongoose also included assassination plots. Again, this is not true.
But we later see why Brandt does this. He wants to argue that these plots gave the Mob blackmail power over John Kennedy. If Kennedy never knew of them and never authorized them, then such is not the case. And it creates another large fault line in his narrative. He adds to this later by saying that Bobby Kennedy concluded that the Mob killed President Kennedy. The best book on Robert Kennedy’s inquiry into his brother’s death is probably David Talbot’s Brothers. In that book, RFK considered three main culprits: the CIA, the Mob and the Cuban exiles. He never came to a definite conclusion. According to Talbot that was going to happen when he won the presidency.
V
Brandt continues his cartoon history by saying that Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger, and he used criminal influence to win the West Virginia primary for his son in 1960. (See Chapter 14, especially p. 59)
Both of these premises are false. And I have expounded on this before at length. The book that this rubbish is owed to is Double Cross, by Sam and Chuck Giancana–which is a wild fantasy. As Daniel Okrent proved in his book Last Call, there is no evidence at all in any FBI files of anyone accusing Joe Kennedy of being involved with the Mob in these kinds of ventures. And since the man was investigated six times for high offices, that includes well over 800 pages of documents spanning over two decades. (Click here for more.) Biographer David Nasaw showed how Joe Kennedy was making literally tens of millions at that time through real estate, stock trading, and most of all, distributing movies and managing film companies. Why would the multi-millionaire—with a Rolls Royce and chauffeur–want to get into something illegal when, for instance, at that time insider trading was legal?
Keeping to the fantasies of Double Cross, Brandt says that the Mob helped Joe Kennedy win the 1960 general election i.e. in Chicago. Again, this is more rubbish. John Binder did a careful study of the election results in Chicago in that year. To put it mildly, they disprove this fiction. The tallies were actually below average for that kind of election. And in talking to one of the ward bosses it was discovered that the actual instructions were to oppose the Kennedy candidacy. (See Binder’s essay, “Organized Crime and the 1960 Presidential Election. This would be a good place to add that the book is very sparsely annotated and has no index.)
Toward the end, Brandt brings in David Ferrie through two witnesses in New Orleans. (See Chapter 39) He writes about Ferrie being questioned by the Secret Service and let go. To my knowledge Ferrie was questioned by Jim Garrison and then the FBI. He then says that at the Camp Street building Ferrie frequented, he was prepping for the trial of Carlos Marcello. Reportedly, Ferrie was doing that at Marcello’s lawyer’s offices. Brandt concludes that Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz would have found out about Ferrie, and had both of them in his office, Oswald and Ferrie, one in one room and one in another. (Brandt, p. 221). I wish I was kidding when I wrote that. Apparently, Brandt is unaware that Will Fritz was the man who turned down an interview with Rose Cheramie. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 228)
To give Brandt some credit, his discussion of the testimony of Jack Ruby is acute as to its lack of credibility, and the author proves a few of Jack’s outright lies. (See Chapters 33-36). And he latches on to how important the testimony of Oswald’s landlady, Earlene Roberts, was and how important it should have been to find out who the two policemen were in that car beeping outside Oswald’s boarding house. The problem is that this is a rather slim portion of the book, and most of what he writes one can find elsewhere.
I was not expecting much from Brandt since I did not find his previous work on the Hoffa case, I Heard You Paint Houses, very distinguished. But in all honesty, I have to conclude that his current book is even worse than I thought it would be.
The documents should have been released by now, but the current and previous administrations keep delaying. The new lawsuit seeks to bring them to light as soon as possible.
The complete title of this new book is America’ Last President: Whatthe World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy. Monika Wiesak begins her book by saying about John F. Kennedy that, after some study, “I realized that the public image of him as a careless, thoughtless, self -involved playboy obscured the depth of what he was trying to achieve and intensity of opposition he faced.” (p. iii) She then quotes Bob Dylan’s lyrics on the subject: “They killed him once, and they killed him twice.” She adds that it was not enough that Kennedy be murdered, his ideas had to perish with him.
In an unprecedented manner, she then traces Kennedy’s anti-imperialist concepts all the way back to 1939, in an unlikely place: Palestine. Even at this early date, young Kennedy writes that the press was not giving the public the whole story. He wrote that it seemed to him that, even at this time, the Zionists wanted to take over Jerusalem, make it the capital of their new country, and to also colonize Trans-Jordan. Kennedy even described what would today be termed as false flag operations: where bombs were being set off in the Jewish quarter, by the Jews, and the British would be called in to fix the damage. (p. 6)
In 1951, Kennedy visited Asia and the Middle East. He wrote that he felt it was wrong for America to support England’s oil interests in Iran, and her military interest in Suez. He also commented on the plight of the 700,000 Palestinians who were now refugees after the Nakba, and how this would not align itself with the promises of the Voice of America. (p. 8). About Indochina, he wrote that we must not sacrifice nationalism for anti-communism, since he thought the latter cause would fail.
From here, Wiesak goes to Kennedy’s famous Algeria speech of 1957. She correctly comments on it as: “…to this day, it remains one of the most potent speeches opposing imperialism ever given by a U.S. senator.” (p. 11). She then acutely adds, not only was Kennedy an anti-colonialist, he was keenly aware of the substitute for colonialism, which was imperialism:
Suspicion is aroused that when colonialism is ousted anywhere and the inevitable vacuum results, dollar control is prepared to move in, so that freedom would amount to little more than a change of masters. (p. 14)
Some of the other ideas that Senator Kennedy advocated were: no nuclear proliferation, anti-censorship and loyalty oaths, and the government should intervene in the economy actively for the public good. This opening is astutely done since she adds that these concepts would carry over into his presidency. Therefore, “The following chapters detail what happened to a world leader whose priority was the people.” (p. 21)
II
The book proper opens with chapters on the CIA and then the Congo. Wiesak focuses on the Bay of Pigs and the deceptions hoisted by the Agency to get Kennedy to go along with that fey excursion. She also points out his deep regrets afterward about allowing himself to be gulled: “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead.” (p. 28) Kennedy literally cried alone with his wife. In fact, she uses the book posthumously published by Caroline Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, as a major and revealing source. Which is something that this reviewer thinks is rather original. I have never seen that book used as extensively, or as pointedly, as Wiesak does here. Kennedy’s widow provided some insightful perceptions into her husband’s thinking. Wiesak deserves credit for mining these hidden and concealed jewels.
In a separate chapter, she writes that presidential candidate Kennedy had sent Averill Harriman to Congo. He reported back to the senator that Patrice Lumumba, newly elected president of Congo, was a nationalist and not a communist and JFK should favor him. (p. 35). In return, Lumumba sent Kennedy a telegram on the day he was elected requesting that he oppose the secession of the state of Katanga and hoping he would cooperate with the United Nations.
As we know, Lumumba did not live to see his request fulfilled. CIA station chief Larry Devlin recommended drastic steps to eliminate Lumumba before Kennedy took office. After all, Ted Kennedy had visited Africa and urged Lumumba be released from house arrest. (p. 37)
After the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, was done away with in September of 1961, Kennedy essentially took control of UN policy in Congo. JFK ended up approving the UN military mission, code named Operation Grand Slam, which stopped the secession of Katanga in late 1962. In short order, after JFK’s assassination, Kennedy’s non-imperialist policy there was reversed by President Johnson. Instead of a democratically elected, constitutional republic, Josef Mobutu and Moise Tshombe ended up being despotic co-rulers. Mobutu lasted for about three decades. After he left, about 5.4 million Congolese perished between 1998-2007, partly as a result of two civil wars in the nineties.. (p. 42) Congo should have been a wealthy and independent republic, an example for the rest of sub -Sahara Africa. It ended up as a poverty racked failed state.
Her chapter on Congo leads up to an overview of Kennedy’s entire Africa policy in Chapter 4. In 34 months, Kennedy greeted 28 heads of state from that continent. This contrasts with President Eisenhower, who met with less than a third as many in eight years. Kennedy’s point man on Africa, G. Mennen Williams, visited every country there except the Union of South Africa; because they would not grant him a visa. (p. 47) Kennedy’s aid package was also different: he sent a larger sum, and less of it was for the military. It is interesting to note, as she does, that Kennedy was criticized for spending too much time and effort on this Third World continent, both by fellow Democrats Dean Acheson and Henry Jackson, as well as the National Review and New York Times.(p. 54). But as Jackie Kennedy said, after she wrote a note to Kwame Nkrumah of Africa, “Jack made you feel how important it was to be polite…how awfully everyone had always treated the Africans, how Eisenhower had kept an African leader waiting for 45 minutes.” (p. 47)
This policy was seriously altered by Lyndon Johnson. By 1969, Africa was getting 29% of the aid it received in 1962. (p. 56) When Kennedy was assassinated, Tommy Mboya of Kenya said the emotional impact was like a death in the family. The leaders of Africa repaid Kennedy by refusing to grant refueling rights to the Soviets during the Missile Crisis.
In Latin America Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress, which broke with tradition. Since it was going to lend money at very low, or sometimes, zero interest rates. So there would not be a constant debt expansion problem. Which could only be cured by purchasing American products. Big business did not like the program. They deemed it one step away from socialism. (p. 61) But Kennedy liked the approach, and he visited Latin America three times, and had another visit scheduled in 1964. His wife had gone with him on two of these journeys south. A Wiesak quote from the First Lady crystallizes the Alliance for Progress, and what JFK was about:
In Venezuela I went to an orphanage, and there was a picture in the paper, all the children were kissing me goodbye, and the headline was…we love Mrs. Kennedy, look, she permits herself to be kissed by these children. And that just hurt Jack so much….And he said you just don’t know the inferiority complex they have that the United States has given them. Jack believed all those things he was saying about our revolution is like yours; at last they had someone they could trust who felt about them. (pp. 63-64)
Another example of how Kennedy felt about the Alliance for Progress, from Teodoro Moscoso:
When he went around and saw the farmers, poor undernourished people who never in their life had ever had anything to their name except the clothing on their back, and assisted in handing them over the title to a piece of property, to a piece of land with a fence around it and with a house on it, he got a fantastic lift out of this. (p. 64)
Jackie Kennedy also wrote that her husband would never have recognized the military juntas in Dominican Republic in 1963 and Brazil in 1964. (p. 64). Juan Bosch, the displaced democratic leader in the Dominican Republic later said of Kennedy’s murder: “The fatal bullet did much harm to you, but greater harm to us.” (p. 66)
III
One of the finest aspects of America’s Last President, is Wiesak’s discussion of Kennedy’s economic program. She starts off by noting that celebrated financial journalist/author Seymour Harris wrote that, Kennedy knew more about economics than any president he covered. Since he wrote columns on the subject from 1943, and published over 30 books dating from 1930, that takes in a lot of territory.
Wiesak notes that, when Kennedy took office, the unemployment rate was 7.7 %. By 1964, it was under 5%. Under Kennedy, the Gross National Product increased by 20%, Industrial Production went up by 22 % and Personal Income increased by 15%. (p. 68) Kennedy greatly wished to stimulate growth and increase productivity. He thought this would contribute to a greater share of wealth for all, but would allow for more to be given to those suffering who were the neediest.
JFK tried to stimulate economic production by granting a tax credit for new plant and equipment; and also providing for a general tax cut. Kennedy’s tax cut would give the largest percentage of relief to the poorest third of the population and to small business. (p. 71) Kennedy also wanted to keep interest rates low and to increase defense contracts for small business. Things like the Area Redevelopment Act, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and Manpower Development and Training Act, these all poured money into distressed areas that needed it the most. In this regard, Kennedy made much more surplus food available to the poor. In fact, in just two months, he doubled the number of recipients. (p. 75). What else did he do to ease the problems of the poor and not well off?
Extended span of unemployment benefits
Increased the minimum wage
Increased by almost 30% the amount of Social Security benefits
Pushed for a Medicare bill
Sanctioned the VISTA program in poverty stricken areas
At his last Cabinet meeting, Kennedy uttered the word poverty seven times. The amazing thing about Kennedy’s robust economic program is this: during his administration inflation averaged just 1.7 %.
Who would be against such a successful program? Well, the denizens of Wall Street of course. Fortune magazine described Kennedy’s policies as a “master government plan.” (p. 80). One of the reasons why people like the owner of that magazine, Henry Luce, bitterly attacked Kennedy was this: he wanted to close off foreign tax havens and loopholes, “which permit and encourage industry to invest overseas.” He even advocated for a withholding tax on dividend payments, since he thought this would be more fair to wage earners and small business. (p. 82-83). Unlike what we had under the likes of Reagan, Bush and Bill Clinton, Kennedy knew where the money was located and wanted to entertain ways to make tax collection more graduated i.e. by eliminating provisions that would allow special tax preferences for wealthy individuals transferring property as gifts. . (p. 83)
In her examination of Kennedy’s economic program she does not ignore the goals of Kennedy against the Federal Reserve. Which he tried to neutralize through the appointment of James Saxon as Comptroller of Currency. (Click here for more detail.)
She also examines the now legendary Steel Crisis, where the magnates of Big Business decided to launch a frontal assault on Kennedy’s policies. One of the strategies Kennedy used to defeat his opponents was to begin giving large defense contracts to smaller steel companies, who were not part of the cartel. (p. 90) Kennedy did not think that rigging prices was the way the free market worked. Even after the price fixing case was broken, Bobby Kennedy launched a law suit which made the culprit companies pay maximum fines in 1965 for price fixing from 1955-61. (p. 91). Kennedy made more than one pithy comment on the crisis after it was over. Consider how he characterized the conflict:
…a small group of men turning against the government and the economy because the government would not surrender to them. That is the real issue. (pp. 94-95)
Later he added the following:
If to stop them saying we are anti-business, we are supposed to cease enforcing the antitrust laws, then I suppose the cause is lost. (p. 96)
Wiesak closes off this section with what is probably the best precis of Kennedy’s environmental program I have seen. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, requested that the White House help publicize Rachel Carson’s upcoming book, Silent Spring. The book had been excerpted in The New Yorker in June of 1962. Kennedy then announced he would be investigating pesticides. Kennedy did not back down when the chemical companies started attacking the book. (pp. 98-99)
As the writer specifies, this is related to Kennedy’s prior address on what he called Consumer Rights. He made this speech on March 15, 1962. Kennedy advocated for more truth in packaging laws, among other consumer rights. Today March 15th is celebrated as World Consumer Rights Day. This was all in keeping with what Kennedy saw as his primary duty, which was protecting the interests of the public. (p. 113)
IV
Wiesak, of course, addresses Kennedy’s epochal confrontations with the Pentagon and CIA over Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia.
About the first, before taking action, Kennedy asked to speak to the American ambassador to Laos, Winthrop Brown. After this talk, where Kennedy said he wanted to hear his observations, not the State Department’s, Brown later said, “I mean, I just thought I’d been in the presence of a great man.” (p. 129)
The Pentagon wanted to send in troops to stop the Pathet Lao. Specifically, about 140,000 of them. As Max Taylor later wrote, it was President Kennedy who resisted sending in troops. (p. 131) Kennedy insisted on a neutralist solution in 1962.
In Vietnam, Kennedy sent John Kenneth Galbraith to give him a dissenting opinion from his advisors, who again, wanted to insert combat troops. Kennedy knew Galbraith would give him a radically different opinion, which he did. Kennedy then passed on that opinion to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and this was the beginning of the president’s withdrawal of all advisors, which would be begun in late 1963 and be completed in 1965. (p. 133)
Kennedy was determined to enact this plan without Pentagon interference. So he forbade any higher ups in the military to visit Saigon without being cleared by the State Department. That paved the way for NSAM 263 which began the withdrawal program with one thousand advisors to be taken out by the end of 1963. Again, LBJ did a reversal and it was not long before the OPLAN 34A program was underway. These patrols, really provocations—featuring attack speedboats accompanied by communications destroyers–paved the way for the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Which was then used as a casus belli for the USA to declare war on Hanoi. With Americans fighting the brunt of the war.
Sukarno of Indonesia liked some of the speeches Kennedy had made in the 1960 election against Richard Nixon. Sukarno had convened the first non-aligned meeting of Third World countries in Indonesia about five years previous. For this and other reasons, covert operations chief Dick Bissell and the CIA did not care for Sukarno. Bissell once said that “Lumumba and Sukarno were two of the worst people in public life I’ve ever heard of…I believed they were dangerous to the United States.” (p. 141). This is how he justified planning to eliminate such “mad dogs”.
Contrary to the CIA and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Kennedy approved of the non-aligned movement. (p. 140) And when Sukarno met with JFK in Washington in 1961, he told the president that 90% of the communist party in Indonesia, the PKI, were really nationalists. The two leaders discussed this issue of non-alignment and neutrality in the Cold War. This is something that both JFK and Dag Hammarskjold agreed upon, specifically in relation to both Congo and Indonesia. (p. 142) Wiesak now reviews the important natural resource information about West New Guinea, today called Papua. How, unknown to either Sukarno or Kennedy, that region was even richer than Katanga in precious metals and oil. In a dispute with the Dutch, who likely did know, Kennedy worked to transfer that land over to Sukarno in 1962. This is something the CIA actually had declared off limits, since they felt it would aggrandize Sukarno’s stature. (p. 144). As Wiesak notes, through the work of Greg Poulgrain, we also know that CIA Director Allen Dulles very likely did know about the enormous amount of resources in Papua.
Kennedy had planned on visiting Jakarta in 1964. He also planned on a large foreign aid package to be sent to Sukarno at the end of 1963. Both of these were eliminated by LBJ. The relations between the two countries now became much more strained and difficult. And it culminated in eventual overthrow of Sukarno, which began in late 1965. No one knows for sure how many were slaughtered in 1965 and continued into 1966; estimates range from a half million to a million killed. As Wiesak observes, there is plentiful evidence to indicate the CIA was involved in this bloody affair. (p. 148) As scholar Bradley Simpson told Oliver Stone in his interview for JFK: Destiny Betrayed, in all probability, this would not have happened if Kennedy had lived.
V
From here, the writer discusses two instances where Kennedy worked with Khrushchev in order to stop what could have ended up in serious conflicts, perhaps escalating into atomic warfare. The two episodes are, of course, Berlin in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. In the former, she notes how both Berlin commander Lucius Clay and General Bruce Clarke of US Army Europe, were trying to provoke a showdown over the Berlin Wall. (p. 150) The Kennedy brothers negotiated a way out of the stand off which included removing tanks at the Brandenburg gate. Kennedy told William Walton: “I am almost a peace-at-any-price president.”
This was further illustrated in October of 1962 during the Missile Crisis. Wiesak notes that Kennedy felt the Russians had installed the medium and long range missiles behind his back over the issue of Berlin. (pp. 153-54) That is, they would demand the giving up of West Berlin over negotiations for removal of the missiles from Cuba. Which is something that Kennedy would not deal over since he thought this would be the beginning of the rolling up of the Atlantic alliance. She also notes that Kennedy was taken aback when Russian foreign minister Andrei Gromyko lied to him about offensive weapons in Cuba.
At the beginning of the crisis, there were two alternatives presented to Kennedy: 1.) A surgical strike against the missile silos, and 2.) An even larger air strike followed by an invasion. But against the majority, Kennedy decided on a blockade. Kennedy stole a quip form Lincoln, saying that his one vote outnumbered all those in opposition. (p. 161) To JFK it was the alternative that had the least amount of casualties attached, and it also minimized the prospect of war, since it allowed for negotiation.
Wiesak dutifully comments on Kennedy’s discussion of the issue with the Joint Chiefs. He first said to advisor Ted Sorenson, “They all want war.” He then commented “…if we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.” (p. 159). His brother Bobby Kennedy, of course sided with the president and managed to convince Doug Dillon of Treasury to accept the blockade.
From here, the boundary lines for a negotiated solution were constructed. UN representative Adlai Stevenson suggested using the American missiles in Turkey as a bargaining chip. To which Bobby Kennedy said, this must only come at the end of negotiations. (pp. 162-63). At first, the Russians wanted a pledge that the USA would not invade Cuba. They later added they would also like the Turkish missiles removed. (Which Kennedy thought were already gone.) Under these parameters, Bobby Kennedy met with Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. RFK told him that the Turkish missiles would be removed six months later. He also added this: the Joint Chiefs are spoiling for a fight. According to Dobrynin Bobby said, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.” (p. 165). Make no mistake, Kennedy was losing support among his advisors, especially when Lyndon Johnson chimed in and said the USA was giving up way too much in the negotiations. (The Kennedy Tapes, by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, p. 587). The visit to Dobrynin, with RFK’s warning, probably turned things. The next day, Nikita Khrushchev announced he was going to begin removal of the missiles. But as Wiesak writes, Kennedy was so determined to get a deal that, if Khrushchev had not sent the telex, the president was going to negotiate through U Thant at the United Nations–and this would have included the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. When it was all over, JFK told John Kenneth Galbraith that, in relation to bombing the missile silos, “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.” (p. 161)
Which was fortunate for us all. Because at a much later seminar on the subject, held in Havana in 1992, some important information was revealed. First that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the medium and long range missiles were already installed at the time of the blockade. Therefore, the maneuver had little if any strategic impact. Secondly, that there were short range tactical nuclear missiles on the island and the Soviet commanders had permission to use them if the Americans invaded. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was on hand for this event. When he learned of this information he was so stunned he tore off his headphones and then waved his arms in disbelief. ( p. 167; see also The Armageddon Letters, by James Blight and Janet Lang, p. 279)
This directly relates to Wiesak’s section on nuclear disarmament. As author Roger Mattson wrote in his book Stealing the Bomb, no president since has been so single-minded and determined about cutting the number of atomic weapons and limiting proliferation than JFK was. Kennedy actually started a new agency for that purpose, the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1961, he said before the UN: “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” (Wiesak, p. 173)
Kennedy then outlined a six step process to begin a world-wide disarmament program. Marcus Raskin, who worked on nuclear studies for Kennedy, recommended a 30% cut in arms and JFK liked that idea. (p. 178) Kennedy envisioned a general and complete disarmament that would take place in stages, with no atmospheric testing. This was the background to the famous Peace Speech at American University in June of 1963. That speech was more admired in Russia and Cuba than in the USA. But it did kick start the Partial Test Ban Treaty of September, 1963. Castro liked this move so much that he said he was willing to declare Barry Goldwater his friend if it would help elect Kennedy. And JFK started planning for a visit to Moscow in his second term. (pp. 185-86)
VI
As rich as the book is, I think its crowning jewel is Wiesak’s discussion of Kennedy’s approach to Arab-Israeli relations. In synoptic form, it is the best I have seen anywhere. Since no president since has come close to duplicating Kennedy’s policy in vision and fairness, it is important to describe it. And to also show how it was dismantled by his successors. To a point where it became unrecognizable.
One of the mainstays of Kennedy’s policy was UN Resolution 194, sometimes called the Johnson Plan. Middle East specialist Joseph Johnson had devised a plan which would settle the refugees of the Nakba. They would have the option of returning to where they lived, staying where they were at, or going elsewhere– and the UN, meaning largely the USA, would cover the costs.
To put it mildly, Israel’s President David Ben Gurion did not like the plan. To be blunt about it, he said, “Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.” (Wiesak, p.189) In order to keep the Johnson Plan alive, when the Russians sent equipment to Egypt in 1962, Kennedy had to agree to sell defensive missiles to Israel. Something he was uncomfortable doing. (p. 191). In fact Johnson quit his position in the fall of 1962.
In the face of much resistance, Kennedy continued to push the plan in bilateral talks. In fact, as Wiesak notes, Kennedy supported the plan through November of 1963. Something the Arabs appreciated, but which Israeli leaders, like Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol, were disturbed by. (p. 193)
The second mainstay of Kennedy’s Middle East policy was his insistence on keeping up a relationship with the man he saw as the potential leader of a Pan Arab movement, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. This was done through a series of letters, of which no one knows the exact number exchanged. Kennedy thoroughly understood Nasser’s impressive stature in the Arab world through episodes like the Lavon Affair and the Suez Crisis. In fact, JFK spent much time and effort in the writing of his correspondence, at times redrafting it 5-6 times. Another hallmark of Kennedy’s was he really studied the history of the Middle East. Diplomats would visit with him and emerge saying, “He knows more about our problems than I do.” (p. 197) In fact, by 1963, some senators were criticizing Kennedy for being pro-Nasser. (p. 201) Coupled with this was the Kennedy brothers opposition to the American Zionist Council, RFK wanted them to register as a foreign lobby. (p. 205) As Wiesak notes, this was the beginning of the formation of AIPAC.
The third rail of Kennedy’s policy in the Middle East was his opposition to the acquisition of atomic weapons by any nation. In March of 1963, Kennedy even drafted a National Security Action Memorandum on the subject. (pp. 210-11) Kennedy was so determined to halt any such program that in April of 1963, when he happened to run into Shimon Peres, Israel’s deputy of defense at the White House, he conducted an impromptu interrogation of him on the subject. After which Kennedy commented to Charles Bartlett, “Sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability.”
This led to a showdown between Kennedy and David Ben Gurion. Kennedy insisted on biannual inspections of what he suspected was a nuclear weapons reactor at Dimona. Ben Gurion denied this and instead insisted on a bilateral security agreement. To Kennedy, this would have put his relationship with Nasser on the line. It was simply a non-starter. In June of 1963, after Kennedy sent him two letters saying aid to Israel would be placed in limbo if there were no inspections, Ben Gurion stepped down. After which CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton visited him at least once in Israel. (p. 217)
Needless to say, LBJ completely reversed Kennedy’s very careful policy. He ended up cutting aid to Egypt and boosting aid to Israel—supplying them with tanks and aircraft. In other words, offensive weapons. In fact, the sum of military aid Johnson gave to Israel in 1966 surpassed the cumulative sum given to the state since its establishment in 1948! (p. 204) Needless to say, this caused a breakage in US/Egypt relations. The imbalance was epitomized with the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. George Ball of the State Department cogently commented on this episode. He said that by allowing Israel to cover up what really happened there, LBJ was telling the Israelis that nothing they did would cause America to refuse their bidding. (p. 204)
Monika Wiesak has written a remarkable and valuable book. It is the kind of volume you can send to friends and relatives for the holidays. It is the best book in its category in fourteen years, since Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable.
Kennedys and King has received the following request from Angela Berry, the attorney representing Sirhan Sirhan.
For Sirhan’s upcoming March 1 parole hearing, we need new, updated letters from people.
As before, the support can be supplemented with the idea that
He’s an old man and no longer dangerous, even [California Department of Corrections] experts have been saying that for many years
It’s a waste of tax payer funds to house an aging man who poses no risk
He shouldn’t be treated differently because of his victim
The Board must find him again suitable for release and refrain from inappropriate persuasion from the Governor
The governor got it wrong and he has no proper place in the decision
Also as before, the letters should be addressed to:
State of California, Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Board of Parole Hearings
P.O. Box 4036
Sacramento, CA 95812-4036
It would be extremely helpful if the letter authors also sent me a copy of their letter. That way, I can send them also to CDCR to ensure they make it to the “packet” that will be considered by the Board.
Angela Berry
Letters in support of Sirhan Sirhan may be sent to:
The attorney representing Sirhan Sirhan has announced an appeal of California Goveror Gavin Newsom’s decision to deny a parole to the convicted killer of Robert F. Kennedy.
Sirhan was granted the parole in August 2021, having served fifty-four years in prison.
At a virtual press conference on September 28 2022, attorney Angela Berry stated that in granting the parole last year, the parole board had followed the law, but in denying it, Newsom had not. Considering Sirhan’s age – 78 – and his model prisoner record, his release should have been the normal decision. According to those in contact with him, he poses no danger to society.
This was one of the most impressive parts of the Sept. 28 conference. Both Berry and Jen Abreu, the director of an agency called Redemption California, presented statements that they secured from those who had contact with Sirhan at Richard J. Donovan Correction Facility in San Diego. Each one of the witnesses stated that Sirhan had both an exemplary record, and was quite cooperative and easy to work with.
In some instances, they said, he had gone beyond what was required of him. He had attended self-help classes that were offered at Donovan on his own initiative. Abreu was very familiar with this evidence since her group had worked with Sirhan for upwards of 13 months to prepare him for his last parole board hearing. She said that in 54 years of incarceration, the record showed one rule violation. And that over fifty years ago. She said, that in her experience, this was an utterly exceptional record. Consequently, according to the prison rating system for release, Sirhan was in the lowest category as per offering a danger to society.
Berry said that at the actual hearing, two of the highest ranking commissioners were in attendance. They voted for release. They then passed on their recommendation to the entire board, which agreed with it. Sirhan joined the conference with a video taped talk. There he stated that what makes his case unusual is that even victims of the crime, like Paul Schrade, have advocated for his release. Its rare that something like that occurs.
There were questions from reporters after the press conference. One was if Berry thought this was going to be a futile effort, due to the notoriety of her client. She replied that she did not think so, since Newsom had previously lost a case like this. In fact, she could have added that the ACLU has filed a lawsuit trying to overturn the governor’s power to do such a thing. (https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/politicians-have-no-place-making-parole-decisions-for-young-people)
Berry said she will be filing her case in Los Angeles Superior Court Department 66, adding that the process could take several months. She does not think the local DA will oppose her, but the state Attorney General, due to Newsom’s position, probably will. When asked, she said she would appeal if she lost the initial hearing.
Berry closed with two interesting points. Sirhan’s next parole hearing is scheduled for March 1st of next year. She said she plans on going through with the process at that time. Finally, in a rather forgotten episode, she added that Sirhan had actually been granted parole back in the seventies. But what happened is that the legislature passed a law giving the governor the power to intercede. The parole board then reversed itself and denied Sirhan the parole they had just handed him.
Sirhan’s family chose Angela Berry to represent him because this kind of law – parole and prisoner release – is her specialty.
•
UPDATE: Kennedys and King has received the following request from Angela Berry, the attorney representing Sirhan Sirhan.
For Sirhan’s upcoming March 1 parole hearing, we need new, updated letters from people.
As before, the support can be supplemented with the idea that
He’s an old man and no longer dangerous, even [California Department of Corrections] experts have been saying that for many years
It’s a waste of tax payer funds to house an aging man who poses no risk
He shouldn’t be treated differently because of his victim
The Board must find him again suitable for release and refrain from inappropriate persuasion from the Governor
The governor got it wrong and he has no proper place in the decision
Also as before, the letters should be addressed to:
State of California, Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Board of Parole Hearings
P.O. Box 4036
Sacramento, CA 95812-4036
It would be extremely helpful if the letter authors also sent me a copy of their letter. That way, I can send them also to CDCR to ensure they make it to the “packet” that will be considered by the Board.
Angela Berry
Letters in support of Sirhan Sirhan may be sent to:
“After a nearly yearlong investigation, the commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891-1974), concluded that alleged gunman Lee Harvey Oswald (1939-1963) had acted alone in assassinating America’s 35th president, and that there was no conspiracy, either domestic or international, involved.” As we all know, this was the Warren Commission’s conclusion about the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy. One of the premises that this conclusion is based upon was that Oswald was a lone, unstable drifter. “He does not appear to have been able to establish meaningful relationships with other people.”
Senator Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee, however, underscored the striking dichotomy of Oswald’s interactions with rabid right-wingers as well as pro-Castro subjects, speculating that he was a double agent. The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and issued its final report the following year, which concluded that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.
In this author’s three-part series on Exposing the FPCC, it is made clear that lone-nut theorists present Oswald’s seemingly bizarre behavior in New Orleans during the Summer of 1963 at face value rather, than accepting the obvious: That Oswald was simply following orders in stratagems to counter communism. That is, he was playing the role of a provocateur.
The number of touch-points he has that put this twenty-three-year-old in proximity with intelligence, anti-communists and rabid right-wingers are so numerous that his drifter tag is simply not credible.
When one reads the Jim Garrison files, there is one of his sidekicks who stands out. Simply because of his unique appearance, by the important number of witnesses who saw Oswald with him, and by the fact that he has never been publicly identified.
Jim Garrison tried but was unable. The Warren Commission and FBI knew about him but did not want to probe very thoroughly. Identifying him and other probably Cuban exiles seemingly connected to Oswald, that would have opened up a whole can of worms. This would have proven that Oswald was not a loner and did not drift anywhere. On the contrary, it would have opened the doors to Lee Oswald`s network, his provocation duties, and it would have validated so many testimonies of troubling witnesses who were unified in aspects of these sightings – which stood out like sore thumbs.
The implications of what you are about to read are many:
Oswald was assigned at least one escort
This escort was most likely known by Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Sergio Arcacha Smith and others, and quite possibly handed his assignments by Banister
He may even have been identified by the FBI, which was kept hidden
Some very dramatic and important testimony by witnesses such as Roger Craig, Richard Case Nagell, Perry Russo, Sylvia Odio and many others become even more credible because of the corroborative value of the escorts they described
Garrison’s work and astuteness are once again bolstered after his forced demise
There are signs that the Warren Commission stepped on the brakes and turned a blind eye to these important leads
Jim Garrison’s files need to be gone through with a fine-tooth comb by researchers and cross-analyzed with the ARRB releases, and other sources. And that will help refute, complete, and corroborate evidence and opinions he put forth on a whole host of issues
This Essay
The main goal of this article is to lay out over 30 testimonies/reports that provide evidence of Oswald having escorts. These sightings begin in 1957 when Oswald was 16 or 17 and go on to November 22nd 1963. They include incidents that occurred when Oswald was in Russia and his identity in the U.S. was borrowed. Almost all of the escort observations include Oswald (or a double). However, a few are described where they are seen with persons of interest while Oswald was elsewhere. There are sightings in both New Orleans and Dallas, including a few in the Carousel Club. The primary sources for each of these come not only from Garrison’s work, but also the Warren Commission, HSCA, FBI and other intelligence documents. The witnesses vary in age, gender, nationality, profession, city of residence etc. On a number of occasions, there is more than one witness to the same event. Some, such as law enforcement officials, are trained observers. There is one polygraph-based testimony and another one took place while the witness was under hypnosis. Many of the testimonials were given shortly after the assassination, eliminating any form of convoluted plot of coaching witnesses. Some of the leads are perhaps a bit tenuous and refutable or explainable, but in this author’s opinion, an overwhelming number are not. Each should be taken seriously as the tables are now turned: It is clear that Oswald was not a lone nut nor a drifter and that there was according to the U.S. government a probable conspiracy.
A second goal is to provoke thought and analysis on the increased value of unfairly discredited testimonies and take seriously contentions that go way beyond Oswald being escorted. For example, if Roger Craig’s description of an Oswald being driven away after the assassination by a very muscular, dark complexed Latino cannot be dismissed- consider the implications of this. Do not ask me today to draw definite conclusions. I am unable to.
To be able to read each record in their entirety, you are encouraged to acquire the Jim Garrison files (available through Len Osanic at BlackOp Radio). Then read the longer primary document through hyperlinking or by using the references to navigate through the files. This will provide the setting, and sometimes, very important collateral affirmations that become more credible if one accepts the escort traces that cannot be explained away by some sort of imagining of so many different individuals. In quoting from the documents, I have underlined what Garrison did and higlighted what he emphasized further.
On the Trail of the Escort
The Garrison Files include thousands of pages of information… a lot of it is pretty raw. When I began reading them, some of the content was stunning from the get-go, other parts only began taking form after reading hundreds of pages. The more I read, the more I noticed testimonies, that were separated by days and sometimes weeks of reading, that referred to physical traits of a Latino that almost seemed freakish in nature. At least this seemed to be the case in the eyes of many of the witnesses. Numerous accounts described looks, nationality and oral skills that were unique enough that they could only belong to one person.
Out of some 35 witnesses, each one said the escorts, (there were often two or more), looked Latin. For many, it was one of the escorts who stood out: This one was often described as short, stocky, in his early to mid-twenties, dark complected and he spoke little English or English with an accent. One person who did take note was Garrison, who would often make special annotations in his documents when this description came up. It is obvious that Latinos following Oswald around this flew in the face of the lone nut-drifter persona the Warren Commission peddled in its report. Garrison wanted to find him
Because Garrison became toxic due to a smear campaign, there seems to have been reluctance to follow-up on any of his leads, including two in the above article: First, that the escort had been photographed in the vicinity of Oswald while he was handing out Fair Play for Cuba flyers; and that he and a group of Cubans were possibly hidden behind a billboard during the murderous motorcade. This last might jibe with the reported presence of the notorious Bernardo DeTorres in Dealey Plaza, as reported by Gaeton Fonzi in his book The Last Investigation.
Garrison may not have been the first to realize the importance of this lead. During his Warren Commission exchange with Wesley Liebeler, New Orleans DRE leader Carlos Bringuier confirms the following: That Oswald was in full provocateur mode in the Habana Bar in New Orleans while accompanied by a short stocky Latino seen by two witnesses. (Reasonable Doubt, by Henry Hurt, p. 360) That the FBI, the Secret Service and the Warren Commission were aware of two Latino escorts and seemed to have identified at least one and even had his picture and were trying to locate them. This was corroborated by Evaristo Rodriguez who met both Oswald and David Ferrie.
Also note how when discussions turn to the photos, Wesley Liebeler goes off the record. This author noticed that Liebeler did not seem to want to dig into this further when questioning other witnesses.
Mr. BRINGUIER. You see, that is a hard question, because here in the city you have a lot of persons. There are some who are pro-Castro, there are many who are anti-Castro. Even among the Cubans you could have some Castro agents here in the city and you could not have control of everybody.
But there is something else: The owner of the Habana Bar – the Habana Bar is located in 117 Decatur Street, just two doors or three doors from my store – the owner of the Habana Bar is a Cuban, and he and one of the employees over there, gave the information to me after Kennedy’s assassination – not before, that Oswald went to the Habana Bar one time. He asked for some lemonade. He was with one Mexican at that moment, and when Oswald was drinking the lemonade, he starts to say that, sure, the owner of that place had to be a Cuban capitalistic, and that he arguse about the price of the lemonade. He was telling that that was too much for a lemonade, and he feel bad at that moment, Oswald feel bad at that moment – he had some vomits and he went out to the sidewalk to vomit outside on the sidewalk. These persons here from the Habana Bar told me that the guy, the Mexican, who was with Oswald, was the same one that one time the FBI told them that if they will see him, call them immediately because that was a pro-Communist. I remember that was between August 15 and August 30, was that period of time. I could not locate that because I start to find out all these things after the Kennedy assassination, not before, because before I did not found any connection. They did not told nothing of this before to me. Between the 15th and the 30th the brother of the owner of the Habana Bar came to my store asking me to call the FBI, because he already saw one automobile passing by the street with two Mexicans, one of them the one who had been with Oswald in the bar, and he told me that the FBI, one agent from the FBI, had been in the bar and told them that if they will see those two guys to call them. This person, the brother of the owner of the bar, he gave to me at that moment the number of the plate of the automobile, but he didn’t get from what state. I called the FBI, because this person don’t know to speak English. That was the reason why he came to me. I talked to the person in the FBI. I explained what was going on, but looked like this person on the telephone didn’t know nothing about that matter and he took the – I believe that he took the notes of what I was telling to him, and that was all.
Mr. LIEBELER. When did this happen, before the assassination or after?
Mr. BRINGUIER. I called before the assassination, but I didn’t know that that was any connection with Oswald, because they didn’t told me at the Havana Bar that one of them was the one that was with Oswald in the Habana Bar, and learn that Oswald was one day over there with one Mexican, the brother of the owner told me, “Yes. You remember those two Mexicans? One of them was the one who was with Oswald in the bar.”
Mr. LIEBELER. Now, tell me approximately when you called the FBI about this.
Mr. BRINGUIER. Well, that was between the 15th of August and the 30th of August, because that was when the owner of the Habana Bar was on vacation. The brother was the one who was at the front of the business at that moment, and we figure that the owner of the Habana Bar went on vacation from August 15 to August 30 and that had to happen in that period of time.
Mr. LIEBELER. As I understand it, sometime between August 15 and August 30 the brother of the owner of the Habana Bar told you that he had seen a man that had been formerly identified to him by the FBI, and the FBI had asked this man, the brother of the owner of the bar, to notify them if he saw this man?
Mr. BRINGUIER. Yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. And he had seen this man together with another man driving in an automobile somewhere here in New Orleans? Is that correct?
Mr. BRINGUIER. But the question is this: The FBI was, according to the information that the brother of the owner of the Habana Bar told me, the FBI was looking for both men, not for one.
Mr. LIEBELER. For both of them?
Mr. BRINGUIER. For both of them, but just one of them was in the Habana Bar with Oswald, not both.
Mr. LIEBELER. What is the name of the brother of the owner of the Havana Bar?
Mr. BRINGUIER. Ruperto Pena, and the one who saw Oswald in the bar – that was the one who served the lemonade to him – Evaristo Rodriguez.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you report this to the FBI when you talked to them after the assassination?
Mr. BRINGUIER. After the assassination?
Mr. LIEBELER. Yes.
Mr. BRINGUIER. I report this to the Secret Service. I believe so. [Producing document.] I have here a copy of the letter that I send to the headquarters on November 27, 1963, informing here to the headquarters the information that I gave to the Secret Service about the man who was working in the Pap’s Supermarket, that he was going to Delgado Trades School, I believe with the name of Charles, and I have here that I gave to the Secret Service this information during that day.
Mr. LIEBELER. May I see that? [Document exhibited to counsel.]
Mr. LIEBELER. It is in Spanish?
Mr. BRINGUIER. Yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. Off the record.
(Discussion off the record.)
Mr. LIEBELER. You have given me a draft of a document entitled “Open Letter to People of New Orleans,” which I have marked “Exhibit No. 4” to your deposition taken here in New Orleans on April 7, 1964, and I have initialed it in the lower right-hand corner. Would you initial it, please? Mr. BRINGUIER. [Complying.] And you agree to send me back the original?
Mr. LIEBELER. Going back briefly to this story of Mr. Pena telling you that he had seen Oswald in the Habana Bar with this other Mexican, did the FBI ever talk to Mr. Pena about this? Do you know?
Mr. BRINGUIER. I don’t know. I know that the owner of the Habana Bar, in my opinion, is a good person; but he says that always, when he talks to the FBI in the bar or something like that, that he loses customers. Because, you see, to those bars sometime there are people, customers, who don’t like to see FBI around there, and he says that always he losses customers when the FBI starts to go over there, and sometimes he becomes angry and sometimes he don’t want to talk about. I am sure that the brother, Ruperto – I am sure that he will tell everything that he knows.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you form any opinion as to whether the report that Ruperto made about Oswald being in the bar was an accurate report?
Mr. BRINGUIER. Well, the question is this: Was not only Ruperto told me that Oswald went to Habana Bar. The one who told me that was Evaristo Rodriguez, and I never saw Evaristo Rodriguez telling lies or never—Evaristo is quiet person, he is young, married, but he is quiet. He is not an extrovert, that is, n— a –
Mr. LIEBELER. He wouldn’t be likely to make this story up?
Mr. BRINGUIER. No; I don’t believe so.
(At this point, Mr. Jenner entered the room to obtain photographs, and there ensued an off the record discussion about the photographs.)
Mr. BRINGUIER. I remember that when somebody—I believe that was the Secret Service showed to me the other picture that I tell you, that they were—they had already identified one and they were trying to identify the other one. I am sure that there were two, and no doubt about that.
Mr. LIEBELER. In any event, you didn’t recognize any of the –
Mr. BRINGUIER. No.
Mr. LIEBELER. Individuals in the pictures that we showed you previously, Pizzo Exhibits 453-A and 453-B, and Exhibit No. 1 to your own deposition?
Who was the Latino who was identified? For Garrison, finding this Cuban would have helped him resolve the whole Fair Play for Cuba Committee leafletting charade and expose damning links between these escorts and their handlers. For the Warren Commission, it would have opened up a Pandora’s box full of intrigue, informants and a special ops stratagem that would have been diametrically opposed to the WC fairy tale, still referred to today in many history books. This story needed to be buried.
Oswald’s Escorts
1.
George Clark – (Garrison Files, confidential memorandum, Sciambra to Garrison April -23 1969, Shaw leads 2)
This first event is the only one that does not relate to a Latin escort. But, if true, would perhaps shed light on the strange relationship between down and outers like David Ferrie and Oswald with the upper crust Clay Shaw. George Clark, a plumber, was doing some work in Clay Shaw’s apartment in the Winter of 1959 when he saw a 16-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald in his CAP uniform – David Ferrie had trained Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol – along with another young fellow who looked to be about 17 years old. During his second day of work he saw Clay Shaw arrive after a day’s work at the ITM.
Does this explain the travel bookings that were made out of the ITM by Oswald when he went to Russia? In the Garrison files there are a number of episodes described where former CAP students seem to be dragged into irresponsible situations by Ferrie and a number of sightings of him with Clay Shaw and young companions. It crossed my mind that Ferrie may have helped set up Shaw with young male dates. I discussed this with Jim DiEugenio and he sent me this jolting information in December 2021:
“I interviewed Larry Delsa in New Orleans. We had lunch and talked for about 4 hours. He was the HSCA investigator, along with Bob Buras, for New Orleans. He told me that Ferrie would take his cadets on bivouacking excursions to Keesler air base in Mississippi. Somehow Ferrie was allowed to do this which told him that Ferrie was really in tight with the military.
He said that from the interviews he did, he got the impression that while working with the CAP that he was securing young men for Shaw. I don’t recall how he attained this information. If it was through interviews he did or files he secured. But that was the definite impression he conveyed to me. Unfortunately, he just passed away so I cannot call him. But he was really reliable.”
2.
Fred Hendrick Leemans – (Garrison Files, Statement of Fred Hendrick Leemans Jr. in the Office of the District Attorney, Parish of Orleans May, 5, 1967)
Around Late 1959 or early 1960, Leemans, became an owner of a gym with a steam bath. On occasion, he saw a man using the name Clay Bertrand accompanied by a friend he would call Lee (later described as Oswald). Sometimes, infrequently, there were two Latinos with them who he described as dark and who spoke Spanish with English.
While we do know that Oswald was in Russia at this time, this would not have been the only occasion that someone allegedly used his identity or that an Oswald double was thought to be identified.
3.
I. E. Nitschke – (Garrison Files, under Banister, pages 3-4)
What I. E. Nitschke saw in December 1961 was so bewildering that the reader should read this document in full. He describes Banister offices as a real beehive of Cuban exile meetings for gun smuggling. He recalls seeing four or five Latinos, three of whom he goes on to describe, and seems to connect them to photographs that are shown to him. Among them, we have a first sighting of the short muscular one who may have been an Oswald and/or an Oswald double escort. The early sightings of the escort provide powerful arguments that he was taking his orders from Banister and, as we will see, Ferrie. He helps reveal an Oswald- Banister- Ferrie- Shaw foursome. Take good note as this description will echo its way through many of the witness accounts. Also, of interest in his revelations is the reference of Klein’s in Chicago for weapon supplies for Banister activities (where Oswald is said to have ordered his Mannlicher-Carcano.)
“The taller of the men that were in Banister’s office had a full head of black hair. He appeared to be between 6’ and possibly 6’2” tall. His lips were full or thick. He appeared to be the leader of the conversation.There was a short, stocky man that I estimated to weigh from 210 to possible 230 pounds with obviously large arms and neck. The others were lighter in complexion and all definitely appeared to be Latins.”
4.
For many researchers, the Bolton Ford incident is so very incriminating, because a fake Oswald, accompanied by a Latino, supposedly named Joseph Moore, attempted to buy a truck for the Friends of Democratic Cuba in 1961, which featured no other than Guy Banister and ex-Oswald employer Gerald Tujague as two of its officers. Observe closely Fred Sewell’s description, whose account is bolstered by two colleagues and documentary evidence: (Garrison Files: Kent Simms memorandum Feb. 14 1968, to Louis Ivon, interview with Fred Sewel Fleet and Truck Manager)
“MR. SEWELL, went on to relate that the man who came in with OSWALD had a scar over his left eye, that he didn’t have a Spanish name but that he was a Cuban type. Further, that his man was either an engineer or a mechanic as he was familiar with the working parts of a truck. Also, that he was between 5’6” and 5’8” and well over 200 pounds. He was the athletic type and in his mid-twenties.”
5.
Eric Michael Crouchet – (Garrison File, Smith Case L, page 26)
In this testimony, storekeeper Crouchet relates a damning sighting of Ferrie and the stocky Cuban in 1961 who is used for intimidation purposes after Crouchet had made a complaint against Ferrie in 1961. If this is the same Cuban as the Oswald escort, we have a definite Oswald link to the Ferrie-New Orleans network of anti-Castro right-wingers who were handling Oswald and the bodyguard.
“According to Crouchet, Ferrie was with another person whom he introduced as a Cuban who had jumped in the recent invasion of Cuba. Ferrie urged him to sign some sort of statement about dropping the charges against him. Crouchet stated that it has been quite a long time ago, and he couldn’t exactly remember what this Cuban looked like. As far as he could remember, he was between 5’8” and 5’10” and weighed between 175 and 180 pounds. He had black wavy, yet sort of “flat” hair stocky build, olive complexion and spoke with an accent. Krouchet stated that this subject appeared to be a weight lifter judging from the way he was built – strong shoulders and a real thick neck.”
6.
Charles Noto and other officers at the Levee Board Police Headquarters – (Garrison Files, Memorandum, March 1, 1967, to: Jim Garrison, From John Volz)
While there is some disagreement on the year that this event took place, the fact that some 7 colleagues of Noto’s were present at the station or during the arrest when Noto brought in “Oswald” who was accompanied by a Latino identified as Celso Hernandez. Hernandez strongly denied this during the Garrison investigation. So far, this author has found two corroborating testimonies you can find in the files.
“…He made the arrest after noticing OSWALD and another white male whom he identified as CELSO HERNANDEZ from our photographs, together in a white panel truck at a late hour. He recalls the truck belonged to an electronics firmbut cannot recall the name. At the time of the arrest OSWALD became very belligerent and went into a spiel about GESTAPO tactics and identified himself as being with Fair Play for Cuba. He demanded to see the officer in charge. Both OSWALD and HERNANDEZ were brought to Levee Board Police Headquarters on the Lakefront, where after a “closed door” session with MARCEL CHAMPON, the officer in charge, he, CHAMPON, told NOTO to release both men.”
Based on Lousteau’s observation, there is an implication that there is an Oswald impostor who has already begun FPCC manifestations while the real Oswald is in Russia.
“Mr. LOUSTEAU also said that he can recall the particular incident that NOTO was talking about, but he cannot place any faces or any names. He did take a look at the photograph and said that man is always around the Lakefront area fishing; that he has talked to him on several occasions; that he has seen him around a panel truck with a television repair sign on it which apparently was done by an individual and not by a professional sign painter. However, LOUSTEAU said that this could not have happened in 1962 because, as he remembers it, it was in 1961. He said that he can remember CHAMPON staying there late that night in 1961,but that he knows this incident could not have happened in October or November of 1962 because JOE CRONIN was not working for the Levee Board at that time.”
7.
Captain Wilfred Grusich and Sergeant De Dual – (FBI Doc (89-69), 11/30/63, FD 302, (Rev. 1-23-80), by John Quigley)
New Orleans officer Grusich reported to the FBI that someone fitting the facial characteristics of Oswald and two Cubans came to see him in March 1962 (while Oswald is still in Russia) in order to obtain a permit for an anti-Castro, fundraising parade (probably for the Crusade to Free Cuba).
“Two of these persons were, as he can remember, Cubans who spoke very little English; the third individual was an American who acted as the spokesman. As best as he can remember, these people represented the Cubans in exile in the United States, and it was their desire to stage a parade for the purpose of raising funds to aid Cubans in Cuba to resist FIDEL CASTRO and his regime.”
This sighting was partially corroborated by Sergeant George De Dual:
“Captain GRUSICH said that he discussed this incident with Sergeant GEORGE DE DUAL who is assigned to the Traffic Division, and DE DUAL felt that he had also seen either OSWALD or someone who closely resembled him in the Traffic Division, attempting to secure a parade permit.”
8.
James R. Lewallen – (The Garrison Files, J.G. Pages 29-30)
Lewallen had met David Ferrie in 1948 in Cleveland. He moved to New Orleans in 1953 where he lived with Ferrie for a short while. He met Clay Shaw in 1958. Ferrie introduced him to Guy Banister and Layton Martens. He also met Dante Marichini whom he introduced to Ferrie. Marichini worked with Oswald at the Reilly Coffee Company. Lewallen stated that Ferrie had him over to his apartment a few days after the assassination to try and help find photos and other items that could link him to Oswald. While all of this is suspicious in itself, we can throw in his description of a Latino who was with Ferrie at an airport during the spring of 1962 as an added oddity:
“As he recalls it, DF and the Latin had just landed. He was introduced to the Latin but did not engage in any conversation with him. He recalls the Latin spoke a few words of English but not having engaged in a lengthy conversation with him unable to say how well he spoke English. The Latin was of olive complexion about 5 feet 7 inches tall with a stocky build appearing to be about 25 years of age. He had black hair… and was wearing casual attire.”
9.
Edward Joseph Girnus – (Garrison Files: Dean Andrews Page 10)
Sometime around May or June 1963, Girnus described this scene with Shaw, Oswald and another unidentified party. While not short per say, he is definitely stocky:
“SHAW was in the office and they started talking about guns. SHAW allegedly knew people who wanted to buy some guns. SHAW made a telephone call, and sometime thereafter two men came to the office. One of the men was LEE HARVEY OSWALD. OSWALD was introduced by SHAW to GIRNUS as LEE. GIRNUS cannot remember the name of the man who came in with OSWALD. He was well dressed in a business suit, 5’11” tall, 210 pounds, and he had dark black hair. OSWALD was wearing khaki pants and a white shirt.”
One young employee in a restaurant who saw Oswald hobnobbing with Latinos on multiple occasions was Garland Babin. Guess which one stood out most?
“GARLAND BABIN, a busboy at Arnaud’s Restaurant, said that during the summer of 1963 on no less then 5 occasions he saw LEE HARVEY OSWALD playing pool at the pool hall on Exchange Place. He said OSWALD never talked much and was accompanied by several people who always referred to him as “LEE”. BABIN described one of the persons as being a short, stocky, heavy set, and either black or very dark. (Possibly the escort.) BABIN also remembers (Kerry) THORNLEY coming into Arnaud’s to see some of his friends. BABIN suggests that we talk to some of the regulars around the pool hall for information about OSWALD.”
11.
Dean Andrews – (Garrison Files: Dean Andrews page 27, page 43 and Miscel. reports 2 and Shaw Cuba, page 67 and Smith Case L pages 41, 42)
Oswald’s lawyer, Andrews, has provided researchers with one of a multitude of clear links between Oswald and one of his handlers, Clay Shaw, as well as powerful arguments that Clay Bertrand was a Shaw alias. (See Exposing the FPCC, Pt. 3.) Probably fear, more than anything, made him perjure himself during the Garrison investigation.
While his descriptions of Oswald’s companions vary, the one of Oswald’s powerful escort are simply too similar to everything else the reader is currently absorbing for it to be dismissed… an escort he saw between three and six times depending on which nervously-evasive testimonial we focus on.
“ANDREWS said OSWALD came to his office in May or June 1963 for legal assistance. From memory, ANDREWS said he probably saw OSWALD three or four times. ANDREWS’ office was in 627 Maison Blanche Building, New Orleans, when OSWALD came with three young men who were obvious homosexuals.
The last time ANDREWS saw OSWALD was in front of the Maison Blanche Building when OSWALD was distributing pro-Castro leaflets. ANDREWS approached OSWALD to attempt to collect a delinquent fee but OSWALD had no money to pay him. ANDREWS recalls a Mexican being with OSWALD at this time. This Mexican was about 5’10”, had a short, flattop haircut that tapered in back, and had an athletic-type build. ANDREWS said a Mexican was always with OSWALD. Although the Mexican was not identified or introduced and never spoke, ANDREWS said he could recognize him.”
Other descriptions by Andrews of the escort:
“During the summer of 1963, OSWALD came into the office of attorney Dean Andrews from three to five times (XI, 325 et seq). On each occasion he was accompanied by a Latin who was stocky, fairly short and who had an “athletic build” and a “thick neck”.Andrews describes him as having “flat” hair. In Andrews’ parlance, this man “could go to ‘Fist City’ pretty good if he had to”. This man spoke little and then only in Spanish.”
“But anyway, to give you more of the picture, the description given by Dean Andrews of the Cuban who was always with Oswald. He was about 5 feet 4 inches which is very short, very muscular and strong and unusually dark like an Indian.”
12.
R. M. Davis – (Garrison Files, Russo Pages 28, 29)
Andrews’ on-call investigator, Davis was a very fearful man whenquestioned by team Garrison. The takeaway from his evasive answers, should be that Oswald was accompanied the way Andrews described and that the Andrews/Bertrand link was real:
“DAVIS stated the he saw LEE HARVEY OSWALD in DEAN ANDREWS’ office in the Maison Blanche Building. He stated that OSWALD was in company with four or five other individuals and that two of three of these individuals were of Cuban or Mexican extraction. He stated the OSWALD was merely one of the group of characters that came in together.” …
“When questioned if he knew CLAY BERTRAND, DAVIS stated no. He stated that he had heard the name CLAY BERTRAND. When asked specifically if he knew CLAY BERTRAND as CLAY SHAW, he became nervous and stated that he did not. When asked if he had seen CLAY BERTRAND, he stated that he did not remember if he did or did not see him.”
13.
Leander D’Avy and Eugene Davis – (Garrison Files, Memo Sciambra to Garrison, August 14 1967, Interview with Leander D’Avy and Eugene C. Davis (Gene Davis), Grand Jury testimony June 28, 1967)
Leander D’Avy was a doorman at the Court of the Two Sisters, a well-known gay establishment at the time. In May or June 1963, he was approached by someone looking for a Clay Bertrand, whom he did not know. He saw the manager Eugene Davis talk to this person. Interestingly, even though he estimated the weight of this person to be 185 lbs, he believed he looked like Oswald. D’Avy goes on to say that he saw Eugene Davis talk to Clay Shaw, who began frequenting his place of work at about this time. D’Avy also makes this connection which caught Garrison’s attention:
Mr. D’AVY also said that GENE DAVIS was very close friends with a Cuban waiter who worked there and whose name was PEPE or JOSE. He said PEPE or JOSE was around 29 to 30 years old with black hair and palled around with a fellow named HAROLD SANDOZ, who was stocky, muscular and had some previous military training and appeared to be rugged.
Lisa Pease and Jim DiEugenio investigated this further and added the following:
“Davis spoke to Oswald at the bar and later told D’Avy that the man had been behind the Iron Curtain… In early November 1963… He found Davis in an upstairs storeroom that was being used as a makeshift apartment. With Davis were Oswald, Ferrie, a Cuban, and three unidentified men… Davis was an active informant for the FBI, designated symbol informant 1189-C, as of October, 1961.”
Davis did admit to Garrison that he knew Clay Shaw very well.
14.
Clifford Joseph Wormser – (Garrison Files, New KT File page 19)
Owner of a junkyard, Wormser, during the summer of 1963, saw Oswald accompanied by likely Marina and their young daughter, as well as two other persons (Latinos). They were there to supposedly sell “Oswald’s” car, which was dealt for 15 bucks, minus 2 tires. Here is how he describes our short hulk:
About 5’6” tall –Dark Complexion (Latin type) -Black curly hair -Approximately 165 pounds –Stocky frame -Approximately 23 to 25 years of age -Wearing dirty clothes, somewhat similar in appearance to a mechanic who had been working on automobiles -This man spoke English without an accent -No noticeable scars
This is a second reference to the appearance of a mechanic. Since Oswald did not have a car, this might be a double.
15.
Perry Russo -Revelations under Hypnosis (Garrison Files, Russo, page 10)
Perry Russo was an important witness for Garrison because he was able to place Oswald, Shaw and Ferrie together with Cuban exiles in Ferrie’s apartment when he overheard Ferrie rant about assassinating JFK. Under hypnosis, here is how he made vivid one of the Cubans who attended the gathering at Ferrie’s.
“Dr. F. Could you count the Cubans that are in the room for me, Perry?
PR. Four
Dr. F. I wonder—are they pro-Castro?
PR. I don’t know, I didn’t talk to them
Dr. F. Anti-Castro?
PR. I didn’t talk to them. – They are in green fatigues, one in khaki pants and he is short and strong and hefty and has on a T-shirt—one maybe 22 or 25 and he is dressed in dungarees and checked yellow and red and blue, lots of colors in his shirt…”
16.
Roland Brouillette – (Garrison Files: Miscel. Materials 2, page 87)
IRS employee Brouillette claimed to have seen Oswald with two foreigners entering a drug store (“it could have been Cubans”), during the Summer of 63. Here is part of what he had to say:
“Three men came up to me and the middle one I later identified as Oswald, the other two looked like foreigners. They were taller than Oswald, they looked like they were fresh from Cuba. They were tall and dark. They were between slight and heavy build… I was looking toward Canal Street and immediately then a heavy-set fellow backed out of the side entrance of Waterbury ‘s and asked the fellow coming out with him in a matter of fact tone, he said “How are you going to kill the President?”
17.
Carlos Quiroga – (Garrison Files, Quiroga, Polygraph, pages 43)
Polygraph results show that Carlos Quiroga knew that Oswald’s role with the FPCC in New Orleans was all a front (also see Exposing the FPCC part 3 for more information about this key subject.)
He also lied, according to this same test, when he said that he had never seen Oswald with any Latin decent subject:
18.
Joseph Oster – (Garrison Files, Misc. Material 1, page 189)
In 1956 Oster and Banister became business partners until he left to start his own firm in 1958. They remained friendly, and between the middle of 62 and the end of 63 he was introduced to David Ferrie and two Cuban exiles who he portrays this way:
“…I was also introduced to David Ferrie and two Cuban exiles… (one) was tall, thin, dark hair (Jorge Ramirez – engineer for Warren Moses – 524 – 1277), and I vaguely remember he was a draftsman or some kind of engineer. He was approximately 30 to 32 years-old. At the time I met them, they were definitely driving an old Ford. The other Cuban was short, stocky, moustache and appeared to be highly educated. He was about 45-years old. When Banister introduced me to them, he told me they were Cuban exiles.”
While the age estimate here seems much older than most of the estimates for the squat tank, he goes on to relate the following that many others claim to have seen:
“This particular unknown Cuban was watching Oswald pass out pamphlets in front of Maison Blanche, Kress, Aubudon Building.”
He clearly places a likely Oswald escort in Banister’s office. The other interesting revelation is about the running of weapons and equipment to Cuba revolving around Banister.
This Cuban exile participated in the skirmish along with Carlos Bringuier and Celso Hernandez. He told Andrew Sciambra that he had worked for Alpha 66 (which was set up by a CIA officer of extreme interest named David Phillips).
He also described a Latino escort actually taking pictures of the scene:
“Cruz said that he had never seen Oswald with any strong-looking Latin-American type individuals, but he could remember a strong looking Latin type person around 25 or 30 years-old who was a little taller than OSWALD and who weighed close to 200 pounds, standing in front of the Maison Blanche Building with a camera and taking pictures of OSWALD and other people when OSWALD was distributing leaflets there… He was dressed in a suit and tie and wore dark glasses.”
20.
Ricardo Davis (Garrison Files, Miscel. Materials, Page 170)
Davis, an encyclopedia salesman, in front of his lawyer had a lot say to William Gurvich. He knew Ferrie, Arcacha Smith, Banister, Manual Gil, Sylvia Odio, Wray Gill, Ronnie Caire; knew about the training camps; he had been introduced to Oswald by Carlos Quiroga; he knew all about Alpha 66. He also corroborates this escort sighting during the Canal Street scuffle:
“DAVIS stated he was standing on a corner near where OSWALD was distributing pamphlets and witnessed the scuffle between OSWALD and CARLOS BRINGUIER. Another man, a Latin-American with olive complexion, disappeared from the scene. DAVIS was of the opinion this man was with OSWALD and found his name as TORRES or GOMEZ CORTEZ.”
21.
Evaristo Rodriguez – (Garrison Files, Shaw Cuba, Page 67, and Rodriguez Testimony to Warren Commission)
Orest Pena owned the Habana Bar that Carlos Bringuier describes earlier in this essay, which was just a few doors down from his store. Pena was very involved with the CRC and was an informant for many intelligence actors in New Orleans, including Warren DeBrueys of the FBI and Dave Smith of INS.
His bartender, Rodriguez, witnessed Oswald, wearing a bowtie, in his full “look atme, shit disturbermode” during the early hours of the morning when he made a stink about a lemonade he had ordered and acted sick while accompanied by mini-herc, whom the bartender described to Wesley Liebeler of the Warren Commission after stating that he spoke Spanish:
Mr. RODRIGUEZ. I am not able to state what his exact nationality was, but he appeared to be a Latin, and that’s about as far as I can go. He could have been a Mexican; he could have been a Cuban, but at this point, I don’t recall.
Mr. LIEBELER. What did this man look like?
Mr. LOGAN. You want a description of him?
Mr. LIEBELER. Yes; how old?
Mr. RODRIQUEZ. He was a man about 28 years old, very hairy arms, dark hair on his arms.
Mr. LIEBELER. About how tall was he?
Mr. LOGAN. He says he was about my height. That’s about 5 feet 8. He is about the same build of man as I am, short and rather stocky, wide. He was a stocky man with broad shoulders, about 5 feet 8 inches.
Mr. LIEBELER. Do you know how much he weighed approximately?
Mr. LOGAN. He probably hit around 155. He doesn’t remember the exact weight, but he would guess around the same weight as I appear to be.
Mr. LIERELER. So he weighed about 155 pounds or so?
Mr. RODRIQUEZ. Yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. Was he taller or shorter than Oswald?
Mr. RODRIGUEZ. Just a little taller than Oswald.
Mr. LIEBELER. Was he heavier than Oswald or lighter?
Mr. RODRIGUEZ. He was huskier and appeared to weigh more than Oswald.
Also, in during his testimony Liebeler alludes to the FBI search of the escort.
22.
Patrolman Manual Ortiz – (Memorandum, February 2, 1967, To: Jim Garrison, From: Andrew Sciambra, Re: Conversation with Manual Ortiz)
In 1967, Andrew Sciambra questioned a cop who seemed to know the Latino beat and reported the following:
“…he had heard that we were investigating Cubans who could be possibly involved in this matter, and he said that he had heard that a Spanish or Cuban lady had overheard two Cubans and Lee Harvey Oswald planning the assassination of President Kennedy.”
23.
Wendall Roache, Ron Smith and David Smith -Stooling for the INS and Customs
The following two testimonials/documents archived by the Church Committee are really worth reading in full. As in their combined form, we can conclude that Orest Pena was clearly an informant for multiple intelligence players which adds strong corroborative value to Bringuier’s story and clearly places Oswald within the group of “nuts” headed by David Ferrie according to Roache.
Pena testified that he saw Oswald in conversation with David Smith (Customs), FBI investigator of FPCC/Cuban exile affairs Warren DeBrueys, and Wendell Roache (INS). Pena told the Church Committee that Oswald was employed by Customs. Informant Joseph Oster went further, saying that Oswald’s handler was David Smith at Customs. Church Committee staff members knew that David Smith “was involved in CIA operations”. Orest Pena’s handler DeBrueys admitted he knew Smith. Oswald was also often seen with Juan Valdes, who described himself as a “customs house broker”. (Bill Simpich… The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend part 9)
From Ron Smith (fluent in Spanish) who interviewed Oswald after his scuffle arrest, because he pretended to only speak Spanish after being called in by the NOPD:
“Ron admitted frequent contact with Orest Pena. Pena’s brother told him that Orest was working for (or was going to work for) the FBI. He also recalls Custom’s David Smith.”
Roache, when called, by Church Committee investigators, replied that he had been expecting a call for twelve years. What he said about Oswald is so damning that it likely contributed to Richard Schweiker’s suspicions that Oswald was a double-agent spying on both anti and pro-Castro groups:
“Included in this surveillance was the group of “nuts” headed by David Ferrie. Roache knew the details on Ferrie i.e., dismissal from Eastern Airlines, homosexual with perverse tendencies (“nuttier than a fruitcake”), etc. He stated that Ferries’ office – on a side street between St. Charles and Camp – (we’ll have a street map for him) was under surveillance (although he never surveilled it, another inspector drove him past it and identified it); that Lee Harvey Oswald – who was identified by IN&S as an American when he first appeared on the New Orleans street scene (he does not recall the circumstances surrounding the identification) – was seen going into the offices of Ferrie’s group, and “Oswald was known to be one of the men in the group.”
24.
(FBI Document, SA Milton Kaack, Nov. 25, 1963 and CE 1154 WC)
Some of the sightings came from ordinary citizens such as Oswald’s neighbors, the Rogers. The husband, Eric, claimed the following during his Warren Commission testimony:
“Mr. Rogers stated that Oswald had several visitors at various intervals, one of whom appeared to be an American; that the others appeared to be foreigners and were the Latin type.”
“Mr. Rogers stated that he was at home on the occasion when Mrs. Oswald and her child left in a light brown Ford or Chevrolet station wagon with a man and woman. He said the man was about in his 40’s and was short and stocky.”
Mrs. Gladys Rogers placed the following Oswald companion near his place at around mid-September 1963:
“…a white male, approximately 5’7”, 175 pounds, dark complexion, and had a foreign appearance, possibly Spanish.”
A Mrs. Rico corroborates this sighting (Garrison files, Shaw leads 2)
“Mrs. RICO told the FBI that she was familiar with the couple (OSWALDS) but never knew their names. She describes two of OSWALD’s visitors, one of which was a short, stocky, dark complexed individual who was wearing a dark business suit and looked to be either Mexican or Cuban. (possibly the escort) This visit was approximately 3 weeks before OSWALDS vacated the apartment.”
25.
Sylvia and Annie Laurie Odio – (Warren Commission Testimony and HSCA report…)
From Spartacus: “On 25th September, 1963, Odio had a visit from three men who claimed they were from New Orleans. Two of the men, Leopoldo and Angelo, said they were members of the Junta Revolucionaria. The third man, Leon, was introduced as an American sympathizer who was willing to take part in the assassination of Fidel Castro. After she told them that she was unwilling to get involved in any criminal activity, the three men left.
The following day Leopoldo phoned Odio and told her that Leon was a former Marine and that he was an expert marksman. He added that Leon had said “we Cubans, we did not have the guts because we should have assassinated Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs”.
The HSCA found Odio’s account to be very credible, knowing that she spoke about it to others before the assassination. Her description of Oswald’s companions (concurred with by her sister) make it irrefutable, given the corroboration she has from sightings that occurred before and after hers. The implications are seismic.
“Mr. LIEBELER. Which one of the Cubans?
Mrs. ODIO. The American was in the middle. They were leaning against the staircase. There was a tall one. Let me tell you, they both looked very greasy like the kind of low Cubans, not educated at all. And one was on the heavier side and had black hair. I recall one of them had glasses, if I remember. We have been trying to establish, my sister and I, the identity of this man. And one of them, the tall one, was the one called Leopoldo.”
“Mrs. ODIO. One was very tall and slim kind of. He has glasses, because he took them off and put them back on before he left, and they were not sunglasses. And the other one was short very Mexican looking. Have you ever seen a short Mexican with lots of thick hair and lots of hair on his chest?”
“Mrs. ODIO. It was different. In the middle of his head it was thick, and it looked like he didn’t have any hair, and the other side, I didn’t notice that.
Mr. LIEBELER. This was the taller man; is that right? The one known as Leopoldo?
Mrs. ODIO. Yes.
Mr. LIERELER. About how much did the taller man weigh, could you guess?
Mrs. ODIO. He was thin-about 165 pounds.
Mr. LIEBELER. How tall was he, about?
Mrs. ODIO. He was about 3.5 inches, almost 4 inches taller than I was. Excuse me, he couldn’t have. Maybe it was just in the position he was standing. I know that made him look taller, and I had no heels on at the time, so he must have been 6 feet; yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. And the shorter man was about how tall, would you say? Was he taller or shorter than Oswald?
Mrs. ODIO. Shorter than Oswald.
Mr. LIEBELER. About how much, could you guess?
Mrs. ODIO. Five feet seven, something like that.
Mr. LIEBELER. So he could have been 2 or 3 inches shorter than Oswald?
Mrs. 0DIO. That’s right.
Mr. LIEBELER. He weighed about how much, would you say?
Mrs. ODIO. 170 pounds, something like that, because he was short, but he was stocky, and he was the one that had the strange complexion.
Mr. LIEBELER. Was it pock marked, would you say?
Mrs. ODIO. So; it was like-it wasn’t, because he was, oh, it was like he had been in the sun for a long time.”
Her sister agreed according to the HSCA report:
“… but believed it might have been “Angelo” or “Angel.” She described him, as her sister did, with black hair and looking “more Mexican than anything else”.
26.
Robert McKeown and Sam Neal.
McKeown had done some gun smuggling for Fidel Castro. According to him, sometime in 1959, Jack Ruby asked him for help in gaining contacts for his dealings with Cuba. He also told the HSCA that late in September or early October 1963, Oswald and a Cuban named Victor Hernandez showed up at his place to try and buy four Savage rifles for $10,000. He was suspicious and refused. His wife and a friend, Sam Neil, were present during this visit. His testimony at the time, wasn’t deemed credible by the HSCA.
If true, the coincidence of his contacts with both Ruby and Oswald is troubling. Some researchers have pointed out that, had he supplied weapons to Oswald and the lone-nut route had not been put into effect, a Castro-linked weapons supplier would have been an effective blame-it-on-Cuba ploy.
According to Larry Hancock, here is how the Cuban was described: “while the other was Latin, dark skin but not black, just less than six feet, older, late 30’s and dressed in a suit and tie. The younger man opened the conversation, “I’m Lee Oswald; I finally found you. You are McKeown are you not?” He introduced the man with him as “Hernandez.” Hernandez had been driving the car.
In his HSCA testimony, he said he was well-dressed, in his forties and spoke very little. He also claimed the following: “…about two weeks ago, maybe between 8:00, 9:00 o’clock at night, the phone rang and I answered the phone and somebody on the phone said this is McKeown? I said yes. He says when you go to testify at that committee, just remember there was no Latin involved, period, and hung up.”
27.
Harvey Lawill Wade -Carousel Club Clients (Garrison Files, Misc. 2, WC CE 2370)
On November 10, Wade attended the Carousel Club and saw Oswald in the company of two male companions, one of whom he describes as follows: “The number two man is described as a white male, 30-32 years old, 200 lbs, 5 feet 10 inches, a stocky build, long black hair, dark complexion, oval face, and Mexican or Spanish in appearance. He had numerous bumps on his face and was believed to have a one-inch scar in the eyebrow of his left eye.”
28.
Floyd and Virginia Davis, Malcolm Howard Price, Mr. and Mrs. Garland Glenwill Slack, Dr. Homer Wood, Sterling Wood -The Sports “Drome” Rifle Range, and the Castro Bearded, Huge-Footed Oswald Target Practice Escort
The testimonies of these seven, seem to have been bothersome to Wesley Liebeler of the Warren Commission, because it suggests a model. A model designed to support a story of an anti-Kennedy Oswald, sometime in November 1963, practicing and being pre-confirmed as a great shot using a Mannlichher Carcano at a shooting range with a high precision scope, while accompanied by a Latino sporting a Castro-like beard.
Both Oswald, or the ersatz Oswald and his escort, do everything to make their appearance noticeable and memorable. Oswald shooting on another client`s target, the Latino pounding his neighbors` shooting booths with his large feet. If true, this would have been effective for countering an objection that Oswald was an out-of-practice poor shot and that he teamed up with Castro-backed plotters. Note that this particular escort is different physically, more like a Castro figure.
Of course when you want to push a lone-nut scenario, such a sighting is very counter-narrative.
Here are some of their WC testimonies:
Mr. Floyd Davis Floyd Davis intervened after a complaint from a client about Oswald shooting at his target:
“Mr. DAVIS. There was a fellow with a black beard in that booth No. 7, at the same time. I remember him because he was outstanding, you know, and I went to these fellows in booth No. 8. and was giving them heck about shooting at the wrong target. And this other fellow, I remember him because he wouldn’t say anything to me. I tried to speak to him two or three different occasions, because he had a lot of guns, and I thought he would be a good customer.
Mr. LIEBELER. The fellow with the beard?
Mr. DAVIS. Yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. He was how tall, approximately?
Mr. DAVIS. He was over 6 feet and he weighed a good 250 pounds. A big bruiser.
Mr. LIEBELER. I think we can assume that was not Lee Harvey Oswald.
Mr. DAVIS. They were trying to find him. Charlie Brown was trying to find this person, and 2 weeks ago on a Sunday morning I saw him in an automobile out on Davis, I believe it was.
Mr. LIEBELER. The big fellow with the beard?
Mr. DAVIS. The big fellow there with the beard. And I got the license number on the car and the type of car it was and called it into the office. I haven’t heard anything from Mr. Brown since then, whether he got the information, but I am sure he did when I turned it into the office…”
Davis even gave the plate-number of the car they drove off in to law enforcement!
Virginia Davis who helped manage the shooting range describes the following peculiar character causing a ruckus:
“Mr. LIEBELER. Was this man with the beard there at that time, do you know?
Mrs. DAVIS. No; that was on a Sunday afternoon or a Saturday. It was a Saturday or a Sunday, and the reason I remember him, it was the same day they said Oswald was out there, and I tried to talk to him, which I talked to everyone that comes in, and he was noticeable because he looked like the Castro type. He had this big beard and he was heavy set and big broad shoulders, and well, he was just outstanding in his appearance. He had big red earmuffs on and I couldn’t help but notice him.”
Garland Slack, Mr. Slack, who made the complaint, and his wife corroborate:
“Mr. Slack furnished information to the effect that he had seen a man believed to be identical with Oswald at the Sports Drome Rifle Range on November 10, 1963, and believed that he was accompanied by another man described as tall, having a lot of dark hair, dark complexion, and a full beard.”
“Mrs. SLACK advised she recalled seeing a great big man with a beard, who was wearing ear muffs, a red plaid shirt, and green pants. She stated he was shooting “big guns” and was shooting from stall No. 4 or 5. She stated she did not see anyone with this person and believed that he was alone at the rifle range .”
Malcolm Howard Price Mr. Price saw this particular duo twice at the range at the same time and was present when “Oswald” got himself noticed by firing on Slack’s target:
“Mr. LIEBELER: So, what about the fellow that was in the booth on the other side of Mr. Slack, do you remember anything about him?
Mr. PRICE: All I remember about him was that he was a big fellow with a long black- it was either black or dark red beard.”
Mr. LIEBELER: Did you talk to him at all?
Mr. PRICE: Other than just to comment on his scope-I didn’t have any conversation at all with him.
Mr. LIEBELER: You are talking about Oswald now?
Mr. PRICE: No; I’m talking about the fellow with the beard.
Mr. LIEBELER: Did you look through his scope too?
Mr. PRICE: Yes; I did.
Mr. LIEBELER: Did Oswald talk to the fellow with the beard?
Mr. PRICE: Well, I suppose-he spoke to all of them-to Oswald and Slack both, about the clarity of the telescope.
Mr. LIEBELER: Were you there when they were talking about the clarity of Oswald’s telescope?
Mr. PRICE: Yes.”
Doctor Wood Dr. Wood and his son Sterling both say they saw Oswald at the shooting range:
“Dr. WOOD. I saw him flashed on the television screen at home several times. They would interrogate him and bring him down the hall and bring him back to his cell. This particular time I mentioned to my wife, I said to her, “Honey, that looks exactly like the fellow that was sitting next to Sterling at the rifle range. But I am not going to say anything to Sterling because I want to see if he recognizes him and if he thinks it was.” Well, I would say within 30 minutes or an hour he was flashed back on the screen and he said to me, “Daddy, that is the fellow that was sitting next to me out on the rifle range.”
His son Sterling saw Oswald leave with a companion:
“Mr. LIEBELER. Did you see him go?
Mr. WOOD. Yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. How did he go?
Mr. WOOD. He left with a man in a newer model car.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you see the model?
Mr. WOOD. No, I didn’t. They went into the parking lot. They went around and I heard the car door slam and they took off, but it was a newer model…”
“Mr. LIEBELER. About this other fellow that this guy was with, was he a big man or just-
Mr. WOOD. About the same size this man was.
Mr. LIEBELER. How tall would you say this man was?
Mr. WOOD. Oh, about 5’9”.
Mr. LIERELER. About 5’9”?
Mr. WOOD. Yes.”
I would suggest two other key points in the testimony of this very observant young fellow: He confirms differences between the scope on the rifle used by “Oswald” at the range and the one shown in photos of the “murder weapon”, and Liebeler skates away from getting a description of Oswald’s companion as he does a number of times with other hindering witnesses.
According to Arnesto Rodriguez who met Oswald and knew David Ferrie, the FBI affirmed that Oswald`s escort at the firing range fit the description of a person taking pictures of Oswald during his FPCC leafletting activities in New Orleans:
(Feb 14, 1967 Memorandum, Assistant D.A, Sciambra to Garrison)
29.
Roger Craig – (Garrison Files, Lead Files 5, November 3, 1967, Garrison, Craig interview report)
From Spartacus: “In 1951 Craig joined the United States Army and served in Japan before moving to Texas in 1955. According to his daughter, Deanna Rae Craig: “was released from duty because he kept injuring himself.”
Craig worked for the Purex Corporation before joining the Dallas Police Department in 1959. He was named Man of the Year by the sheriff’s office in 1960 for his work in aid in helping to capture an international jewel thief. He had a successful career in the DPD and was promoted four times.
Roger Craig was on duty in Dallas on 22nd November, 1963. After hearing the firing at President John F. Kennedy, he ran towards the Grassy Knoll where he interviewed witnesses. About 15 minutes later he saw a man running from the back door of the Texas School Book Depository down the slope to Elm Street. He then got into a Nash station wagon.
Craig said he saw the man again in the office of Captain Will Fritz. It was the recently arrested Lee Harvey Oswald. When Craig told his story about the man being picked up by the station wagon, Oswald replied: “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine… Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.”
Craig was also with Seymour Weitzman, Will Fritz, Eugene Boone and Luke Mooney when the rifle was found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Craig insisted that the rifle found was a 7.65 Mauser and not a Mannlicher-Carcano.
Craig became unpopular with senior police officers in Dallas when he testified before the Warren Commission. He insisted he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald get into the station wagon 15 minutes after the shooting. This was ignored by Earl Warren and his team because it showed that at least two people were involved in the assassination. Craig, unlike Seymour Weitzman, refused to change his mind about finding a 7.65 Mauser rather than a Mannlicher-Carcano in the Texas School Book Depository. Craig was fired from the police department in 1967 after he was found to have discussed his evidence with a journalist.
In 1967 Craig went to New Orleans and was later a prosecution witness at the trial of Clay Shaw. Later that year he was shot at while walking to a car park. The bullet only grazed his head. In 1971 Craig wrote “When They Kill A President”. In 1973 a car forced Craig’s car off a mountain road. He was badly injured but he survived the accident. In 1974 he survived another shooting in Waxahachie, Texas. The following year he was seriously wounded when his car engine exploded. Craig told friends that the Mafia had decided to kill him. Roger Craig was found dead on 15th May, 1975. It was later decided he had died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.”
Craig, like Abraham Bolden, was another tragic character who paid a heavy price for telling the truth. Perhaps his description of the driver of an Oswald (or more likely an Oswald double) escort in a getaway car, can help bolster his credibility:
“Craig’s attention was initially engaged by a whistle, evidently a signal between the operator of the vehicle and OSWALD and then he noticed that OSWALD was leaving the scene while others were arriving. Craig placed the time at about 12:45. He said that the man driving the vehicle was a Negro but that he was dark-skinned—possibly Latin. His skin he said appeared to be very smooth. The driver had a powerful face, neck and shoulders. Craig repeatedly used the words “powerful” and “muscular” to describe his neck and shoulders. The driver wore a light tan zipper jacket found near the scene of the TIPPIT murder, Commission Exhibit 162. Craig said it was identical with the jacket worn by the driver.”
30.
Richard Carr’s Birds Eye View
Witness of the assassination Richard Carr Carr was a World War 2 vet, who had a vista from the Dallas County Courthouse on the seventh floor, and he corroborates Craig: “He reported to me that he saw 2 white men run from behind the wooden fence, that location being the one which we claim some of the shots came from which killed President Kennedy. Carr stated that the two men ran in a northeasterly direction behind the School Book Depository Building, and while they were out of sight they were joined by a colored man (he called him a negro). The colored man got in the driver’s seat of a gray Rambler station wagon. One white man got in the rear seat on the left-hand side and the car drove North on Houston, turning to the right on Pacific. The other man, a dark-complexioned white mail, about 5’8”, heavyset, wearing dark rimmed glasses, brown hat and brown coat, walked South on Houston Street…”
“After the shooting Carr saw the man emerge from the building. Carr followed the man and later told the FBI: “This man, walking very fast, proceeded on Houston Street south to Commerce Street to Record Street. The man got into a 1961 or 1962 gray Rambler station wagon which was parked just north of Commerce Street on Record Street.” This evidence corroborated those claims made by Roger Craig. Both Carr and Craig described the driver of the car as being dark-skinned.” (Spartacus)
“A: North is the top, and it was headed in this direction towards the railroad tracks, and immediately after the shooting there was three men that emerged from behind the School Book Depository, there was a Latin, I can’t say whether he was Spanish, Cuban, but he was real dark-complected, stepped out and opened the door, there was two men entered that station wagon, and the Latin drove it north on Houston. The car was in motion before the rear door was closed, and this one man got in the front, and then he slid in from the – from the driver’s side over, and the Latin got back and they proceeded north…” Q: Now, Mr. Carr, did you have occasion to give this information to any law enforcement agencies? A: Yes, I did.” (EXCERPT OF THE TESTIMONY TAKEN IN OPEN COURT February 19, 1969 Before: THE HONORABLE EDWARD A. HAGGERTY, JR., JUDGE, SECTION “C”)
Highlights:
The witnesses: There are at least 35 witnesses who saw Oswald (or a double), accompanied with at least one Latino escort. Another six corroborate the occurrence of an event described by another witness without giving a physical description of the escort. Nine were connected to intelligence or law enforcement; one was a lawyer and another, his assistant. Eight were Cuban exiles; four owned businesses; six worked in clubs/restaurants/bars; three were Oswald neighbors; Seven saw Oswald at a shooting range. Almost all were in close proximity with Oswald and friends; Many exchanged words with Oswald and/or his escort(s).
The sightings: Out of all the sightings of the Latinos, sixteen were of two or more; in the case where physical descriptions were given of at least one Latino, twenty-five describe a stocky one (the words, hefty, athletic, muscular, powerful, strong looking come back); four point out his powerful neck or arms; three mention how hairy he was; Most describe a short person; Seventeen point out how dark/olive complexed he was; In general, age estimates range between 20 and 25; about ten did not offer a physical description beyond Latin looking; some eleven events had multiple witnesses. There are five people who claim to have seen Oswald with the escorts while Oswald was in Russia (Reminding us of Jim Garrison’s discovery about the Friends of Democratic Cuba phenomenon). Seventeen of the sightings were in the Dallas area, one in Mexico City, the rest were in New Orleans.
Wesley Liebeler often uses Pizzo exhibits for identification purposes where a number of witnesses express strong opinions confirming Oswald as one of the persons they had observed:
Summary
Warren Commission apologists have often painted witnesses like Richard Case Nagell, Sylvia Odio, Roger Craig, Perry Russo and others as unreliable, possibly demented, mixed-up or brainwashed, all in a desperate attempt to dismiss their stories. Yet a number were given shortly after the assassination. How could all the corroborating testimonies align that much? The sources are too varied to accuse the DA of a form of bias or manipulation.
And many were up close and had no reason to make anything up. At least three were informants. When one reads WC questioning of witnesses, one gets a feeling that they, at least Liebeler, understood the significance of this blatant, pit-bull lead and avoided shedding light on this potentially explosive piece of evidence by rarely asking for precise descriptions. This character deserved the production of a composite drawing and a full-fledged man-hunt with investigating starting with Dean Andrews’ clients and the goings-on in the Ferrie and Banister network. There are vague references to photos, cars used by the Latin suspects, police investigations that may help confirm identities of Oswald’s escorts. Carlos Bringuier, Orest Pena and Arnesto Rodriguez all stated that the FBI was on the lookout for Oswald Latin companions. There is testimony that he was in fact identified, but never talked about.
Given the corroborative value of these testimonies, should we not be taking each and every one of these sightings very seriously? The implications are monumental. The myth of Oswald the lone nut should be torn down once and for all. Some of these accounts, including Craig’s, and a few while Oswald was in Russia, would imply that there was in fact an Oswald double. The sightings of Oswald in the Carousel Club need to be reevaluated. As with the Friends of Democratic Cuba, this strongly implies that the escorts were given their assignments by Banister and or Ferrie.
All this dovetails with a stunning revelation concerning training footage of Cuban exiles (as told to Jim DiEugenio) by Robert Tanenbaum, Chief Council of the HSCA, who was there when it got started:
JD: Was it really as you described in the book, with all the people in that film? Bishop was in the film?
BT: Oh, yeah. Absolutely! They’re all in the film. They’re all there. But, the fact of the matter is the Committee began to balk at a series of events. The most significant one was when [David Atlee] Phillips came up before the Committee and then had to be recalled because it was clear that he hadn’t told the truth. That had to do with the phony commentary he made about Oswald going to Mexico City on or about October 1st, 1963. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 5)
The people in the film they are discussing include Banister, Oswald and David Phillips.
There are a number of witnesses that I did not include in this analysis. And they would bring the sum total to over forty. Some of these were part of decades worth of research by John Armstrong, who developed a highly detailed chronology around two separate paths of two Oswalds, one he calls Harvey and the other Lee. There is a malaise among researchers when it comes to concurring fully with John’s conclusions. This author does not consider himself to be in a position to pronounce himself on all of Armstrong’s work. However, his raw information, just like Jim Garrison’s, cannot be ignored. And it includes many sightings that are revealing if we accept that there may have been an imposter as we know there was in in Mexico City, and while Oswald was in Russia and even on November 22nd. Sightings that included Latin escorts, often the stocky individual.
Oswald’s escorts give a whole new meaning to Senator Schweiker’s observation that Oswald was mixing with both anti and pro-Castro elements and proves that Garrison was on the right track. This simply cannot be dismissed by anyone who has even a minute sense of logic. The reader is encouraged to read the sources in full. Do not take my word for it, consider this small part of INS officer Wendell Roache’s landmark statement:
“Roache stressed that the NOPD (specifically the intelligence division) and the East Metairie’s Sheriff’s Office had reports on Ferries’ group. He added that “Garrison had something; I read his reports in the newspaper and they were correct, he received good intelligence information, whether he was using it for politics or not.” Roache also noted that (1) Garrison was all eyes and ears in the French Quarter and (2) that he had heard Ferrie was running when he was killed.”
