Reclaiming History (368 page)

^*
West and Vernon are the ones who started the whole Files story and got it out there. It is noteworthy that on September 5, 1992, West wrote to Files, “When I get your songs, I’m going to show them to a friend of mine who is a music producer and see if there is anything he can do with them. He was Fats Domino’s manager for over ten years.” There are no references to songs in West’s and Files’s letters to each other, so Files wanting help with his songs must have been discussed when West met Files at the Stateville Correctional Center (Files was not incarcerated in the much more famous Joliet State Prison across the river, which was closed in 2002) for the first time about three weeks earlier, on August 17, 1992. Shortly after Bob Vernon took over the Files case from Joe West on March 10, 1993, he wrote a letter (date of letter not known, but it was on March 10 or a day or so thereafter) to Files. On March 15, 1993, in Files’s very first letter to Vernon, he writes, “I received your letter with ‘Earlene’s’ [Joe West’s widow] this past Saturday evening. Thank you for writing to me…Thank you for wanting to help with my music. It would be really nice to hear some of my songs over the radio.” (Dankbaar,
Files on JFK
, pp.360, 392, 394) It could very well be that part of Files’s motivation for telling his phony “Kennedy assassin” tale was not just his fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen or more minutes of turntable time on the radio for his songs.

^*
Files said he had met Oswald earlier in New Orleans, and when Oswald was in Clinton, Louisiana, Files said he “was running semi-automatic 45 caliber submachine guns” down to Oswald for CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who he said introduced him to Oswald (Dankbaar,
Files on JFK
, pp.51, 173–174).

^*
One of the things that convinced Sample and Collom that Factor was telling the truth and was on the sixth floor that day is his telling them he saw a “table saw” on the sixth floor, and they say that the late Harold Norman told Sample in 1993 that there was a table saw on the sixth floor. How could Factor have known this if he wasn’t there? But assassination researcher Dave Perry, who specializes in poking holes in the more-far-out conspiracy allegations, said he and Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, looked over film footage and many photographs taken on the sixth floor after the assassination and saw no table saw. (
Los Angeles Times
, Orange County edition, January 16, 1996, p.E5; Telephone interview of Dave Perry by author on December 20, 2004)

† Factor said he never saw anyone when he entered the building and proceeded to the sixth floor, or when he descended the stairs and exited the building. Many Book Depository Building employees gave statements to the FBI that they saw no strangers in the building on the day of the assassination. Ruth Ann, Factor, and Wallace, all strangers, must have done a good job hiding not only their physical form inside the building that day, but also the rifles that one or more of them apparently carried into and out of the building that day.

‡ Although Collom and Sample’s book is silly beyond belief, British conspiracy theorist Robin Ramsay couldn’t be more impressed with the authors, asserting that they “solved the case” (Ramsay,
Who Shot JFK?
p.67).

^*
In Estes’ later memoir,
Billie Sol Estes
, he makes the same incredible charges, suggesting that the reason for all these murders was that all of the victims were “associated with me. Each of these victims could have revealed my connection to Lyndon Johnson” (Estes,
Billie Sol Estes
, pp.90, 98). If this is true, Billie, why didn’t LBJ have you killed? Wouldn’t you be the most dangerous to LBJ of all people in his eyes?

† In a September 18, 1964, letter to the Warren Commission’s general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that “on our efforts to identify the latent fingerprints and palm prints [on the four cardboard boxes inside the sniper’s nest]…
only one latent palm print remains to be identified
” (CE 3131, 26 H 799, 809). As we have seen, apart from the prints of Oswald found on the cartons, of the nineteen other fingerprints and six palm prints on the four cartons, all except the one palm print were found to belong to either Dallas detective Robert Lee Studebaker or FBI clerk Forest L. Lucy, both of whom handled the cartons during the investigation (CE 3131, 26 H 809; WR, p.249).

^*
The author says that Wallace’s first wife was Mary Andre Dubose Barton, and there is a “possible connection with Clark’s family line. They share a common name, that of Dubose,” and “while the connection [between Wallace and Clark] cannot be made from this, the possibility cannot be excluded.”

† Actually, there is a likelihood that LBJ had at least a passing acquaintance with Wallace, though this in no way supports the outrageous and foundationless allegations in McClellan’s book. Apparently McClellan was unaware that in 1986, Horace Busby, an LBJ aide, told the
Dallas Times Herald
that around 1949 or 1950, Wallace and Josefa, LBJ’s sister, “were having a relationship” in Washington, D.C., and “she may have moved in with him or he moved in with her” (
Dallas Times Herald
, March 31, 1986, p.11A). Also, Busby said that Johnson had met Wallace once, when Cliff Carter had taken Wallace to Johnson’s home in Washington, D.C., presumably during this same period of time (
Dallas Morning News
, March 23, 1984, p.5A).

^*
McClellan was convicted of forging a $35,000 deed of trust in 1982 and the “criminal charges were dismissed” in 1992 (McClellan,
Blood, Money and Power
, pp.292–294). As of February 19, 2006, he was not listed as a member of the Texas State Bar.

^*
The only weapon any Secret Service agent accompanying the president had on his person in Dealey Plaza was his handgun, a four-inch revolver. In the presidential follow-up car there was also a shotgun inside a compartment in front of the jump seats, and the AR-15 automatic rifle lying on the floor of the rear seat between Agents George Hickey and Glen Bennett (2 H 69, WCT Roy H. Kellerman; 2 H 134–135, WCT Clinton J. Hill; CE 1024, 18 H 760).

† Though Donahue believes that Secret Service agent George Hickey accidentally shot Kennedy with a fatal shot to the head from behind, two young Canadian sleuths, Ray Dupois and Jason Amelotte, are “positive” that another Secret Service agent, William Greer, the driver of the presidential limousine, intentionally fired a fatal shot into Kennedy’s head from the front. Dupois and Amelotte find it “hard to believe that more people” haven’t come to this conclusion, since “the evidence is obvious.” What is that evidence? They say that if you watch the Zapruder film closely, when the limousine slows down on Elm after Kennedy is shot in the back, Greer can be seen turning around in his seat holding a handgun in his left hand, with which, they say, he fired the fatal shot. So it may have been Greer, not Hickey, who actually killed Kennedy. But Dupois and Amelotte can’t take full credit for finally solving the twentieth century’s biggest murder mystery. As indicated earlier, author Milton William Cooper, in his book
Behold a Pale Horse,
is the first one to have caught Greer in the act of killing Kennedy. (“Did Chauffeur Murder JFK?”
Windsor (Ontario) Star
, November 22, 1993)

^*
The only reference to Hickey having fired the gun was really no reference at all. When Secret Service agent Winston G. Lawson, riding in the lead car (directly in front of the presidential limousine), heard three shots coming from his rear, he turned around and saw Hickey standing up with the AR-15 in his hand. He testified, “The first thing that flashed through my mind…was that he had fired because this was the only weapon I had seen up to that time” (4 H 352–353).

^*
The first reference in print to the three men came in the April 6, 1964, Warren Commission testimony of Lee Bowers, the Union Terminal switchman, who said he had “held off the trains [from continuing on] until they could be examined, and there was some transients taken [off] at least one train” (6 H 288). The first reference to “tramps” came in the April 9, 1964, testimony of D. V. Harkness, one of the five Dallas police officers who arrested the three men at the boxcar, referring to them as “tramps” (6 H 312).

† On the other hand, Wise said they were “smelly” and the photos didn’t really show how “dirty” they were. Indeed, a female reporter is being seen in a
Dallas Morning News
photo covering her nose as they walked by.

^*
The commission concluded that Sturgis “was not an employee or agent of the CIA either in 1963 or at any other time.” Nor was he an “informant or other operative.” Sturgis himself testified before the commission that he had never been a CIA agent but that he had engaged in several “adventures” relating to Cuba which he believed to have been organized and financed by the CIA.

^*
Although the Rockefeller Commission, headed by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, and consisting of many distinguished Americans such as C. Douglas Dillon, Erwin N. Griswold, Lane Kirkland, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and Ronald Reagan, was a blue-chip body, it clearly made a mistake in appointing former Warren Commission assistant counsel David Belin as its executive director, not because he wasn’t more than qualified, but because of the appearance of a potential conflict of interest, Belin being one of the strongest and most vocal defenders of the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

^*
In a 2001 book,
The Making of a Bum
, Gedney said that for years up to and including the day of the assassination, he was “a bona fide bum, tramp, hobo, rounder, and all-around drunken scoundrel…A scum-bag [who] lived in doorways and cardboard boxes, begged for money to buy a meal but used it for cigarettes or wine…My only allegiance was to the bottle” (Gedney,
Making of a Bum
, Preface, p.116).

^*
Corpus delicti is not, as many lay people believe, the dead body in a homicide case, but rather the body or elements of the crime.

^*
Dr. Renatus Hartogs, the psychiatrist who examined Oswald in New York City when Lee was thirteen, offered a few possibilities of why Oswald killed Kennedy. Remarkably, if we’re to believe Hartogs, one is that Oswald, by his act, may have been shrieking to the world, “I have been deprived of a father, which is every man’s birthright, who would have taken care of me and protected me from my wild impulses, and now I will deprive everyone else of a father, too,” the president being the father of the nation. As far-out as this was, Hartogs wasn’t through. He went on to say that Oswald’s act may also have been “his unconscious attempt to castrate his father,” the “top man in his life as a child [Oswald’s father was already dead at the time Oswald was born], the man who is his rival for his mother. His ‘place in history’ may have meant what he believed to be his rightful ‘place’ in his mother’s bed,…the secret wish to commit what he unconsciously believed to be the highest of forbidden pleasures—incest.” (Hartogs and Freeman,
Two Assassins
, pp.188–189) So it was all about the Freudian Oedipus complex. Oswald was just trying to retroactively have sex with his mother, Marguerite. My question is, What can society do to protect itself from such psychiatric silliness?

† One circumstance militating against the conclusion that Oswald knew precisely why he killed Kennedy is that his decision did not appear to be thought-out, but seemed to culminate more from a potpourri of hemorrhaging emotions. Some have defined emotion as that which is devoid of reason. That may be too simplistic, but surely an extremely emotional act, as killing the president has to be, isn’t grounded too much in reason. Two facts, among others, suggest that Oswald’s killing of Kennedy was not too premeditated: First, as known from earlier in the book, he left a threatening, inflammatory note at FBI headquarters about two weeks before the assassination. It seems very, very unlikely he would have done that (or would have even concerned himself with a minor matter like being upset with FBI agent James Hosty) if he at that time (two weeks before the assassination) was right in the midst of his plans to murder the president of the United States. Second, and also mentioned earlier, he didn’t take his revolver with him on the morning of the assassination to aid in his escape, going back to his rooming house to get it after he shot Kennedy.

^*
The three prior assassinations of American presidents are compatible with the political motivation factor. Abraham Lincoln’s assassin (assassination on April 14, 1865), John Wilkes Booth, was a Confederate sympathizer. So were all of his co-conspirators. James A. Garfield’s assassin (July 2, 1881), Charles J. Guiteau, was a would-be officeholder who earlier had unsuccessfully sought to be appointed U.S. ambassador to Austria. Guiteau became enraged when Garfield failed to appoint him as ambassador to Austria. William McKinley’s assassin (September 6, 1901), Leon F. Czolgosz, was an avowed anarchist. (HSCA Report, pp.21–23; WR, pp.506–510)
It should be noted that there is no such crime known as assassination, though by definition an assassination necessarily includes murder, which, next to treason, is the ultimate crime. The word
assassination
has come to mean the murder of a public official (e.g., Julius Caesar, Lincoln) or a public figure (e.g., Pancho Villa, Leon Trotsky), and hence, unlike a murder, its occurrence affects the lives of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people, and often the course of public policy and events. Because of this reality, and because of the empirical evidence, we can safely say that most assassinations have, as their primary motive, the changing of history. A personal hatred of the victim by the killer, present in the majority of murders, is frequently absent or of secondary importance in assassinations. Oswald’s killing of Kennedy was, of course, a classic assassination. Though we don’t know his motive, the evidence is lacking that he “hated” Kennedy.