Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (9 page)

On the other hand, I was less worried than ever about seeming paranoid. If one thing had been made perfectly clear, it was that in the United States of America suspicions of conspiracy were no longer regarded as symptoms of mental illness.

In July of 1975 I noted in passing headlines in the local Atlanta papers that city Commissioner of Public Safety, Reginald Eaves, had for some time been quietly investigating anew the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although I had admired King while I held John Kennedy in contempt, I was then so preoccupied with things I was ferreting out here and there about the Presidential assassination that I failed to take much notice. For articles about the John Kennedy murder now seemed to be appearing everywhere.

From time to time I was meeting to compare notes with a staffer on
The Great Speckled Bird
who had written about the Southern Rim. Without mentioning my man in New Orleans with the bald head and links to Carlos Marcello, I sought further evidence that the cowboys of the military-industrial complex had murdered Kennedy in their way with the Yankees of the Northeastern Establishment. Marcello, as well as Nixon and Howard Hunt, were alleged to belong to this Southern faction. I figured the man I remembered and feared had to be in there somewhere.

Then I encountered an article in a scandal tabloid that disturbed me more than anything else, again for largely subjective reasons. One of their correspondents who was probing links between Carlos Marcello and the John Kennedy murder had blown his brains out with a .38 caliber pistol for no particular reason. As it happened, this resident of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, named Joe Cooper was lefthanded and the weapon was found in his right hand. The former girlfriend of the man with whom I discussed murdering the President met with much the same fate in 1964, just before I returned to New Orleans after a year’s absence to visit.

Then early one morning the phone rang. On the other end of the line was the ACLU lawyer who at that time was the only other person with whom I had confided about the conversations summarized in my notes. One afternoon, after deciding I wanted him to handle my case when the time came, I had regaled him with a rambling, slightly hysterical account of my worst suspicions.

Now he was to ask me, “Have you been following this investigation by Eaves of the Martin Luther King assassination?”

I admitted I had not. “You might want to look into it,” he said. “Their witness seems to be talking about some of the same people you mentioned to me in connection with Carlos Marcello.”

That afternoon I obtained an Atlanta newspaper and read the article pertaining to what was fast becoming a controversial investigation. A young man who supplied accurate information to the police about a narcotics ring was also insisting that just previous to the murder of Martin Luther King he overheard one of its members say of King, “I’m going to shoot that damned nigger in the head and frame a jailbird for it, just like I did with Kennedy.”

Had the word “jailbird” been a post-hypnotic trigger been planted in my unconscious to release a flood of memories, results could not have been more dramatic. For one of the things my own suspect had discussed with me all those years ago was framing a jailbird for the John Kennedy murder. In fact, I recalled now that I was the one who talked him out of it. Moreover, he had also talked about assassinating Martin Luther King.

No longer in doubt that my man, known to me as Gary Kirstein, possessed advanced knowledge of the John Kennedy murder, I went into action. First I typed up a number of brief memos about our conversations and distributed them almost at random, in order to assure that if I was fatally silenced there would be evidence to indicate why.

Thereafter I endeavored to contact my prospective attorney, only to discover that he was out of town. Unsure of what to do next, convinced that I should act fast, I wound up taking my information to the office of the Commissioner of Public Safety. That was after I first attended a party where I was given a funny-tasting marijuana cigarette, that made me feel uninhibited and talkative, and then questioned intensively by a group of inquisitive individuals. And it was after, within a few days of the first incident, I again met one of the people from that party, who handed me a pipeload of marijuana that blistered the inside of my mouth when I started to inhale the smoke.

Commissioner Eaves then announced a press conference wherein he said he would reveal startling evidence in the King case. Instead, when the day of the conference arrived, he said he was dropping the probe — because, he said, his chief witness, Robert Byron Watson, refused to take a lie detector test. I was baffled and frightened.

Then the newspapers announced the disappearance of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, and I recalled that the man I knew as Gary Kirstein once asked me what I thought about letting Hoffa in on a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy.

Greg Hill, my former New Orleans roommate, arrived in Atlanta for a visit to find me nearly hysterical. At least once he had met Gary, remembering as I did that we had suspected him of stealing a typewriter from our apartment. Greg also drew my attention to a magazine article asserting that counter-cultural writer and publisher Paul Krassner had uncovered links between the Kennedy assassination and the Manson family.

Twelve days after I had taken my information to the Atlanta police, a ski-masked bandit pulled a stick-up at a party both Greg and I were attending and stole his identification and mine — taking only money from other guests.

From that day in early August of 1975 until the day of this writing in 1982 my life has been a constant series of similar misadventures — including poisonings, threats and bribe offers, intense psychological harassments, mysterious interrogations and occasional reminders about things in those fateful conversations with “Brother-in-law.”

I call that man “Brother-in-law,” because I am not at all certain that his name was really Gary Kirstein. There is every reason to surmise he was not using his own name, and I remember him most as the brother-in-law of a French Quarter character named Slim Brooks. And because of Slim’s extremely distinctive turn of speech, he himself seldom called Gary “my brother-in-law.” Instead, it was always, “Let’s go visit Brother-in-law tomorrow.”

I had arrived in New Orleans the day after Mardi Gras in 1961. Except for May, June, July, August and part of September of 1963 — I lived there until 13 December 1963. Beginning in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, and continuing up to about the time of the John Kennedy assassination, Slim must have uttered those words between fifteen and twenty-five times. Since these invitations were far apart and infrequent, I never turned Slim down.

Sometimes Brother-in-law would come to the French Quarter and get us. More often, Slim would arrange in advance to borrow his car and then would drive us to Brother-in-law’s house out in the country the next day.

It was difficult to take seriously what Brother-in-law said about his plans to murder the President. Not that Slim didn’t seem honest. On the contrary, he seemed too honest to get himself involved with anyone heavy enough to actually go out and assassinate a President — if Slim would have to lie about it afterwards. To suspect Slim of being a conspirator seemed too paranoid for words.

In April of 1976 I again had occasion to think about paranoia in relation to the John Kennedy assassination. For I attended a lecture in Atlanta by none other than Jim Garrison, for whom by then I felt a lot of sympathy. In light of what I remembered now, it seemed his suspicions of me were only slightly misplaced. I was not a field agent in the assassination; I was among those who helped plan it!

In the question period after his speech Garrison said something I found both significant and touching: “Of course, I have to lean over backwards not to be paranoid, because I have been accused of paranoia in the past.”

One of his diagnosticians had been me; now I was dealing with exactly the same double bind of trying to probe conspiracies without coming on like a paranoid in the eyes of my friends.

Through an emissary I let it be known to Garrison that I wanted to meet with him. His reply: “Not only do I not want to meet with Kerry Thornley, I don’t even want to hear his name. In fact, I don’t even want to think about Kerry Thornley!”

Feeling very much alone, I continued my daily dealings with what were obviously conspiracies — including a correspondence with a man I hoped was a charming crank who was telling me in his letters “why we Fascists assassinated Kennedy.” How I got on Stan Jamison’s mailing list in the first place some years earlier was a mystery to me. Since 1970, though, Greg Hill and I both had been receiving from him everything from advice about how to grow organic sprouts to racist newspapers published by White Christians who were armed and quite dangerous.

In reply to one of my memos about Kirstein that had fallen into his hands indirectly, he wrote me to say that the tragedy in Dallas was plotted by the Secret Order of Thule in such a way as to assure that no cover-up could remain convincing forever. Motive: to make the American public paranoid about their government and mass media. For paranoia, he told me, is a big step in the direction of mental health.

People who become paranoid, Stan Jamison wrote, will not rest until they discover every last shred of truth. Among the devices used to encourage awareness of conspiracy were the many crude Oswald impersonations that occurred just previous to the assassination. Puzzled for more than a decade about exactly that mystery, I had to admit this was the first credible hypothesis to explain it without making the assassins look like idiots. And had they been less than geniuses, there would have been no cover-up at all.

Jamison further informed me that the conspiracy was constructed in concentric circles, like Chinese boxes, with descending levels, so that only “the man at the center” understood afterwards exactly what had happened. Of course, I could not ignore the possibility that man might have been Brother-in-law.

What brought the many loose ends in the John Kennedy murder mystery together for me was this realization that it was a maximum complicity crime. Various factions must have been deliberately implicated on a blind-alliance basis, so that once the event occurred, every group of conspirators was startled at evidence of participation by someone besides themselves.

Like Brother-in-law, Jamison seemed morbidly fascinated with Hitler and Nazi Germany. Both men mentioned in particular little-known aspects of the Third Reich — such as the secret pagan rituals of the S.S. and the occult beliefs of Hitler’s cohorts. Both repeated a rumor that Nazi rocket scientists discovered energy secrets the oil companies were repressing to this day. And whether either or both were living some kind of macabre hoax or were absolutely fanatical was impossible to decide, since neither man was without humor. For instance, Jamison always signed off with, “Love is Alive and Well.”

As might be anticipated, it struck me that perhaps Stan Jamison and Gary Kirstein were the same person, so in 1977 I dropped in on Jamison unexpectedly at his address in Sacramento, California. Not only was he not the same man I had conversed with in New Orleans, but it was plain that the spine-chilling ranting in his letters was just a big put-on.

That isn’t to say his information about the assassination could not have been valid. A warm, intelligent human being obviously unsympathetic to Fascism, he nevertheless seemed quite versed in secret society and intelligence community politics.

“I come on all hairy like that in my letters,” he told me, “to scare off government agents.” Although that statement didn’t sound convincing, it seemed a safe bet his motives were not cruel — a consideration that leaves undetermined whether or not they were misguided.

How paranoid is it to fear such individuals? Perhaps that is the wrong question. Maybe we should ask ourselves: Is it rational to dismiss them in the name of popularized notions of sanity?`

Later on I was to encounter a rumor that Stan Jamison acquired his information from one Michael Stanley, then serving a prison term in California. As Lovable Ol’ Doc Stanley, Michael Stanley was known to me personally as one of the heavier, darker characters of the California counter-culture. We met each other in a hip coffee house after I moved to Los Angeles about a year after John Kennedy’s assassination. Although I didn’t like to admit it for fear of seeming paranoid, I found Michael Stanley terrifying.

Perhaps if we clearly defined this thing we call paranoia it would not cause us to behave so foolishly. Genuine paranoia actually contains at least three ingredients: fear, suspicion and mystification. Technically, it is heightened awareness, but not yet perfect awareness.

Professional espionage agents are, for example, frequently both suspicious and mystified, but have long since learned to live without much fear. For that reason, we don’t call them paranoids.

To be both frightened and confused, without a systematic method of blaming others for those conditions, is to be vulnerable to some other psychiatric classification than paranoia. Fear and suspicion combined with exact, provable knowledge as to the identity of one’s oppressors is generally considered heroic. Paranoia, then, only exists in politics where fear and suspicion linger for no external reason and, as is more often true, in cases where the subject is incorrect about who to suspect and what to fear — the condition of mystification.