by Joan Mellen
And always there was gossip because these towns were tiny and everyone knew everyone else. Gladys ate raw oysters with my Daddy, Henry Earl Palmer’s daughter Margaret Harvey, told me. Margaret recounted that in 1965 her father had given up his Klan robe so that her mother could use the material to make choir robes for her sister and herself to wear in the school Christmas pageant. Her father, she remembered, was a good man, if also a “product of the times in the South,” as had been his own father and grandfather before him. Margaret had no problem with a narrative that would vindicate Jim Garrison, a liberal proponent of civil rights.
One-time Garrison volunteer, psychologist Gary Schoener called to tell me he had followed up on the woman named Margaret Hoover in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Hoover had found a telling piece of paper in the partially-burned trash belonging to her next door neighbor, a Cuban. His name was Julio César Fernández, and he taught Spanish at the local high school.
On that piece of paper were the names Ruby and Oswald, along with the word “Silver Slipper,” which was a bar Jack Ruby had owned outside Clinton, Louisiana. The name “Ruby” struck her because she and her husband were separated, and she suspected that “Ruby” must be a woman with whom her husband was having an affair. There was also a torn paper with directions to the Silver Slipper on it and other items.
After Ruby assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald, Mrs. Hoover called her brother and he summoned the FBI. The Bureau was not interested in evidence of a connection between Jack Ruby and Oswald, let alone in introducing a connection between the Silver Slipper in East Feliciana Parish and Ruby and Oswald. When at first she couldn’t find the slip of paper with the names “Ruby” and “Oswald” on it, the agents were irritated. When Mrs. Hoover offered to take a lie detector test, they refused her request.
The Bureau was so unnerved by this evidence connecting Oswald and Ruby that they talked with Mrs. Hoover’s son-in-law with whom she didn’t get along. The agents were placated when the son-in-law, whose name was Gerald A. Kauffman, told them she was unreliable. The FBI did discover that the relatives of Julio César Fernández had been highly-placed members of the Batista government and that at a local dive the Cubans were seen throwing darts at a board with John F. Kennedy’s picture on it. These FBI reports, distorted as they were, became Warren Commission exhibits.
Realizing that the FBI was not interested in what she had found, Mrs. Hoover sent a pile of things, among them the slip of paper with the names “Ruby” and Oswald” and plane tickets to Vegas she had recovered, to Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania. Having acknowledged the arrival of the package, not bothering to examine any of it, Scott sent it all to the FBI. Like so much evidence that fell into the hands of the Bureau, it disappeared forever. There is no sign of the torn piece of paper at the National Archives and it is not mentioned in the FBI documents on Mrs. Hoover published in the Warren Commission volumes.
It was a stroke of original investigative genius that led a young student of psychology named Gary Schoener, to Martinsburg, Pennsylvania to interview Mrs. Hoover.
“How do I know you’re not a Communist?” Mrs. Hoover said when Schoener came to interview her.
Mrs. Hoover told Schoener that on the day of the assassination, no one left the house next door; the Spanish teacher did not go to school. Before the end of the school year, the family left town. A fervently patriotic American, Mrs. Hoover came out of the incident disillusioned and believing that the government was not interested in investigating the Kennedy assassination. It was clear to her that the FBI had wished that she would just shut up.
In the spring of 1968—he was twenty-three years old—Schoener went to New Orleans to reveal to Jim Garrison what he had discovered. He brought with him some additional items that Mrs. Hoover had extracted from the trash, used plane tickets and tickets to the Silver Slipper Club in Vegas. It was original evidence that would have been useful were one to investigate Julio César Fernández and whatever group he was linked to. Schoener’s work had been meticulous and solid.
Jim Garrison did not seem to be paying attention; he was unable to focus on what Schoener was telling him. He murmured something about his not being interested in anything that did not connect to Alpha 66 and one of its subgroups, a subject that never became part of State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw.
Garrison spoke as if the case had been solved and the focus was so clear that he needed only evidence that pertained to what he already had. He did not seem to realize that his best evidence was out of Clinton and Jackson where Oswald had traveled with Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. Mrs. Hoover’s revelation connected to the Clinton evidence, but Garrison didn’t see it.
Schoener was taken aback. He didn’t know what to say. The materials Gary Schoener brought with him were duly placed in Garrison’s safe.
The next day Schoener learned that the original evidence he had brought with him had vanished from Garrison’s safe. Margaret Hoover does not appear in the original edition of A Farewell to Justice because the Garrison office did not investigate this important lead developed by young Gary Schoener. Schoener did far more with it than the FBI was willing to do, or, alas, that Jim Garrison would do. There is no NODA Memorandum, or mention of Margaret Hoover, in Garrison’s papers as far as I could tell.
Schoener had brought not only the Margaret Hoover materials, but also what he had learned about a Minneapolis lawyer named David Kroman, who had been in federal prison with Richard Case Nagell and claimed that he possessed documents that linked H. L. Hunt to the Kennedy assassination. By 1968, his office overrun by government plants, Garrison, disoriented, was unable to evaluate new evidence or to pursue new leads.
Not only was Garrison short-handed, but some of the people doing his investigative work were less than energetic. You may recall from A Farewell to Justice that Dr. Frank Silva, who had been medical director of the East Louisiana State Hospital at Jackson during the summer of 1963, had a bad cold when Moo Sciambra visited him. Dr. Silva urged Sciambra to return, he wanted to talk, but Sciambra never came back.
The Hoover story remained with Schoener. He wondered how Julio Fernández knew about Ruby and Oswald and a connection between them. Who was Fernández and who had passed the word to him?
In 1975, Schoener brought the evidence to Senator Richard Schweiker and his investigator Gaeton Fonzi. Fonzi managed to locate Julio Fernández in upstate New York, but he never got to the bottom of the story. “I can’t explain what you found,” Fonzi told Schoener. Fonzi pronounced Fernández “clean,” without explaining how he came to that conclusion.
It was the moment when Gaeton Fonzi was closing down his efforts. He had begun to sense that the Church committee didn’t have the firepower to go any further. The House Select Committee would be even less interested in links to CIA operations.
Looking back, Louisiana investigator Robert Buras remembered his trip to Clinton and Jackson with HSCA’s Patricia Orr. If he mentioned any leads developed by the Garrison office, Orr told him, “that was Garrison stuff. We can’t go there!”
Why not? Buras thought.
“I hate to think about those days because we had no chance,” Buras said after the publication of A Farewell to Justice.
William C. Wood (“Bill Boxley”), whom Garrison banished, finally, from his office, wound up working with the Los Angeles Police Department. (See Chapters 17 and 18.)
That the FBI raided the Tulane Library and walked off with Oswald files was confirmed by curator Wilbur Meneray, who had been with the library for thirty-two years. I was told that the library only became aware of the missing Oswald files after finding a receipt left behind by the FBI agents. Meneray then contradicted himself, stating that the librarians consented to all the FBI’s requests regarding the Oswald files.
Among the most charming people I met after the publication of A Farewell to Justice were the sons of David Ferrie’s friend Benton Wilson. Benton Wilson, whom Jim Garrison never could pin down for questioning, although he tried, disappeared into
the American Southwest. All his life, he was certain that CIA had murdered David Ferrie to ensure that he not fall into the hands of Jim Garrison and tell what he knew.
Benton Wilson was certain. Regardless of what Jim Lewallen had said, or the phony unsigned suicide notes, “David just wouldn’t kill himself.” Benton Wilson’s sons remembered for me their father’s speaking of David Ferrie as a man people admired. Dave was articulate, strong and formidable. He was not the caricature who has come down in history.
Wilson lived the rest of his life fearing that the Agency would come after him too. He chose to live in a very remote place so that if a stranger came to town, he would know it. He ferreted out who the local CIA assets were, in particular a reporter on the local newspaper.
Benton Wilson kept a 9 mm pistol in his belt every day of his life. Just as David Ferrie had a machine gun on the landing of his apartment, so Benton distributed guns strategically throughout his house. When his sons reached the age of ten, he had them carry guns whenever they went out. (Both grew up to be solid citizens, hard-working and distinguished in their professions. One became an international lawyer.)
On a visit to New Orleans during their childhood some cops approached Wilson, and his sons remembered years later how he hustled them into the car and sped down back roads out of Louisiana into Texas. The Benton Wilson story is another measure of how close Jim Garrison had come to penetrating the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. It is the story of some collateral damage along the way.
Finally no one remains invisible. Bernardo de Torres was photographed in 2007 shopping at a PUBLIX supermarket in Miami. He was not hiding out somewhere in Latin America after all. He wore glasses and a Chicago White Sox baseball cap. Among Bernie’s friends was Oscar Zamora, who pitched for the White Sox way back before free agency. Bernie gave writers to understand that he would have to be paid if they wanted an interview.
AN ANONYMOUS LETTER ARRIVES AT LOU IVON’S HOME
This anonymous letter was dated 15 October, 2007, and was postmarked Houston, Texas. Not only did the writer know where Ivon lived, but he knew that Ivon was a “former St. (State) Rep (Representative).” He confirms what Garrison believed, but his detractors worked tirelessly to deny, that “Oswald, Shaw, Russo and several others did meet at Ferrie’s apt. Shaw arrived 1st, Oswald 2nd, Russo 3rd,” the writer says. He notes that “Shaw left his special pk. of cigarettes on a chair by the entrance,” telling us that he too was present.
The author of the letter then confides to Ivon, “You know and I know that Garrison DID have something. But the team fumbled on the 10 yd. line.” The ten yard line, of course, is very close to goal.
This writer announces himself as the “2nd Oswald.” He tells Ivon, “I think that you know that I exist. Big Jim did.” He says he was taken from “1026 Beckley Av. (my rooming place),” which had been Oswald’s Oak Cliff address in Dallas, minus the North, to Mexico City and then to Colombia. “There were many ‘Executives’ who set the whole thing up,” he writes. “A couple of them are still alive.”
All of this makes sense: stolen identities and doubles characterize this case, and that there were two Oswalds was painstakingly analyzed by John Armstrong in his 2003 book, Harvey & Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald. The writer tells Ivon that “the correct Oswald got shot by Ruby. He had to be silenced or else he might start to sing.” (This was exactly what Ruby himself wrote in a letter he slipped to a Dallas police officer before his death.)
He himself had been used as a “decoy,” the writer says, “taken from the ground floor of the Texas School Book Depository to go back to my house to get a pistol that I hid for LHO. As it was, he killed the cop with it. I didn’t pln on that.” The writer dubs himself “the 2nd Lee Harvey Oswald,” and he announces that he now plans to return to Mexico City.
Louis Ivon never heard from this anonymous source again. Was his letter a hoax, its information gleaned from published sources, as several figures who have inserted themselves into the history of the Kennedy assassination have done?
Just as this updated edition of A Farewell to Justice was going to press, long-time intelligence officer John Patrick Quirk recalled his time working and traveling with David Atlee Phillips. For Quirk as a young man, Phillips was an intimidating presence. Phillips, along with Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, hated John F. Kennedy, Quirk remembers. Quirk had been called to a CIA Kennedy assassination committee because he had worked with Phillips. He viewed a film, he says, in which Phillips revealed his profound hatred of John F. Kennedy. According to Quirk, Lyndon Johnson met with Phillips two days after the president was murdered. Here then was a crucial connection, one more step toward unraveling what Sylvia Meagher called “the proof of the plot” in Accessories After the Fact.
Phillips was a real cold warrior, Quirk says, and “fanatic about getting rid of Castro.” And yes, as Gaeton Fonzi, working as the chief House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator, struggled for years to establish, David Atlee Phillips “was the mysterious Maurice Bishop, Oswald’s case officer.”
THE SCARCITY OF RECORDS
I had hoped that by the time I would be writing an update certain unavailable files, particularly those originating with the Church Committee, would have become available. Yet the imperative of transparency has receded with time. CIA’s protective screen around its operations has meant that many Church Committee testimonies would remain classified. Among them were two depositions of CIA’s mad scientist Sidney Gottlieb, who devised the poisons to be used against Congo Premier Patrice Lumumba.
Regarding CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, buried were the testimonies of an “Assistant” of Desmond Fitzgerald; that of Sheffield Edwards, at the time the Director of the Office of Security; George McManus, Richard Helms’ Special Assistant for Cuba; McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson; an “Official” in the Western Hemisphere Division; and John McCone, Dulles’ erstwhile successor.
With respect to Lee Oswald’s relationship with U.S. Customs in New Orleans, discussed for the first time in A Farewell to Justice, the Church Committee Interim Report indicates that Immigration and Naturalization Service Officers, including David Smith, were deposed out of New Orleans. A summary of Smith’s testimony remains available, but not his actual testimony.
Still unavailable as well is the testimony of bar owner Orestes Peña, who talked about how Lee Harvey Oswald was seen often in the company of INS and Customs people. “It is our understanding that Mr. Peña testified,” the government admits. Peña’s voice, however, has been silenced.
Another “lost” document is the testimony of Gerald Patrick Hemming, that former U.S. Marine and soldier-of-fortune who was present among anti-Castro Cubans prior to the Kennedy assassination, and who remained a close friend of Angelo Murgado. Hemming’s name appears in some records as “Jerry Henning.” Hemming’s testimony might throw some light on the role of Angelo Murgado in Robert Kennedy’s anti-Castro efforts. We don’t have it.
A three page summary of French secret services agent Philippe de Vosjoli is available, but not his actual deposition. Staff members at the National Archives profess ignorance of its existence.
According to the FOIA staff of the National Archives and Records Administration, the Assassination Records and Review Board (ARRB) staff in the late 1990s reviewed the “original Church Committee files,” but failed to “produce the hardcopy of testimony cited in the JFK report.” The JFK Records and Collections Act of 1992 mandated the release of all records related to the murder of President Kennedy. The ARRB was obliged to conclude: “At the time of this Report, the SSCI (Church Committee) could not explain the absence of these original transcripts (and perhaps accompanying materials) relating to the Kennedy assassination.” The new buzzword was “NBR”—"not believed relevant.”
In 2005, the National Archives claimed that they “can do nothing further to locate what the government now acknowledged as thirty-three missing do
cuments.” Obfuscation had become the rule. “As far as new CIA releases are concerned, the RIF numbers cannot be printed out.”
WHY THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
The Kennedy assassination was about more than the murder of one man, even a head of state. It marked a moment when the moral and political fabric of the country began, systematically, to be laid waste. You can draw a direct line from the golden age of the Warren Court; when a president could categorically refuse to populate a ground war in foreign jungles, to the present with its permanent wars and steady deterioration of civil liberties and human rights.
After the Kennedy assassination, CIA emerged with powers beyond those enjoyed by any elected official, presidents included. “No man alive knows the enormous power that is now vested in the CIA, nor the wealth it dispenses, nor the policy it makes,” Scripps-Howard reporter Richard Starnes wrote a month after the assassination. At that same moment, former President Harry S. Truman, in a much quoted op ed piece on the front page of the Washington Post, accused CIA of running a “shadow government.” CIA’s unilateral exercise of power was only just beginning.
By the second decade of the millennium, CIA was a government in its own right; the Agency was choosing its own targets for murder. It was indeed a “farewell to justice.” In the years following the Kennedy assassination, a political culture began to take hold that was radically different from the one John F. Kennedy believed he was serving under. Kennedy opposed a grinding ground war in Vietnam, and all the begging and pleading of his cabinet did not persuade him otherwise.
His death was followed by a politics of permanent war, wars of duration. Vietnam was followed by a plethora of wars and conflicts, Iraq and Afghanistan only the most flagrant examples. If Kennedy believed he could thwart CIA in its claims to power (see Chapter 11), CIA made world-wide political assassination its “new normal” and received presidential endorsement for whatever it did. Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of the Iran-Contra illegalities was one example.
