* In 1993, a photograph surfaced of a Civil Air Patrol (CAP) cookout in New Orleans, showing Ferrie and Oswald in it, though not anywhere near each other. At the time the photo was taken, sometime in 1955, Oswald, who joined the CAP briefly on July 27, 1955, was clearly a member of the group, but Ferrie, a pilot who had previously commanded the group, was not, having been expelled from it on December 31, 1954. However, he apparently continued to be associated with the group in an unofficial capacity, and the HSCA was unable to determine if Ferrie and Oswald actually knew each other in the CAP. (9 HSCA 103–115) With respect to Ferrie having no recollection of ever having met Oswald, even if Ferrie had met Oswald at a CAP meeting, as the owner of the photo, John Ciravolo, told author Patricia Lambert in a July 9, 1997, interview, “I’m in the picture [too], and I’m sure David Ferrie wouldn’t remember me, either” (Lambert, False Witness, p.61). Prior to the emergence of the photograph, the person most cited as putting Oswald and Ferrie together at the CAP in New Orleans was Edward Voebel, a high school friend of Oswald’s in New Orleans who got Oswald interested in the CAP unit. Voebel testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald only attended “two or three meetings” and then “lost interest.” Voebel said, “I think [Captain Ferrie] was there when Lee attended one of those meetings, but I’m not sure of that.” (8 H 14)
* For many at the time, the sudden and untimely death of Ferrie, just four days after he had been identified in the media as a target of Garrison’s investigation, seemed to confirm Garrison’s allegation that powerful, unknown forces were behind the assassination, forces that would never permit Garrison to peel away the layers to the truth. “He sure took a bad time to die,” Attorney General Ramsey Clark told President Johnson on the evening of Ferrie’s death (Tape-recorded conversation between Clark and LBJ at 6:40 p.m., February 22, 1967, in Holland, Kennedy Assassination Tapes, p.402). To a media that was becoming impatient with Garrison for his failure to provide substantive evidence of his startling charges, Ferrie’s death caused a heightened interest in the case. Maybe, the journalists thought, Garrison was on to something after all. The problem for Garrison was that, if we’re to believe him, with Ferrie’s death he had lost his main suspect in the Kennedy assassination. But Garrison was not about to let a little thing like death derail his determination to solve the assassination. Within three short days, he had a new chief suspect, Clay Shaw, and four days later, March 1, introduced Shaw to the world when he placed him under arrest for having conspired to murder Kennedy.
* Ferrie elaborated on the problem in an earlier interview with the FBI. He said he had been working as an investigator and law clerk for Gill since March of 1962. Martin began visiting him at Gill’s office, and because Gill didn’t want Martin “hanging around” his office, Ferrie admits he put Martin out of Gill’s office in an undiplomatic manner. Since that time, Ferrie said, Martin had been out to hurt him “in every manner possible,” including, finally, trying to connect him with the assassination. (CD 75, pp.287, 293, FBI interview of David Ferrie by SAs Ernest C. Wall Jr. and L. M. Shearer Jr. on November 25, 1963)
* I say “virtually” as opposed to “positively” because at a press conference on February 22, 1967, the coroner, Dr. Chetta, theorized the possibility of a link between Ferrie’s aneurysm and suicide if Ferrie ingested pills to kill himself and the pills induced such violent retching that it burst a blood vessel (Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1967, p.6). But this was before the negative toxicology report came out on February 24. On February 25, Chetta announced to the media that there was “no indication whatsoever of suicide or murder” in Ferrie’s death. (Times-Picayune [New Orleans], February 26, 1967; see also Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1967, pp.1, 6)
* But the person who Garrison says reignited his interest in investigating the assassination in the autumn of 1966 (and before he called Martin into his office) was the U.S. senator from Louisiana, Russell Long, whom he knew and whose father was Huey “Kingfish” Long, the most colorful and powerful politician in Louisiana history. In November of 1966, Garrison found himself, as noted earlier, seated on a plane next to Long on a flight from New Orleans to Washington, and when the subject turned to the Kennedy assassination, the senator expressed his doubts about the Warren Commission finding that Oswald had acted alone. He just didn’t believe that Oswald, using a cheap, bolt-action rifle with a defective scope, could have fired two out of three shots with deadly accuracy at a moving target. Someone else was also involved, Long told Garrison, who at that time had put the Kennedy assassination behind him. When Garrison asked Long who would have had a motive to kill Kennedy, Long replied, “I wouldn’t worry about motive until I find out if there appeared to be more than one gunman.” After returning to New Orleans, Garrison, who respected Long’s intelligence and stature, immediately ordered the entire set of Warren Commission volumes to study, and he was on his way. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp.13–15; Mann, Legacy to Power, pp.254–256; Morning Advocate [Baton Rouge], February 21, 1967)
* Assassination researcher Gus Russo believes that when the national office of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee denied Oswald’s request to set up a local chapter in New Orleans, he simply appropriated this address near where he worked to give the appearance of substance to his one-man operation (Russo, Live by the Sword, p.550 note 23).
* Even without Beverly Oliver’s admission, it appears obvious from the Babushka Lady photo that Oliver was not she. Photos of Oliver at the time show her to be a teenager of average weight. But even though one can’t see her face, the Babushka Lady gives every appearance of being heavier and much older, almost matronly.
* Beverly Oliver is so outrageous that in 1997 she contacted James Earl Ray’s lawyers with some explosive information. Ray, in Memphis, Tennessee, had been arguing that a mysterious and long-sought figure he had met by the name of “Raoul” was the mastermind behind the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and it was Raoul, not he, who had shot and killed King on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. (Ray pled guilty in 1969 and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison, but in later years tried to set aside his conviction on the ground that he was innocent and had been coerced into pleading guilty.) Oliver told Ray’s lawyers that at the time she met Oswald and Ferrie at Ruby’s nightclub, Raoul was with them. (Michael Dorman, “Prosecutors Probe Claims by Ray’s Lawyers about King Assassin,” Newsday, December 10, 1997, p.A24)
* Also historians agree that JFK and his brother RFK were of the same mind about virtually every issue pursued by the Kennedy administration. Indeed, as one author wrote, RFK was “his brother’s troubleshooter, lightning rod, spokesman, adviser, no-man [as in yes and no], eyes and ears (‘Little Brother Is Watching’), whiphand overseer of the FBI and CIA and [all of the] presidential wishes and thoughts that the President would not let himself be heard to speak” (Beschloss, Crisis Years, p.303). No one (except, perhaps, Oliver Stone’s X, who did not exist) was more aware of JFK’s disenchantment with the CIA over the Bay of Pigs than former CIA director Richard Helms, who was the CIA’s chief of operations at the time. In his memoirs, he writes that in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, “at the Agency [CIA] the impression was that Robert Kennedy…would serve as his brother’s vengeful hatchet man.” But Helms goes on to say that “whether it was the result of General [Maxwell] Taylor’s perceptive and levelheaded approach, the influence of Admiral Burke and Allen Dulles [JFK had appointed General Taylor to head the aforementioned executive inquiry as to why the Bay of Pigs invasion had failed, and Burke, chief of naval operations, and CIA Director Allen Dulles were on the committee], or his own findings, [Robert] Kennedy was to develop a more balanced view of the Agency than he had in the days after the collapse of the ZAPATA [code name for invasion] operation. In the weeks that followed, we were relieved to learn that he was a quick study. The two months of back-to-back interviews and briefings with the committee left Kennedy with an abiding interest in covert action and a measure of respect for the Agency.” Elsewhere, H
elms, who worked very closely with RFK for over a year on Operation Mongoose, the administration’s effort to overthrow Castro, said about RFK, “as always speaking for his brother.” (Helms with Hood, Look over My Shoulder, pp.182, 205)
†That the majority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (one of whose members, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, Kennedy almost outwardly detested because of his crude bravado and hard-line, saber-rattling rhetoric) wanted our nation to militarily intervene in Vietnam has been established and is almost a given. That’s usually, though not always, the military’s mindset. As General George S. Patton Jr. wrote in a letter to his hero, General John J. (Black Jack) Pershing, at the time of the First World War, “War is the only place where a man really lives.” Indeed, as far back as October of 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff took the position on Vietnam that “the time is now past when actions short of intervention by outside forces could reverse the rapidly worsening situation” (Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on October 5, 1961). It also is well known that Kennedy’s relationship with the nation’s military leaders was only lukewarm. Basically, he did not trust their judgment, particularly after the Bay of Pigs, where they had endorsed the CIA operation, and they weren’t enamored with his overly cautious military instincts. But where is there any evidence in American history that when our military leaders wanted a war and their commander in chief wouldn’t give it to them, they even thought about murdering him, much less actually doing it?
* Our military presence in Vietnam (opposing Communism), in the form of military advisers, arms, and equipment, dated back to the administration of President Eisenhower during the Indochina War between France and the Vietminh, the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists. The war, which started in 1946, ended with the Geneva Accords of 1954 (which the United States refused to endorse) calling for the withdrawal of all French troops from Indochina (which included Vietnam [divided by the Accords at the 17th parallel into North and South Vietnam], Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaya, and Burma), which the French had dominated and colonized since the mid-nineteenth century. By the end of the war, the United States had 342 military advisers in Indochina, mainly in Saigon, assisting the French Expeditionary Corps.
* Stone told the National Press Club that his movie JFK “suggests it was Vietnam that led to the assassination of John Kennedy, that he became too dangerous, too strong an advocate of changing the course of the Cold War, too clear a proponent of troop withdrawal for those who supported the idea of a war in Vietnam” (C-Span transcript of appearance by Oliver Stone before National Press Club on January 15, 1992, p.5).
†NSAM 273 came out of the now famous “Honolulu Conference” of November 20, 1963, at CINCPAC (Commander in Chief of the Pacific) headquarters in Hawaii. There, President Kennedy’s top national security people, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA Director John McCone, and McGeorge Bundy met to formulate a post-Diem (South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated on November 2) American foreign policy vis-à-vis Vietnam, the withdrawal plans for the 1,000 troops, and the increase in U.S. covert actions against the North Vietnamese. (Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp.429–435; O’Leary and Seymour, Triangle of Death, p.49) Author Craig Roberts erroneously writes that the draft of NSAM 273 was “prepared for LBJ” (Roberts, Kill Zone, p.98). But not only was the draft prepared while Kennedy was still alive, but its language can only be interpreted as referring to President Kennedy, not LBJ.
* One thing that militates against Kennedy ever sending combat troops to Vietnam and, even if he decided he wanted to, to his not ordering U.S. soldiers to engage in armed conflict in Vietnam without an actual congressional declaration of war (as opposed to the mere congressional resolution in 1964 flowing from the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was cited as support for our further military involvement in Vietnam) is that Kennedy, unlike so many of his predecessors and successors, understood that as president he did not have the constitutional right to engage the nation in war.
Although Article II, Section 2 (1) does provide that “the President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” technically this only places the president at the head of this nation’s armed forces. It clearly envisions, as a predicate to his conducting war as the head of the nation’s armed forces, that war has been declared. And Article I, Section 8 (11) (“The Congress shall have power…to declare war”) exclusively and unambiguously gives that power to Congress, not the president. So much for the apparent intent of the framers of the Constitution. The reality is that throughout this nation’s history, presidents, with out the approval of Congress, have time and again committed American military forces abroad. In fact, only five times in the nation’s history has Congress declared war: the War of 1812; the Mexican War, 1846; the Spanish-American War, 1898; World War I, 1917; and World War II, 1941. Political commentator Russell Baker has wryly observed that “presidents now say, sure, the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war, but it doesn’t forbid presidents to make war, so long as they don’t declare it. As a result, the declared war has become obsolete. Its successor is the undeclared war.”
In a March 1962 press conference, Kennedy said that if combat troops “in the generally understood sense of the word” (i.e., fighting soldiers, not advisers) were required in Vietnam, that would call for a “constitutional decision, [and] of course, I would go to Congress” (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp.708–709). Kennedy’s realization that a congressional declaration of war was truly necessary may have had at least some deterrent effect on him, if only in the sense that he knew that if he were going to follow the Constitution he could not commence war at his whim, but would have to negotiate a major, heavily publicized hurdle in Congress.
* “As is stated in the Pentagon Papers, NSAM 273,…only three days after [Johnson] assumed the Presidency, was intended primarily to endorse the policies pursued by President Kennedy and to ratify provisional decisions reached in Honolulu just before the assassination” (Pentagon Papers, vol.3, p.2).
†As George Lardner, national security reporter for the Washington Post, said, “There was no abrupt change in Vietnam policy after JFK’s death” (George Lardner Jr., “On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland—How Oliver Stone’s Version of the Kennedy Assassination Exploits the Edge of Paranoia,” Washington Post, May 19, 1991, p.D5).
* Ken O’Donnell, Kennedy’s appointments secretary and political right hand, says that actually, Kennedy would have wanted to withdraw American troops before 1965, but, as he told Senator Mike Mansfield (who recommended to JFK that we withdraw from Vietnam after JFK sent him there in 1962 to assess the situation) during a meeting in the Oval Office in the spring of 1963, “I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m reelected.” O’Donnell quotes the president as telling him after Mansfield left the office, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.” (O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, pp.16, 472)
* A reference to the North Vietnamese Communist government (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) of President Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, which supported militarily and manipulated the Vietcong in their joint effort to overthrow the South Vietnamese government (Republic of Vietnam) of President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon.
* As we know, the number of American combat troops in Vietnam would eventually swell to over 500,000, of whom 58,000 would die. The Vietnam War (called the American War by the Vietnamese) would claim an estimated 3.6 million Vietnamese lives. (David Shipler, “Robert McNamara and the Ghosts of Vietnam,” New York Times Magazine, August 10, 1997, pp.30, 50; the highest troop deployment was 529,000 in 1968: New York Times, January 28, 1973, p.1) Although the number of troop
s deployed and casualties were vastly greater in the Second World War (as well as the First World War), remarkably, by December of 1967, “the United States had dropped more tons of explosives—1,630,500—on North and South Vietnam than it did on all World War II targets (1,544,463) and twice as many tons as were dropped during the Korean War” (Wicker, JFK and LBJ, p.286).
America’s military involvement in Vietnam ended with the cease-fire agreement signed in Paris on January 27, 1973, by representatives of the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Vietcong (New York Times, January 28, 1973, pp.1, 24). On March 29, the last U.S. combat troops in Vietnam were withdrawn. However, the war continued between North and South Vietnam until Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975. Today, of course, there is no North and South Vietnam, just the one Communist nation of Vietnam, whose capital is Hanoi. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
* See endnote for a discussion of the allegation that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged and used as a pretext by LBJ to go to war.
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