The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  On October 1, 1960, the State of Louisiana set up the aforementioned Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities (LUAC). The chairman was James Pfister, a segregationist Louisiana legislator (who had a close relationship to Clarence Manion, long-time Dean of Notre Dame Law School and a charter member of the John Birch Society). Guy Banister applied for a position at LUAC. Staff from the Louisiana Sovereignty Commission were assigned to assist LUAC. Banister was hired as an investigator.

  Robert Morris, LUAC and Lee Harvey Oswald’s FPCC in 1963

  LUAC held a hearing on April 24, 1963. Two witnesses testified about Communist literature in New Orleans. Robert Morris, former counsel of SISS, testified next. He shared his work history with the Committee with regard to his role as a Naval Intelligence officer in 1941. As part of his job, he attended a Communist rally in New York City. Importantly, Morris warned LUAC about the Fair Play For Cuba Committee (FPCC) whose only member in New Orleans in 1963 was Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Basically, one has to conclude that Morris knew Lee Harvey Oswald either indirectly or maybe in person. If Morris testified under oath about the FPCC in New Orleans, what other conclusion could one reach?

  Senator James O. Eastland had been investigating the FPCC in SISS hearings beginning in 1960. Out of eight hearings, five were held during the time when Lee Harvey Oswald was active in contacting Communist groups which included the FPCC. Oswald actually wrote to the Socialist Worker’s Party trying to entangle them with the FPCC. Dr. Caulfield points out that the witnesses against the FPCC had not been to the Soviet Union. In the past, turncoat Communist witnesses before SISS, HUAC and the McCarthy Committee had usually been to Russia. This is an important argument when we evaluate Oswald as possibly working for SISS. Eastland would have welcomed Oswald as an informant, infiltrator and witness. Oswald’s history in the USSR would be crucial to Eastland’s task.

  In October, 1961, there had been a “school” on anti-Communism held in New Orleans. Guy Banister, Robert Morris and Herbert Philbrick were in attendance. (As mentioned elsewhere, the name Herbert Philbrick pops up at a very high level in statistical analysis of the assassination). HUAC investigated the FPCC in 1962. To restate the facts regarding Willis, in Me & Lee, Judyth Vary Baker implicates HUAC chairman and Louisiana Congressman Edwin Willis in the assassination plot.

  Upon returning from Russia, Lee Harvey Oswald began correspondence with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He wanted to start a Dallas chapter but was refused. He also communicated with a number of other Communist related groups. He was seeking to manufacture evidence that he had actually done photographic work for the Communist Party.

  On February 8, 1963 Eastland held a hearing on the FPCC where he used letters from SCEF officers Aubrey Williams and Carl Braden to forge a link between FPCC and SCEF. On February 14, 1963 at an Eastland hearing on FPCC, the start witness was V.T. Lee. As most readers familiar with the JFK history will recognize, V.T. Lee was exchanging letters with Oswald during this period. In March, 1963 while hearings about the FPCC were ongoing, Oswald ordered his rifle. As Dr. Caulfield points out, the Warren Commission found that LHO may have handed out FPCC literature in Dallas in April, 1963. In April, 1963, the FPCC sent literature to Oswald while he was still living in Dallas. In May, 1963, Oswald again wrote to FPCC head V.T. Lee. This time it was about his, Oswald’s, opening an office in New Orleans which went against the instructions he received from Lee.

  At this point, Caulfield injects evidence produced by Jim Garrison that ex-Marine and Oswald buddy Kerry Thornley was impersonating Oswald in New Orleans. So, even as of May, 1963, the circumstantial evidence seems clear that Eastland and Oswald were working together with regard to the issue of the FPCC. If Thornley was involved, then there were other U.S. Government agencies involved as well. This would be because Thornley (Oswald’s buddy from long ago in the Marines) was essentially stalking Oswald for some unknown reason, which could only have been a mission for some “deep cover” intelligence operation.

  The reader may have read that Thornley was not only Oswald’s acquaintance in the Marines, but also (for some bizarre reason) had written a book about Oswald years before 1963. That could only be the case if Thornley had become an expert on Oswald so he could impersonate him at some later date. All of this smacks of the “false defector” program in action.

  In June 1963, SISS Chairman James O. Eastland was doggedly working to link the FPCC and SCEF to the Communist Party. On August 9, 1963, the famous brawl involving Cuban Carlos Bringuier and Lee Harvey Oswald occurred on the streets of New Orleans. Not only were SISS and HUAC investigating Communists in Septermber, 1963, but the old McCarthy Committee (the Permanent Subcommittee on investigations) was interviewing crusty old Communist turncoat Louis Bundez on the subject of Corliss Lamont, the NAACP and the Committee to abolish HUAC with which James Dombrowski was involved. Your author found a listing of members of the Committee to Abolish HUAC among Dombrowki’s personal papers.

  On August 16, 1963, Oswald was again handing out FPCC literature, this time in front of the International Trade Mart. On August 28, Oswald wrote the the Central Committee of the Communist Party, discussing the FPCC and events in New Orleans. At this same time, Oswald gave people his business address, which was actually the address of the New Orleans African-American newpaper, The Louisiana Weekly. Because James Dombrowski of SCEF was the preeminent white civil rights figure in New Orleans at that time, he and SCEF had a close relationship with the newspaper. Also at this same time, Oswald appeared at the famous black voter registration drive in Clinton, Louisiana.

  On November 14, 1960, just seven days after the presidential election, U.S. Marshalls forcibly integrated the New Orleans schools. On May 19, 1961, Dombrowski was called to Montgomery, Alabama by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and other leaders to assist Freedom Riders there. Clifford and Virginia Durr were there along with other staunch supporters of SCEF. A car belonging to the Durrs was turned over and set on fire. Meanwhile, inside a church, Dr. Martin Luther King was giving a speech.

  The Freedom Riders headed on to New Orleans. In Montgomery, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy dispatched 400 federal marshalls to protect demonstrators. JFK’s personal representative there was clubbed unconscious. At this point the Bradens acted to ally the SCEF with such other groups as the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). Carl Braden of Dombrowski’s SCEF had strong ties to Labor. He got the Teamsters to contribute to SNCC. Bob Zellner, a graduate of a Methodist school called Huntington College was hired by SNCC. He, in turn, urged the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to start an organizing drive in the South. SDS was, in its day, considered a violent and dangerous group by many. Governor George Wallace of Alabama ordered Zellner arrested but was found to lack the legal authority.

  When Zellner and SNCC marched on the City Hall in McComb, Mississippi, Zellner was beaten, his eyes gouged, and he was kicked unconscious. In nearby East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Zellner and SNCC volunteer Charles McDew were jailed and charged with criminal anarchy. By mid-1962, SCEF was working with the National Lawyers Guild, which was considered to be a subversive group by Southern segregationists.

  Around the time of the anti-Communist activity of James O. Eastland and SISS, the Louisiana legislature enacted tough new laws aimed at subversive activities and Communist propaganda. The impetus for these laws came from the wealthy quasi-dictator of Plaquemine Parish, Judge Leander Perez. The first announcement about these laws came on May 11, 1962.

  According to Dr. Caulfield, the planning for the raid on SCEF which was attendant to these laws, began as early as July, 1962. He says that in an affidavit in a later proceeding, SISS Chief Counsel J.G. Sourwine admitted to being involved in SCEF raid-planning before July, 1962. If that is true, then the timing coincides exactly with the activities of Senator Dodd and General Julius Klein in co-operation with General Reinhard Gehlen of West German intelligence and the overall plan of the JFK assa
ssination. Dodd and Eastland shared the chairmanship of SISS. Obviously their activities would have to be in tandem.

  Dr. Caulfield believes that the hearings held on July 31, 1963 were also part of the plans for the SCEF raid. The subject of the hearings was JFK’s proposed Civil Rights Act and the hearings focused on Communists within the Civil Rights movement. Robert F. Kennedy had recently denied the presence of Communists on the Staff of Dr. Martin Luther King. Senator Strom Thurmond, a strong segregationist, is one of several such Southern Senators whose names are not usually seen in the assassination literature. Others are Senator Richard Russell of Georgia and Senator John Stennis of Tennessee.

  But in on August 24, 1963, Thurmond began inserting anti-Communist propaganda into the Congresssional Record which blamed Communism for the increasing civil rights pressure in the South. This even included specific statements about SCEF officer Carl Braden. Dr. Caulfield suggests that this was because Thurmond was by then aware of the plan for the SCEF raid and the legal attack against SCEF. If so, Thurmond’s knowledge likely did not include any inkling about the JFK assassination plot. Apparently Richard Russell, John Stennis and Strom Thurmond never had any JFK blood on their hands. In the opinion of the author, this fact can be inferred because of their reputations for favoring “law and order” instead of lynchings and terror. By their actions after the assassination, Russell and Stennis seemed to favor exposing the truth about the assassination.

  After the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace made an appearance on the television show Today where he blamed the bombing on agitators and on the Kennedy Administration. Especially significant to our story, he displayed pictures of SCEF officers Anne Braden and Carl Braden; also SCEF chief James Dombrowski. Wallace cited the hearings of Eastland in 1954 and the HUAC hearings in 1958. This connection to violence on September 15, 1963 mirrored the tongue-slashing of witness Stanley Holden of the Otepka hearings around the same time. Incidents of violence were beginning to escalate on the part of perpetrators and their opponents. Of course, this escalation led up to the assassination.

  In order to move forward with their plans for SCEF, in August 1963, the Louisiana segregationists decided to stage a raid to get the list of supposed Communist supporters rather than rely on the power of the subpoena. They met together with SISS counsel J.G. Sourwine to plan this raid.

  On October 4, 1963, over 50 attorneys who were members of the National Lawyers’ Guild were in New Orleans for a conference together with the SCEF. Just after 3 p.m. that day, police broke into Dombrowski’s office with pistols drawn. The police boxed up all of the SCEF records. These police raiders included the Louisiana State Police Bureau of Identification led by Major Russell Willie. Also involved was New Orleans Police Intelligence represented by Major Presley J. Trosclair. And last but not least was Frederick B. Alexander, the staff director of the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities (LUAC).

  The raiders carried away 73 boxes of SCEF records. Although SCEF was a foundantion and therefore had no actual members, the raiders found a mailing list for an organization called New Orleans Committee for Peaceful Alternatives. (Dr. Caulfield, in General Walker, presents evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald had infiltratied that group). Some of the Louisiana State Police involved in the raid were, at the time, assigned to the staff of the Louisiana Sovereignty Commission.

  At 11:45 p.m. on October 4, 1963, the Counsel for LUAC Jack Rogers called SISS counsel J.G. Sourwine in Washington. Rogers described what had been found. He called Eastland who then ordered a subpoena for the SCEF records. The subpoenas were dated on October 4, 1963 which proved that Eastland had involvement before the fact of the raid, but he denied it. James Pfister, chairman of LUAC blamed the SCEF raid on the anti-Braden press statements of Alabama Governor George Wallace.

  James Dombrowki and his lawyer Ben Smith were arrested. Smith and his law partner Bruce Walzer were arrested and charged with being members of the National Lawyer’s Guild, a subversive group and that they hadn’t registered as such. Back at the NLG convention, the 50 lawyers who were assembled went wild with anger. Such nationally prominent lawyers were in attendance as Arthur Kinoy and William Kunstler, who would eventually gain national fame.

  The SCEF raid made page one headlines as far away as Los Angeles. Jack N. Rogers, who was chairman of LUAC, held a press conference. He said the raid had been sparked by Governor George Wallace of Alabama who said on TV that Dombrowski and the Bradens were “the cause of racial agitation in his state.”

  LUAC counsel announced the theory of the LUAC case against SCEF. He alleged that SCEF was a “holding company” for all Southern civil rights groups. As such, if you proved that SCEF was involved with the Communist Party, that would apply to all the “affiliated” civil rights groups that SCEF supported, either verbally or financially.

  Thus, under the state Communist Control acts, virtually all southern civil rights groups could be legally abolished as Communist.

  SCEF leader James Dombrowski spoke out against the raid and prosecutions. He said that if the Communist Control Act remained in force and applied, that no citizen or lawyer would come to the aid of the blacks because they would be afraid of a conviction for subversion.

  Acting on the advice of his noted lawyer Arthur Kinoy, Dombrowski filed a civil rights suit against Eastland. The judge in the criminal case was J. Bernard Cocke. In this criminal proceeding, a policeman testified that an informant had supplied information that the SCEF was subversive. Under cross-examination, he refused to give the name of the informant. That informant was probably Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Judge Cocke ordered LUAC to bring into court every item seized in the raid. Failing that, the judge quashed the arrests citing insuffient evidence and accused LUAC of having based the arrests on their own conclusions rather than upon the evidence. Outside the courtroom, Representative James H. Pfister, chairman of LUAC held a press conference. He said that on the following Tuesday, both he and Jack Rogers, chief counsel of LUAC, would appear before SISS at a public hearing. Before this press conference, no one had known that James O. Eastland was involved in the raid. It was also revealed that J.G. Sourwine, Chief Counsel of SISS came to New Orleans the day before with blank subpoenas.

  Federal Judge Robert A. Ainsworth ordered SISS to keep the records inside the boundaries of Louisiana. But overnight, SISS absconded with the records, taking them across the river to Mississippi and thus out of the jurisdiction of the Louisiana Federal District court. Although in Birmingham on business, Dombrowski returned to New Orleans on November 14, 1963 where a grand jury was convened to investigate SCEF. The Federal Court was asked to quash the State proceedings which, at that time, would have been totally against both Federal Statutory law as well as Federal precedent. The issue before Judge Ainsworth was whether the Louisiana Communist Control act was constitutional. In a decision by a three-judge appeals panel on December 9, 1963, one judge thought the law unconstitutional but the majority upheld the Louisiana anti-Communist law.

  District Attorney Jim Garrison was on the side of the prosecution, but he agreed to delay the prosecutions of Dombrowski and others until the Supreme Court of the U.S. heard the appeal. Recall that Dombrowski had also filed a civil suit based on the Civil Rights Act against James O. Eastland. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided that James O. Eastland was immune from suit because he was a member of Congress acting in his job. However, Chief Counsel of SISS J.G. Sourwine was not held to be immune and he was required to defend himself in court and suffer possible liability if he lost.

  In a case which became a landmark, in April, 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court in Dombrowski vs. Pfister, struck down the Louisiana Communist Control Act in a 5-2 decision with two abstentions. One abstention was Justice Hugo Black, who abstained on the basis that his in-laws had been founders of SCHW, the predecessor of SCEF. With only five justices against the Communist Control Act, a switch by only one
Justice could have thrown the entire civil rights movement into oblivion.

  Equally important in the case was the ending of the “doctrine of abstention.” This required Federal Courts to await the outcome of State proceedings until reviewing or altering them. This was a major fundamental earthquake in the relationship between State and Federal courts. Finally, approving Dombrowski’s civil case against the raiders of SCEF was also a landmark decision. It is remarkable that a Federal Judge would allow a suit for damages against the Chief Counsel of a Senate Committee when he was in the process of doing his job in that capacity. One has to wonder whether the precedent in the case by Dombrowski against Sourwine has ever been followed by Federal Courts or was it unique to this explosive case.

  The wheels of justice turn slowly. But in the case of the SCEF raid, the Federal Courts moved like lightning. When they instantly intervened to halt the SCEF raid trainwreck in New Orleans, there could only have been one reason. Their actions totally ignored the ironclad doctrine of abstention which was both a statute and in total precedence without exception. The Federal Judge involved had to know that there was an overwhelming national security issue behind this raid and the aftermath. In the opinion of this author, it was very likely that the Judge was quietly told that this raid might be part of a plot to murder a high official (or some story close to that) and if this case blew up in the papers, when that happened, then the cat would be out of the bag and this would spell disaster.