The Clinton-Jackson Link to Lee
Harvey Oswald
and Judyth Vary Baker
by Judyth
Vary Baker
with
commentary by Dr. Howard Platzman
A defining event that established an undeniable link among three
individuals
--Lee Harvey
Oswald, Clay LaVergne Shaw, and David William Ferrie –long ignored or obfuscated
by Warren Commission aficionados – was established when witnesses in Clinton,
Louisiana observed them together; less well-known is a more obscure report that
Lee Harvey Oswald was associated with an unknown female when he was reported
seen in nearby Jackson, Louisiana.
Supporting statements include those offered by employees at the East
Louisiana State [Mental] Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, generally regarded to
have occurred no more than a few days after the sightings of Oswald with Shaw
and Ferrie in Clinton.
Other sources can supply
information about the lives of all three men, amply demonstrating that under
ordinary circumstances a disgraced Marine who was a returned “defector” from a
stint in the USSR lasting over two and a half years, a pilot of questionable
repute, with ties to Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and a highly decorated World
War II veteran --currently the overworked and esteemed Director of the
International Trade Mart of New Orleans-- had no reasonable excuse to be seen
together in a town 110 miles from New Orleans.
The three afore-mentioned
personages were seen together in Clinton from approximately 10:45 am until
about 3:45 pm, in a black Cadillac identified by Clinton Town Marshall John
Manchester
as belonging to Clay Shaw of the International Trade Mart.
Manchester and Henry Palmer, East Feliciana
Parish’s
Registrar, worked together to impede blacks from getting on the rolls.
Manchester’s diligence (and racist attitude) concerning handling outsiders is
revealed in this quote:
“
At the instruction of Henry Earl Palmer,
John Manchester arrested CORE worker Stephen Lesser on August 28, 1963,
allegedly because he refused to leave the courthouse, which housed Palmer's
office. Lesser had been escorting in black citizens and helping them register.
Wednesday, August
28, 1963 was the same day Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech
in Washington, which galvanized efforts to get blacks registered. The event of concern in Clinton occurred
Thursday, August 29, 1963. A vigilant
John Manchester would be sent by Palmer to check on the identity of the driver
of a black Cadillac parked about 50 feet from the Parish courthouse, within
which the Registrar’s Office was located.
Manchester testified
to the HSCA after giving interviews to Garrison investigators. In this essay, we
will concentrate on the earliest testimonies offered by such witnesses as
Manchester, rather than on statements they might have made many decades
later. One reason for doing so is
because of the complaint of Jackson barber Edwin Lea McGeehee that he was
pressured by researchers to say he saw Lee Harvey Oswald enter a black Cadillac
after getting a haircut in his barbershop, when he insisted to the author and a
witness
that he never saw what vehicle Oswald entered after getting his haircut.
In McGeehee’s
testimony in the Garrison trial, an attempt to place the event as late as
mid-September was resisted by the barber:
Q: In other words, it could have
been as late as September 15?
A: It was more closely, I would say,
the last of August and the early part of September.
…
Q: Now, did you not testify that
you had cool nights through the 15th of September?
A: Well, the last part of August
we had some relatively cool nights, which was unusual for August, and we
commented on that several times in the barber shop. If I had to say it, I would
say the last of August.
Q: And you say you discussed
this with the farmers in the barber shop? Is that right?
A: Yes.
Q: Well, now, is your testimony
the testimony of the farmers in the barber shop or your testimony?
A: Both of us.
Q: Oh, I see. In other words,
you are testifying here from the knowledge of the farmers in the barber shop
and from yours, is that Right?
A: Well, we discussed it, and
they said how cool it was and I agreed.
As a matter
of fact, Oswald’s encounter with the barber occurred on the afternoon of August
30, 1963, a Saturday.
Q: Now let's see if you can be a
little more accurate on your description of this automobile…
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Was it a large automobile or
a small one?
A: If I had to say what it was,
it was a -- it resembled a Kaiser or a Frazer or an Old Nash.
Q: Did it appear to be old
enough to have been a Kaiser or a Frazer?
A: Yes, that is what I noticed
about it.
Next.McGeehee was telling the court that he saw a woman in
the old car:
A: The door was open and I noticed this car
drive up. It passed the door a little ways, not too far, where the back end was
just a little past the shop, and I did not see the man get out, and the next
thing I noticed, there was nobody on the street hardly, not anybody, as a
matter of fact, and this man walked in the shop.
Q: Could you describe the car
for us at all?
A: Yes, the car was -- it was an
old car, it was battered, it was a dark colored car -- it might have been dark
green -- but the make of it I just couldn't remember, it was an old car, real
old.
Q: Now, Mr. McGehee, to the best
of your recollection and knowledge, was there anyone else in that car?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you describe that person?
A: There was a woman sitting on
the front seat -- this is after the man was getting a haircut I glanced at the
car -- and in the back seat what I noticed was -- looked like a bassinet.
Q: A baby bassinet?
A: Right.
Q: Now, Mr. McGehee, had Oswald
entered the shop before this car pulled up?
A: No, after.
Q: Did you ever see that car
leave in front of the shop?
A: It eventually left after he
left; I didn't notice if he got in the car, I didn't pay any attention.
Q: Well, approximately how long
after he left the shop did the car leave?
A: Right away. I noticed -- I
heard it pull off, I didn't pay no attention to it, it was gone.
daughter Mary was home –an important statement, since she
would have returned to her college dormitory at LSU for classes by the first
week of September and would not, presumably, have been present in this small
rural town. On June 3rd,1967,
Andrew J. Sciambra wrote a Memorandum
to Jim Garrison containing the following information:
MEMORANDUM
January 29, 1968
TO: JIM GARRISON, District
Attorney
FROM: ANDREW J. SCIAMBRA,
Assistant District Attorney
RE: Interview with MARY MORGAN,
June 3, 1967
I went back to the home of
REEVES MORGAN to talk further with MR. MORGAN about OSWALD's appearance at his
home and also to talk with his daughter, MARY MORGAN, who had been at home at
the time of the OSWALD visit.
MARY MORGAN informed me that she
did not pay much attention to the incident as it was all very normal for lots
of people to drop in her dad's home in order to get some help for employment.
MARY told me that when OSWALD was in the house talking with her dad, she
happened to walk towards the screen door and went onto the porch and just
casually noticed that there was a dark colored car parked under the tree in
front of the house. It was rather dark and she didn't really pay much attention
to the car. She says that as best she can remember, it was an old car and the
model was somewhere in the Fifties. She says that she remembers seeing a woman
in the car. She did not pay much attention to the whole situation and she did
not go out to see OSWALD and the woman in the car drive away.
“At the end of
Feb.1969, during the closing arguments of the trial arising from Jim
Garrison's investigation into the JFK Assassination, Assistant District
Attorney James Alcock mentioned a witness
had reported seeing a woman other than Marina Oswald in a
car with Lee Harvey Oswald during the Summer of 1963.
|
|
|
Mr. Edwin Lea McGehee, the barber from Jackson, Louisiana
testified that Lee Harvey Oswald came into his barber shop in late August or
early September 1963 and that Oswald arrived in an old battered automobile
and that "there was a woman sitting on the front seat."
|
|
|
Asst. DA James Alcock concluded his comments by explaining to the jury that the
State could not identify the
woman, but they knew she was not Marina
Oswald.
|
|
|
I wish we could have identified
her.
I wish we could have brought her into the courtroom
and presented her to
you.
|
|
|
|
The “old car” was
not a popular item in the researchers’ bag of theories. And the absence of Shaw
and Ferrie from the car, to be replaced by a woman, made McGeehee’s and Mary
Morgan’s statements difficult to fit into any theory among the researchers.
It seems the easiest way out of the problem was simply to
refrain from mentioning the old car at all. In a much later interview, Mary
Morgan’s having seen an old car and a woman in it is completely left out of a
description in a Jim DiEugenio interview, now widely copied, that her very
young brother had seen a black Cadillac pull up to the Morgan homestead. If DiEugenio did not know about the Sciambra
Memorandum of June 3, 1967 (buried under the date of Jan. 29,1968) he would not
have thought to ask her again about her sighting of an old car with a woman in
it.
(August
26 and Sept. 4, 1994 Interviews of Mary Morgan Jenkins and her brother Van, by
Jim DiEugenio)
“Morgan’s daughter,Mary, also
confirmed seeing Oswald that night – she walked right by him on her way out of
the house.”
No mention was made of an old car, tough both the barber
Edwin Lea McGeehee and Mary Morgan had both described the same car, and noted
the presence of a woman in the car. With Sciambra’s Memorandum lost to these
researchers. They proceed to focus on a black Cadillac, and a boy, Van Reeves,
complies:
“Von,
himself [was] a young teenager at the time…As is a young boy’s wont, Von was
“horsing around” by the cedar trees in the front yard of the Morgan house, when
he took notice of the car coming up the drive. He remembered being impressed
with the look of the car and waited outside while the visitor talked to his
father.”
At this point, we are not given the name of Lee Oswald as
having been recognized by the young teenager, but the researcher implies that
‘the visitor’ was Lee Oswald. I would be good to get a direct quotation
concerning the identity of the ‘visitor’ but we are not given one in this
particular article. What we read next is
puzzling:
“He noticed that the driver of the
car waited as well. He couldn’tmake out the features of the driver in the
darkness of early evening, but remembered one unforgettable characteristic—a
shockof white hair. When the car left, Von asked his faher if the governor had
just paid them a visit. When asked why he thought it was the governor, Von
replied that he thought only the governor would come to their house in a black
Cadillac.” (emphasis by DiEugenio)
Reeves Morgan was a Louisiana State representative twice,
most recently from 1960-1964.
A’J. Weberman looked thoroughly into Morgan’s
life and background: here are some excerpts from his investigation:
REEVES MORGAN
Louisiana
State Representative Reeves Morgan told the HSCA:
“...I called the FBI. They are the only ones I ever related it to.
…Well, the fellow I talked to thanked me, but said, 'We already knew he had
been up in those parts.' He didn't say he knew he had been to my house.
Sometimes afterward, several days or so, I received a call from them and they
wanted to know what kind of clothes he had on; whoever it was called me from
the FBI…I didn't bother about [contacting the Warren Commission]. I figured I
went as far as I wanted to go. If they wanted to know anymore, I figured they'd
contact me. My testimony [during the Clay Shaw trial] kind of insinuated that I
wanted him to register in [Clinton], when I didn't tell him anything about
where to register.”
Weberman tells us that
“Reeves
Morgan, 78, had a stroke and was hospitalized in 1993. His grand-daughter,
Marguerite Morgan, explained that when Reeves Morgan went to the FBI with his
story the Bureau prevailed upon him not to make it public. She added, "My
grandfather is an old-style Louisiana politician who worked with Huey Long, a
friend of the Long family. He started in St. Helena Parish where he ran a
dairy. He was elected to the State Senate in the late 1950's…”
Did DiEugenio interview Reeves Morgan in 1994,
so that we could discern ‘who’ drove up in the black Cadillac, and when?
Juxtaposing Mary Morgan and Van Morgan together on the same night as having
seen “Oswald” (Mary)and “a visitor” (Van) might or might not have been a
problem, except that Mary saw an old car with a woman sitting in it –never
mentioned by Van—and never mentioned by DiEugenio—while Van said he saw a black
Cadillac. We have no statement from Reeves Morgan to clear up the problem.
However, as a witness to the trip to Jackson,
having been the occupant of the old car in question, I am able to do so. My
statements have never been challenged, though they have been ignored, and
persons never interviewed have been substituted for my presence, as explained
by researcher Dr. Howard Platzman, in his essay on the subject, repeated here:
Mellen’s
Magic Show:
How to Make
Two (or Three) Women and an Old Car Disappear
Whatever
the merits of Joan Mellen’s A Farewell
to Justice -- and there are more than a few -- the author fails utterly to
clarify the trip reputedly taken by Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and Lee Oswald to
the Clinton-Jackson area of Louisiana in the late summer of 1963. Having
declared that Clinton-Jackson is her specialty, her account is a monumental
disappointment.
Personal
note: Joan and I met once, for a long (at least five-hour) discussion during
the period in which she was researching her book. I find myself in the
unsettling position of having to note several mysterious omissions from, as
well as additions to, the final published account.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A man
fitting Oswald’s description visited Lee McGehee, a barber, and then Reeves
Morgan, formerly a state representative, both (by both witnesses’ testimony) in
the early evening of late August or early September 1963. Oswald asked McGehee
if there was work to be had at the East
Louisiana State
Hospital, a mental hospital located in
Jackson.
McGehee referred Oswald to Morgan and gave him directions to Morgan’s
home.
Rejecting
the reports of all researchers and witnesses, Mellen pegs the visits as taking
place on September 19, arguing that the weather was too cool for the visits to
have taken place during the earlier timeframe. This despite the assertions by
both McGehee and Morgan that the date could not have been past September
15. At the Garrison trial, asked four
times if the date could have been as late as “mid-September,” Morgan each time
declared: “I don’t believe it could have.” Mellen also doesn’t address the
probability that the college students organizing for voting rights in Clinton would most likely
have been in school by her late date. This is a small consideration, however,
when compared with the chaos that mars the rest of her account.
Most
importantly, a consensus has been developing that the Jackson hospital was a hotbed of MK-ULTRA
mind control experiments. After coming awfully close to confirming Garrison’s
speculations about companion research being conducted in biological warfare –
specifically, one centered on the weaponizing of cancer cells -- Mellen
sidesteps the issue. Her discussion of the role played by Dr. Mary Sherman in
this intrigue (Sherman’s mysterious death in 1967 lingers in New Orleans
lore) simply goes nowhere. Laudably, she arrives at the dots, but, troublingly,
she fails to connect them.
McGehee, Garrison Trial Testimony
Q: Now,
Mr. McGehee, can you recall approximately when it was that you saw Leon Oswald?
A: This
was -- as near as I can remember, it was in the -- we had some cool weather in the
last of August and the early part of September. I barber by myself, and when it
is cool I turn the air-conditioning off and keep the door open.
Q: Would
that have been the latter part of August, early part of September, 1963?
A: Right.
Q: Now,
at the time that Lee Harvey Oswald was in your barber shop, was anyone present
besides yourself?
A: No.
Q: Can
you recall approximately what time of day or night this was that he was in the
shop?
A: This
was along toward the evening.
Q: Were
you able to see, Mr. McGehee, how Oswald came to the shop, whether he --
A: The
door was open and I noticed this car drive up. It passed the door a little
ways, not too far, where the back end was just a little past the shop, and I
did not see the man get out, and the next thing I noticed, there was nobody on
the street hardly, not anybody, as a matter of fact, and this man walked in the
shop.
Q: Could you describe the car for us at all?
A: Yes, the car was -- it was an old car, it
was battered, it was a dark colored car -- it might have been dark green -- but
the make of it I just couldn't remember, it was an old car, real old.
Q: Now, Mr. McGehee, to the best of your
recollection and knowledge, was there anyone else in that car?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you describe that person?
A: There was a woman sitting on the front
seat -- this is after the man was getting a haircut I glanced at the car -- and
in the back seat what I noticed was -- looked like a bassinet.
Q: A baby bassinet?
A: Right.
Q: Now, Mr. McGehee, had Oswald entered the
shop before this car pulled up?
A: No, after.
Q: Did you ever see that car leave in front
of the shop?
A: It eventually left after he left; I didn't
notice if he got in the car, I didn't pay any attention.
Q: Well, approximately how long after he left
the shop did the car leave?
A: Right away. I noticed -- I heard it pull off, I didn't pay no attention to
it, it was gone.
The street was empty and
still, the barber states, except for the arrival and departure of one old car,
which parked “just passed the door a little ways, not too far, where the
back end was just a little past the shop. That car held a lady passenger, but he could only see the back of her head. The barber
appears to be stating his belief that Oswald arrived in this car and left in
it, though he didn’t actually see him do either. Notably, his testimony
includes no mention of a black Cadillac, although Garrison’s case would be
immeasurably strengthened by such a report.
Morgan, Garrison Trial Testimony
Q: (Exhibiting photograph
to witness) Mr. Morgan, I will show you now a picture that the State has marked
"S-1" for purposes of identification, and ask you if you recognize
the individual in that BY MR. SCIAMBRA:
Q: When did this
individual come to your home?
A: Had it figured out as
the latter part of August or either the first part of September, because I made
no dates or no memorandums or nothing on it.
Q: Was this in 1963?
A: '63, 1963.
…
Q: Tell the Court what you told Lee Harvey Oswald that day that you talked to
him in your home.
A: I told him that I
could not help him get a job at the hospital ahead of any of my constituents,
at the East Louisiana State Hospital, but I was not going to try to prevent him
from getting a job, and I told him all the procedures he would have to go
through to get in position to get a job, about going and putting in his
application and getting set up to take a Civil Service examination, and that
you just didn't go over there and get a job and just go to work, you had to go
through applications and take a Civil Service examination for a job in the
electrical department or something like that. They did have some jobs over
there maybe, but I didn't tell him all that, but to get into the electrical
department or maintenance you had to have a Civil Service exam, and -- he was
from New Orleans -- it wouldn't hurt if he was a registered voter up there, and
I told him that I knew a fellow up there once trying to find out what he can
from everybody around there, and I told him I knew a fellow up there whose
first name was Oswald and I asked him was he any kin to him.
Q: I take it then that
the conversation that you had with Oswald was pertaining to a job at the East Louisiana
State Hospital?
A: That was practically
all we discussed.
Q: And approximately how
long did you say you talked to Oswald that day?
A: Well, it wasn't too
long, I would say maybe 20 minutes or 25, just talked along there. I wasn't
wanting him to get the impression I was trying to rush him off or nothing.
Q: Was anybody at home when Oswald was at your house,
besides yourself?
A: Yes, sir, my daughter was there.
Q: Anybody else?
A: I don't remember whether my wife was there or not; I do
know my daughter was there though, but I never could place whether my wife was
there at the time or not.
Morgan doesn’t mention a car at all or any witness
other than his daughter, Mary, who was later interviewed by Andrew Sciambra,
Garrison’s lead investigator, on June 3, 1967. In his report dated January 29,
1968, he writes:
“I went back to the home of REEVES
MORGAN to talk further with MR. MORGAN … and also to talk with his daughter,
MARY MORGAN, who had been at home at the time of the OSWALD visit. MARY MORGAN…told me that when OSWALD was in
the house talking with her dad, she happened to walk towards the screen door
and went onto the porch and just casually noticed that there was a dark colored
car parked under the tree in front of the house. It was rather dark and she
didn't really pay much attention to the car… it was an old car and the model was somewhere in the Fifties. She says
that she remembers seeing a woman in the car. She did not pay much
attention to the whole situation and she did not go out to see OSWALD and the
woman in the car drive away.”
So, at each of the two
stops in Jackson,
the first reports are of an old car with a woman inside -- no mention of a
Cadillac.
Morgan Renovated
However, Mellen relates
more recent testimony – by Morgan and by his son, Van.
Without crediting Bill
Davy’s fine book, Let Justice Be Done,
where Van’s statement is first reported, Mellen describes the boy (age not
given) sitting in a tree playing “Tarzan” at the time Oswald arrived in a black Cadillac. Mellen repeats one
line from the Sciambra statement, saying that Mary “did not pay much attention
to the whole situation.” By “the whole situation,” Mellen must mean the matter
of the car(s) and its (their) occupant(s), because Mellen describes the young
girl as “anxious to get a look at the young man.” Indeed, the line she leaves
out is “didn't really pay much attention to the car” – a bit of fudging. More
importantly, if Mellen asked the now grown-up Mary Morgan whether she wanted to
retract her early statement to Sciambra about the old car and the young lady,
she neglects to mention Mary’s response. Surely she is familiar with the
testimony.
Mellen then adds to Mr.
Morgan’s testimony:
“Morgan had made up his mind. ‘A smart aleck
white boy who is a nigger lover appeared in a black Cadillac,’ Morgan said
later. When Morgan went outside to see Oswald off, the Cadillac sped off so
quickly that he was almost run over in his own driveway.”
“Morgan said later” raises three
questions. When is “later”? To whom did
he say this? And why didn’t he mention almost getting run over by a Caddy in
his earliest statements and testimony? Checking the footnotes to this page, and
counting down the lines, as the book’s odd footnoting format requires, reveals
no source for this new information.
The main question of
course is:
What happened to Mary Morgan?
How did her earlier, detailed
statement about seeing the old car and the woman passenger disappear? You would
think a book so painstakingly footnoted might include a citation, at the very
minimum, of this second old car witness. Where is the explanation for her
disappearance?
McGehee Renovated
While repopulating the
Morgan scene, Mellen also retells the barber’s story:
“As he (Oswald) departs,
McGehee, washing his hands, looks out the window. The green car is nowhere in
sight. Suddenly a large black car with a big wraparound bumper pulls up from Church Street…Oswald
is seated in back, his arms splayed across the back of the front seat. There
are two persons in the front, and they are all laughing as the car, pulling
onto State Road 10, passes in front of the barber shop on its way to Clinton.
The
statement that the old car is “nowhere in sight” suggests that it left before Oswald “departed.” Yet it was McGehee’s
testimony that the old car “left after he (Oswald) left.” The car was parked
very near to the shop, so a quick departure might be expected. The best that
can be said of Mellen here is that the issue, as described by her, is vague and
unresolved.
Wonderland
More
confounding is that the updated testimonies appear to place a convoy --
consisting of an old car and a new one – at both Jackson sights. The eyewitness testimony at Clinton produces no such
oddity. One is tempted to ask: where did the old car go during that long stay?
With
respect to the McGehee sighting, a Mellen footnote acknowledges that McGehee
“told Moo Moo Sciambra (in a June 17 interview), tentatively, that Oswald had
gotten into an old beat-up car, dark in color, a Nash or a Kaiser, with a young
woman in the front seat and a bassinette in the back.” But, she goes on, “to
the House Select Committee in 1978, McGehee said he saw Oswald neither exit the
car nor enter it upon his departure from the barber shop. By the time he turned
around after he was washing his hands, the car was gone. Note that McGehee told
Robert Buras and Patricia Orr, interviewing him on January 19, 1978, that ‘a big black car pulled
away shortly after Oswald left.’ He continues to believe that this is the car
Oswald entered.”
Well, he
would have to believe this, wouldn’t he? Indeed, given Mellen’s report that
McGehee had actually seen Oswald
sitting in the car and laughing, her tentativeness seems unwarranted. But this
is not the last we hear of the old car and the woman in Mellen’s account. Now
it really gets bizarre.
She first
denies any connection between Oswald and the old car and the female passenger.
Then, later on, a footnote speculates: if there
was a woman with him, it would have been one, Gladys Palmer. This makes
little sense since she has already stated rather emphatically that McGehee
saw Oswald seated and laughing in a black Cadillac. That Mellen is even tempted
to raise this possibility is revealing, but let’s play along.
Mellen
puts Oswald in a "dating" relationship with Palmer as early as May
1963 (Baker claims to have met Oswald in late April). According to Mellen, Gladys
was over 40 (Lee was 23), but still "hot." It would seem that Mellen is
trying to keep one, Judyth Baker, out of her account, even if she has to find
another love affair to crowd her out. Baker is the only woman ever to claim
that she was the passenger in that old car and the only woman to declare that
she was Oswald’s lover! A finding that Baker’s story is not persuasive might be
intellectually responsible; failure to even consider Baker’s detailed account,
even if only to dismiss it with a derisive paragraph or two, is, it seems to
me, just plain indefensible.
So Mellen
is prepared, if she has to, to concede that there may have been a woman in the
car who was associated with Oswald. The question then becomes: if it was
Gladys, as Mellen suggests, what happened to her? Did she get antsy while
Oswald was chatting up the barber, take the steering wheel, and simply drive
off? Lucky for Lee that Caddy showed up!
But wait,
didn't Lee go up in the Caddy? In that case, who drove Gladys to the barber shop? And if Lee got into
the Cadillac, who drove her away? And what was she doing there to begin with? Mellen
appears to see none of the complications arising from the web of speculations
she weaves.
Curiously,
Mellen describes an incident at a Lafayette Holiday Inn bar in which an Oswald
impostor might have been involved. A belligerent patron who signed his bar tab "Hidell"
swore his hatred of Kennedy. She tells this story and yet doesn’t even entertain
the possibility that the Oswald seen with Gladys was her own impostor. Perhaps
real Oswald did get in the Caddy and impostor Oswald got in the old car! This
version would at least have the advantage of not stranding poor Gladys while
the real Oswald drove off with his pals. Or maybe it was the impostor Oswald
that drove off in the Caddy (having the last laugh at Mellen?).
One is
tempted to ask: whatever happened to Gladys? Having committed no crime, you
might think she would have been teased out of obscurity to say she was the one.
Is she still alive? Is she the third woman made to disappear conveniently,
useful to justify her omission of Baker, discarded when no longer needed for that
purpose.
Truly,
Mellen is confused.
All this
hocus pocus for Lee McGehee?
I think
not.
All This for Judyth Baker
Judyth
Baker gives an unorthodox spin to the Clinton-Jackson story – a spin that, in
fact, jibes with many of Mellen’s most important findings. They are, in fact,
so close in their stories that her failure to mention Baker at all, and her
footnoted substitute of the elusive Palmer woman, can only be considered
perverse.
Mellen
retells Jim Garrison’s JFK investigation and expands on the DA’s suspicions
about Dr. Mary Sherman’s and David Ferrie’s involvement in the creation of a
cancer bioweapon to be used against Fidel Castro. According to Baker, it was
this plot that linked Sherman, Ferrie, and Shaw. Baker claims to have handled
the day-to-day operations of two clandestine labs in the apartments of Ferrie
and Sherman. The plot was allegedly funded by Texas
oil, with Shaw as a conduit in New
Orleans. Indeed, Garrison himself raised the specter
of a get-Castro cancer plot in his famous Playboy
interview. As Baker’s story goes, Garrison had the right characters but the
wrong plot.
With
Sherman and Ferrie found dead within two weeks of each other in 1967, Garrison
would never get hard evidence of a plot to kill Castro, and ran with what (or
whom) he had: Clay Shaw in a plot to kill Kennedy.
I don’t
think Mellen ever expected that her attempt to rehabilitate Garrison, a
righteous enough cause, would embroil her in the controversy over Baker’s
credibility. Unfortunately for her, she can’t claim that she never heard of
Baker, because she got Baker’s story from me. But ignoring Baker as she does
only causes her to lapse time and again into incoherence. By contrast, New Orleans native Ed Haslam also wrote of Sherman’s private lab and what he calls “the spooky stuff”
swirling about her employer, Dr. Alton Ochsner, anti-Castro fanatic, famed
cancer expert, and founder of a prestigious clinic in New Orleans. Haslam’s
father was Sherman’s
colleague and a friend of the family. As a youngster, Ed sat on her lap.
Unlike
Mellen, Haslam did not ignore Baker, though initially tempted to. While
residing the Bradenton, Florida, where Baker attended high school, he spent
hours in the library, pouring over microfiche, to authenticate the many
articles written about Baker’s exploits.
Baker has
been dismissed in many quarters as a fraud, but among the conspiracy witnesses
to emerge “late,” who hasn’t? Fraud or
not, it seems undeniable that Baker presents a fuller and more coherent
narrative than the one Mellen patches together. At the very least, Baker is a
more accomplished storyteller.
To create
a coherent story out of Clinton-Jackson, Mellen must at the very least explain
away the sightings of an old car with a woman in the passenger seat at each location -- by McGehee and then
by Morgan’s daughter. I take it as unlikely that the two vehicles traveled in
tandem, with an Oswald – one real, one fake? -- in each car.
It would
have been much easier for Mellen to simply deny Oswald’s link to the car and the
woman and to state, unequivocally, that an unrelated-to-Oswald driver joined
the unrelated-to-Oswald woman, and the two drove off into the sunset together. The
best explanation for the persistence of this story, even as Mellen recasts it,
is that one or more witnesses continue to resist her attempts to edit the old
car story out of the picture, so we get a silly hybrid instead.
Compare
this to the more straightforward alternative Baker offers:
n
On
Thursday, August 28, the three men set out bright and early in a Caddy, and,
after an unexpectedly long layover in Clinton, waiting
for test subjects to make their way from Angola Prison to the hospital, proceeded
to Jackson. The
prisoners had been told falsely that they had cancer and were being given the
opportunity of participating in an experimental treatment. And so that day, the
guinea pigs were given cancer (with Ferrie administering the lethal dose),
after which the three men returned to New
Orleans.
n
Two
days later, Oswald and Baker went to the hospital, with two stops in the early
evening, to McGehee and then Morgan. They drove an old car belonging to former
Banister detective David Lewis and his wife Anna. The bassinette belonged to
them. (Anna Lewis has stated and, in the face of harassment and threats, restated
her direct knowledge that Judyth Baker was Lee Oswald’s “mistress.”) Baker
tested the prisoners to see if the “treatment” had taken. Baker appears to have
had the specialized medical training necessary to culture the cells and track
their damage in the blood work. Baker is also adamant about the date. This was
her last weekend in New Orleans.
Within days she moved to Florida,
never to lay eyes on Oswald again.
Mellen
might like to know that Baker and a friend, the granddaughter of a US Customs
official who was Oswald’s contact in New York
and later in Florida,
visited McGehee after I visited Mellen. According to the two women, McGehee said
he resented the efforts of researchers
to get him to change his original testimony. He wouldn’t name names.
Another
unasked question: why would a VIP like Clay Shaw be needed to chaperone an
outing with the likes of Ferrie and Oswald? Indeed, it would seem imperative
that Shaw and Ferrie both make sure not
to be seen in Oswald’s company – that, in fact, they not be seen in each
other’s company, much less showcased in a gaudy black Caddy. The
Oswald-Shaw-Ferrie link was supposed to be secret, wasn’t it? Instead, we get
Oswald emerging from a vehicle containing two out-of-place-looking characters
very much exposed to public view: a distinguished white-haired gentleman who
actually tipped his hat to myriad passers-by, says Mellen, with an
unforgettably weird-looking companion. If such a trip took place, it would have
to be pretty important to risk anyone recognizing either or, worse, any two of
these men.
Further:
Mellen doesn’t even try to account for the three days it is commonly alleged
this trip took, although she confidently stated to me that the trio stayed at
the nearby home of Clay Shaw’s boss, Lloyd Cobb. Apparently that was just
speculation proven untrue by further investigation. So, instead, we get no
explanation at all, not even the acknowledgement that this piece of the puzzle
is missing. In fact, there is barely the shadow of a timeline evident in her
account.
Even more
worrisome is that, after all her work, she seems entirely clueless concerning the
very purpose of the trip.
Her best
guess is that the Clinton-Jackson affair was engineered to begin the setting up
of Oswald as patsy. But to accomplish
that, nothing so elaborate as a three-day sojourn with an important, powerful,
and well-known businessman was necessary. If we edit Clinton-Jackson out of the
patsy narrative, we are left with more than enough incidents implicating
Oswald; sometimes, I think, too many.
In any
case, her depiction of Oswald going into an anti-Castro
rant at the Jackson
hospital well post-dated his pro-Castro
leafleting and radio appearance. Why, at a time when he was clearly repainting
himself red, would he revert to anti-Castro colors? If the idea was to set Oswald up, it would
have made much more sense to continue the portrait in red that was begun in New Orleans. Moreover,
had this been part of a frame-up, Oswald would have been encouraged to raise a
pro-civil rights ruckus at the CORE rally – and his cohorts (manipulators?)
would have had it photographed. As Mellen herself notes, CORE’s voter
registration drive was getting daily press attention. “The Clinton incident” would then have found a
prominent place in the Warren Report, further evidence of Oswald’s pro-Cuba
leanings. Yet the Oswald of New Orleans,
publicity hound, remained unaccountably camera shy in Clinton.
He didn’t make a scene. He didn’t even hold up a sign in silent protest.
Instead, he waited patiently in line for hours -- and the fact that he was ever
there at all did not emerge until Garrison’s investigators found “the Clinton witnesses” years
later.
The best
explanation I’ve heard is Baker’s: as they passed the time, Lee bet Dave that
he could register to vote even though he did not live in the district, purely
because he was white. Baker claims that Lee was staunchly pro-integration and,
in fact, was disgusted by Guy Bannister’s racism.
Another
of Mellen’s speculations has Oswald looking for a cover job at the hospital. A
cover job for what, one might ask? He had a cover job in New Orleans and then spent a month and a half
“uncovered.” His work at Reily’s was done. What work did he have in Jackson? At least at
Reily’s, he was a hop away from Eli Lilly, where, according to Baker, he could
pick up or drop off materials for her lab work, and two hops from Banister’s
shop. Why would Oswald need a cover job in far-away and lightly populated Jackson? Mellen doesn’t hazard a guess.
Then she
wonders, repeating Garrison’s own forlorn query, if Oswald’s getting a job at a
mental hospital might somehow be seen as precursor to his becoming a patient
there, as if his file were to read “employee” one day, “patient” the next. Even
if the intention was to portray Oswald as a “nut” who needed hospitalization,
why go to all this trouble? Is a right-wing rant nuttier than a left-wing rant?
(Well maybe, but not in Louisiana 1963.) Or was his rant contrived to reveal a
split personality? After Oswald made a name for himself in New
Orleans as a fighter for “fair play for Cuba,” why would Shaw seek to
depoliticize him? Having constructed a pro-Castro persona, he could then go,
credentials intact, onto the next scene in the patsy scenario in Mexico City. Finally, if
the plan was to hospitalize Oswald, for whatever reason, what happened to
scuttle it? Question after question after question, unasked and unanswered.
Mellen is
uncertain about the purpose of the hospital visit, and clearly has no idea why
Oswald got on that line. She has no idea what he believed he was accomplishing
or what his supposed manipulators (Shaw and Ferrie) thought they were
accomplishing. As Mellen leaves it, almost nothing is made clearer.
About the
only thing one can be sure of in Mellen’s account of the nefarious doings in Clinton and Jackson
is that Judyth Baker played no part in them. In a book that has more names than
the Mexico City
telephone directory, you might expect to see the name Judyth Baker listed in
the index, especially as Mellen’s first response upon hearing Baker’s story was
that “it makes a funny kind of sense.” But, as we have seen, Mellen is not a
particular fan of first responses.
If she
has a problem with Baker as a witness, it would appear that “office politics”
(an exceedingly kind term) has led her to erase Baker from the plot, as opposed
to dealing directly with her “sensible” story.
As noted,
the reason for both trips, as Baker tells it, was related to the "black
ops" Mellen herself mentions in connection with Dr. Mary Sherman’s work
with a linear particle accelerator, the nature and purpose of which she leaves
unspecified, though she perfectly well knows Baker's story and, I'm sure, Ed
Haslam's research. Unlike Mellen, Haslam took the time to confirm for himself
Baker’s independent knowledge of the underground labs at Sherman’s and Ferrie’s
apartments.
This is a
sad enough execution of Mellen’s powers as researcher and analyst -- especially
as she has turns up so much new information, up to and including a role for Bobby
Kennedy, which Baker was dimly but surely aware of, and which was confirmed in
a meeting with former Interpen leader Gerry Hemming, a self-admitted Mellen
source. But it gets sadder.
Had she
been the first to uncover Oswald’s ties to the Customs Department, that would
be to her credit, but she never mentioned this supposedly key finding to me.
She may, of course, have made the discovery after we met, but there are two
things I know: I never mentioned it to her (because I didn’t think it was that
important, really, given the explosive nature of Baker’s larger story); and I
heard about it from Baker way back in 1999. Indeed, according to Baker, it was
she who supplied the lead to Mellen in a phone call she made to Mellen after
Mellen failed to call her, as I repeatedly urged.
For some
odd reason, Mellen chastised me, somewhat genially, for not doing the requisite
“field work” and later called my advice to include Baker in her field work “unprofessional.” I could
never account for this odd remark, except to surmise that she viewed witnesses
as belonging somehow to their researchers, a troubling phenomenon I have
encountered elsewhere in the research community – especially troubling as aging
witnesses die one after another. In any case, I didn’t own Baker, and if, in
any sense, I did, I was offering her to Mellen, asking for nothing in return.
(Understand: I wasn’t writing a researcher’s book. I had only agreed to edit
Baker’s memoirs. This forced me to do some research, but I had limited time for
field work. I simply wanted to alert researcher Mellen to material I thought
she should check out, especially as we live in the same general neighborhood,
and especially as she was going to do more field work in Baker’s general
neighborhood.)
When we
met, Mellen either did not have the cancer angle yet or she hid it from me
well. As I spoke at length about Ochsner and Sherman, Mellen never uttered a
word of recognition. All of a sudden, years later, Ochsner becomes a part of
her story and Sherman
gets even more pages, all without mentioning Judyth Baker or Ed Haslam. The same
is true for the role Bobby Kennedy may have played (according to Hemming, “Lee
was one of Bobby’s boys”). Her account could be made to jibe with Baker’s
without much difficulty, but she is so determined to edit everyone but the CIA
out of the picture that she has the CIA being Ochsner's and Shaw's only
sponsors. In fact, Ochsner was best buddies with Clint Murchison, and Baker was
told that the cash for her project was funneled from Texas to Shaw. There is no mention of Texas money in A Farewell to Justice. There are,
however, several specific denials that the Mafia was involved, save for having
foreknowledge (which is Baker’s understanding). She even asserts that
it was the CIA that paid Ruby to kill Oswald.
In any case, after we met, Mellen
went on to write a book that neither addresses nor cites Baker and Haslam while
retelling in a sketchy way the story they tell. Baker and Haslam appear to have
been buried together, without ceremony. And nearby
lies Mary Morgan.
Perhaps
Gladys Palmer -- here today, gone the next -- was a CIA operative.
Over and
over again, where Mellen’s meticulously detailed volume turns speculative and
stalls, Baker’s testimony and Haslam’s research are there to move it forward.
Mellen takes us right up the steps of the U.S. Public Health Service building
where Haslam guessed there might be a linear particle accelerator, but she
doesn’t open the door. Why? Because Baker and Haslam are the only ones on the
other side, figuratively speaking. Not even the peripatetic Palmer woman found
her way there.
Make no
mistake about it: Baker’s testimony and Haslam’s research well predate Mellen’s
book. They just plain got there first.
In any
case, Mellen’s intellectual curiosity wanes quite suddenly and she is off on
another subject. Her seemingly willful obtuseness on the subject is exceeded
only by her scholarly penchant for completeness (if not for clarity). Consider
the following, in her footnotes (pp. 364-365), describing an unpublished
fictional piece by Garrison, shocking in its content:
Innovative in challenging the boundaries of the
conventional short story, the piece is in the form of an
"Affidavit." The author's name appended is not "Jim
Garrison," but one Robert L. Russell, "also known as James Alexander
II."
Russell is a "wealthy oil man" working undercover for Robert F.
Kennedy. He swears under oath that he attended a 1964 meeting with Guy
Banister, "known to me at the time as an employee of the CIA."
The murder of Jack Ruby is planned by a method that will be "both
undetectable and beyond suspicion of foul play."
In "Affidavit," Dr. Mary Sherman passes
information from her cancer researches to David Ferrie, known to
"Russell" as a CIA contract employee." Sherman had created live cancer cells that
were injected into Ruby's feet with a long needle between his toes. Ruby
was finished off before he could talk, as history reveals he longed to do near
the end, and as one of Bobby Kennedy's closest people suggests he did.
....The motive for Sherman's
unsolved murder, he suggests, was the need to keep a secret associated with the
assassination. The planner of Ruby's murder was Dr. West, "who did
his best to help people and to work for the security of the United States." West, of
course, is a thinly disguised Dr. Alton Ochsner, who decrees that Ruby must die
because if he won his trial, "he would hurt many people, open old
wounds." The witness to the "Affidavit" bears the names of
both Garrison's most virulent antagonist, Walter Sheridan, and his assistant,
Richard Townley: "Richard Sheridan."
Asked
separately by at least two researchers where she came across this item, she did
not reply. Perhaps she gave a second thought to her decision to include the
piece. Perhaps she blanched because I was one of the researchers who asked.
Office Politics
From what
I have learned, Mellen did skirmish with Baker over the latter’s claims
concerning her correspondence with philosopher and political activist Bertrand
Russell. Mellen insisted that no exchange had occurred, or at least not in the
way Baker describes it. How would she know? Her ex-husband is Ralph
Schoenstein, who was Russell’s secretary between 1961 and 1965, during which
time he allegedly handled all of Russell’s correspondence. Small world!
Indeed, Schoenstein appears to recall seeing one letter from Baker
(then Vary, her maiden name), but not a second. Mellen avers that the second
piece of correspondence could not have escaped his notice. Yet a statement by
counsel for Schoenstein in a libel case he won establishes clearly that it very
easily could have.
Although
it is correct that the Claimant was a friend and colleague of Bertrand Russell
for a ten-year period…the Claimant has always travelled regularly, and it would
have been impossible for him to intercept communications to Bertrand Russell
even if he had been inclined to control Bertrand Russell
[one of the libels], which he was not.
This statement was made
in 1999 and the Mellen-Baker spat occurred soon after. So, an integral part of
Schoenstein’s complaint directly conflicts with Mellen’s insistence that her ex
was privy to everything Russell wrote or received by mail during the period in
question. Clearly, Schoenstein’s legal
argument, which was victorious, throws a window of opportunity wide open for
him to have missed a letter.
Petty,
you say?
What the
heck does all this have to do with the price of tea in Clinton-Jackson?
Nothing,
of course.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mellen has unearthed much in her labors, but her determination to
discredit Judyth Baker and Ed Haslam by focusing on side issues, or just plain
ignoring the two, leaves the entire Clinton-Jackson saga in a bigger muddle than
before she unleashed her expertise on it.
It is my hope that
serious researchers will consider the above information and take the contents
of the book ME & LEE- How I came to Know,<Love and Lose Lee Harvey
Oswald as seriously as have some excellent researchers in the past who now
stand by me as a living witness in the case.
