Mellen’s Magic Show:
How to Make Two (or Three) Women and an
Old Car Disappear
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| Clinton, Louisiana courthouse |
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.
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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.
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
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 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
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 (Judyth Vary 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 [dead by July, 1964] and Ferrie found dead ...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.
.jpg) |
| David Ferrie, found dead... |
Unlike Mellen, Haslam did not
ignore Baker, though initially tempted to. While residing in Bradenton , Florida
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 to join a convoy bringing]...test subjects to make their way from Angola Prison to the hospital, [they then] 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.
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| Dr. Platzman, Judyth Baker,Debra Conway,Martin Shackelford, Anna Lewis |
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.
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.
(Note by JVB: The trip and experiment was planned in advance without the participants realizing that Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech had inspired a voter registration drive the next day at the Clinton courthouse, where the men in the Cadillac -- an official-looking vehicle that would look like an official part of the convoy to the hospital-- had to wait for a phone call from a payphone--no cell phones existed back then.)
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.
{Note by JVB: Since this experiment was an anti-Castro effort, it would be logical that Lee Oswald would present himself to the hospital personnel as vehemently anti-Castro; this location was far from New Orleans, where he had recently been posing earlier as "pro" Castro.)
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 inNew 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. “TheClinton 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.
{Note by JVB: Since this experiment was an anti-Castro effort, it would be logical that Lee Oswald would present himself to the hospital personnel as vehemently anti-Castro; this location was far from New Orleans, where he had recently been posing earlier as "pro" Castro.)
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
As Mellen herself notes, CORE’s voter registration drive was getting daily press attention. “The
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 Banister’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 inJackson ? 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.
What work did he have in
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 fromTexas
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.
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
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
....The motive for Sherman United States
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!
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.
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.
