Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Around this time, as the HSCA pointed out, “upon returning from trips abroad, as many as 25,000 Americans annually provided information [about countries they had visited] to the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division [actually, Domestic Contact Service] on a nonclandestine basis. Such acts of cooperation should not be confused with an actual Agency relationship.”71 But since a great many conspiracy theorists believe the CIA was behind the assassination, they feel it simply cannot be a benign coincidence that Oswald had a friend who was connected in any way with the CIA.

  Speaking of coincidences, as mentioned in the Oswald biography section, what a remarkable coincidence that de Mohrenschildt knew Jackie Kennedy and her mother, Janet Auchincloss. Additionally, as alluded to earlier, de Mohrenschildt, quite a writer of letters, wrote a letter to President Kennedy on February 16, 1963, congratulating Kennedy on his recent goal to try to make the average sedentary American more physically fit. De Mohrenschildt told Kennedy of the long and physically rigorous journey, by foot, that he and his wife had taken in 1961 throughout Latin America, and said that if the “typescript and many photographs” of the journey he offered to send Kennedy impressed him, “I would ask you, Mr. President, for a foreword to my book.” He closed by saying, “By the way, I am an old friend of the Bouvier family and of Mrs. Janet Auchincloss, but I prefer to write to you directly, as ‘getting fit’ seems to be a personal concern of yours. Please accept my sincere wishes of success in all your endeavors. Sincerely yours, George De Mohrenschildt.”*

  A man of George de Mohrenschildt’s innate theatricality just had to exit this planet with a bang. His Haitian adventure, intended to put him on easy street like all of his others, had failed, his Haitian Holding Company folding in 1967. George and Jeanne returned to Dallas, where George seemed to be resigned, for the first time in his life, to living a more mundane existence, and took a position as an assistant professor of foreign languages, teaching French at Bishop College, a small black school in South Dallas.72 In the early 1970s he started slipping into dementia, Jeanne later saying that he began acting in an “insane manner,” having delusions of persecution. He also attempted suicide and beat her, breaking several of her ribs and damaging several teeth. In November of 1976, she finally got him committed to a state mental institution. But he was released after around three months.73

  If George was limiting himself to an ordinary life of teaching with an occasional attempted suicide, someone else wanted to bring him back on stage for one last chance at a prize. NOS Television (a small group of TV and radio stations in the Netherlands) journalist Willem Oltmans, who attended Yale University in 1950, met Marguerite Oswald on an American Airlines flight from New York to Dallas in 1964, and Marguerite succeeded in convincing Oltmans that her son may not have acted alone in the assassination. Back in the Netherlands, when he told a clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset, Marguerite’s story, Croiset said that Oswald had a Dallas friend with the letters sch and de in his name. This man was of noble descent and was a geologist, Croiset said, and it was he, backed by big Texas oil interests, who had been the architect behind Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald being the fall guy. Oltmans returned to Texas, and Marguerite pointed to de Mohrenschildt as Croiset’s mysterious Mr. X. Oltmans eventually hooked up with de Mohrenschildt, and per de Mohrenschildt, they became personal friends and de Mohrenschildt believed he had “convinced” Oltmans that he “had nothing to do whatsoever with the JFK assassination.” Indeed, de Mohrenschildt thought about suing Croiset but said he was probably “broke” anyway. Despite de Mohrenschildt’s denials, Oltmans persisted in trying to get de Mohrenschildt to confess, visiting him and Jeanne every year and hoping for a breakthrough.

  According to Oltmans, but not de Mohrenschildt, he got what he wanted in February of 1977 in Dallas. On April 12, 1977, after an appearance on the Good Morning America show that morning where he said Oswald and de Mohrenschildt were involved in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, Oltmans told the HSCA in executive session all he knew about the de Mohrenschildt story. He testified that when he would visit de Mohrenschildt every year or so in Dallas, the latter was always “a man who wins tennis matches, who is always suntanned, who jogs every morning, who is as healthy as a bull.” But Jeanne de Mohrenschildt told him during one visit in late 1976 that George was in a mental hospital and receiving electric shock treatments, and when Oltmans saw him on February 23, 1977, though he was out of the mental hospital, there was a “total transformation” in him. He was “shaking” and “trembling.” Oltmans said, “I couldn’t believe my eyes. The man had changed drastically.” Oltmans said that de Mohrenschildt took him out to Bishop College. Per Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt proceeded to confide in him that he was “responsible” for what Oswald had done “because I guided him. I instructed him, to set it up.” De Mohrenschildt begged Oltmans to “take me out of the country because they are after me,” they being Jews, the CIA, and FBI. Because of feeling “responsible” for Oswald’s conduct, de Mohrenschildt spoke many times to Oltmans of wanting to kill himself, not wanting to be around when his children learned of his responsibility, and said he had tried to commit suicide several times but had failed.

  When Oltmans excitedly called collect from a pay phone in the library at Bishop College to his home office in the Netherlands to report that he had gotten a “confession” in the Kennedy assassination from de Mohrenschildt, he was instructed “to get him at any cost…to the Netherlands.” But de Mohrenschildt suddenly started to waver and it wasn’t until March 1 that the two flew, at NOS’s expense, to New York, stayed overnight at the Waldorf hotel (NOS’s “at any cost”), and then traveled on to London and the Netherlands the next day. In Amsterdam on March 3 and 4, de Mohrenschildt negotiated with the head of Dutch National Television himself, Karl Enklraar, as well as the representative of a book publishing house, on the sale of TV, film, and book rights to his story, all of which, he said, was contained within a manuscript he had left behind in Dallas. The understanding was that NOS would put de Mohrenschildt up in a hotel for a month and be given a staff to help him get the story out quickly.

  Just what was that story? What, specifically, were the instructions on the assassination de Mohrenschildt had given Oswald? HSCA counsel Robert Tanenbaum kept pressing Oltmans, who assured Tanenbaum he had nine hours of tape, some on film, of his conversations with de Mohrenschildt, tapes he had somehow neglected to bring with him to the hearing. But he said he had some of his notes of the taped interviews with him. Fine, said Tanenbaum, who wanted to know what his notes said. “What were his instructions?”

  “I think that—I don’t know. I guess it was the cross-fire, to round up, you see. He also said that Oswald had many friends among the Cubans.”

  Oltmans was full of it. And he was full of it largely because de Mohrenschildt—if he, indeed, told anything at all to Oltmans—was full of it. A can’t give B something that A doesn’t have. But when Tanenbaum kept pressuring him for concrete information, Oltmans reluctantly said de Mohrenschildt had indicated there was more than one gunman, and H. L. Hunt, the Dallas oil man, was apparently somehow involved.

  The exasperated HSCA counsel asked Oltmans, “Mr. Oltmans, did he tell you what his instructions were to Oswald?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you what his instructions were from H. L. Hunt, or anyone else?”

  “No.” Oltmans, trying to defend himself, said that de Mohrenschildt “talked in question marks—like, ‘Why do you think Oswald wrote to Hunt?’—…and in circles.* He wasn’t on record yet. He was negotiating to go on record” (i.e., apparently de Mohrenschildt was devilishly exploring how much money he could get for selling nothing, or whatever he decided to pull out of his hat). And, Oltmans said, before he could press him for the details (nine hours wasn’t enough?), de Mohrenschildt, no contract yet being signed, “walked out” on him, disappearing right from “under my own nose. So I hadn’t [yet] asked everything I planned to.”

  How and when had George disappeared? Oltmans said
that George “was a nervous wreck,” and to get a breath of fresh air away from the intense negotiations, George and he drove to Brussels for several days. Early on the afternoon of March 5 at their hotel, the Metropole, George said he wanted to take a walk and would be back “in an hour.” He left with his attaché case and never returned, leaving all of his belongings, even his pipe and keys, behind. In late March, George’s Dallas lawyer called Oltmans to inform him George had returned to America and was in South Florida.74†

  De Mohrenschildt had flown to New York City and taken a Greyhound bus from there to Florida to visit his daughter Alexandra, who was staying at the seaside mansion of Mrs. Nancy Tilton. Mrs. Tilton was the cousin of de Mohrenschildt’s first wife, and when the latter abandoned Alexandra shortly after she was born, Mrs. Tilton raised her. Alexandra had lived with Mrs. Tilton off and on all her life and they referred to one another as mother and daughter. De Mohrenschildt had told Oltmans that when he called Alexandra from the Waldorf hotel and told her he was going to the Netherlands, Alexandra had told him, “Papa, come back to Palm Beach. I will save you.”75

  De Mohrenschildt arrived in West Palm Beach on the evening of March 16, 1977, and was picked up by Mrs. Tilton and a friend of Alexandra’s, Katherine Loomis. His only baggage was a green attaché case‡ and a few articles of clothing. He was taken to Mrs. Tilton’s home in Manalapan, a town of a few hundred people just south of Palm Beach, where Alexandra was waiting. Between March 16 and March 28, 1969, though having bouts of depression during which he spoke of suicide, he otherwise seemed to enjoy his leisure at the sun-splashed villa facing the sea. He had agreed to be interviewed by writer Edward Epstein in four sessions for a fee of four thousand dollars paid by Reader’s Digest. The first session was a short one at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach on March 28 that basically covered de Mohrenschildt’s early life and did not get very much into his relationship with Oswald.76

  On March 29, after an early-morning breakfast prepared by the cook, a Miss Romanie, de Mohrenschildt took a short walk on the beach, then drove to the Breakers for his second session with Epstein in a car Epstein rented for him. Meanwhile, HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, in Miami, had been apprised by his office in Washington (which had been alerted by Oltmans, who had been in touch with Tanenbaum since February about the story) as to where de Mohrenschildt was staying, so he went to the Tilton residence around 10:00 a.m. to interview de Mohrenschildt. When Alexandra told Fonzi her father was in Palm Beach, he left his card and said he’d call back later in the day. When de Mohrenschildt returned home for lunch and Alexandra told him of the HSCA investigator’s visit, he seemed upset by the news but did not appear to be overly fearful. Around 1:30 p.m., after bidding good-bye to his daughter and her friend, Katherine Loomis, who were going shopping, de Mohrenschildt went upstairs to his room, presumably to rest for awhile before returning to the Breakers for the next scheduled session at 4:00 that afternoon. But at roughly 2:15 p.m., he apparently left his room and walked the short distance down the hallway to Mrs. Tilton’s room. He removed a double-barrel 20-gauge shotgun from its resting place beside her bed, along with two live 20-gauge shotgun shells from a nightstand beside the bed. He then walked out of the bedroom, entered a small hallway off the main hallway, sat in a chair, placed the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth, and fired it at an upward angle through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.77

  In the conspiracy community, de Mohrenschildt’s suicide shortly after he learned an HSCA investigator was seeking to interview him immediately elevated de Mohrenschildt to a higher position than he already had as a probable conspirator in the assassination of Kennedy, book after book implying a possible connection between the suicide, Oswald, and the CIA’s role in Kennedy’s murder, suggesting he was murdered.78*

  Indeed, if we’re to believe HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, the committee’s investigation of Kennedy’s murder only survived as long as it did “because de Mohrenschildt committed suicide. That basically is why the committee survived.”79

  Immediately, de Mohrenschildt’s last interview with Epstein assumed major importance to conspiracy theorists. But on the issue of de Mohrenschildt’s contact with Oswald for the CIA, Epstein writes vaguely that de Mohrenschildt said that in late 1961 at a lunchtime meeting with J. Walter Moore to discuss a trip to Central America from which de Mohrenschildt had just returned, “although no specific requests were made by Moore, de Mohrenschildt gathered that he would be appreciative to learn more about this unusual ex-Marine’s activities in Minsk.” He quotes de Mohrenschildt as telling him, “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.”80 Assuming de Mohrenschildt told Epstein precisely what Epstein said he did, if anything it goes in the exact opposite direction of what the conspiracy theorists believe—that Oswald was a secret CIA operative, and when he killed Kennedy, he was acting at the agency’s behest. Because if Oswald were a CIA operative whom the agency thought so highly of that it had entrusted the assassination to him, why would it ask (and, apparently, vaguely at that) de Mohrenschildt, who wasn’t even a CIA operative, to keep tabs on Oswald?

  By far the most reasonable inference is that either de Mohrenschildt, who was delusional and approaching dementia at the time he killed himself, made up or imagined the purported CIA-implied instruction to him,* or even if everything de Mohrenschildt told Epstein was true, it doesn’t connote anything sinister at all. As the HSCA said, Moore’s duties in the Dallas office of the CIA were to gather information from people in the Dallas area who had information on foreign matters.81 Since de Mohrenschildt was a friend of Oswald’s, and Oswald was a defector to the Soviet Union who had returned to America, Moore would obviously be interested in learning, through de Mohrenschildt, what Oswald had to say about Minsk and Russia. But when de Mohrenschildt testified before the Warren Commission, not only didn’t he suggest that Moore was interested in learning about Oswald’s activities in Minsk, but he thinks he may have asked Moore about Oswald. De Mohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that because Oswald was a defector, he tended to believe that he “asked point-blank [Max] Clark [whose wife was a part of the Russian emigré community in Dallas with de Mohrenschildt] or Walter Moore about Oswald. I probably spoke to both of them about him. My recollection is…that either of them said he is a harmless lunatic.”82 However, although Moore said he had interviewed de Mohrenschildt, he told the HSCA that he never spoke to de Mohrenschildt about Oswald.83

  When HSCA staff investigator Harold Leap asked Moore if he knew Oswald, Moore replied, “I never met or talked to Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, I never heard of the name until the day of the assassination.”

  Question: “Are you aware that allegations have been made that de Mohrenschildt asked permission of you to contact Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  Answer: “Yes, the allegation is not true.”84

  The Palm Beach County sheriff’s office, which investigated de Mohrenschildt’s death, concluded he died “by his own hand.”85 As indicated, the conspiracy theorists find de Mohrenschildt’s suicide highly suspicious (many suspect he was actually murdered), but they don’t go on to say why—they can’t because no conspiratorial inference can be drawn. Neither the Warren Commission nor the HSCA ever considered de Mohrenschildt a suspect in the assassination. Even if they did, why wouldn’t simply telling the truth and denying guilt to an HSCA investigator be preferable to killing oneself? Indeed, even if de Mohrenschildt were guilty, again, why wouldn’t lying under oath and denying guilt, which thousands of defendants in criminal cases do every day throughout the land, be preferable to killing oneself? It makes absolutely no sense at all that de Mohrenschildt would “rather die than lie” to an HSCA investigator, even if he was eventually asked to testify under oath. In fact, de Mohrenschildt had already testified under oath about his relationship with Oswald before the Warren Commission in 1964. Even if he were involved in the assassination, which there’s absolutely no evidence of, why wouldn’t he, in 1977, be willing to sim
ply tell the same story under oath again?

  What does make sense (and the conspiracy books don’t usually tell their readers this) is that George de Mohrenschildt, age sixty-five at the time of his death, had in recent years, as indicated, become a deeply depressed and mentally unstable individual who wanted to die. The Palm Beach County sheriff’s office conducted a fairly thorough investigation of de Mohrenschildt’s death, and everyone whom chief investigating officer Thomas Neighbors (a detective for the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office) spoke to confirmed that de Mohrenschildt was mentally ill. His investigative report said that Mrs. Tilton recounted that during de Mohrenschildt’s stay, “he discussed previous attempts at suicide…[and] expressed feelings of persecution from unspecified Jewish elements, the federal government, and [being] blackmailed by an attorney in Dallas, but she knew that he was suffering from mental illness and depression and she did not lend credence to his fears.” His daughter Alexandra told Neighbors that her father had been shadowed with the suspicion among conspiracy theorists that he had been involved in the assassination and that this, along with other personal problems, disturbed him to the point where he had made several previous attempts on his life, was committed briefly to a mental institution, and since his stay in Florida had expressed a desire to commit suicide.

  When Neighbors reached de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jeanne, by phone in Los Angeles, she elaborated on his mental condition. He wrote, “She stated that…over the past several years he has been acting in an ‘insane manner.’ He constantly was in fear of what he termed the ‘Jewish Mafia’ and the FBI, but she felt his fears were groundless…On November 9, 1976, Mrs. de Mohrenschildt signed commitment papers in Dallas…to have her husband placed in a mental home for treatment [actually, the psychiatric unit at Parkland Memorial Hospital]…In the affidavit she stated that the victim suffered from depression, heard voices, saw visions, and believed that the FBI and ‘The Jewish Mafia’ were persecuting him.” Also, that he “had attempted suicide four times in 1976 by slashing his wrists, trying to drown himself in a bathtub, and twice taking overdoses of medicine.” De Mohrenschildt was confined for eight weeks in Parkland, during which time, per his lawyer Pat Russell, he received heavy shock treatment.86*