I started making phone calls and writing letters. First, I tried to contact Garrison, but his publisher told me that he was already in a coma. I told her that I had seen Banister’s files, and that I would be willing to try and locate them, if possible. The problem was that I did not know who had shown them to me, but I had seen them in a small radio station in New Orleans. She passed my story to Jim DiEugenio, the author of Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, and sent me a copy of his book, which detailed the background of the Garrison investigation.
As I read this book, I found an interesting section on Dr. Alton Ochsner. There was a photo of Ochsner with William “Wild Bill” Donovan, both elected officers of the American Cancer Society. (Donovan was a celebrity in military intelligence circles. He founded and directed the Office of Strategic Services, the WWII predecessor of the CIA. Much of the CIA’s Cold War leadership was recruited from Donovan’s New York law firm.) The book went on to explain that Ochsner was President and Founder of an organization called INCA (the Information Council of the Americas) which produced and distributed anti-Communist radio messages to Latin America.
This had potential. It had “radio, anti-Communist, Latin America, and doctors” all in one. After several letters and phone calls, DiEugenio brought Gus Russo into the loop. Gus had been a consultant to Oliver Stone’s JFK, and was working on a documentary about Lee Harvey Oswald for the PBS television show Frontline. I gave Gus the same information, and told him what I knew about New Orleans. He was very interested in who had Banister’s files, and we talked a lot.
During this string of phone calls, I found an old New Orleans phone book packed away in my Michigan basement. First, I looked up the Maison Blanche Department Store: 901 Canal. Then the Maison Blanche building: 921 Canal. Then INCA. Their address was listed simply as “ Audubon Building.” So I looked up the Audubon Building: 931 Canal. I told Gus what I had found. He was headed for New Orleans to do some advance work for the Frontline piece on Oswald, and arranged for me to meet him there to see if we could locate Banister’s files. It was January 1993.
On our first day in New Orleans, we drove all over town, checking out locations for Frontline like Oswald’s apartment on Magazine Street and the New Orleans Lakefront Airport, where Oswald had been a cadet in Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit.
On the second day, we went to see a man named Ed Butler, who had debated Oswald on the radio in August 1963. It was Butler who re-exposed Oswald’s “defection” to the American public. Butler’s job, both in 1963 and in 1993, was Executive Director of INCA.
We met him in the elevator of his office building and rode to the top floor. The entrance to INCA was a grandiose façade at the end of the hall, reminiscent of large law offices with their thick walnut doors. Upon closer inspection, it became obvious that this was not thick walnut. The façade was made of thin plywood panels nailed to a wooden frame erected in front of the old door. Screw-mounted brass letters from the local hardware store spelled out INCA. But we did not enter through this august entrance. Butler took us to a side door on the north side of the hall. There we entered a small functional office. A Frank Sinatra-era microphone sat on his desk like a paper weight. Audio and video tapes were neatly organized on the shelves. We sat down and exchanged business cards. He looked at Gus Russo’s Frontline card, then at mine.
“ Haslam,” he mused. “Where do I know that name from?”
I offered some mumbo-jumbo to distract him. I did not want him to remember who I was at that moment. He might clam up. He furrowed his brow in concentration and stared at my card.
“No, that’s not it. The word ‘Egyptologist’ keeps coming to mind,” he mulled. I shrugged aimlessly, while Gus started questioning him about Oswald.
This brought Butler to life. He started banging on the desk with his first, calling Oswald one of the world’s great revolutionaries,” the “first New Leftist,” the ““first hippie,” the “spearhead of world revolution” who set in motion a chain of events that led to the collapse of the Iron Curtain. He even called Oswald an “avatar,” a Hindu word for a deity who becomes a human to accomplish some divine purpose. In the middle of his Oswald theories, he took time to criticize the Warren Commission critics for grasping at straws, and ridiculed all the reports connecting Oswald to Banister as meaningless speculation. Gus and I listened.
Then Butler proudly told us how, immediately after the assassination, he carried a reel-to-reel tape player over to Congressman Hale Boggs’s office and played the tape of his radio debate with Oswald, so that Boggs could hear Oswald say, “I am a Marxist.” As Butler told it, upon hearing the recording, Boggs called Lyndon Johnson to tell him he had just heard evidence that Oswald was a Communist. If this story is true, it means that President Johnson knew Boggs’ position on Oswald before appointing him to the Warren Commission. Is this prejudicial? Or manipulative? Think how hard it would be for a Congressman to change his position on a subject of this magnitude after he had staked it out with the President of the United States.12
As Butler talked, I studied him closely. His tweed jacket and cardigan sweater. His ivy-league haircut parted to the side, hanging slightly in his face. Was this the same man who showed me Banister’s files ten years before? He looked about fifty years old now. Then years before he would have been forty. This was likely the same man, but I could not be absolutely sure.
Gus finished his questions, and Butler walked us to the hall to say good-bye. INCA occupied about seven rooms, but Butler had handled the whole interview in one small office. What about the rest of INCA? What about the files? Was INCA really WNCA?
Gus and I kept at him in the hall to keep him talking, hoping that something else would happen. Finally, in a surprise gesture, he offered to show us inside INCA. First, he took us to a room across the hall to find a record album that INCA had produced on the radio debate with Lee Harvey Oswald. It was called Oswald: Self-portrait in Red. Butler gave Gus and I each a copy, assuring us it was a collector’s item. He was right.
On the front of the album was a drawing of Oswald depicting him as an angry young revolutionary. On the back of the album the headline at the top read, “I am a Marxist,” with a signature line from Lee Harvey Oswald, dated August 21, 1963. Below were three photographs: Hale Boggs, Dr. Alton Ochsner and Ed Butler. Beneath the photo of Ochsner it said, he was “perhaps the only listener who knew of Oswald’s defection before the debate” [my emphasis].
Butler gave us a quick walking tour. The place was a mess. Every conceivable space was stacked with dust-covered boxes. It had obviously not been anything but a storage area for years, but it did make me wonder who had been paying the rent for all those years. The desk with the eagle on the front was there. The high ceilings were there. The American fag was there. The expensive wooden desk was not. And the rooms seemed smaller than I remembered. Then we saw a bank of black file cabinets.
Butler continued his narration about his study of revolutions around the world, gesturing toward the file cabinets as he talked. Gus was about to climb out of his shoes. Butler opened a file cabinet. The files had obviously been worked over. The hanging files were gone. All that was left were manila file folders with hand-written names on their tabs. Butler commented that they had gotten some volunteers to update the files. He flashed some articles in front of us. Some had the aged, yellow look of thirty-year-old newspaper clippings. Others were more recently photocopied on clean white paper. Were these the remains of Banister’s files? And if so, what did this mean?
Gus and I walked back to his hotel just a few blocks away. There he started pressing me: Was that the same man? Were those the same files? I realized that my answer might be used to implicate someone in a conspiracy to assassinate the President. The scale of the accusation confounded me. I wanted to make sure my answer was right. I told Gus Russo that I had to check out one more bit of information before I said anything definitive.
The next morning I stopped by to see Ron Tompson, President of Fit
zgerald Advertising, Inc., the man who had sent me on the courtesy call ten years before. I told him I was in town working on a Frontline documentary about Oswald and that we had just interviewed a man named Ed Butler. I asked him directly if Ed Butler was the man he had sent me to see ten years before. Ron said, “Yes,” adding that he had been a childhood friend of Butler’s brother.13 The brother had called and asked him, as a favor, to take a look at the operation. “They were doing some Voice of America-type work,” Ron added. “I don’t think they were involved in anything illegal.” Since I never told Ron Thompson anything about the files, either in 1982 or in 1993, my assumption is that no one at Fitzgerald was ever aware that Butler had them.
Later that morning Gus and I went to see Boatner Reily, President of the Reily Coffee Company. Russo wanted to talk to him about Oswald, and I tagged along because I was still looking for the older man I had met at INCA. Reily received us promptly despite the surprise visit. We talked to the tall, slender, athletic Reily for about fifteen minutes. He was charming and sophisticated, which is not surprising, considering he was Chairman of the Board of Tulane University for twelve years. He was definitely not the older man I saw at INCA. He did, however, acknowledge that his uncle had contributed financially to Ochsner’s political activities, and he asked us how he might get his company’s employment records of Oswald back from the FBI.
To this day, I do not know who the older man at INCA was. But what is clear to me is that there was a right-wing medical-political alliance at work in New Orleans in the 1960s, and that Dr. Alton Ochsner was at the center of it.
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1 The purchase of the United Fruit land has always been presented in the U.S. media as socialists nationalizing foreign owned assets. To the contrary, the Guatemalan government paid United Fruit exactly what the company had declared the value of the land to be for tax purposes. This was a case of eminent domain, not nationalization. United Fruit felt “cheated” because they had deliberately under-valued the undeveloped land to avoid paying taxes on it.
2 The 1954 coup d’etat in Guatemala was engineered by CIA officer Howard Hunt, who later master-minded the Watergate burglary. It has always amused me to read that John McCloy (Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, architect of the Japanese internment program, target selector for the World War II bombing of German cities, and member of the Warren Commission) said, “The Warren Commission must show the American people that we are not a banana republic.” The Dulles brothers’ stock position in United Fruit is discussed by Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Secrets, p. 40.
3 It has been reported that the Ochsner Medical Center treated wounded Contra soldiers for free (Carpenter, “Social Origins,” p. 163) as part of a commitment to fight Communism in Latin America, but that should not be confused with Freckles’ comment, which referred to a deliberate attempt to develop a biological weapon to assassinate a foreign head of state.
4 DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 38. Numerous other references in JFK assassination literature point to the FBI’s Chicago office. For example, in Deadly Secrets Hinckle and Turner discussed Robert Maheu (p. 31-32) and William Harvey (p. 136-137), both of whom worked there before joining the CIA. Maheu was the CIA’s contact with the Mafia, and later joined Howard Hughes’ organization. Harvey headed the CIA’s assassination squad. Guy Banister headed that same Chicago FBI office.
5 Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Secrets, p. 231.
6 Ibid., p. 233.
7 The Honorable F. Edward “Eddie” Hebert (last name pronounced A-BEAR). I knew where his New Orleans office was because I went there once in 1968. From his window you could see the line at the unemployment office.
8 Espionage field work is divided into two primary roles, spies and spymasters. The spy-master “handles” the spy, giving him or her assignments, rewards, and/or money.
9 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 40.
10 I remembered his precise answer because it contained a W, which is the FCC prefix for “east of the Mississippi,” plus the first letter of each of the major networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. Since New Orleans straddles the river, it has both “K” and “W” stations.
11 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 41.
12 Hale Boggs was House Majority Whip, the third most powerful member of that chamber, and helped pass LBJ’s Great Society budget. One of two U.S. Representatives appointed to the six-man Warren Commission, he was one of the only members of the Commission to raise substantive questions during their sessions. When the theory was proposed that the bullet which entered Kennedy’s back exited through his throat and then hit Connally, Boggs asked about the earlier medical reports which said that bullet path only went a few inches into Kennedy’s back. Years later, Boggs is said to have expressed his doubts about the Commission’s conclusions. He became Majority Leader in 1971. In October of 1972, as he campaigned for a colleague, his plane and the entire entourage disappeared over the Gulf of Alaska; no trace of it was ever found.
13 Frankly, I do not remember now if Thompson said that he knew Butler’s brother or that Butler knew Thompson’s brother, but a brother was a bridge between them.
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CHAPTER 8
Dr. O
PEOPLE TEND TO RESPECT both medical reputations and financial success. Dr. Alton Ochsner had plenty of both. Before his life was over he had been President of the American Cancer Society, President of the American College of Surgeons, President of the International Society of Surgeons, the Chairman of the Section on Surgery for the American Medical Association, and President of the Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation, one of the largest medical centers in America, with annual revenues approaching $300,000,000 per year. As a recognition of his contributions, he received the Distinguished Service Award of the American Medical Association in 1967, and he also received honorary awards from Ireland, England, Greece, Spain, Nicaragua, Columbia, Honduras, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, and Japan.1
As all could see, he was a highly respected man of medicine, clearly above suspicion as it is commonly known. But there was another side of Alton Ochsner which the public did not see as clearly. He used his position and contacts to advance his right-wing political philosophy, and in the process developed a long complex relationship with powerful political figures and agencies of the U.S. government.
Ochsner was born in Kimball, South Dakota, in 1896,2 towards the end of the era of sod houses and Indian massacres. The only son with five older sisters, Alton grew up the product of his German ancestry, and became what might be called an over-achiever. He attended the University of South Dakota and did his medical training at Washington University in St. Louis. His advanced medical training and many of the pivotal moves in his career were arranged by his uncle A.J. Ochsner, a famous surgeon who was chief of surgery at two hospitals in Chicago.
A.J. Ochsner’s influence cast a long shadow. He was founder and later president of the American College of Surgeons, as well as head of surgery at the University of Illinois Medical School. His international contacts were considerable. A.J. saw to it that Alton trained under the leading surgeons of the day. A.J. Ochsner’s best friend was William J. Mayo, founder of the famous Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and when it was time for Alton Ochsner to start his own clinic, the Mayo Clinic was used as a model.3
In 1921, Alton Ochsner headed to Chicago to train at his uncle’s elbow. He fainted at his first sight of surgery, and at his second, and at his third. His uncle told him to get a grip if he wanted to be a surgeon. He did. A.J. worked Alton hard and taught him his own set of medical standards, like “Don’t operate on anybody who is not going to get well.” Anxious to begin surgery of his own, Alton practiced by performing surgical procedures on dogs in an outbuilding on the grounds of his uncle’s hospital.4
Then in 1922, again thanks to his uncle’s influence, Alton Ochsner headed to Europe for a two-year residency in Switzerland and Germany. The first big medical success of his career was bringing blood transfusions to Eur
ope. Or should we say “back to Europe.” Early attempts at blood transfusions had failed miserably. It was not until an Austrian physician named Karl Landsteiner developed techniques for blood typing that blood transfusions became safe. Landsteiner’s original work had been ignored in Europe, so he came to the U.S. in 1912, and introduced the technique at A.J. Ochsner’s hospital in Chicago.5 Alton Ochsner learned to type blood while working in his uncle’s laboratory. His uncle provided him with blood transfusion equipment to take with him to Europe.
There, Swiss doctors refused to perform blood transfusions because of the terrible results of earlier attempts. They were skeptical of young Ochsner’s claim that the techniques which he had been taught in Chicago were safe. They first let him attempt a transfusion on what they considered to be an expendable patient, a criminal who had been shot by the police. If he died, it was no great loss to society. He survived.
Several days later the president of a Swiss bank entered the hospital suffering from heavy blood loss due to a ruptured ulcer. The Swiss doctors were unable to help the banker and feared the embarrassment of such a prominent person dying in their hospital. They asked Ochsner to do what he could. When the banker pulled through, Ochsner was proclaimed the blood transfusion expert of Europe. He lit up the European scene with his first medical article, telling of the magic of blood transfusions. It was written in German. He was an American medical celebrity in Europe at the age of twenty-seven.6 A.J. was pleased.
In 1923, while still in Switzerland, he married the daughter of a wealthy American family whom he had met in Chicago. Soon they departed on a kind of victory tour, visiting first European and then American medical clinics for several months. In Europe he got his first exposure to politics and witnessed epidemic inflation first hand. When he arrived, the exchange rate in Germany was four marks to the dollar; when he left, the rate was four million marks to the dollar.
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