by J. W Lateer
Boggs’ brother Robert was a Jesuit priest and Dean of Students at Loyola University in New Orleans. Boggs graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1934. As a student he was generally a progressive. He and his wife claimed to be part of the “reform” movement in Louisiana Democratic politics. There is no mention, however, of any reforms instituted by this group, which included the cousin of Mrs. Boggs, Mayor DeLesseps Morrison of New Orleans. In this case “reform” was a code-word which related to the battle between Catholic Democrats in New Orleans and the KKK-minded anti-Catholic Democrats in upstate Louisiana.
The only arguable “reform” was the assassination of Governor Huey Long. Cynically, Corinne “Lindy” Boggs seemed to justify both the murder of Huey Long and JFK as necessary because they had created political tensions that had to be released. That in itself tells you volumes about both Boggs and his wife. As mentioned elsewhere, JFK counted the Boggs’ as personal friends. As early as 1946, when Mrs. Boggs was in the hospital with hepatitis, Boggs would bring JFK, who had himself suffered from hepatitis, to the hospital to offer her encouragement.
Per Mrs. Boggs, “Congress worked gingerly with President Kennedy.” She recounted a conversation with a priest, where she admitted that she was campaigning for two relatives at the same time when they were running for office against one another. “You should have been a Jesuit,” as she reported cynically the reaction of the priest. And this typified her attitude about life and presumably reflected also that of her husband with whom she was very close. She portrayed herself as a “Southern belle,” looking at life through a royal purple veil. Unfortunately, this role of Southern Belle included, at least in spirit, the plantation wife who supervised the whipping of slaves, the chopping off of feet, the lynchings, etc. which are portrayed in movies about the antebellum South.
Boggs got his daughter Barbara a job working in the JFK White House to set up a volunteer corps. Mrs. Boggs reports that “some groups got uncontrollably angry” at JFK over Civil Rights. They became murderers of the President. They just couldn’t help it! Mrs. Boggs arranged for a last minute visit to the White House in November, 1963 so she could show off her “connections” to the President for her mother and her mother-in-law. She had to hurry, because her husband was very likely going to help murder the President at any time now. You know, it was “uncontrollable.”
Boggs became Majority Whip and then Majority Leader of the House. Speaker Carl Albert was to retire in 1978 and Boggs was slated to succeed him. But on October 16, 1972, the light plane carrying Boggs back from a trip to Alaska vanished without a trace in the rugged mountains southeast of Anchorage. Although the largest search party in Alaska history was mounted, no trace was ever found, although various other previously unknown crash sites of small aircraft were discovered.
It has been reported in some sources that the person who drove Boggs to the airport was actually a young William Jefferson Clinton. Dating back to at least the mid-1960’s, Hale Boggs had become a serious alcoholic. Some historians or researchers have speculated that because of his worsening alcoholism, the FBI worried that Boggs would “talk out of school” about his role in the assassination, perhaps while under the influence.
The daughter of Hale and Corinne “Lindy” Boggs, Barbara Boggs, was quoted by her mother as saying “when I want to do something directly, she thought of her father, but when she wanted to do something ‘indirectly,’ I thought of my mother.” Mrs. Boggs and her cynicism gives her the medal in the eyes of this author as the most reprehensible “leader” involved in the the assassination. Mrs. Boggs and David Rockefeller were longtime friends. Toward the end of her career, Mrs. Boggs was instrumental in starting the Democratic Leadership Council, which led to the eventual election of Bill Clinton as President.
To the knowledge of this author, there were only three leaders who spoke or wrote with any degree of approval about the JFK assassination. Those three were Mrs. Hale Boggs, Senator Thomas Dodd and Herbert Hoover through his son Allan Hoover.
Apparently, for Hale Boggs or at least for Mr. and Mrs. Boggs, duplicity was a virtue, hiding behind the “purple veil” was the way to go through life. For the cadre of people in New Orleans who had the blood of both Huey Long and JFK on their hands, one can only shake one’s head in discouragement.
John Sherman Cooper
One of the least well-known members of the Warren Commission was Senator John Sherman Cooper, Republican from Kentucky. But Senator Cooper was far from unimportant in both American history and with regard to the Warren Commission.
Fortunately, there is a very well written biography about Cooper called John Sherman Cooper: The Global Kentuckian, written by Robert Shulman. Much of the following information can be verified in that excellent volume.
John Sherman Cooper was born in Somerset, Kentucky in 1901. His father was reputed to be the wealthiest man in Somerset. Cooper was tutored by a neighbor until he was in the sixth grade. In High School, he delivered the commencement address. His topic was “The German Spy System.” After High School, he started out at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky and then transferred to Yale. At Yale, he was voted the most likely to succeed in his class. At Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones, the secret society often associated with conspiracy theories and alleged covert activities. After Yale, he attended Harvard Law School for two years. He had to drop out for financial reasons, but at Harvard he acquired the polish he would later use in holding important positions in government.
In the 1920’s, he spent 8 years as a county judge. Cooper’s father had graduated from the University of Kentucky Law School and had been a Collector of Internal Revenue under Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1942, after rejecting the offer of an officer’s commission, Cooper enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private. He was then sent to Officer’s Candidate School and graduated second in his class. After fighting under George Patton, in July, 1944, Cooper became a courier for the military police and then was trained to be an expert in the U.S. Military Government of Germany, charged with the task of helping rebuild the Judicial System in Bavaria. At the end of 1945, Cooper was the legal advisor in repatriating 300,000 former slave laborers used by the Nazi’s back to their proper countries.
But there is more information on Cooper which is very important to our story of the assassination. While working on the repatriation of the slave laborers, Cooper worked with such groups as the World Council of Churches, the Papal Emissary and the Jewish Agencies. There were some complaints against Cooper by these groups. They claimed that he personally picked 239 new Judges for Bavaria. He was supposedly charged with weeding out Nazis. Most historians agree that the Judiciary was one profession where Nazis were deliberately allowed to remain in post-War Germany. History has suggested that the weeding out of Nazis from the German State Governments like Hesse and Bavaria, was not very effective. We know that General Patton himself, who was in charge at one point in Bavaria, was believed to be soft or too sympathetic toward the Nazis.
Most importantly, Cooper placed Ludwig Erhardt into the economics ministry and Erhard remembered him for this. As we will explore in the chapter on the LBJ phone calls, Ludwig Erhard was the new Chancellor of Germany, in office less than four weeks when Kennedy was shot. Erhard was given priority over all other foreign leaders following the assassination and was a special guest of LBJ at his Texas Ranch.
Author T.H. Tetens, a leading expert on the Nazi’s, is quoted frequently in these pages. Tetens quotes New York Times correspondent Delbert Clark who reported that as Minister of Economics Erhard was in full cooperation with the Nazi regime, was advisor to Nazi Gauleiter [mayor] Buerckel in the Saar region of Germany and also the chief of the Hitlerite Institute for Industrial Research.
John Sherman Cooper was a “one-worlder” and won appointment to an open Senate seat in 1946. He believed that nations should be free to choose Communism but that the Marshall Plan would discourage this. After losing his Senate seat, he was appointed the U.S. dele
gate to the U.N. replacing John Foster Dulles.
Cooper had seven key State Department assignments.
United Nations.
Special Assistant to Dean Acheson to help form NATO.
Ambassador-at-large to assist Acheson with building the Atlantic Pact.
Ambassador to India.
Secret emissary of JFK to Moscow.
Delegate to the U.N. for the Legal Committee to define “aggression.”
Ambassador to East Germany.
While on a European fact-finding mission for Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy invited Cooper to have dinner with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and himself.
The domestic life of John Sherman Cooper is a story in itself. He was first married to an Army nurse but was divorced. He then married socialite Lorraine Rowan McAdoo. She was formerly married to Robert McAdoo, son of Woodrow Wilson’s Treasury Secretary. Then she married a “Palm Beach Playboy” named Tom Shevlin, Jr. but was again divorced. Following that, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asked John Sherman Cooper to marry Ms. McAdoo Shevlin. He was then named Ambassador to India, complete with a socially accomplished wife at his side.
In his first non-appointed Senate service, President Eisenhower had asked Cooper to run for a Senate seat. He won in 1956 and was immediately placed on the Foreign Relations Committee.
As one of the great ironies of the JFK assassination, John F. Kennedy counted Cooper as one of his personal friends along with such other members of Congress like Rep. Hale Boggs and Senator George Smathers. The Cooper-JFK relationship began while both served on the Senate Labor Committee. The Kennedy’s and the Coopers were dinner guests at each others’ homes beginning in 1957. While on the Warren Commission, Cooper eagerly helped to whitewash the murder of his “friend” JFK. Brutus or Judas, take your choice.
Cooper was considered a “German hand” because of his service in Bavaria during World War II and he was named the first U.S. Ambassador to East Germany for that reason. Like Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy, John Sherman Cooper had a face-to-face history with German Nazis. This was his special qualification to serve on the Warren Commission. As we shall see in a later chapter, this background was the subject of a special mention in the post-assassination phone calls when the subject of the Warren Commission was discussed.
Richard
Russell
Senator Richard Russell was a famous figure in Senate history. A Senate Office Building was named for him due to his lengthy and influential service. Russell had served as Governor of Georgia before being elected to the Senate. Russell was a segregationist. However, he was considered a “law and order guy” as were fellow segregationists Strom Thurmond and John Stennis. That meant that Russell believed in above board and “on the table” restriction of voting rights for blacks through such means as poll-taxes and literacy tests. He simply felt that whites in Georgia should not and would not submit to black county governments in the one-third of Georgia counties where blacks were in the majority. This may sound evil and of course it was. But Russell wasn’t a believer in terrorism against blacks and lynchings and often pointed out that lynchings had been substantially decreased during his term as Governor.
Russell was a proponent of the liberal economic policies of the New Deal. He was especially strong when it came to liberal agricultural price supports for cotton. He also was Chairman of the Armed Services Committee from 1951 to 1969 and also Chairman of the Committee that oversaw the CIA.
Russell was considered by many to be the Senator with the most influence over his colleagues, more influential than even Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. Russell became discouraged when liberal Democrats scored their important victory in 1958 which gave them control of the Senate and put them ahead of the Republican-Southern Democrat coalition. After this happened, Senator William Fulbright began his reign as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with liberal Senator Frank Church as his right-hand man. Both were disliked by conservatives and staunch ant-Communists of both parties.
When LBJ called Russell to ask him to serve on the Warren Commission, there ensued the most rancorous phone call that LBJ probably ever made. LBJ apparently knew that he had to have the support of Russell in the cover-up of the assassination. Russell was not in favor of the cover-up. We know this by the position he took in the LBJ phone call. Russell later made derogatory comments and statements about the “lone gunman” theory. He also attempted to boycott the signing of the final report of the Warren Commission, although the Commission ignored him on that point.
To summarize, both Richard Russell and fellow Southern Democrat John Stennis apparently wanted the truth to be told about the assassination. Russell even pressured LBJ to have Stennis included in the Warren Commission. Unfortunately, despite good intentions, both of them failed.
Gerald Ford
Since Gerald R. Ford was our 38th President, he is well-known and little needs to be said about him. He was picked for the Warren Commission because he was a member of the House of Representatives and he was a Republican. This served to balance out the Warren Commission, which was legally and in reality a joint committee of the Congress except in name. LBJ needed a Republican from the House on the Warren Commission because the Republicans together with the Southern Democrats in the Congress had just helped conspire to murder JFK. It is as simple as that.
Ford had been an All-America football player at the University of Michigan. He married the once-divorced Betty Ford who became famous for founding the Betty Ford Institute for treatment of substance abuse which was a pioneering effort. Unfortunately, his marriage to Betty Ford worked out less and less well in their golden years. Ford was criticized by some for abandoning his hometown in Michigan for his retirement, choosing instead to become a virtual hometown citizen in Palm Springs, one of the two or three wealthiest cities in California.
More importantly, as the nation soon learned after Ford became President, he had no ideology, no particular ideas and stood for absolutely nothing. There are very few Americans who were of age during his Presidency who can name a single thing he stood for. The exception of course, was his pardon of Nixon. As a member of the Warren Commission, he also helped pardon the murderers of JFK. I guess his name should have been Gerald Pardon Ford.
The only two outstanding facts about Gerald R. Ford are these: first, he was working as a retail clerk as a very young man when a customer came in the store and said “Hi, I’m your father.” Ford had been raised in ignorance of the fact that he was adopted by his step-father and had to learn the truth in this brutal manner. Second, after he was being considered for the Warren Commission he began to get invites to such events as Bilderberg meetings and the like. So Ford was a late comer to the “inside Washington” events like the making of the National Security State, the flirtation with ex-Nazi’s and fascists and the JFK assassination. But he was amply rewarded by being appointed President without even having to stand for election. All must agree that this was not an insignificant payback. Washington rewards its own.
The Jim
Garrison Investigation
Jim Garrison
The second official investigation of the Kennedy assassination was the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans. This investigation was dramatized in the 1991 film JFK directed by Oliver Stone and starring Kevin Costner. This investigation was also discussed in depth by Garrison himself in his famous book On The Trail of the Assassins.
Garrison was the elected District Attorney of Orleans Parish (county) at the time of the assassination. The reason he started his investigation of the JFK assassination was because at least three of the main players (David W. Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Guy Banister) lived in and operated out of New Orleans. The precipitating cause for Garrison starting his investigation was the “bug” put in his ear by Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, who secretly mentioned off the record to Garrison that he had serious questions about the true story of the assassination.
The fa
ther of Russell Long, Huey Long had been assassinated while Russell was only a teen-ager. That assassination involved the same interest groups and possibly one or two of the same people who murdered JFK.
Garrison was a graduate of Tulane Law School, but his family had Iowa roots. In the personal opinion of your author, Iowa is a very squeaky-clean place when it comes to strict compliance to laws and procedures. Garrison himself emphasized his Iowa roots in his book.
Let’s face it, Louisiana (although a very pleasant and interesting state), has a reputation for political corruption along with Illinois and New Jersey. But Garrison was apparently a totally honest official motivated by patriotism who wanted to do right by his country. Garrison tried to start his investigation in secrecy, but the word leaked out and the press began intense publicity about the investigation. Garrison’s resources were limited, so he accepted volunteers to help him along.
Some of these volunteers turned out to be CIA operatives.
The Garrison investigation lasted from 1966 to 1969. Garrison was portrayed in the national press as a buffoon, a lunatic, and an unscrupulous politician obsessed with political gains and publicity at any cost. He went nationwide, appearing on the Johnny Carson show and writing an article in Playboy magazine.
Clay Shaw
Garrison had three main suspects as the plotters of the assassination: David W. Ferrie (a CIA-connected pilot and adventurer), Guy Banister (an ex-FBI and CIA plotter extraordinaire), and Clay Shaw (a lifelong spy and a professional international conspirator). All three of these suspects had been openly connected to Lee Harvey Oswald, and in the case of David W. Ferrie, since LHO was a teenager.