by Jim Marrs
Herb Atkin, a former CIA operative, has stated that DeMohrenschildt was involved in a failed CIA plot to overthrow Haitian president Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in June 1963.
Following DeMohrenschildt’s death in March 1977, Atkin told author Dick Russell, “I knew de Mohrenschildt as Philip Harbin. A lot of people in Washington have claimed that Harbin did not exist. But he’s the one that ran me from the late fifties onward. I’m certain that DeMohrenschildt was my case officer’s real name.”
Recall that De Mohrenschildt’s fourth wife, Jeanne, was born in Harbin, China.
The DeMohrenschildts were in Haiti when they learned of Kennedy’s death. Reportedly DeMohrenschildt told friends there the FBI was behind the assassination. Whether or not he actually made such a comment, he did start to experience difficulties after Haitian president Duvalier reportedly received a letter from the FBI telling of DeMohrenschildt’s friendship with Oswald and labeling him as a “Polish communist and a member of an international band.”
The DeMohrenschildts were called to Washington to testify to the Warren Commission in April 1964. Oddly enough, when DeMohrenschildt tried to raise the issue of the damaging FBI letter, Warren Commission attorney Albert Jenner quickly told him, “I would say you have been misinformed on that.” DeMohrenschildt replied, “Well, he did receive some kind of letter.” Jenner then said, “But nothing that would contain any such statements. . . . It may have been a crank letter, but nothing official.” DeMohrenschildt, catching the drift of Jenner’s remarks depreciating the whole subject, suddenly agreed: “Yes, I am sure it is nothing official. I am sure it could not have been anything official.”
Researchers are left with the question of how a Warren Commission attorney, supposedly searching for the truth of the Kennedy assassination, could have been so confident that the FBI letter was a “crank” and why he had closed the subject rather than trying to learn more about it.
Jeanne DeMohrenschildt claimed the Warren Commission did not appear eager to hear from her and her husband and that they had to ask to testify. She told this author:
Much of our problems with government authorities came from our refusal to slander Lee’s name. The Warren Commission, along with the mass media, depicted Oswald as a complete loner, a total failure, both as a man and a father. This is not the impression George and I had of this man. Lee was a sincere person. Although from a modest educational background, he was quick and bright. . . . Lee obviously loved his daughter June. We could not possibly consider him as dangerous.
During their stay in Washington, the DeMohrenschildts visited in the home of Jackie Kennedy’s mother, Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss, who, according to an unpublished book by DeMohrenschildt, said, “Incidentally, my daughter Jacqueline never wants to see you again because you were close to her husband’s assassin.”
Returning to Haiti, the DeMohrenschildt’s problems there increased to the point that in 1967 they were forced to sneak away from the island aboard a German freighter, which brought them to Port Arthur, Texas. Here, according to Jeanne, the DeMohrenschildts were met by an associate of former Oklahoma senator and oilman Bob Kerr. The returning couple were extended the hospitality of Kerr’s home.
By the 1970s, the DeMohrenschildts were living quietly in Dallas, although once they were questioned by two men who claimed to be from Life magazine. A check showed the men were phonies.
DeMohrenschildt seemed content to teach French at Bishop College, a predominantly black school in south Dallas. Then in the spring of 1976, George, who suffered from chronic bronchitis, had a particularly bad attack. Distrustful of hospitals, he was persuaded by someone—Jeanne later could not recall who—to see a newly arrived doctor in Dallas named Dr. Charles Mendoza. After several trips to Mendoza in the late spring and summer, DeMohrenschildt’s bronchial condition improved, but he began to experience the symptoms of a severe nervous breakdown. He became paranoid, claiming that “the Jewish Mafia and the FBI” were after him.
Alarmed, Jeanne accompanied her husband to Dr. Mendoza and discovered he was giving DeMohrenschildt injections and costly drug prescriptions. Jeanne said her husband’s mental condition continued to deteriorate during this time. She now claims, “I have become convinced that this doctor, in some way, lies behind the nervous breakdown George suffered in his final months.”
The doctor is indeed mysterious. A check with the Dallas County Medical Society showed that Dr. Mendoza first registered in April 1976, less than two months before he began treating DeMohrenschildt and at the same time the House Select Committee on Assassinations was beginning to be funded.
Mendoza left Dallas in December, just a few months after DeMohrenschildt refused to continue treatments, at his wife’s insistence. Mendoza left the society a forwarding address that proved to be nonexistent. He also left behind a confused and unbalanced George DeMohrenschildt.
During the fall of 1976 while in this unbalanced mental state, DeMohrenschildt completed his unpublished manuscript, I Am a Patsy! I Am a Patsy! after Oswald’s famous remark to news reporters in the Dallas police station. In the manuscript, DeMohrenschildt depicts Oswald as a cursing, uncouth man with assassination on his mind, a totally opposite picture from his descriptions of Oswald through the years.
The night he finished the manuscript, DeMohrenschildt attempted suicide by taking an overdose of tranquilizers. Paramedics were called, but they declined to take him to a hospital. They found DeMohrenschildt also had taken his dog’s digitalis, which counteracted the tranquilizers.
Shortly after his attempted suicide, Jeanne committed her husband to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where he was subjected to electroshock therapy. To gauge his mental condition at this time, consider what he told Parkland roommate Clifford Wilson: “I know damn well Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy—because Oswald and I were together at the time.” DeMohrenschildt told Wilson that he and Oswald were in downtown Dallas watching the Kennedy motorcade pass when shots were fired. He said that at the sound of shots Oswald ran away and DeMohrenschildt never saw him again.
This story, which was reported in the April 26, 1977, edition of the National Enquirer as “Exclusive New Evidence,” is simply untrue since both George and Jeanne were at a reception in the Bulgarian embassy in Haiti the day Kennedy was killed. But the incident serves to illustrate George DeMohrenschildt’s mental condition at the time.
In early 1977, convinced that evil forces were still after him, DeMohrenschildt fled to Europe with Dutch journalist Willems Oltmans, who later created a furor by telling the House Select Committee on Assassinations that DeMohrenschildt claimed he knew of Oswald’s assassination plan in advance.
However, DeMohrenschildt grew even more fearful in Europe. In a letter found after his death, he wrote, “As I can see it now, the whole purpose of my meeting in Holland was to ruin me financially and completely.”
In mid-March DeMohrenschildt fled to a relative’s Florida home leaving behind clothing and other personal belongings. It was in the fashionable Manalapan, Florida, home of his sister-in-law that DeMohrenschildt died of a shotgun blast to the head on March 29, 1977, just three hours after a representative of the House Select Committee on Assassinations tried to contact him there.
Earlier that day, he had met author Edward J. Epstein for an interview. In a 1983 Wall Street Journal article, Epstein wrote that DeMohrenschildt told him that day that the CIA had asked him “to keep tabs on Oswald.” However, the thing that may have triggered DeMohrenschildt’s fear was that Epstein showed him a document that indicated DeMohrenschildt might be sent back to Parkland for further shock treatments, according to a statement by attorney David Bludworth, who represented the state during the investigation into DeMohrenschildt’s death.
Although several aspects of DeMohrenschildt’s death caused chief investigator Captain Richard Sheets of the Palm County Sheriff’s Office to term the shooting “very strange,” a coroner’s jury quickly ruled suicide.
One other matter that involved the DeMohren
schildts with the assassination has proven as unfathomable as so many others. According to Jeanne, when the DeMohrenschildts arrived back in the United States in early 1967, they discovered a photograph of Oswald in some Russian-English language records they had loaned to Marina Oswald prior to leaving for Haiti. The picture is one of the famous backyard scenes depicting Oswald with his rifle and pistol while holding a communist publication. It is one pose of at least three separate photos believed by most researchers to be faked. On the back of the photo is one inscription in English reading “To my friend George from Lee Oswald.” Beneath this is an inscription in Russian Cyrillic script that translates “Hunter of fascists Ha-ha-ha!!!”
The photo also bears the date “5/IV/63,” apparently meaning April 5, 1963. The date is curious, mixing in Roman numerals as it does and written in the European style. The New Orleans–born Oswald more likely would have written “4/5/63” and, in fact, a check of dozens of other examples of dates in Oswald’s mass of written material shows not one written in the manner on the photo.
Handwriting experts for the House Select Committee on Assassinations could not identify Oswald, Marina, or the DeMohrenschildts as authors of the inscription.
And Marina gave mixed accounts of the photo, which surfaced just at a time when many assassination researchers were first beginning to question the authenticity of the backyard photographs.
While testifying to the committee in 1978, Marina suddenly blurted out, “I remember being surprised at [Oswald] showing pictures like that to George [DeMohrenschildt], so apparently I saw them at the apartment. . . . Something strikes my memory that—how dare he show pictures like that to a friend?”
If her statement is true, and that’s a big “if” since later in her testimony Marina suddenly could not remember much else about the episode, it would mean that George DeMohrenschildt—the man with numerous intelligence connections—was aware of Oswald’s possession of weapons months before the assassination.
The DeMohrenschildts denied any knowledge of the photo with the incriminating inscription, and Jeanne swore to this author neither she nor her husband ever saw the photograph until discovering it upon their return in 1967. She was convinced that the picture had been planted among their possessions.
Looking over the fascinating life of George and Jeanne DeMohrenschildt, one is struck by the idea that this sophisticated couple may be one of the biggest “red herrings” of the assassination, as DeMohrenschildt had numerous and long-standing connections with intelligence—most notably the CIA and perhaps private intelligence groups connected with the oil industry and defense work. Through DeMohrenschildt, certain elements within oil, business, and intelligence circles could have become aware of Oswald, who with his procommunist background must have appeared to be a prime candidate for an assassination patsy.
After the assassination, DeMohrenschildt—with his connections to German, French, Polish, and US intelligence, wealthy right-wing Texas oilmen, and Caribbean business interests—provided a wonderful opportunity to draw investigators into a labyrinth of false leads. The mental deterioration near the end of his life caused DeMohrenschildt to make untrue statements that further clouded the issue.
If George DeMohrenschildt had a genuine liking for President Kennedy, as he stated on several occasions, this fondness was not shared by his conservative oil and business associates. They felt threatened by the young president, who was making decisions on finances, taxation, and foreign policy outside their control. This concern was shared by the military and intelligence communities.
President Kennedy’s shift from Cold Warrior to seeker of world peace is well documented in James W. Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable. Douglass drew the term “unspeakable” from author and social activist Thomas Merton, an ordained Catholic priest turned Trappist monk. The term refers to a hidden but insidious ideology of fascism that has so permeated American society that it must remain unmentioned in public. Douglass wrote, “The Vietnam War, the race to a global war, and the interlocking murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all signs of the Unspeakable. It remains deeply present in our world.”
Corporate heads initially may have been mollified to think that Kennedy was being guided by the hand of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, a pro-Nazi former bootlegger and political boss. But in December 1961, Joseph Kennedy had a stroke that left him totally incapacitated. His son Jack was now in the highest office of the land with no direct control over him.
And the younger Kennedy was moving to restrict the predations of Wall Street and the corporations it funded. In his 1994 book, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency, University of Pittsburgh professor Donald Gibson, who spent nearly forty years researching economic and political power in the United States, made a cogent argument that the primary motive behind the JFK assassination was that he was at loggerheads with the Wall Street Establishment, those same globalist financiers who first promoted communism in 1917 Russia and then national socialism, the Nazis, in Germany.
After detailing attacks on Kennedy’s economic policies, beginning with his success in forcing the major steel manufacturers to reverse a price increase in 1962, Gibson stated, “The Establishment rejection of Kennedy became increasingly intense during his time in office.” Gibson wrote that two prominent business publications—Fortune and the Wall Street Journal—were the most hostile critics of Kennedy and his economic policies and both “were related in numerous ways to the two most influential financial groups in the United States—Morgan and Rockefeller.” He also noted, “By the early 1960s, the Council on Foreign Relations, Morgan and Rockefeller interests, and the intelligence community were so extensively inbred as to be virtually a single entity.”
Other researchers also have revealed the closeness between the Wall Street Establishment and US intelligence, particularly the CIA. They are virtually two sides of the same coin.
As evidenced by the affair of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko and the on-again, off-again anti-Castro Mongoose program, there appear to have been serious divisions within the CIA in the early 1960s. While some factions undoubtedly supported President Kennedy and his programs, others did not disguise their hatred of him.
The CIA had become highly compartmentalized. Often CIA employees working on one project would have no idea that people they came into contact with also were working for the agency. And for expediency, the agency employed and used some very unsavory characters—such as David Ferrie.
There can be little doubt that Oswald and many persons in contact with him were connected to the CIA. These contacts, plus the abundant evidence that Oswald was involved in intelligence work, point to who was maneuvering Oswald in the fall of 1963. Some individuals within the CIA may have played roles in an assassination conspiracy that later compelled their superiors to cover up their activities for fear that their connection to the agency might become public.
However, it seems highly unlikely that as an organization, the CIA initiated the Kennedy assassination. But senior corporate and intelligence officials were not overly concerned if something were to happen to the young president. Such officials traditionally have sought out politicians who would look out for their interests in Washington. So in the days of Kennedy’s Camelot, intelligence chiefs along with oil and business titans may have looked to a man they knew they could deal with, if not completely trust—vice president Lyndon B. Johnson.
All the Way with LBJ
In Dallas on the day Kennedy died some people were iconoclastic enough to suggest that Vice President Johnson was behind the assassination. These were mostly longtime Texas residents who had heard vicious stories about Johnson for years and who knew the Texas politician had more to gain from Kennedy’s death than just about anyone. Even today, many serious students of the assassination cannot discount the idea that Johnson in some way played a role in the Dallas tragedy. In fact, in recent years, a spate of books led by Barr McClellan’s 2002 Blood, Money & Power have
actually accused Johnson of masterminding the assassination. However, none have offered irrefutable evidence to support that charge. McClellan, whose son Scott was among George W. Bush’s White House press secretaries, had worked for the Austin law offices of Clark, Thomas, Harris, Denius and Winters, a firm closely associated with Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson’s actions following the assassination do little to stop such speculation. And a close study of the corruption and murder that dogged Johnson’s political career only adds to the suspicion.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was born August 27, 1908, near Johnson City, Texas, which had been named for his grandfather, one of the area’s original settlers. His father, Sam Ealy Johnson, who served in the Texas Legislature for twelve years, told neighbors, “A US senator is born today.”
Young Johnson graduated from Johnson City High School as president of his senior class of six. After running away to California, he hitchhiked back home and enrolled in Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos.
After graduating at age twenty-two, Johnson got a teaching job in Houston, but it failed to hold the interest of this ambitious young man. So in 1931, Johnson was drawn into Texas politics, campaigning strenuously for conservative congressman Richard M. Kleberg. After Kleberg’s victory, Johnson accompanied him to Washington as his secretary.
In 1934 Johnson was visiting in Austin when he met an attractive twenty-one-year-old journalism student named Claudia Alta Taylor, the daughter of an affluent merchant and landowner in Karnack, Texas. As the story goes, a black “mammy” took one look at the infant Claudia and declared, “Lawd, she’s as pretty as a lady bird,” and from then on, she was known as “Lady Bird.” After a whirlwind courtship of two months, consisting mainly of daily telephone calls from Washington, Johnson returned to Texas and asked “Bird” to marry him. She agreed and the couple drove to San Antonio for a rushed wedding in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. After a brief honeymoon in Mexico, the Johnsons moved to Washington, where they rented a one-bedroom apartment and Johnson resumed his political work for Kleberg.