by Barry Ernest
It felt good. It felt right. And then, it ended.
Not long after, the Roosevelt eased from its berth and turned eastward. I watched America recede and slip over the horizon. My active research into the Kennedy assassination was over, at least for a while.
The Guess Who had been right that night. There was no time.
CHAPTER 16
January 1970-February 1981
There was nothing else to do but read the books on the assassination I had brought along, plus the material sent to me overseas by my fellow researchers. I remember the Europeans who, to a person, said they could never understand why Americans naively believed that their government did not lie to its people. I remember the lieutenant who, spying the dust jackets of the books next to me on the mess-hall table late one night, arrogantly commented that I was wasting my time reading such garbage.
“But I’m reading the Warren Report . . . sir.” He was not amused.
By the time I returned home, things had changed. Jim Garrison in New Orleans by now had lost his bid to prove conspiracy. The ripple effects, especially from an I-told-you-so media, made legitimate researchers look like fools.
“We are now in a difficult period,” Weisberg wrote me. “Several of us have exercised very poor judgment, and some, without evil motive but quite erroneously, are recriminating. Some, also, are inclined to shoot from the hip. This addresses their personalities and judgment more than their integrity, and I suggest tolerance and an effort at understanding. We will survive it.”1
Even the once-cohesive underground network was coming apart, unraveling because many of its members were now fearful their tireless and original research would be stolen for the thief’s own lucrative book deal.
Weisberg had recently called his former good friend Penn Jones “miserable” and “shameful” and “straight out crooked” over a difference of opinion involving Garrison’s investigation. Jones in turn accused Weisberg of being a CIA agent. A scathing letter from Weisberg replying to that charge effectively ended their long relationship.
The once-unified band of truth seekers was collapsing, a lack of time for research and a loss of trust for each other to blame.
The sixties were over. America was leaving Vietnam in disgrace. Gas lines were longer than those to see the hit movie, Jaws. Nixon resigned for lying. Former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, who had pilfered classified information about Lee Oswald for his own book deal, suddenly became president.2
I went back to college, marrying halfway through. Then came a job, a mortgage, monthly bills, a son. Life had caught up with me too.
But Victoria Adams still haunted my mind. I could never let go of that search.
Yet the lack of results was frustrating. I thought for sure, in all the literature on the assassination, after all these years, someone by now would have found her, questioned her in more detail, determined the real story, or, at the least, provided a clue as to her current whereabouts. But there was nothing, not a word I had not read before, nothing fresh in any of the growing supply of books.
That is, until David Belin wrote his in 1973. In November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury, Belin asked his faithful readers to become the panel of peers never formally mustered to judge the guilt of Oswald.3
He brought nothing new to the mix. Unlike practically every other author who was ignoring Victoria Adams, though, the man who conducted the official questioning of her did not. “If her testimony was correct that she started running down the stairs when she did,” Belin re-explained, “this conflicted with the other evidence that seemed to indicate that Oswald immediately came down the stairway from the southeast corner of the sixth floor to the second floor.”4
Echoing the Warren Report, Belin discounted Miss Adams on the grounds she had seen William Shelley and Billy Lovelady on the first floor. “It is obvious that the human mind is far more accurate on identification of known persons than it is on estimates of time,” Belin analyzed. “This is particularly true in this case because Miss Adams is so definite about whom she saw when she got to the first floor, and her observations are confirmed by the testimony of Billy Lovelady, who believed that he saw Miss Adams when they got back into the building [author’s emphasis].”5
How can observations be “confirmed” by someone who merely “believed” what was seen? Belin didn’t explain. Nor did he provide his “jury” of readers with the impromptu and suspicious passage of Lovelady’s testimony—“I saw a girl but I wouldn’t swear to it it’s Vickie”—made before Miss Adams’ name had even been mentioned.6
Shelley’s testimony is even less “confirming,” which is perhaps why Belin failed to cite it at all in regards to Miss Adams.7
And once again, where was Sandra Styles in all this? Belin, as a Commission attorney, failed to summon her for questioning. As an author, he neglected to even cite her name.
“The testimony of Victoria Adams, in summary, does not rebut the other facts,” Belin concluded, “which indicate that the assassin, shortly after the time of the shooting, came down the stairway from the sixth floor. Rather, these facts seem to show that Victoria Adams was mistaken in her time estimate and that she did not get down to the first floor as soon as she thought she had, unless she ran down the stairs at the time of the lunchroom encounter when Oswald, Truly and Baker would not have been in view of anyone coming down the stairs.”8
Even if that last possibility were the case, Miss Adams would have heard Oswald ahead of her on the stairs, as the Warren Report admitted years earlier.
To his credit, Belin took three pages to reject Miss Adams. The Warren Report had done it in two paragraphs. Yet what seemed curious about Belin’s exposé was the fact that a decade after the assassination, despite most having never even heard of someone named Victoria Adams, he chose to spend this much time on a witness deemed from the very start to have simply been mistaken.9
Belin seemed to be beating a dead horse.
“By now,” he related after bidding Miss Adams adieu, “you have an insight into the method of our investigation.”10
A pivotal moment in this madness occurred in March 1975 when, for the first time, the Abraham Zapruder film was shown on national television. The program was “Goodnight America,” hosted by Geraldo Rivera. “I’m telling you right straight out,” he warned, “that if you are at all sensitive, if you’re at all queasy, then don’t watch this film—put on the late-night movie because this is very heavy.”11
And there it was again, fuzzy now in its televised format but certainly clear enough to bring to the public eye the supreme horror of it all, proving Rivera accurate in his admonition. The studio audience audibly gasped as Kennedy’s head exploded. “That’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in a movie,” Rivera responded. “That’s the most upsetting thing I’ve seen.”
“Goodnight America” woke up the country.
Early in 1975, Pres. Gerald Ford directed that an inquiry be made into alleged illegal activities by the CIA within the United States. The result was the Rockefeller Commission. David Belin was appointed its executive director.
Its findings were startling. The CIA had engaged in domestic break-ins and had been spying on, while illegally opening the mail of, thousands of American citizens. Something sounded familiar about that.
Fascinating also were two other conclusions. The CIA did not have a hand in the death of President Kennedy. And Kennedy’s backward motion shown in the Zapruder film was not caused by a frontal shot, as many by now suspected, but by a seizure-like reaction from instantaneous and massive damage to his brain.
Next came a Senate inquiry headed by Idaho senator Frank Church. The Church Committee began delving more deeply into the CIA’s illegal activities. A special JFK Subcommittee, headed jointly by Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker and Colorado senator Gary Hart, was charged with taking a closer look at whether those activities might have had connections to Kennedy’s murder.
Surfacing at this point too was the unusual dis
closure that a Dallas FBI agent, James Hosty, Jr., had received a letter from Oswald only days before the assassination and had been ordered by his boss, Gordon Shanklin, to destroy it following Oswald’s murder. Hosty flushed the letter down the toilet.12
Hosty’s name, office address, telephone number, and license-plate number had appeared in Oswald’s address book.13 Oswald had made the notation after Hosty repeatedly tried to interview him in Dallas following Oswald’s return from Russia. Curiously, the FBI removed the page containing the Hosty information before Oswald’s address book was given to the Warren Commission. The Commission also was not made aware of Hosty’s destruction of evidence.
Whether it was that disclosure, Watergate, sinister activities by the CIA, or the public revelation that even then-Pres. Lyndon Johnson did not fully believe the Warren Report, things started to boil in Washington. The Church Committee concluded its review and voted without objection on May 13, 1976, to recommend formation of a special congressional panel to once more probe the John Kennedy assassination. The Committee found that the CIA had more irons in the fire than first imagined.
Foremost, it had been involved with the Mafia in secret attempts to eliminate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and had financed several anti-Castro organizations planning a second invasion of that island, against the explicit orders of President Kennedy that had been issued in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only did the CIA keep Kennedy in the dark about many of these operations, it also failed to disclose these secrets to an inquiring Warren Commission. This was especially disturbing since one of the Commission’s members, Allen Dulles, had been director of the CIA during the period in question.14
Less than a month later, the Senate’s JFK Subcommittee issued its report, which strongly suggested that a conspiracy had taken Kennedy’s life.
In September 1976, after combining two formal resolutions that called for such, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established, to once more investigate the death of President Kennedy. It would use the Warren Commission’s earlier treatise as its benchmark.
When that announcement hit the headlines, it gave me hope. I quickly wrote a letter to the Committee. I brought up Victoria Adams, shared what I had discovered about her over the years, and pleaded for them to resolve once and for all her important timing questions. I suggested they also locate Sandra Styles.
I never received a reply.
Most of the Committee’s efforts were conducted behind closed doors. But in late 1978, television sets across the nation began glowing with live broadcasts of selected public hearings. One of the more interesting people questioned was Marina Oswald.
Looking older than her thirty-seven years and sporting a new name by marriage, Mrs. Porter told the Committee that her former husband greatly admired President Kennedy and never once said anything bad about him.15 “That is very hard for me to comprehend,” she said, when asked why Oswald would shoot a man he respected.16
Oswald’s unexpected visit to the Paine residence the evening before the assassination, she explained, was an attempt on his part to patch up an earlier argument between the couple. He seemed relaxed and calm that night, she said, and they talked about moving into their own apartment in Dallas. When Kennedy’s impending visit came up, Mrs. Porter said Oswald appeared to know very little about it, changing the subject back to family matters.
Oswald went to bed before her, she said, and was asleep by the time she retired. She said she never saw him enter the garage during the evening, where the rifle was stored.
Oswald was occasionally abusive toward her, she admitted, and he did not have many friends. He read books profusely, admired Fidel Castro, and had, in fact, told her he was the one who shot at General Walker, comparing his intended victim to Adolf Hitler. She said, “He thought he was really doing good service to a country by eliminating a person like Mr. Walker.”17
When asked if she thought her former husband killed Kennedy, she said she believed Oswald was capable of doing so. She also felt he was alone when he did it.
The Telltale Tape
One of the more interesting witnesses before the HSCA was J. Lee Rankin, the former general counsel for the Warren Commission. He expressed disappointment over “some of the things that have been revealed” about the FBI and the CIA—two agencies the Commission had depended on.18
From the beginning, he said, the Commission was under pressure to finish its investigation quickly for an “anxious” America. He said Earl Warren had initially told him the job would take “2 or 3 months at the outside.”19
There was never any attempt by the Commission, he explained, to hide or withhold information concerning a possible conspiracy. Nor, for instance, did the Commission have concerns about where Oswald was heading when he left his rooming house, the assumption being he was merely trying to escape.20 The Commission, he assured, made accurate conclusions, despite the criticism prevalent throughout the intervening years.
Next came Richard Helms, who was downright indignant at having to answer questions about his role as deputy director of covert operations for the CIA during 1962-65. Despite Church Committee revelations, Helms said that the CIA “did everything in its power to cooperate with the Warren Commission”21 and that it “made a major effort to be as cooperative and prompt and helpful as possible.”22
This spirit of teamwork, however, had its limits. Helms explained to the HSCA that when he appeared before the Commission in 1964, he was mute about the CIA’s illegal activities toward Cuba:23
I don’t know what the Warren Commission knew. . . . I didn’t inform them of these things, but they had among them as members Mr. Allen Dulles, who was certainly aware of what had been going on with respect to Cuba; Senator [Richard] Russell of Georgia, the chairman of the Oversight Committee, who was also aware of what was going on with respect to Cuba; Mr. McCone who was director at the time, also knew what was happening. What the Commission knew from those gentlemen I don’t know. I never spoke to them myself about it.24
In hindsight, keeping the Commission in the dark was “a mistake, no doubt about it,” he admitted. “I think we should have shoved the whole thing over. I would have backed up a truck and taken all the documents down and put them on the Warren Commission’s desk.”25
Mysterious deaths also became an HSCA agenda item. After careful examination, the Committee found no basis to rumors those deaths were related to the assassination.26
It found nothing suspicious about the recent death of Mafia henchman Johnny Roselli, who had testified in June 1975 before the Church Committee that he was the go-between for CIA contacts with organized crime in the Castro assassination plots. What was left of his body was found stuffed into a drum and floating off the coast of Florida not long after.
Nor did the HSCA think it unusual that Mafia boss Sam Giancana died shortly before he was scheduled to appear at the Church Committee to discuss the CIA/Mafia working relationship. While fixing a meal in his home, he was shot once in the back of the head and six more times in and around his mouth.
Then there was George De Mohrenschildt, who supposedly committed suicide shortly after he was told of the Committee’s interest in questioning him about his relationship with Oswald.27 De Mohrenschildt, a former CIA contact at opposite ends of the social and financial spectrum from Oswald, nevertheless befriended the aloof and impoverished assassin and kept in regular contact with him after Oswald returned to Dallas from Russia.28 Regarding De Mohrenschildt’s sudden demise, the Committee acknowledged it required “further investigation.”29
Up to this point, the Committee was reinforcing the Warren Commission’s conclusions. The severe backward head motion experienced by Kennedy was attributed to a “neuromuscular reaction” and not a gunshot.30 Neutron-activation analysis on Commission Exhibit 399 and other ballistics evidence showed a “high probability” Kennedy was struck by only two bullets and Connally by one, all coming from above and behind and all “most likely” from Oswald’s rifle.31
Even the bullet found in General Walker’s home, unable to be traced to a source up to this point, became an “extremely likely” match with Oswald’s ammunition.32
By December 1978, near the end of its existence, the Committee seemed poised to render a verdict that Oswald remained the sole guilty party. Then the other shoe dropped.
On December 29, one of the most controversial aspects of the HSCA investigation reared its ugly head. The deadly sounds of the assassination in Dealey Plaza may have been inadvertently recorded onto a Dallas Police tape when a microphone on a motorcycle in the motorcade became stuck in the “on” position.
Gary Mack, an assassination researcher in Dallas, already had done work in this area. In 1976, he had obtained a multi-generation copy of the Dallas Police radio transmissions for November 22. He began analyzing the tape to determine what was on it. What he found was an approximately eight-minute gap produced when the transmitter button on one of the motorcycle police radios became stuck.
Thinking the open microphone may have been in Dealey Plaza and perhaps had picked up the sounds of gunfire, Mack began to study the tape and enhance its sound qualities. A year later, his suspicions were confirmed. There were at least a half-dozen instances on the tape where he felt gunfire might have occurred.
Mack wrote about his findings in an August 1977 article published by Penn Jones, who had sold the Midlothian Mirror by then and started up a research newsletter called The Continuing Inquiry.33 That article caught the attention of the HSCA, which found the original dispatch tape kept during the intervening years by a retired Dallas police officer. After extensive searching “for the best people in the acoustics field,” the Committee hired the Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm of Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) to conduct scientific analysis of the tape.34