Was Mary Ferrell A Disinfo Agent?

First topic message reminder :

According to researcher Joe McBride,Ferrell was a disinfo agent.Here is an excerpt from his book "Into The Nightmare".

THE GATEKEEPER

After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA
based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I
became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened.

According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary
Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository
in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events.

Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available
online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly selfeffacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Dale K. Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to
the HSCA.

As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the
Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.”

Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a Germanborn Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.”

It was at a February 22,1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt,that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political
topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a Nazi”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” .

Stan Dane wrote:

JFK Student wrote:According to researcher Joe McBride,Ferrell was a disinfo agent.Here is an excerpt from his book "Into The Nightmare".

What did you think of McBride's book? Just curious.

Hi Stan

 I found it fairly interesting,but some of his conclusions were quite hard to accept. For example he claims that Officer Tippit was most probably the Grassy Knoll Shooter,the one who fired the fatal headshot and the so called "badgeman" allegedly seen in the Moorman photo.

 He also claims that Tippit was assigned to hunt down Oswald and kill him.Also there is the stuff about Ferrell,Kenny "O'Donnell etc.

So all in all his book was a mixed bag.

JFK Student wrote:

Stan Dane wrote:

JFK Student wrote:According to researcher Joe McBride,Ferrell was a disinfo agent.Here is an excerpt from his book "Into The Nightmare".

What did you think of McBride's book? Just curious.

Hi Stan

 I found it fairly interesting,but some of his conclusions were quite hard to accept. For example he claims that Officer Tippit was most probably the Grassy Knoll Shooter,the one who fired the fatal headshot and the so called "badgeman" allegedly seen in the Moorman photo.

 He also claims that Tippit was assigned to hunt down Oswald and kill him.Also there is the stuff about Ferrell,Kenny "O'Donnell etc.

So all in all his book was a mixed bag.

Thanks. That pretty well sums up my thoughts too. I bought the book a year ago when it came out and only just recently finished it. I found the pace to be rather plodding, often finding myself dozing off while reading. It didn't keep my attention very well, but that might just be me, not the book necessarily.
 
Not having the in-depth knowledge of the JFK assassination that so many have here, I've been interested in what others thought of it.

I think it's laughable when someone like McBride happily quotes someone as saying “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies” and then, with nothing at all to substantiate the allegation, concludes that "after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation."

Give me a break. How about some actual evidence to buttress this crap? Is that too much to ask? I guess hearsay and innuendo are much easier to come by so why bother looking for proof, right?

This bollocks about how the dictabelt recording "seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated by Ferrell to discredit it in due course" simply proves that McBride doesn't understand the acoustics evidence. At all.

BBN found five impulses on the tape that are 1.7, 1.1, 4.8, and 0.7 seconds apart. These were matched to test shots fired in Dealey Plaza and recorded at microphones placed along Houston and Elm Streets. If the impulses were random static then the matches could have fallen in any one of 125 different sequences but they didn't. They fell in the correct 1-2-3-4-5 topographic order thus validating the hypothesis that they were recorded by a motorbike travelling along Houston and Elm.

The distance from the first matching mic to the last was 143 feet and the elapsed time between the first and last impulse on the tape was 8.3 seconds. For the bike to cover that distance in the given time it would need to be travelling at 11 mph - the very speed the motorcade was travelling on Elm.

On top of this, the dictabelt synchronizes perfectly with the Zapruder film. Obviously Kennedy's head explodes at frame 313. Before this we see Connally's white Stetson hat flipping up and down between frames 225 and 230,  the apparent result of a bullet passing through his wrist. When we align the fourth shot on the dictabelt (the knoll shot) with frame 313, the third shot falls precisely as expected at frame 225. Therefore, the exact same 4.8 second gap between shots is found on both the audio and visual evidence.

Now if McBride or anyone else wants to believe that some random burst of static or whatever created five separate impulses that just happened to precisely mimic the echo patterns of rifle shots fired from the depository and the knoll if recorded by a microphone travelling north on Houston and west on Elm at 11 mph when the air temperature was 65 degrees Fahrenheit then so be it. Some people believe in little green men, bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster and I guess everyone has a right to believe whatever idiotic crap they wish.

But I'm not wearing a tin foil hat for anyone.

yes yes yes yes and yes, Martin. With McBride I have tended to focus on the O'Donnell crap, but there's lots more silliness.

I can't judge the book as a whole because I've not read it. Based on what I'd heard about the O'Donnell crap and the fact that McBride believes in Zapruder film and body alteration I knew it was book I'd never get on with. Even more so since even the Kindle edition is way over priced.

I've been told that it's not without merit. Apparently he managed to track down and interview T.F. Bowley? Can anyone share the details of that interview?

Martin Hay wrote:I can't judge the book as a whole because I've not read it. Based on what I'd heard about the O'Donnell crap and the fact that McBride believes in Zapruder film and body alteration I knew it was book I'd never get on with. Even more so since even the Kindle edition is way over priced.

I've been told that it's not without merit. Apparently he managed to track down and interview T.F. Bowley? Can anyone share the details of that interview

Working on it...give me a little time as I still can't type as well as I did before my accident...check back in an hour or so...

I'll do this in a few installments over the next few hours.

From pages 246-251 (first part)
 
Bowley told me on November 22, 1963 he had just turned west onto East Tenth Street  approaching the scene of Tippit shooting after having picked up his 12 year old daughter Kathryn at school, they were headed toward nearby telephone company office where his wife worked. He was driving to pick her up for a family vacation in San Antonio. He said he stopped his station wagon several houses down when he saw the officer lying in the street "because I didn't want my little girl to see all of it." Kathryn Bowley Miles recalled in 2013 that she did see a part of the crime scene and seemed to indicate that there car was closer to Tippit than her dad remembered: "It was disturbing for a young girl to see a man lying in the street. As we pulled up to the police car I remember my daddy saying to me "Stay in the car.' I did stay but we had pulled up just in front of the police car so I was witness to this event and it has stay with me all these years. My father NEVER talked about it and when asked about it his answers then (and even now) were terse".
 
T.F. Bowley was familiar with first aid from working as an installer of business systems for telephone companies (he was an employee of Western Electric at the time), so he went to see if he could help the officer. He gathered that he had arrived "just momentarily" after the shooting but said that Tippit "was laying there when I turned the corner, so he may have been there five minutes, for all I know. I didn't see him fall. People had already gathered, so some amount of time had elapsed. Now how much is anybody's guess—a couple of minutes at least. And then it took me a little bit of time to walk up there.
 
"I didn't see the guy [the gunman] or hear any shots or anything. I just noticed the [squad] car was parked and [Tippit] was laying beside it, and some other people had already got there before I did. I know [Tippit] hadn't been here long, because people were still millin' around like a bunch of startled goats. They said they'd seen the guy run down the street." Asked in which direction he was told the man had run, Bowley said "There were quite a few people saying different things at the time. All I remember was that it seemed like they said he had a tan jacket on and he run down the street thataway [i.e., going west down East Tenth]. I don't recall any conversation other than that one guy had run." Bowley remembered ten or twelve people being at the scene, including ones who fit the descriptions of two other important witnesses, Helen Markham and Domingo Benavides.
 
Bowley said "At the time, of course, there was no association with what was going on downtown in my mind; it didn't occur to me. The officer was lying by the left front wheel of his car. He was lying face down. We [he and another unidentified man] turned him over." The other people "looked like they were all scared to touch him. In the excitement, I didn't really notice wounds. I don't recall seeing any wounds or blood. His eyes were open." But Bowley could see that Tippit (who had been shot in the head and chest) was "beyond help" and appeared to be dead.  He and other witnesses found Tippit's service revolver lying under him, out of his holster, which made Bowley think "It looked like he had attempted to draw it." Greg Lowrey, who talked with numerous witnesses, disputed the claim that Tippit had pulled his gun out of his holster, and pointed out that if the officer had not drawn his gun, it could indicate he was not wary of his killer when he left the car to talk with him.

Bowley told me it was he who put Tippit's gun on the hood of the car and then moved it to the car seat. Another witness, Ted Callaway, a used-car salesman who was at his lot a little more than a block away when the shooting occurred, arrived after Bowley and also claimed to have removed the gun from under Tippit's body and put it on the hood of the car. Callaway's subsequent actions are, to say the least, questionable. According to a written statement Callaway signed for the police, he took the gun, commandeering a cab to go off in an unsuccessful pursuit of the gunman, thus breaking the chain of official custody on Tippit's revolver. This is an incident Bowley did not remember witnessing; he expressed surprise when I showed him his police affidavit with his account of that incident with Callaway. Also differing from Bowley's later recollection of picking up Tippit's pistol and placing it on and then inside the car, the affidavit states "As we picked the officer up, I noticed his pistol laying on the ground under him. Someone picked the pistol up and laid it on the hood of the squad car. When the ambulance left, I took the gun and put it inside the squad car. A man took the pistol and said 'Let's catch him.' He opened the cylinder and I saw that no rounds in it had been fired. This man then took the pistol with him and got into a cab and drove off." After reading the affidavit, Bowley told me "I don't remember that part about the pistol, I really don't. But he also told HSCA investigators in 1977 that he had picked up the pistol: "Recognizing the [dead] man as being a police officer Bowley stated he found the officer's revolver on the ground under him. The weapon was out of its holster and near the officer's right hand. Bowley picked the weapon up and placed it on the front seat of the scout [sic] car." The report of that interview does not mention Callaway or his taking off with the gun, as Callaway himself admitted doing.

From pages 246-251 (second part)
 
Bowley told the police on December 2, 1963, that he checked his watch when he left his car to go to the scene and that the watch read 1:10. The affidavit begins,
 
On Friday November 22, 1963, I picked up my daughter at the R. L. Thornton School in Singing Hills at about 12:55 pm. I then left the school to pick up my wife who was at work at the Telephone Company at Ninth Street and Zangs Street. I was headed north on Marsalis and turned west on 10th Street. I traveled about a block and noticed A Dallas police squad car stopped in the traffic lane headed east on 10^th Street. I saw a police officer lying next to the left front wheel. I stopped my car and got out to go to the scene. I looked at my watch and it said 1:10 pm.
 
In our interview, Bowley reiterated that he looked at his watch upon arriving at the scene of the shooting and saw that it read 1:10. But he was less certain about when he had looked at his watch. After reading what his affidavit said about the watch, he said "I don't recall that part of it, but I'm sure I did, if that's what the statement said, because I gave that when it was fresh in my mind." As for why he checked his watch, "Only reason I did that," he told me with a laugh, "I was supposed to pick up my wife at a certain time, and I wondered if I was late." He thought he had been expected to pick her up at about 1 pm but added, "It seemed like I was supposed to pick her up at 1 o'clock, but then maybe it wasn't. Shortly after 1 would have been right in the ballpark."
 
After attending to the officer, Bowley found Domingo Benavides—the closest witness to the actual shooting, who saw it from his pickup truck stopped across the street, fifteen feet from Tippit's squad car—trying to call in a report of the shooting on the radio in Tippit's squad car. Benavides, an auto mechanic, was having difficulty doing so, and since Bowley had a professional familiarity with radios, he took charge. His report was recorded on the police radio at 1:16 pm: "Hello, police operator... We've had a shooting out here. On Tenth Street. Between Marsalis and Beckley. It's a police officer. Somebody shot him...what's this? 404 Tenth Street." Bowley estimated that he stayed at the shooting scene for no more than ten minutes, although that estimate appears to be a few minutes short. He said that he was there when the ambulance arrived (at 1:19) from the Dudley M. Hughes Funeral Home at 400 East Jefferson Boulevard, only two and a half blocks from the scene of the crime, to pick up Tippit to take him to Methodist Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The first police unit reached the Tippit murder scene at 1:22; Bowley said he stayed and talked with officers for a few minutes before leaving to pick up his wife.
 
Alterations appear in the records of Tippit's official time of death, further complicating the question of the time of his shooting. At 3 pm on November 22, DPD Officer R.A. Davenport and Captain George M. Doughty signed a receipt for a slug a uniform button removed from Tippit at the hospital at the department's request; the slug and the button (which had been impacted by a that bullet) were given to Davenport as evidence and transferred by him to Doughty. The document has a handwritten notation reading "Dr. Paul Moellenhoff /Removed at 130/PM/Methodist Emergency/ Dr. Richard Ligouri  Pronounced DOA @ 115/PM." The "AUTHORIZED PERMIT FOR AUTOPSY" signed by Justice of the Peace Joe B. Brown, Jr., at 3 pm also lists Tippit as having been DOA at Methodist at 1:15. But the DPD Homicide Report against Oswald in the Tippit shooting typed at 5 pm on November 22 has the time the officer was pronounced DOA bt Dr. Ligouri as 1:30. An undated "Supplementary Offence Report" by Officers Davenport and W. R. Bardin seems to show the time of the Tippit being pronounced dead by Dr. Ligouri as 1:00 or 1:06 but with the time being typed over to look like 1:16; none of those times appear plausible, given the other records. A November 29, 1963 FBI report of an interview with Dr. Ligouri by Special Agent Robert C. Lish has Tippit being pronounced dead at 1:25, but the "2" is higher than the other numbers and appears to have been typed in separately. (This was one of numerous such alterations that appear in significant documents pertaining to the events involving Tippit, Oswald and Kennedy. The Tippit Homicide Report has the "Time Reported" listed as "1:18pm" but appearing to be typed over a time of "1:28pm," apparently to conform with that document's listing of the time of the event [supposedly] occurred, 1:18.)   

When Dallas Morning News Reporter Earl Golz interviewed Lottie Thompson, an emergency room nurse at Methodist Hospital who was present when Tippit was pronounced DOA, she said the FBI had contacted Dr. Moellenhoff repeatedly about the discrepancy in the report of the time of the pronouncement. Thompson claimed that the large clock in the emergency room, which she said was used to mark the time Tippit was DOA, was fifteen minutes slow, and the hospital maintenance department had not gotten around to fixing it While it is possible that the clock may have been off, a fifteen-minute discrepancy sounds suspiciously extreme and suggests that the hospital personnel may well have been pressured to change the time (much as the doctors at Parkland were pressured to change their initial report of Kennedy's throat would being a wound of entrance).

Thanks for taking the time to do this Stan.

greg parker wrote:

Tom Scully wrote:Greg, and those who agree with his posted opinion?
I cannot recognize what motivated Mary in the first place, or what kept her going. Was she not disinterested in JFK?

Tom,


my point was not to suggest Mary was or wasn't a "disinformation" agent. It was to suggest McBride's reasons for that belief are entirely inadequate to maintain such a claim. I further hinted about people in glass houses, given his own spurious beliefs and the people he chooses to credit as being monuments to research credibility.

Amen. There is a nasty spiteful undercurrent in a lot of "research", that looks like it seems more to discredit entities and people associated with the US government, than it does to solve any assassination questions.

"Just because" someone has worked for the CIA, or maintained a contact with someone who did, or "might have come across some such person sometime during his or her lifetime", is not at all an adequate reason to heap scorn and discredit on the person and/or the organization.

That should be lesson #1 from a quick study of the JFK landscape - EVERYONE's a CIA agent! There isn't even anyone in this story who isn't! And, there are good ones, and there are bad ones. There are people who simply "do their jobs" (however nasty those jobs may become), and then there are people who do "more" than their jobs, and take orders from people "other than" those in their direct chain of command.

You speak of AFIO - has anyone taken a very careful look at the housecleaning that Adm. Stansfield Turner attempted during the Carter administration?

That list of names, should be interesting, shouldn't it?

Cheers, Stan.
I was hoping he asked Bowley about his association with Ruby.

From pages 246-251 (third part)
 
The time recorded by the police dispatcher when Bowley called in the report of the Tippit shooting (1:16) makes a later time that 1:15 for Tippit being DOA likely, but Bowley's call and the time of the ambulance arrival and its quick departure from the scene suggest the officer was pronounced DOA closer to 1:25 than 1:30.  According to Myers book, Mary (Mrs. Frank) Wright, who lived on the block where Tippit was shot, also called in a report of the shooting by telephone to the DPD at 1:18, which was relayed to the Dudley Hughes Funeral Home. The ambulance attendants (Jasper Clayton Butler and William [Eddie] Kinsley) who picked up Tippit reported on the police radio that they arrived on East Tenth Street at 1:19, only about thirty seconds after the call was recorded. But the trip ticket at the funeral home, with a time stamp reportedly showing the call at 1:18, has disappeared. Butler, who drove the ambulance, said in a 1977 interview with HSCA investigators that the last time the ticket was seen was in about 1965, and that in 1964, he had copied it for representatives of Life magazine. Butler said "I was on the scene one minute or less. From the time we received the call in our dispatch office until Officer Tippit was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital was approximately four minutes." That would make the time he was pronounced DOA about 1:22 or perhaps within a couple of minutes later.
 
On the police radio at 1:26, an officer says, "NBC News is reporting DOA," to which the dispatcher replies "That's correct." In the midst of some confusion, when the dispatcher is asked to clarify whether that NBC report meant Tippit or Kennedy was DOA, he replies "J. D. Tippit." Kennedy's death, although widely rumored for some minutes on network radio reports, was not officially announced until 1:33 by White House Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff at Parkland Hospital and was given as "approximately one o'clock," although he probably had dies ten minutes before that. It strains credibility that NBC could have learned that Tippit was DOA within only one minute of the officer being pronounced dead, so that also makes a time earlier than 1:25 more likely for when the doctor at Methodist Hospital pronounced him DOA.
 
After Bowley said in our interview that he looked at his watch upon arriving at the scene of the Tippit shooting and saw the time as 1:10, he seemed to reconsider the sequence of that memory, saying he might have checked the watch a few minutes after his arrival, which would make the time of the shooting even earlier than 1:10, as another witness originally reported. Bowley said he may have looked at the watch "I guess when I radioed in...because I was really concerned, you know, because I had to pick up my wife. That's how the time got involved, because I was supposed to pick her up. I may have looked at it when I stopped my car. I just honestly don't remember. Well, you know you don't place much importance on things like that."
 
Asked if his watch was reliable, Bowley laughed and said "Best I remember. I usually had pretty good watches." But he conceded that "it could have been five minutes off." When I told him that his observation of his watch was important because there is a dispute about the time of the shooting, he admitted, "I had never heard there was. As a matter of fact, I never heard the time mentioned before."
 
Despite Bowley's honest confusion after the passage of twenty-nine years about when he had checked his watch, it seems likely that his account given in December 1963, that he did so shortly after leaving his car, is the most reliable version. Bowley's concern about meeting his wife would have made it natural for him to check his watch when he experienced the initial delay caused by seeing the officer lying in the street. If he checked his watch at 1:10, and the officer had just been shot, that would be in approximate range with another eyewitness report of the time of the shooting as being around 1:06 or 1:07 (probably a couple of minutes too early; see below) as well as with the last reported transmissions by Tippit from his squad car shortly after that. The delay of several minutes between Bowley checking his watch and calling in the report at 1:16 is consistent with Bowley's explanation of how he had to come to the aid of Domingo Benavides. Benavides told the Warren Commission that he had "set there for just a few minutes" in his pickup truck after the shooting because he was afraid the gunman might come back and "might start shooting again." After he left his truck, Benavides had trouble trying to operate the radio in Tippit's squad car, so Bowley made the transmission.

------------------------------------------- 
This is what I was able to find concerning Bowley. If I find anything else, I'll note it. Also, if you see anything funny looking or questionable, let me know and I'll recheck/fix it. I do make errors and my typing is still rather clumsy.

Indeed many of each side of the debate are more concerned with being correct and not revealing evidence. Unfortunately the many contentious debates have not been very productive but often instead end in personal attacks. One of my favorite things about this forum is the informational and relaxed fashion we usually have. 

Additionally, many in each camp seem to forget we can all be and are wrong at times. Some can admit it, some double down on speculation despite the evidence. That is perhaps the worst problem. 

Ideas without substantial evidence claimed as the truth have poisoned many conspiracy advocate contentions and utter denial in the face of evidence has destroyed many critical arguments.

I hope some of us can bridge the gap in time with reasonable people who disagree but are willing to refine their views in the face of evidence. However, if not at least we tried, and when, not if, when most evidence emerges unreasonable critics and advocates are going to feel like a bunch of charlies.

The MMF documents are there for all to peruse. They have been collected and sorted from all the originating sources. Unless someone can prove Mary Ferrell created or altered any of them, how the fuck can she be accused of being a disinfo agent.

Paul Klein wrote:Cheers, Stan.
I was hoping he asked Bowley about his association with Ruby.

Ah, I found some blurbage on Bowley and Ruby. Stand by...

From page 486
 
T. F. Bowley told me he had been in Ruby's clubs when he was younger, which didn't seem unusual for a young man in Dallas during those years, but he didn't volunteer the information that he'd actually worked for several years as a "doorman" (a euphemism for bouncer?) for Ruby. That revealing piece of news emerged in the media only in 2010, when it was announced that the 82-year old Bowley would be honored by the Dallas police for his action in alerting the department in the Tippit shooting. The local CBS affiliate reported, "Bowley also spent several years in the 1950s moonlighting as a doorman for Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby." Bowley had earlier told the HSCA that he worked for Ruby from 1951 to 1958 and that his wife knew Ruby and Ruby's bookkeeper. Bowley asserted to the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he couldn't recall how long or during which years he had worked for Ruby at the Silver Spur club on South Ervay Street. "I knew Jack well, but half the people in Dallas knew Jack," Bowley said. "He was a tough little cookie, but he would give you the shirt off his back."

The paper added that "ever since No. 22, 1963, [Bowley] has worried that the connection [with Ruby] somehow might cast suspicion on him. 'It crossed my mind, yes,' he said." That could be one reason Bowley kept a relatively low profile for many years. His daughter Kathryn Bowley Miles, who recalled in 2013 that "My father NEVER talked about it," also said of him, "He didn't even want to talk to his friends about it."

Thanks, Stan.
The coincidences in this case never cease to amaze me but its probably no coincidence the WC never called him up. They, like Bowley, were probably also worried about the connection to Ruby.
I remember Colin Crow bringing this very thing up on another forum once upon a time.

Above and beyond, Stan. Your work on that is appreciated. Thank you.

I'd point out that it's much easier to copy & paste from an e-book pdf when you feel like sharing large passages of information, but then some of us never do things the easy way. So I guess it's true what everybody's been saying: you're not just another pretty face.

================

Allen Lowe,

Re the Kenny O'Donnell business, it reminded me of allegations made against Bill Barry and even Frank Mankiewicz years ago in relation to Robert Kennedy's murder. Back then I thought that stuff was too obviously ridiculous; nowadays I feel the same as you mention: it's beneath contempt. (And at least those allegations weren't in a large book taken seriously by many, what with C. David Heymann being safely dead now)

================

Alan Dixon,

You're free to get pissed off and cancel your membership as often as you like, but I'm afraid you're one of us now. And if I couldn't figure out how to cancel mine 3 months ago, I don't think it should be so easy for you.

My opinion is that these things are mostly a distraction and intended that way. It goes with the territory of these forums: the best way to keep people from getting anywhere is to keep them fighting and wondering and worrying. It's the easiest thing in the world to pose a question or make an allegation and then sit back and watch everybody jump into what often turns into a clusterfuck. That's what made me suspicious (eventually) of the photo interpretation debates that went on (forever) at the EF -- it was like they were intentionally meant to be a distraction, not just because the fights were always hot but because the subject (films, photographs) was of more interest to more people than -- oh I don't know -- something like a paragraph explaining simply and concisely the details of the dictabelt recording and its importance.

Please bear that kind of thing in mind, Alan. This shit is frustrating at times, too many times, but very often that's because the real goal is to discourage people from being involved.

Take care of yourself and be well, my friend

dwdunn(akaDan) wrote:Above and beyond, Stan. Your work on that is appreciated. Thank you.

I'd point out that it's much easier to copy & paste from an e-book pdf when you feel like sharing large passages of information, but then some of us never do things the easy way. So I guess it's true what everybody's been saying: you're not just another pretty face.

================

Allen Lowe,

Re the Kenny O'Donnell business, it reminded me of allegations made against Bill Barry and even Frank Mankiewicz years ago in relation to Robert Kennedy's murder. Back then I thought that stuff was too obviously ridiculous; nowadays I feel the same as you mention: it's beneath contempt. (And at least those allegations weren't in a large book taken seriously by many, what with C. David Heymann being safely dead now)

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Alan Dixon,

You're free to get pissed off and cancel your membership as often as you like, but I'm afraid you're one of us now. And if I couldn't figure out how to cancel mine 3 months ago, I don't think it should be so easy for you.

My opinion is that these things are mostly a distraction and intended that way. It goes with the territory of these forums: the best way to keep people from getting anywhere is to keep them fighting and wondering and worrying. It's the easiest thing in the world to pose a question or make an allegation and then sit back and watch everybody jump into what often turns into a clusterfuck. That's what made me suspicious (eventually) of the photo interpretation debates that went on (forever) at the EF -- it was like they were intentionally meant to be a distraction, not just because the fights were always hot but because the subject (films, photographs) was of more interest to more people than -- oh I don't know -- something like a paragraph explaining simply and concisely the details of the dictabelt recording and its importance.

Please bear that kind of thing in mind, Alan. This shit is frustrating at times, too many times, but very often that's because the real goal is to discourage people from being involved.

Take care of yourself and be well, my friend

Thanks Dan.
 
It's one thing to clown around and have fun, but when I feel I can help somebody doing real research, then I consider it a privilege to try to give something back to the forum once and awhile. I only had a physical copy of the book, so I had to do things the old-fashioned way, and even though I'm still typing like R2D2, it was time well spent if it helps others.
 
And Alan...
 
Please don't stay away too long. As Dan said, you're one of us.

Thank you so much for going to the trouble of typing all that, Stan.

You are very much the gentleman.

I don't think the Jack Ruby "connection" is what stopped the Commission from calling Bowley to testify. It seems obvious to me that they just didn't need somebody telling them that he arrived on the scene at 1:10 pm to find Tippit already dead. Such testimony would have to be dealt with whereas a simple affidavit is easy to bury or ignore. And by not giving Bowley a chance to expound upon his account he could easily be dismissed as mistaken and no one would have to ask him whether or not his watch could have been 5 minutes slow without him knowing - something I find extremely unlikely.

Those commission lawyers sure knew what they were doing. Unfortunately.

Martin Hay wrote:Thank you so much for going to the trouble of typing all that, Stan.

You are very much the gentleman.

Thanks Martin.
 
BTW, I thought your Watchman Waketh response was kick ass.

Thanks, Stan!

I was really hoping to draw Willens back out and make him respond to the stuff about his distortion of the medical evidence.

So far, not a peep.

Here is what he says about O'Donnell.

Further support for the presence of a shooter on the knoll came from surprising sources, Kennedy’s close aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers, who were riding in the Secret Service followup car and witnessed the assassination at close range. Their once-private recollections were reported in House Speaker Thomas (Tip) O’Neill’s 1987 book, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (with William Novak). After John F. Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952, O’Neill was the man who replaced him in their Massachusetts district of the House of Representatives before going on to become speaker from 1977 through 1987.

O’Neill wrote in his book:I was never one of those people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination.

I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence.

“That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said.
“You’re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth.”
“Tip, you have to understand. The family -- everybody wanted this thing behind them.”

Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s. Kenny O’Donnell is no longer alive, but during the writing of this book I checked with Dave Powers [who from 1964 until 1994 was museum curator of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum]. As they say in the news business, he stands by his story.

And so there will always be some skepticism in my mind about the cause of Jack’s death. I used to think that the only people who doubted the conclusions of the Warren Commission were crackpots. Now, however, I’m not so sure.

O’Donnell’s behavior surrounding the assassination, and not only his lie in this critical matter, raised questions in my mind. He had the reputation of being a great Kennedy loyalist, an impression promoted by the intermittently powerful yet somewhat ludicrous 2000 film Thirteen Days. Although it dramatizes the opposition Kennedy faced from General Curtis LeMay in the Cuban Missile Crisis, it blinks on the full implications of that conflict and grossly exaggerates the role of Kennedy’s special assistant/appointments secretary by portraying him as a key presidential confidant in that crisis; JFK’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen mockingly described the film as “Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.” It turned out the film was hardly an unbiased historical account. According to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, it was covertly an O’Donnell family enterprise: “His son Kevin, an internet tycoon, helped bankroll a buyout of Beacon Entertainment, which made the movie, and appears to have been the partial inspiration for promoting his father -- played by Kevin Costner -- to the role of the ‘ordinary Joe’ hero audiences identify with.”

I find it hard to accept Kenneth O’Donnell as a loyal, sympathetic figure because I can’t overlook his role in covering up the truth about the assassination. When asked by Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter his “reaction as to the source of the shots,” O’Donnell testified cryptically, “My reaction in part is reconstruction -- is that they came from the right rear. That would be my best judgment.” Powers more truthfully told the commission, “My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead, but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple overpass. This may have resulted from my feeling, when I looked
forward toward the overpass, that we might have ridden into an ambush.”

The 1972 book by O’Donnell and Powers, with Joe McCarthy, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”:Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, is silent on the source of the shots, but it does indicate that Powers, unlike O’Donnell, did not accept the single-bullet theory: “Dave, who was watching the President and Connally carefully during the shooting, still thinks that the first bullet hit Kennedy in the neck, the second struck Connally and the third one ripped open the President’s head.” O’Donnell also admits interfering with a Secret Service man’s attempt to respond to the shots: “A Secret Service agent beside me, probably Tim McIntyre who was standing behind Clint Hill on the left running board, pulled his gun and I reached for it, pushing it down, thinking that if he fired, he might hit somebody in the crowd.”

O’Donnell also was instrumental in the illegal removal of Kennedy’s body from Dallas, which prevented a legitimate autopsy and made the coverup of a conspiracy possible. Furthermore,O’Donnell had played a major role, and probably a decisive one, in choosing the Trade Mart as the venue for JFK’s Dallas speech, evidently in concert with Texas Governor John Connally, who was pressing hard for it. And according to Secret Service expert Vince Palamara, it was O’Donnell who had decided that neither of Kennedy’s military aides, Air Force Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh or Army Major General Chester Clifton, would ride in the presidential limousine, as one usually did, and instead placed them far behind JFK in the motorcade and unable to see the president. The 1964 Ford Mercury station wagon in which they were riding was the sixteenth car in line, just ahead of the first press bus, and, according to researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, originally was scheduled to carry members of the Washington press corps and was the personal vehicle of assassination “researcher” Mary Ferrell.

The decision by O’Donnell to choose the Trade Mart for the president’s speech, with the additional connivance of the Secret Service, determined that the limousine would pass through Dealey Plaza at a slow pace. The HSCA staff report on the motorcade cites Gerald A. Behn, the Secret Service’s Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail, as stating that O’Donnell made the decision for the Trade Mart, overruling security concerns expressed by Behn and others about that location. O’Donnell testified to the commission, “There was a controversy between the Governor [Connally], and between some of the local Democratic figures, and between our people, as to whether the place finally selected
was the best place for the President to give the address. The Governor felt very strongly on it. And we finally acquiesced to his views. But I would think that came rather late in the game, and it would have altered the route quite dramatically.” According to the HSCA, the principal advance man on the Texas trip, Jerry Bruno, made notes on November 6 indicating that “O’Donnell held and exercised the power to make the final decision and accordingly gave orders to Bruno and Behn to implement the decision.”

But the decision was not finally settled until November 14, the day of the motorcade planning meeting in the office of Dallas attorney Eugene Locke, the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas; Bruno wrote in his journal, “On this day, Kenny O’Donnell [who was in Washington that day] decided that there was no other way but to go to the mart.”

On November 15, Bruno wrote, “The White House announced that the Trade Mart had been approved. I met with O’Donnell and [Peace Corps deputy director and Texas advance man Bill] Moyers who said that Connally was unbearable and on the verge of cancelling the trip. They decided they had to let the Governor have his way.” November 14 was the day Democratic National Committee representative Jack Puterbaugh, who presumably was working closely with O’Donnell, participated in that final decision in Dallas or perhaps conveyed it from Washington (see further
discussion of the all-important choice of the motorcade route, and the role of Locke as well, in Chapters 6 and 16). As mentioned earlier, when William Manchester interviewed O’Donnell about his and the Secret Service’s heated struggle, with guns being drawn, to remove President Kennedy’s coffin illegally from Parkland Hospital over the objections of the local medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, O’Donnell said, “it became physical -- us against them.”

Manchester suggests that Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman made the initial decision to remove the body, but also calls O’Donnell “the leader of Rose’s opposition.” O’Donnell told the commission that it was his decision to remove the coffin so that Mrs. Kennedy would not have to stay in Dallas when an autopsy was being performed: “I in my own mind determined that we had no alternative but to just depart. . . . I notified the Secret Service and General McHugh, and told them to get ready to depart. We went in and took the body out.” Manchester quotes O’Donnell as saying to a Dallas policeman at Parkland, “Get the hell over. We’re getting out of here. We don’t give a damn what these laws say.”

If all these actions by O’Donnell were the actions of a Kennedy loyalist, I wondered what a disloyal aide might have done under the same circumstances. And why was there such an effort in later years to burnish the image of O’Donnell, including not only a 2000 big-budget movie but also a 1998 book by his daughter Helen, A Common Good: The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy and Kenneth P. O’Donnell? I searched for clues about why O’Donnell’s loyalty to JFK might have been compromised.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh provides them in his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, alleging that O’Donnell was the center of a corruption scandal at the White House that appeared about to explode once the president returned from Dallas. John and Robert Kennedy reportedly were already working to shed Lyndon Johnson from the 1964 ticket, using the spreading Bobby Baker scandal as leverage. Hersh writes: “During his last days in Washington, [President] Kennedy was confronted with a serious allegation against Kenny O’Donnell.” According to Hersh, the allegation came from Kennedy presidential campaign and Democratic National Committee operative Paul Corbin, who was close to Bobby: “In the late spring of 1963, Corbin concluded that he had solid evidence of the skimming of campaign contributions by O’Donnell and two others, and he went to [a close friend of JFK, journalist Charles] Bartlett to have him warn the president.” Although JFK was dismissive of the allegations, Bobby was not. Hersh writes that Corbin returned to his inquiry with renewed determination, Bartlett told me, and, after months of preparation, “brought Bobby the stuff. He had affidavits proving that it was still going on” as of November 1963. “He was a good sleuth,” Bartlett said. “He told me he got it all together, signed statements, with Kenny O’Donnell being the bagman. He took it to Bobby and Bobby went through it and said, ‘This is it.’ He called Jack” in front of Corbin. Evelyn Lincoln told the attorney general that his brother had just left for Texas. “Bobby said,” Corbin told Bartlett, ‘“We’ll do it Monday. First thing.”‘ After the assassination, the distraught attorney general told Corbin to let the issue rest. “Lyndon wouldn’t believe me,” Kennedy said, according to Corbin.

So both O’Donnell and Johnson may have been saved by Dallas from expulsion from the administration or possibly even prison terms. Hersh reports that Bartlett in the summer of 1963 wrote JFK another memorandum revealing that O’Donnell, far from being loyal, actually held his boss in contempt: “O’Donnell, while drinking at a bar in Hyannis Port, had been overheard by a Secret Service agent making derogatory remarks about the president. ‘The purport of O’Donnell’s remarks,’ Bartlett wrote, ‘was that the President was in fact rather stupid and that if it were not for [O’Donnell’s] assistance, he would fall flat on his face. O’Donnell said he had had a great many offers from industry but that he was afraid to leave because he knew that the administration would fall apart.’ Kennedy’s response was to give the note to O’Donnell, who had the Secret Service agent immediately removed from the White House presidential detail, disrupting his career.”

Hersh also quotes from a July 19, 1963, memo Bartlett wrote the president reporting, “An aura of scandal is building up -- someone as remote as John Sherman Cooper [the Republican senator from Kentucky] observed to me the other evening that . . . it would be a terrible thing if your record as President were to be impaired by disloyalty on the part of your associates.” Cooper that November was appointed by President Johnson to the Warren Commission.

After the assassination, O’Donnell began a long slide into alcoholism that led to his premature death in 1977. He worked for LBJ for a while, and then for RFK in his 1968 presidential campaign,and he made two unsuccessful bids to become governor of Massachusetts. His daughter writes that he was always “haunted” by Dallas. Although she makes no mention of the financial scandal that Hersh reports was brewing, and blames Governor Connally for choosing the Trade Mart, she writes that her father blamed himself for choosing the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza: “His decision would haunt Kenny for the remainder of his life.” O’Donnell would tell his wife, “I let him down. I failed. I let him down.” As Mort Sahl put it, President Kennedy “had a strange group of friends. Remarkably absent when he fell.”