Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (18 page)

The officers of the Book Depository Company were—like Byrd, Murchison, and their core group—outspoken critics of Kennedy, and also major military buffs. Its president turned out to be one Jack Cason, who was also the longtime head of the local American Legion post, a leading forum for hard-line military views. The company, like all publishers and distributors of books that shaped the perceptions of young Americans—of all Americans—was of keen interest to the propaganda machinery of the U.S. government, and the intelligence community. Allen Dulles was even a member of the advisory board of Scholastic Magazines, whose publications were distributed to schoolchildren throughout the country.

These operations at least seem to offer a plausible explanation of why a man like Cason, affluent and socially connected, deeply involved in anti-Communist and military-themed activities, might choose to bypass more traditional pursuits such as oil and banking in favor of the textbook distribution business. The CIA was deeply involved, abroad and at home, in creating and distributing literature that would promote democratic Western values in the cold war battle for hearts and minds. As the Senate’s Church Committee would note: “In 1967 alone, the CIA published or subsidized over 200 books, ranging from books on African safaris . . . to a competitor to Mao’s little red book, which was entitled
Quotations from Chairman Liu
.” One such book, produced by the Domestic Operations division—the one that was monitoring Oswald—told the story of “a young student from a developing country who had studied in a communist country.” According to the CIA, that book “had a high impact in the United States.”
⁶²

The important point here is that a division of the CIA was producing general nonfiction books, and it would not be inconceivable that it was also interested in the textbooks distributed by companies such as the Texas School Book Depository.

Allen Dulles even infiltrated that paragon of objectivity the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
, whitewashing the agency’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in an article in the 1963
Book of the Year
.
⁶³

It is worth noting that D. Harold Byrd, a big-game hunter, decided to take his first-ever foreign safari—to Africa—during this period. That removed him from Dallas precisely when the assassination took place. Besides Byrd’s far-right politics, his founding role in the Civil Air Patrol, and his ties to de Mohrenschildt, he evidently rejoiced in Kennedy’s assassination—as suggested by the macabre fact that he arranged for the window from which Oswald purportedly fired the fatal shots to be removed and set up at his home.
⁶⁴

Dulles Does Dallas

As far as we know, on November 22, 1963, George de Mohrenschildt was far away from Dallas too, managing his “business ventures” in Haiti. According to the record, de Mohrenschildt and Oswald had no contact during the prior six months. It was this hiatus, and de Mohrenschildt’s physical absence from the United States, that enabled the Warren Commission to discount his otherwise glaring relationships with Oswald and Oswald’s preassassination “handlers” in Dallas. Not to mention his many links to members of the Texas Raj, who were noted for their anti-Kennedy animus and extensive ties to the national intelligence apparatus.

One curious matter concerns some communications about de Mohrenschildt in June 1963, between the Republic National Bank in Dallas and Brown Brothers Harriman in New York—where ex-senator Prescott Bush had just resumed work as a senior partner. The date is important because it is just after de Mohrenschildt leaves for Haiti. The communications, revealed in an FBI agent’s report of 1964, appear odd. As it is presented, a confidential client of Brown Brothers, “a firm dealing in the import and export of fibers,” had made a credit inquiry “concerning George de Mohrenschildt.” Brown Brothers had replied that it knew nothing of him, but forwarded the inquiry to Republic National Bank, whose “report was favorable concerning de Mohrenschildt’s credit.” Why this confidential client would ask a bank in New York about a man based in Texas—and this bank in particular—is not made clear. The thread, or fiber, tying this mini-episode to the larger unfolding drama is sisal. It gave yet more prominent people—including top officials at Republic National Bank and Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman—the same cover story it provided to everyone else: if anyone discovered that they had been dealing with de Mohrenschildt, they could claim that their sole motive was to make money off Haitian sisal.
⁶⁵

The coincidences mount. After his dismissal as director of the CIA, Allen Dulles had written a book called
The Craft of Intelligence
—with the assistance of E. Howard Hunt. As might be expected, it was hardly a tell-all exposé. Reviewers were generally unimpressed, especially with the innocuous anecdotes. “It is a book that could as well have been written from an outside, as from an inside, view,” wrote one critic.
⁶⁶
The book did, however, give Dulles a reason to remain in the public eye—including a visit to Dallas in late October 1963. Although excerpts had been published, most notably in
Harper’s
, starting at the beginning of the year,
The Craft of Intelligence
was held for release until the fall. Dulles appears to have made no book-related appearances outside the Washington–New York corridor except for Dallas, to which he traveled at the invitation of Neil Mallon to speak at the Council on World Affairs.
⁶⁷
The Dallas Council would certainly be a receptive audience. After all, it had been conceived, in Mallon’s own words, along “the guidelines of central intelligence.”

THIS GIVES US Dulles in Dallas, scant weeks before the assassination; Al Ulmer, the foreign-based CIA coup expert, in Texas and visiting with Poppy Bush; E. Howard Hunt, top Dulles operative and covert operations specialist, said by his own son to have been in Dallas; and Poppy Bush in Dallas— until he leaves town either the night before or on the very day of the assassination and places his covering alibi phone call from Tyler, Texas.
⁶⁸
Oswald’s all-too-public “friend” George de Mohrenschildt is safely off on important business in Haiti, and D. Harold Byrd is off on a safari. Again, this scenario may mean nothing. It all may just be coincidence. But the confluences among this cast of characters are at the very least remarkable. It does not take a hypercharged imagination to construe a larger story of which they might be part, or to wonder why these people might have gone to such lengths to create “deniability” concerning any connections to the events in Dallas—unless they had a connection.

Another salient fact is that, on the day of the assassination, Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin was driving the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade, a quarter mile ahead of JFK’s vehicle.
⁶⁹
Lumpkin was a friend of Jack Crichton, Poppy Bush’s GOP colleague. Like Crichton, moreover, he was a member of an Army Intelligence Reserve unit. (Lumpkin would later tell the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he had been consulted by the Secret Service on motorcade security, and his input had eliminated an alternative route.)
⁷⁰
In the car with Lumpkin was another Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, commander of all Army Reserve units in East Texas, who happened to be Jack Crichton’s boss in the Reserve.

Although Whitmeyer was not on the police list of those approved to ride in the pilot car, he had insisted that he be in the vehicle and remained there until the shooting. The only recorded stop made by the pilot car was directly in front of the Depository building. Lumpkin stopped briefly there and spoke to a policeman handling traffic at the corner of Houston and Elm.

To the right of the motorcade, in front of the grassy knoll, stood Abraham Zapruder with his camera, ready to capture the 8-millimeter short film that would make his name famous.

The Zapruder film would be cited vigorously by both critics and supporters of the Warren Commission’s conclusions. As of late 2008, the latest attempt to back up the lone gunman theory was historian Max Holland’s twelve-years-in-the-making study of the assassination. Citing the Zapruder film, Holland argues that a careful study of it shows that Oswald actually fired the first shot earlier than previously calculated. This allows, according to Holland, enough time for Oswald to have gotten the second and third shots off before the car sped up. He says this new theory establishes that Oswald could have done it—and therefore indeed did do it, and did it alone. “If I restore faith in the Warren Commission,” Holland told the
Washington
Post
, which published a highly sympathetic profile of the author, “I’ll put to rest some of the disturbing questions people have had.”
⁷¹

Zapruder is widely characterized as an innocent bystander, simply an onlooker who happened to capture historic footage that would dominate the evidentiary debate. Innocent he may well have been, but hardly unknown in Dallas intelligence circles.

It turns out that the short, bald recorder of history was also a former colleague of Mrs. de Mohrenschildt, who worked with her at Nardis when she first moved to Dallas. Zapruder also sat on the board of Neil Mallon’s Dallas Council on World Affairs. Like numerous figures in this story, he had a propensity for groups built on loyalty and secrecy, having attained the status of thirty-second-degree Freemason. The film he would make on November 22 would soon be purchased by Henry Luce, a Skull and Bones colleague of Prescott Bush and a devotee of intelligence—whose wife, Clare Booth Luce, had personally funded efforts to overthrow Castro.
⁷²
Henry Luce had warned that JFK would be punished if he went soft on Communism. After quickly purchasing the original Zapruder film, Luce’s
Life
magazine kept it in lockdown until New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison successfully subpoenaed it in 1969.

At the moment that Kennedy’s car passed the Stemmons Freeway sign on Elm Street, a man standing in front of the grassy knoll opened an umbrella and pumped it repeatedly above his head. Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations found this strange, given that it was a gloriously sunny day. Next to him was a man with a dark complexion who appeared to be speaking on a walkie-talkie shortly after shots were fired.
⁷³

In 1978, one Louis Steven Witt came forward to identify himself as the “Umbrella Man.”
⁷⁴
A self-described “conservative-type fellow,” Witt claimed that he had opened his umbrella repeatedly because a colleague had told him that the gesture would annoy the president.
⁷⁵
He did not elaborate on
why
anyone would have thought this.
⁷⁶
In his testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he lamented that “if the Guinness Book of World Records had a category for people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing, I would be No. 1 in that position, without even a close runner-up.”
⁷⁷
He also claimed to have no recollection of the dark-complexioned man, though photos show the two men speaking. Witt’s curious and seemingly choreographed umbrella opening remains another question mark on a day full of perplexing coincidences.

Where Was Poppy? Part II

If indeed it can be established that Oswald was being guided to his destiny—either because he would become the shooter or because he would be framed for the shooting—then whoever was running him, and whoever was controlling Oswald’s controller, were integral parts of a plot.

By now, we have enough information to show, fairly conclusively, that Oswald was being managed by Poppy’s old friend de Mohrenschildt. We also have others connected with Poppy closely associated with the events of November 22. And we have Poppy creating an alibi for himself.

Details on who fired the gun, whose gun it was, and how many shots were fired from where remain relevant, but become of secondary importance. The central question is the story that lies behind these details.

In summation, here’s just some of the new, relevant information:

• Poppy Bush was closely tied to key members of the intelligence community including the deposed CIA head with a known grudge against JFK; he was also tied to Texas oligarchs who hated Kennedy’s politics and whose wealth was directly threatened by Kennedy; this network was part of the military/intelligence elite with a history of using assassination as an instrument of policy.

• Poppy Bush was in Dallas on November 21 and most likely the morning of November 22. He hid that fact, he lied about knowing where he was, then he created an alibi based on a lead he knew was false. And he never acknowledged the closeness of his relationship with Oswald’s handler George de Mohrenschildt.

• Poppy’s business partner Thomas Devine met with de Mohrenschildt during that period, on behalf of the CIA.

• Poppy’s eventual Texas running mate in the 1964 election, Jack Crichton, was connected to the military intelligence figures who led Kennedy’s motorcade.

• Crichton and D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building, were both connected to de Mohrenschildt—and directly to each other through oil-business dealings.