JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (136 page)

[
839
]. Pat Stith, “Oswald May Have Tried to Call Raleigh Man from Dallas Jail,”
Raleigh News and Observer
(July 17, 1980), p. 11. Grover B. Proctor, Jr., “The Phone Call That Never Was,”
Raleigh
Spectator
(July 17, 1980), p. 6.

[
840
]. Alveeta A. Treon cited by Proctor, “Phone Call That Never Was,” p. 6.

[
841
]. Proctor, “The Phone Call That Never Was,” p. 6. Sherman H. Skolnick vs. National Archives and Records Service, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, No. 701 790, April 6, 1970. I am grateful to Sherman Skolnick for sharing with me the complaint he filed and his documents.

Dallas City Hall switchboard operator Alveeta Treon moved to Springfield, Missouri, where she told her story about Oswald’s attempted Raleigh call to Arnold Mickey Owen, the sheriff of Greene County, Missouri, in 1966. In a 1980 interview, Sheriff Owen said: “She gave me the impression she was scared to death. Absolutely afraid, period. In my opinion, she thought she was telling the truth.” Stith, “Oswald May Have Tried,” p. 11.

“The sheriff said Mrs. Treon told him that she and her daughter and another telephone operator were in the Dallas City Hall switchboard room on the evening of Nov. 23 when two lawmen came in [and said they wanted to listen to Oswald’s call].” Ibid.

Raleigh News and Observer
reporter Pat Stith wrote: “Mrs. Treon’s daughter, who was working in November 1963 as a stenographer in the Dallas Police Department, corroborated her mother’s story. The daughter asked not to be identified.”

[
842
]. Proctor, “Phone Call That Never Was,” p. 6.

[
843
]. Grover B. Proctor, Jr., “Oswald’s Raleigh Call,”
Raleigh Spectator
(July 24, 1980), p. 5.

[
844
]. Proctor, “Phone Call That Never Was,” p. 6. After John David Hurt died in 1981, his widow told author Henry Hurt the following year that her husband “had admitted the truth before he died. Terribly upset on the day of the assassination, he got extremely drunk—a habitual problem with him—and telephoned the Dallas jail and asked to speak to Oswald. When denied access, he left his name and number.” Henry Hurt interview with Mrs. John Hurt, March 1982. Cited in Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt
, pp. 244-45.

Besides conflicting with the description of the incident given by Alveeta Treon and her daughter, Mrs. Hurt’s explanation leaves unresolved why there would have been phone numbers for both of the Raleigh John Hurts on the message slip, as if Oswald was trying to reach one of them but was uncertain of the correct number. If John David Hurt had initiated the call in the manner Mrs. Hurt claimed, why would he have left the phone numbers of both himself and John William Hurt? On the face of it, her story is implausible. Was Mrs. Hurt coerced into telling that story by government forces in a way similar to the pressures described by Joyce Pitzer, Lt. Cdr. William Bruce Pitzer’s widow, after his death?

[
845
]. Summers,
Conspiracy
, p. 143.

[
846
]. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks,
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
(New York: Dell, 1975).

[
847
]. Proctor, “Oswald’s Raleigh Call,” p. 9.

[
848
]. Interview with Victor Marchetti, “Marchetti: Call to Contact,”
Raleigh Spectator
(July 24, 1980), p. 8.

[
849
]. Ibid.

[
850
]. HSCA Deposition of Ann Elizabeth Goldsborough Egerter, pp. 8-10. Cited by Lisa Pease, “James Angleton,” in
The Assassinations
, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), pp. 146-47. See also chapter 4 above.

[
851
]. James B. Wilcott’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, March 22, 1978, pp. 11, 47. Bob Loomis, “Ex-CIA Couple Tell of Disillusion,”
Oakland Tribune
(September 18, 1978), p. B14. Warren Hinckle, “Couple Talks About Oswald and the CIA,”
San Francisco Chronicle
(September 12, 1978).

[
852
]. Jim Wilcott, “The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A C.I.A. Insider’s View,”
Stray Magazine
(February 1989), p. 38.

[
853
]. Billy Grammer interview on Central Independent British TV program; cited by Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone,
High Treason
(New York: Berkley Books, 1990), p. 461.

[
854
]. Ibid.

[
855
]. Report from Deputy Sheriff McCoy to Sheriff Decker, November 24, 1963. Decker Exhibit 5323,
WCH
, vol. 19, pp. 537-38.

[
856
].
WCH
, vol. 24, p. 429.

[
857
]. Orders for Oswald’s fatal transfer may have come down a chain of command through Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell to Police Chief Jesse Curry. The process puzzled members of the Sheriff’s Department, who said it was odd that Oswald’s transfer was even done by the Dallas Police Department.

Deputy Sheriff Bill Courson told researcher Larry Sneed, “Very seldom did the Dallas Police Department transfer any prisoner to the county jail.” Larry Sneed,
No More Silence: An Oral History of the Assassination of
President Kennedy
(Dallas: Three Forks Press, 1998), p. 488. Courson said, “I think it’s a fact that [Police Chief] Jess Curry yielded to political pressure from Mayor Earle Cabell for the city to transfer Oswald. Normally that was a sheriff’s department function.” Ibid.

A second deputy sheriff, Jack Faulkner, agreed that for the police to carry out Oswald’s transfer was unusual: “It was our normal procedure that we [the Sheriff’s Department] transferred everyone after they filed on from the city hall.” Ibid., p. 218.

When Police Chief Curry testified to the Warren Commission about a conversation between himself and Sheriff Decker concerning Oswald’s transfer, he said the opposite of what the sheriffs knew was the normal practice: “I said [to Sheriff Decker], ‘If you want us to bring him, we will bring him to you.’ This is not an unusual procedure at all.”
WCH
, vol. 15, p. 126.

Deputy Sheriff Faulkner commented: “I understand that the Warren Commission asked Jess Curry if it was the usual procedure for them to transfer prisoners to the county and he told them, yes, which was a lie!” Sneed,
No More Silence
, p. 218.

Why would Police Chief Curry lie about so simple a matter as the usual procedure for a prisoner’s transfer? If Deputy Sheriff Courson was right that the order for the fatal transfer came from Mayor Earle Cabell—for what was, in effect, a police set-up for Ruby’s murder of Oswald—then Chief Curry may have been covering for Mayor Cabell, who had an invisible link to the CIA. Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas when Kennedy and Oswald were killed, was the brother of Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA under Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired along with Dulles after the Bay of Pigs. District Attorney Jim Garrison’s discovery of the Cabell brothers’ CIA connection was a milestone in his New Orleans investigation of the assassination.
On the
Trail of
the Assassins
, pp. 118-21.

I am grateful to John Armstrong in
Harvey & Lee
, p. 944, for leading me to Larry Sneed’s interviews with the deputy sheriffs, and to Larry Sneed for sharing the texts of his interviews with me.

[
858
]. Martin,
Seeds
, p. 451.

[
859
]. Ecclesiastes 3:2. Sorensen,
Kennedy
, p. 751.

[
860
]. Martin,
Seeds
, p. 451.

[
861
]. William Manchester interviewed Ethel Kennedy on April 17, 1964, then drew on her description of JFK’s preoccupation during his last night at the White House in
Death of a President
, p. 21.

[
862
]. William Manchester’s interview with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, May 18, 1964.
Death of a President,
p. 21.

[
863
]. Ethel Kennedy, ibid.

[
864
]. “
WELCOME MR. KENNEDY
,” Commission Exhibit No. 1031,
Warren Report
, p. 294.

[
865
]. The “Chairman” of “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” as identified in the ad, was Bernard Weissman. In fact, as Bernard Weissman told the Warren Commission, there was no such organization. The ad was conceived by Larrie H. Schmidt, William B. Burley III, and Weissman, three self-identified conservatives who had come together in the U.S. Army in Germany in 1962, and by Joseph P. Grinnan, an independent Dallas oil operator and local John Birch Society coordinator. The group decided to put Weissman’s name on the ad “in part to counter charges of anti-Semitism which had been leveled against conservative groups in Dallas” (
Warren Report
, p. 297), thereby in fact making Weissman, in the aftermath of the assassination, a focus of the Warren Commission’s investigation into the genesis of the ad.
Warren Report
, pp. 293-97.

[
866
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 25.

[
867
]. Manchester,
Death of a President
, pp. 137-38.

[
868
]. Matthew Smith,
Vendetta: The Kennedys
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1993), p. 119.

[
869
]. Faxed letter from Wayne January to Matthew Smith, December 27, 1992. I am grateful to Matthew Smith for sharing with me his faxed correspondence from Wayne January.