Reclaiming History (219 page)

The story started gaining such momentum that when the Rockefeller Commission conducted its investigation of CIA activities within the United States in 1975, it took testimony from Gregory, Hunt, Sturgis,
*
and several other witnesses on the issue. Remarkably, of the eighteen pages of its June 1975 report that were devoted to the Kennedy assassination, seven (almost 40 percent) dealt exclusively with the three-tramp issue. The commission concluded that Hunt and Sturgis were not two of the three tramps. It said that the weight of the evidence was that Hunt and Sturgis were in Washington, D.C., and Miami, Florida, respectively, on November 22, 1963. What conclusively proved they weren’t the transients in Dealey Plaza was a comparison of the tramp photos with those of Hunt and Sturgis by FBI agent Lyndal Shaneyfelt, a nationally recognized expert in photo identification and analysis. Although two of the tramps bear a resemblance to Hunt and Sturgis, they clearly are not one and the same. Shaneyfelt found, among other things, that the tramp believed to be Hunt was much older than Hunt, was two inches shorter, and had a more pointed chin and more bulbous nose. The Sturgis tramp looked Nordic, whereas Sturgis (real name, Frank Angelo Fiorini) looked Latin. Also, other facial features were different and the tramp was three inches taller than Sturgis.
⁸²
Indeed, even
Rolling Stone
magazine, pro-conspiracy in its early San Francisco years, commissioned the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Oakland, California, to make a comparison of the tramp photos with those of Hunt and Sturgis, and the institute concluded Hunt and Sturgis were not the tramps.
⁸³

While the Rockefeller Commission was in the midst of its hearings on the CIA,
*
Weberman and Canfield published their book
Coup d’État in America
, in which they went beyond the mere charge that Hunt and Sturgis were two of the three tramps, alleging that Hunt and Sturgis most likely were two of the actual assassins.

The authors, whose book never rises to the level of elementary-school scholarship, tell their readers that two of the tramps “fit the descriptions of the men seen running” from the assassination scene after the shooting. But they are so inept that they actually say that the older of the three tramps, whom they believe to be Hunt, and whom they described as someone of “very thin build” who wore “no coat,” fit the description of the man Jean Hill saw running from the Book Depository Building toward the railroad tracks. But they quote Hill as saying the man she saw was “shorter than Ruby/stocky” and wore a “brown overcoat.” How these two descriptions, which the authors themselves give, match up with each other is only known to them. The authors also say the tallest tramp, the one they believe to be Sturgis, and whom they describe as “175–200 lbs./6 tall,” fits the description of the man Jesse Rice (see endnote) saw running in the railroad yards, whom they quote Rice as saying was “145 lbs./5’6 or 7.” To suggest that 175 to 200 pounds and six feet tall fits the description of someone who is 145 pounds and five feet six or seven inches tall is not just goofy but
non compos mentis
. The authors said they did not know who the third tramp was, but originally suspected he was an Oswald impersonator. Later, in 1992, they concluded he was Dan Carswell, believed by them to be a CIA operative.
⁸⁴

In 1978, the HSCA revisited the issue, and its panel of forensic anthropologists concluded that none of the three tramps were Hunt or Sturgis. The HSCA also compared several other conspiracy “suspects” (including Dan Carswell, whom they also eliminated as a tramp) and concluded that only one, Fred Lee Chrisman, a New Orleans minuteman, had facial measurements “consistent” with any of the tramps. However, the HSCA could not establish any link between Chrisman and the assassination, and further, it “independently determined that Chrisman was not in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination.”
⁸⁵

E
ven before the JFK Act, in October of 1992, ordered the release of all records related to the assassination of any “local law enforcement office” that assisted in the investigation of the assassination, the Dallas Police Department released thousands of pages of arrest and investigation reports on January 27, 1992. On February 3, 1992, at the Dallas Municipal Archives and Records Center journalist Mary La Fontaine, after finding nothing of any real value among these recently declassified and released documents, discovered among a different batch of documents voluntarily released by the department back in 1989, the arrest records (which, as indicated, were previously thought to have never existed, or to have been destroyed) of the “three tramps.” Their names were Harold Doyle, John F. Gedney, and Gus W. Abrams.
⁸⁶

According to their November 22, 1963, arrest reports, filed by Dallas police officer W. E. Chambers, the three tramps, Doyle (age thirty-three, home address Red Jacket, West Virginia), Gedney (thirty-eight, home address “None”), and Abrams (fifty-three, home address “None”) were arrested as “investigative prisoners” for vagrancy and robbery. The sparse report says they were “taken off a boxcar in the railroad yards
right after
President Kennedy was shot.” The reports said the men “are all passing through [town]. They have no jobs, etc.” The three were kept in custody until 9:25 on the morning of November 26 and released.

A front-page article on Mary La Fontaine’s discovery written by her and her husband, Ray, in the
Houston Post
on February 9, 1992, prompted an immediate search for the tramps by the FBI and many others. But it was the La Fontaines themselves who tracked down Harold Doyle in 1992 in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and who ended up producing a February 25, 1992, segment on
A Current Affair
on their search for and interview of Doyle which received the highest rating, a 14 share, in
Current Affair
history. In the interview, Doyle said that although he had heard of the tramp controversy throughout the years, he never came forward because to do so might implicate him in the assassination, and “the tramps had nothing to do with it.” As for the notoriety of identifying himself, he said, “I am a plain guy, a simple country boy, and that’s the way I want to stay. I wouldn’t be a celebrity for $10 million.”
⁸⁷
On February 29, 1992, four days later, the Portland office of the FBI interviewed Doyle, who advised the agents that around the time of the assassination, he, Gus Abrams, and John Gedney had been riding the rails in Texas. The three arrived in Dallas during the early morning hours of November 22, 1963, and spent the night at the Irving Street Mission in Dallas, where they “showered, cleaned up,” and were fed. After a noon meal, they headed to the railroad yards intending to hop a freight to Fort Worth. While inside a “coal car” they were confronted by several police officers, who told them not to move or they’d be shot. They were arrested, he said, interrogated about the assassination at the Dallas Police Department, and released a few days later.
⁸⁸

On February 26, 1992, the Tampa FBI office caught up with John Gedney in Melbourne, Florida, where he was working as a code enforcement officer for the city. Back in 1976, Gedney had obtained a bachelor of science degree from Northeastern University in Boston. His relation of the events was the same as Doyle’s, though he describes the railroad car they were arrested in as a “flatbed car with large sheets of steel” inside it. After he, Doyle, and Abrams were released, they rode the rails to Fort Worth, then to Arizona, where they picked lettuce, then into Mexico and back to the states to Los Angeles, where the three of them split up, never seeing each other after that time.
⁸⁹
*

The following year, 1993, assassination researcher Kenneth Formet located the sister of the third tramp, Gus Abrams, and she identified him from the Dealey Plaza photos, saying he had died in Ohio in 1987. She recalled that in the years around the assassination, her brother “was always on the go, hopping trains and drinking wine,” and speculated he didn’t even know who the president of the United States was at the time.
⁹⁰

From all appearances, and to the satisfaction of the FBI, the tramps turned out to be exactly what people had called them through the years, the conspiracy theorists coming up empty-handed once again.

There is no question in my mind that the search by conspiracy theorists for an assassin or assassins other than Oswald will continue down through the ages.

One of the biggest unanswered questions that has always bedeviled students of the Kennedy assassination is, Why did Oswald kill Kennedy? What was his motive? Indeed, it was an issue I had to deal with at the London trial. When I say I
had
to deal with it, I do not mean in a legal sense. It should be explained that motive is not the same as intent, two terms that are sometimes erroneously used interchangeably by those unfamiliar with the criminal law.
Motive
is the emotional urge or reason that induces someone to commit a crime. It is different from
intent
in that a person can intend to steal property or kill someone and can be found guilty of that theft or homicide irrespective of what his motive was(e.g., need, avarice, revenge, jealousy, etc.). To say it more succinctly, motive is what prompts a person to act (or fail to act). Intent is the state of mind with which the act is done. Motive, of course, may aid you in determining what one’s intent or state of mind was.

While intent is an element of every serious crime and a prosecutor has to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, motive is
never
an element of the corpus delicti
*
of any crime. Therefore, the prosecution
never
has to prove motive. All it has to prove is that the defendant did, in fact, commit the crime with the requisite intent (e.g., intent to kill, steal, deceive, burn, etc.), not why. I’ve put people on death row without knowing for sure what their motive was for the murder. All I knew for sure was that they had intentionally put someone in his or her grave and had no legal right (e.g., justifiable homicide) to do it.

However, even though prosecutors have no legal burden to prove motive, it is always better if they can, because juries want to know “why.” And just as the presence of motive to commit a crime is circumstantial evidence of guilt, the absence of motive is even stronger circumstantial evidence of innocence. Why? Proving that the defendant had a motive doesn’t mean that others didn’t also. But a complete lack of motive is very powerful circumstantial evidence of innocence because there is a motive, no matter how irrational or even insane, for every crime.

Since Oswald is dead, we will never know for sure why he killed Kennedy.
*
Ironically, the advertisement for the movie Oswald was watching at the time of his arrest,
War Is Hell
, just over an hour after he murdered Kennedy, contained these words: “There are some things that only the people that do them understand.” Even if Oswald were alive and wanted to tell us, though he could tell us much, he might not be able to convey all the psychic and subconscious dynamics swirling about in his fevered mind that led up to his monstrous act of murder. Even on a conscious level, his demented mind may have been confused as to the main reason or reasons why he pulled the trigger.
†
So all we can do is draw inferences from the available evidence, knowing that trying to divine human motivation is a rather unprofitable undertaking, and that our quest is circumscribed by the contradictory reality of trying to find rationality in an inherently irrational act.

The Warren Commission, after saying it had no doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy, considered “many possible motives” he may have had for doing so. It ended up conceding that it could not “ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives.”
¹
Former President Gerald Ford, in testimony before the HSCA, said, “We were not able to precisely pin down a motive for the assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald of President Kennedy. There was no way of really being definitive as to that motive, and so we could only speculate.”
²
“The Commission reached no conclusion on motive,” Warren Commission assistant counsel Norman Redlich said.
³
The HSCA in essence agreed with the Commission that many “factors” were involved in Oswald’s decision and that “in the absence of other more compelling evidence,” the ones set forth by the Warren Commission “offered a reasonable explanation of his motive to kill the President.”
⁴

If the Warren Commission and HSCA conceded that they could not nail down for sure why Oswald killed Kennedy, I surely am not so presumptuous as to believe that I can.

One thing, however, we should all agree on. Killing a president and thereby negating a presidential election is the ultimate “political act.” And we know that starting with his reading
Das Kapital
in his early teens, Oswald’s life was consumed by politics. “Politics was the dominant force in his life right down to the last days…,” the HSCA said. “Although no one, specific, ideological goal that Oswald might have hoped to achieve by the assassination of President Kennedy can be shown with confidence, it appeared to the Committee that his dominant motivation, consistent with his known activities and beliefs, must have been a desire to take political action.”
⁵
*

Were Oswald’s political imaginings akin to that of a small-town city councilman? We know they were not. Though he may have been a small man in virtually every way, his thoughts were big and grand, thoughts in which he personally played a historically important role. How many people do you know who call their daily diary a “Historic Diary”? That’s what Oswald called the mundane journal he kept in Russia.
⁶
†

Moreover, Oswald viewed himself as a militant soldier of action in the Marxist class struggle to bring about change, not by a slow, evolutionary process but by a violent revolution. The backyard photo of Oswald with a rifle and a pistol and holding two left-wing publications shows this. In a letter from Russia to his brother Robert, he wrote, “I…would like to see the present capitalist government of the U.S. overthrown…I fight for communism…In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government—any American,” he emphasized, implying he’d even be willing to kill members of his own family.
⁷
Michael Paine, who had several conversations with Oswald about politics, told HSCA investigators in 1978 that it was “Oswald’s belief that the only way the injustices in this society could be corrected was through a violent revolution.”
⁸
Paine told
Frontline
in 1993 that Oswald “thought capitalism was rotten, it was a fraud, and it needed to be overthrown. Lee wanted to be an active guerrilla in the effort to bring about a new world order…There’s no doubt in my mind that he believed violence was the only effective tool. He didn’t want to mess around with trying to change the system.”
⁹

We know that Oswald’s life was consumed by politics, especially with regard to Fidel Castro, Cuba, Marxism, and the notion of revolution, and among much other literature found in Oswald’s tiny Beckley Street room or stored in Ruth Paine’s garage after his arrest (including twenty Russian-language books, seven Russian-language newspapers, and the American leftist publications the
Militant
and the
Worker
) were booklets titled
The Coming American Revolution, Cuban Counter Revolutionaries to the U.S., Fidel Castro Denounces Bureaucracy and Sectarianism, Ideology and Revolution, Socialist Workers Party, Speech at the U.N. by Fidel Castro,
and
Continental Congress of Solidarity with Cuba, Brazil
; a book titled
A Study of U.S.S.R. and Communism Historical
; pamphlets titled
The End of the Comintern, The Crime against Cuba, The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought, The Road to Socialism
, and
New York School for Marxist Study
; 358 handbills titled “Hands off Cuba, Join the FPCC”; and seven photographs of Fidel Castro.
¹⁰

A person with an obsessive fanaticism for militantly revolutionary politics coupled with personal delusions of historical grandeur automatically removes himself from the general run of men, making a monstrous deed like Oswald’s so much more likely. After all, there’s always much more reason and motivation to do a bold and dramatic thing if that person is not just going to vicariously share in someone else’s reflected glory, but be the principal recipient of the glory himself. And Oswald had such dreams. Recall his telling Marina that someday “he would be prime minister.” She felt he had a “sick imagination” and tried to convince him he was just an ordinary man like others around them and “it would be better [for him] to direct his energies to some more practical matters,” but she said, “He simply could not understand that…His imagination, his fantasy, which was quite unfounded, [was] that he was an outstanding man…He was very much interested, exceedingly so, in autobiographical works of outstanding statesmen of the United States” and elsewhere. “I think he compared himself to these people whose autobiographies he read.”
¹¹

No one, of course, knew Oswald better than Marina, and when Warren Commission counsel asked her simply, “Do you have any idea of the motive which induced your husband to kill the president?” she answered, “From everything that I know about my husband, and the events that transpired, I can conclude that he wanted in any way, whether good or bad, to do something that would make him outstanding, that he would be known in history.” Later in her testimony she repeated that her husband “wanted…by any means, good or bad, to get into history.”
¹²
Earlier she had told the FBI something very similar: Her husband had “an obsession to get his name in history. Everything he did was toward that end.”
¹³
In an even earlier interview with the Secret Service, she had said her husband always tried to improve himself, but mostly concentrated on “reading books about the great men of the world, their achievements and their contribution to the world.” She said her husband was “an ego-maniac who wanted to be a ‘big man’ but that in failing to be so he decided to show the whole world who he was by killing the president so that the whole world would know his name.”
¹⁴

“My general impression [of Oswald] was he wanted to become famous or infamous. That seemed to be his whole life ambition…He just seemed to have the idea that he was made for something else than what he was doing…He seemed to think he was destined to go down in history someway or other,” said Max Clark, a Fort Worth lawyer who had become an acquaintance of Oswald’s when Oswald sought out Clark’s wife, an immigrant from France who was three-quarters Russian and spoke the language fluently.
¹⁵
Michael Paine inferred from his political conversations with Oswald that Oswald believed that society was bad and had to change, but “he was of the mind that something small, or evolutionary changes were never going to be of any effect…It had to be of a rather drastic nature. Society was all tied together. The church and the power structure and our education was all the same vile system and therefore there would have to be an overthrow of the whole thing. Just how he was going to overthrow it or what he was going to overthrow toward, it was not clear to me.”
¹⁶
Mack Osborne, who served with Oswald in Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 in Santa Ana, California, told the Warren Commission, “I once asked Oswald why he did not go out in the evening like the other men. He replied that he was saving his money, making some statement to the effect that one day he would do something which would make him famous.”
¹⁷
Even those like Volkmar Schmidt, the de Mohrenschildts’ friend who did not know Oswald well but had at least one lengthy conversation with him, came away with the clear impression that he “was extremely fixed on making an impression with his life. [He was] enormously ambitious, ambitious to achieve something beyond the normal.”
¹⁸

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, the American reporter who interviewed Oswald in her Moscow hotel room in November of 1959 and author of the definitive book on Oswald and his wife,
Marina and Lee
, wrote in 1964, “If there was one thing that stood out in all our conversation [in Moscow], it was his truly compelling need…to think of himself as extraordinary…the desire to stand out from other men…I believe that Oswald yearned to go down in history as the man who shot the President.”
¹⁹

Kerry Wendell Thornley was a corporal in Oswald’s Marine unit at the El Toro Marine base near Santa Ana, California, in 1959. As indicated earlier, he told the Warren Commission that in conversations with Oswald he sensed that Oswald “looked upon history as God. He looked upon the eyes of future people as some kind of tribunal, and he wanted to be on the winning side so that ten thousand years from now people would look in the history books and say, ‘Well, this man was ahead of his time.’”
²⁰
*
In other words, Oswald was not someone who wanted to make a ripple or even a wave on this planet. His grandiose dreams were nothing short of changing the tide of history. And as stated earlier in this book, the assassination of John F. Kennedy arguably altered the course of world history.

Conspiracy theorists seek to rebut the argument that Oswald killed Kennedy because he wanted to be known as a revolutionary hero and famous down through the ages, by asking, If this were so, why did Oswald try to escape and, when apprehended, deny that he killed Kennedy? In other words, if Oswald wanted to get credit for the assassination, why did he do everything possible to cover up his perpetration of it? But this is a non sequitur predicated on the belief that his wanting to become famous and his denying guilt right after the assassination are mutually exclusive states of mind. They are only so on the surface. Though Oswald’s leaving his wedding ring and most of his money behind on the morning of the assassination shows he thought he probably would not survive his killing of Kennedy, and was willing to sacrifice his own life, if necessary, to accomplish his plan to murder the president, this is not synonymous with saying he
wanted
to die. His conduct after the shooting clearly showed that he wanted to survive, to see another day. More importantly, just because he wanted to be famous for his deed doesn’t necessarily mean he wanted this to happen immediately, thus ensuring his apprehension and likely execution. It is much more reasonable to assume that he wanted to disclose his identity on his own terms and at a time and place he, not the authorities, chose, such as in Cuba or Russia. There is no indication that Oswald
only
wanted to be famous
after
he died. In fact, his outsized grandiose dreams always imply his living to reap the rewards (e.g., his telling Marina that someday “he would be prime minister”). Knowing Oswald as he did from the Marines, Kerry Thornley told the Warren Commission that because Oswald had killed Kennedy, “I think he probably expected the Russians to accept him…in a much higher capacity than they [had]. I think he expected them to, in his dreams, invite him to take a position in their government…that he could go out into the Communist world and distinguish himself and work his way up into the party, perhaps.”
²¹
Of course, you don’t get that high position if you’ve been arrested, prosecuted, and executed in Dallas.