Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (8 page)

Besides that, much like Jim Garrison, Charles Manson was a paranoid. Nowhere is this more evident than on page 129 of
The Family,
where he is quoted as saying: “Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert — it’s the same thing, man. The coyote is beautiful. He moves through the desert delicately, aware of everything, looking around. He hears every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s always in a state of total paranoia and total paranoia is total awareness. You can learn from the coyote just like you learn from a child. A baby is born into the world in a state of fear. Total paranoia and awareness…” Once again I was grappling with the riddle of a man who appeared to act on the basis of a supreme confidence in the validity of his own delusions.

Escalation of the Vietnam war had radicalized me, once again, politically. So Charlie Manson’s affinity for right-wing organizations was something else that alarmed me. Most particularly I was spooked by allegations about links between Manson’s people and the Process Church. For when I had returned to New Orleans in order to clear myself, unsuccessfully, of Jim Garrison’s suspicions, I encountered the Process Church there — in circumstances giving me ample reason to suspect it was at least partially involved in framing me.

So as to avoid the mistakes of people like Garrison and Manson, it seemed essential to study psychology. That was another subject I found more fascinating than conspiracy theories about the John Kennedy assassination. Already acquainted with Freud and other pioneers of psychoanalysis, I began devoting my attention to more recent trends. That the older theories were unconsciously tainted with reactionary ideology was frequently mentioned in my political readings.

In 1972 I discovered a psychology book that dovetailed beautifully with my political opinions, by then both anarchist and left of center. A collection of readings compiled by Jerome Agel and The Radical Therapist newspaper staff,
The Radical Therapist
anthology found the roots of nearly all neurosis and psychosis outside the individual, lodged firmly and visibly in the authoritarian class structure of society. As a sociology major at Georgia State University I had already begun to suspect as much.

There was only one hitch, best summed up in “The Radical Psychiatry Manifesto” by Claude Steiner: “Paranoia is a state of heightened awareness. Most people are persecuted beyond their wildest delusions.”

I wondered if that could be true. Certainly it was not without personal relevance, in terms of my own very unsatisfactory adjustment to the John F. Kennedy murder mystery. Perpetually fearing that my radical friends would think I was a CIA agent, because of what Garrison had said, and yet afraid that I would become paranoid if I delved into the unanswered questions about Oswald too deeply, I walked an uncomfortably narrow line.

In
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
by Abraham Maslow (Penguin Books, 1971) there appears the following: “There is still another psychological process that I have run across in my explorations of failure to actualize the self. This evasion of growth can also be set in motion by a fear of paranoia.” Although I was not to read those particular words until many years later, I was versed enough in modern literature of psychology to realize that traditional Freudian notions of paranoid schizophrenia and classical paranoia were under attack by more than just wild-eyed radicals. One of my textbooks in school contained a sociological study of a man who was committed for symptoms of paranoia; it demonstrated that, due to his rather unpleasant personality, he was actually being secretly harassed by his co-workers who, upon being interviewed, admitted as much.

At that point I took a long second look at the origins of my own fears of paranoia.

What popularized that brand of psychosis for my generation was the film,
The Caine Mutiny,
with Humphrey Bogart clicking his steel marbles compulsively, saying, “I kid you not,” and making a fool of himself over a few stolen scoops of ice cream.

Another French Quarter writer who worked in a record store next to the Bourbon House, where I ate and drank and socialized when I lived in New Orleans, possessed a book about color psychology that said brown was the favorite color of most paranoids. He added to my information that most novelists tended toward paranoia, something about which we had both laughed a little nervously.

Another Quarterite, a painter named Loy Ann Camp who was among my closest friends, had a textbook from her days in nursing school that said paranoia was related to fear of latent homosexuality. Since my reason for joining the Marines earlier had been to prove to myself that I was a man in every sense, I didn’t find that information comforting either.

From additional sources I gathered that paranoids were quite undesirable cranks who took to sitting in corners stroking their chins and observing those around them with sidelong glances. Senator Joseph McCarthy was said to have been a paranoid as was Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. In fact, all the really famous paranoids seemed to be anti-Communist — a consideration that did not sit well with my own rational capitalist philosophy of those days. Paranoids, in addition to all the other problems they were causing, were giving my politics a bad name with outlandish notions like Welch’s charge that grandfatherly old Ike was “a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” and his grandiose ambition to impeach Earl Warren from the Supreme Court.

Intellectual respectability required mental health, and it was becoming evident to me by then that mental health consisted of trusting everyone about everything as much as possible — and, for good measure, poking fun at anyone who didn’t. Especially to be trusted were the mass media, whose owners and personnel were not to be regarded as minions of the Establishment because, as they themselves used to attest with confidence, there was no Establishment in the United States of America. Only foreigners and paranoids believed that there were.

Intellectualizing and joking about paranoia was a favorite pastime of post-Beatnik, pre-Hippie Bohemian America — for reasons that were undoubtedly the result of coincidence, at least among individuals who did not want their sanity called into question.

A habitue of the Bourbon House, Chris Lanham, once entertained us with the diabolical theory that the psychological classification of paranoia had been developed by conspirators for the purpose of discrediting anyone bent on exposing them. When his friend, Jack Burnside, suggested sharing this hilariously evil notion with a wandering conspiracy buff we called Crazy David — because he thought people like the Rockefellers and DuPonts controlled the government — we told Jack the joke had gone far enough. Crazy David might actually believe him. And, as everybody knew, paranoids who received reinforcement for their delusions could become very dangerous.

In retrospect, I realized that Crazy David’s views about who rules America did not seem especially insane. By 1972, my own analysis resembled it in many essential respects.

Then came Watergate.

Again my attention was absorbed by a public event that did not seem related to the John Kennedy assassination. That a reactionary warmonger like Nixon might be unceremoniously ejected from the White House for crimes that even Conservatives would find shocking seemed almost too good to be true. Eagerly, I followed the scandal, becoming more and more aware at the same time that conspiracies were a fact of political reality, even in America.

During the summer of 1973 I was in New York City, visiting my old friend Greg Hill, who in years past had accompanied me to New Orleans and lived as my roommate there for a few months. At a folk concert in Washington Square I was approached by a Yippie who wanted to sell me the latest issue of
The Yipster Times
for a quarter. A glance at the headline and cover photos convinced me it was worth the price.

What I found there has since been published in an excellent book by A.J. Weberman and Michael Canfield called
Coup d’Etat In America.
Convincing photographic evidence tends to establish that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were in the immediate vicinity of Dealy Plaza in Dallas the day John Kennedy was shot. That possibility brought to mind something I had almost managed to happily forget. A decade earlier in New Orleans I had discussed, among other things, the idea of assassinating President Kennedy with a man who in many unsettling respects bore a resemblance to the members of the Watergate break-in team. As I was to say to Weberman in a letter two years later, this man was “a plumbers type of guy.”

Although he even looked something like pictures of E. Howard Hunt, his bald head diminished any direct physical similarity to that now-famous spy. More a matter of style than anything else seemed pertinent then. Also relevant were links between the CIA and organized crime that were coming to light in the wake of the Watergate revelations. For the man I spoke to used to let on that he was somehow associated with New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello.

Already I had been suspecting tie-ins between Watergate and the J.F.K. murder because both crimes seemed connected to the Southern Rim or Cowboy faction of the American Establishment — the so-called military-industrial complex. I had, however, been bending over backwards not to jump to conclusions. Something about those photos of that man
The Yipster Times
argued was Edward Howard Hunt made such restraint harder. What, exactly, it might be continued to elude me.

Something else occurred that same summer that wore at my ability to keep believing this is the least conspiratorial of all possible worlds. Again, it was nagging rather than sensational.

After I wrote an article published in Atlanta’s underground paper,
The Great Speckled Bird,
titled “Did the Plumbers Plug J.F.K., Too?” — I got two unusual phone calls.

First was a male voice imitating the sounds of a speeded-up tape recorder or a gibberish-talking cartoon character. Ten years earlier a Quarterite named Roger Lovin and I used to address one another in the Bourbon House with identical noises to those I was now hearing on the other end of the line, as an inside joke intended to freak out strangers. This time I simply replied with a word or two of bewilderment, and the caller hung up.

Within seconds, the phone rang again. Now a male voice — not Roger’s — said very clearly, “Kerry, do you know who this is?” When I answered in the negative, he said, “Good!” — and again the caller hung up.

Enough similarity existed between that voice on the phone and the voice of the man I had talked to all those years earlier about assassinating John F. Kennedy, that I became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of keeping my suspicions to myself much longer.

I nevertheless persisted in my silence for more than another year. That was more than a little uncharacteristic of me, to consciously nurture something without talking or at least writing of it. But, while I was no longer as worried about going paranoid as in years past, I remained concerned that others would think me paranoid.

Then, too, there was another thing. This suspect of mine more than once had claimed a connection with the Mafia. Even if he was innocent of assassination, were I to accuse him in public, he might have what he considered a good motive for getting me killed. Until I was certain of his guilt, I didn’t want to open my mouth.

Meanwhile, I continued to think about the phone calls. Was the caller trying to determine indirectly whether or not I’d spoken recently with Roger Lovin? Could Roger have known something that I happened to guess in my Bird article?

As a matter of fact it was not so long before that Roger Lovin had called me, making an appointment to come by the house while he was in town for a visit. On the day of his expected arrival, the woman I was living with and I went out for a brief interval. We returned to find all her jewelry missing, and Roger never showed up. I recalled that when I had known him in New Orleans, in the same year Kennedy was assassinated, his principal reputation was that of a talented con-artist.

I shrugged. That wasn’t much to go on.

Soon there was enough information in the news about assassination plots involving organized crime to draw my attention in that direction. In February of 1975 I had begun making cramped, secretive notes about the mysterious bald-headed man I had known in New Orleans. For the first time since the assassination, the Establishment was expressing suspicions of conspiracy, pushing for a Congressional probe of the events in Dallas. Only recently I had been called by CBS and someone from
Reader’s Digest
was even attempting to contact me. Expecting that before long I would be called before a Congressional committee to testify, I didn’t want to divulge anything sensational until I could speak under oath.

Instead, I prepared — quietly. As soon as my notes were completed to the point where they told a coherent, if abbreviated, story — I began discretely searching for a politically radical attorney. Employed part-time as a student assistant and distrustful of the Establishment because of their dishonesty in the past about the assassination issue, I wanted a lawyer who was an idealist because, neither financially nor politically, could I afford any other kind. If my information was relevant, and I believed now that it probably was, doing anything useful with it was still going for a long shot.