JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (85 page)

Mercer looked up at the bridge that formed an arch over the street ahead of her. Three police officers were standing talking beside a motorcycle. She wondered why they took no interest in the man carrying the rifle up the hill.

Mercer eased her car forward, until she was parallel to a second man, who was driving the pickup. The driver turned his head, looking straight into the eyes of Julia Ann Mercer. The man had a round face. He turned away, then looked back at her. Their eyes locked again. Two days later, while watching television, Mercer would recognize the driver of the truck, Jack Ruby, in the act of shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.
[196]

After Mercer drove away from Dealey Plaza, she stopped to eat at a favorite restaurant. She told friends there about the man she’d seen carrying the rifle up the hill. She guessed he had to be a member of the Secret Service. “The Secret Service is not very secret,” she said.
[197]

When she continued her drive to work, a police car pulled her over. Two officers who had overheard her in the restaurant said she was needed for questioning in Dallas. President Kennedy had been shot in Dealey Plaza, where she had seen the man with the rifle.
[198]

For several hours that afternoon and the next morning, Julia Ann Mercer was questioned by the Dallas police and the FBI. Four years later, she saw the statements they attributed to her. She was unable to recognize them as her own.

It was in January 1968, during Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, that Julia Ann Mercer’s husband phoned Garrison. He said he and his wife were in New Orleans and wanted to talk with Garrison. When Garrison met them in their hotel suite, he was confronted, as he would write, by “a most impressive couple. A middle-aged man of obvious substance, he had been a Republican member of Congress from Illinois. Equally impressive, she was intelligent and well-dressed, the kind of witness any lawyer would love to have testifying on his side in front of a jury.”
[199]

Garrison showed Mercer her statements as printed in the Warren Commission Exhibits. Reading them carefully, she shook her head.

“These have all been altered,” she said. “They have me saying just the opposite of what I really told them.”
[200]

She said that on Saturday, November 23, the day after the president’s assassination, FBI agents showed her an assortment of pictures. She selected four of the pictures as looking like the driver of the green pickup truck. When they turned one over, she read the name “Jack Ruby” on the back.
[201]

She told Garrison, “I had no doubts about what the driver’s face looked like. I do not know whether the other three pictures shown me were other men who looked like Ruby or whether they were three other pictures of Jack Ruby. But they definitely showed me Jack Ruby, and I definitely picked him out as looking like the driver.”
[202]

Her identification of Jack Ruby as the driver had occurred on
the day
before
Ruby shot Oswald. If her testimony on Ruby delivering a man with a gun case to the grassy knoll had become public, it would have created a major problem for the government’s argument that there was no conspiracy. Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI version of her statement claimed “Mercer could not identify any of the photographs” with the driver.
[203]

Julia Ann Mercer wrote down, on Garrison’s copy of the FBI report, a description of her identification of Ruby’s picture. She added: “I again recognized Jack Ruby when I saw him shoot Oswald and I said to my family, who were watching TV with me, ‘That was the man I saw in the truck.’”
[204]

After seeing Ruby’s murder of Oswald, Mercer notified the FBI that she had again recognized Ruby as the driver of the truck.
[205]
That is not in the FBI report. According to it, she never identified Ruby at all, much less a second time. The FBI report acknowledges only that she had been shown a picture of Ruby (without disclosing that this happened on the day before Ruby shot Oswald). The FBI again claims “she could not identify him as the person [driving the truck].”
[206]

Pointing this out to Garrison, she laughed and said, “He was only a few feet away from me [in Dealey Plaza]. How could I not recognize Jack Ruby when I saw him shoot Oswald on television?”
[207]

The FBI and Dallas Sheriff’s Department versions of Mercer’s statement not only denied her identification of Ruby as the driver. They also claimed she said the truck had a sign on its side in black, oval letters that read “Air Conditioning.”
[208]
Mercer told Garrison she said the opposite: “Every time I was questioned—which included at least two times by the FBI—I clearly stated that there was no printing on the truck.”
[209]

The FBI’s and Sheriff’s Department’s false description of the truck as having an “Air Conditioning” sign on its side resulted in a charade. FBI agents then conducted a thorough but irrelevant search throughout Dallas for the driver of such a truck.
[210]

The government’s documents on Julia Ann Mercer are, on close examination, not only deceptive. They are also fraudulent.

The Sheriff Department’s statement was signed by “Julia Ann Mercer” and notarized. However, in Garrison’s presence, Mercer signed her name below the written corrections she had just made to the statement. She showed him the difference between her signature and the forgery someone had done in her name on the original document.
[211]

She stated: “Neither of the signatures on the two pages of this affidavit is mine although they are fairly close imitations (except for the way the capital A is written in my second name, Ann. I have always used a pointed capital A and whoever signed my name on these two pages used a round capital A each time).

“Also I note that a woman has signed her name as a Notary Public and has indicated that this alleged statement was ‘sworn to and subscribed’ before her. This also is untrue.” Mercer said she was the only woman present during any of her questioning.
[212]

Julia Ann Mercer has been a key witness in the assassination of John F. Kennedy from the beginning. The government knows that. So does she. For that reason, she has been almost impossible to locate for decades.

Jim Garrison, “conscious of the sudden deaths of some witnesses who appeared to have seen too much for their own survival,”
[213]
thought she should continue to use her maiden name on her New Orleans statements, just as she had in Dallas. She followed his suggestion, and thereby became inaccessible. Nevertheless, because of the critically important nature of her testimony, in the late 1970s Garrison offered to locate her for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, “if they intended to call her as a witness and would assure me that there would be a serious effort to protect her.”
[214]
He never heard from them. He later read in the HSCA’s published report that he had sent them statements on the “allegation” made by Julia Ann Mercer, but that the “committee has been unable to locate Ms. Mercer.”
[215]

From reading her own definitive statements, countering the government’s claims of what she said, I have sometimes felt like I knew her. Of course, I don’t. However, I once talked to someone who did—her stepdaughter. She described her in the same way anybody might who has read Julia Ann Mercer’s own words, as opposed to their government revision. She said her stepmother was “very dynamic, very straightforward, and very determined.”
[216]
She also made it clear that her stepmother knew the meaning of witness intimidation and had chosen to disappear from public view. Since 1983 when Mercer granted an interview to author Henry Hurt,
[217]
she has remained hidden and anonymous.

From the moment on November 22, 1963, when Julia Ann Mercer was caught in traffic beside the grassy knoll, she has been very dynamic, very straightforward, and very determined to see and tell the truth. For some, that has made her a very dangerous person. It has also placed her in danger. However, she has never repudiated or compromised her testimony.

Julia Ann Mercer summarized her response to the repeated government claims that she could not identify the driver of the pickup truck from which the rifle had been taken up the grassy knoll: “That is not true. I saw the driver very clearly. I looked right in his face and he looked at me twice. It was Jack Ruby.”
[218]

At a White House meeting the evening of Tuesday, November 19, JFK’s second-to-last night in Washington, the president said he was willing to visit the developing nation of Indonesia the following spring.
[219]
Kennedy was thereby endorsing a long-standing invitation from President Sukarno, the fiery Indonesian leader. Sukarno was notorious in Washington for his anti-American rhetoric and militant third world nationalism. Although Sukarno said he was a neutralist in terms of the Cold War, U.S. analysts saw him favoring Soviet policies, as shown by his acceptance of Soviet military aid to Indonesia.

Yet Kennedy, who had been an outspoken senator in support of newly liberated third world nations, welcomed Sukarno to the White House in 1961. Sukarno had in turn hoped to host Kennedy in Indonesia. When the Indonesian leader repeated his invitation in November 1963, he said he would give the U.S. President “the grandest reception anyone ever received here.”
[220]

Kennedy’s openness to Sukarno and the nonaligned movement he represented once again placed the president in direct conflict with the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, wrote to Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, in March 1961:

“Indonesia’s growing vulnerability to communism stems from the distinctive bias of Sukarno’s global orientation, as well as from his domestic policies . . . That his dictatorship may possibly endure
as long as he lives
strikes us as the crux of the Indonesian problem.”
[221]

The CIA wanted Sukarno dead, and what the Agency saw as his pro-communist “global orientation” obliterated. Still justifying the CIA’s assassination efforts in an interview long after his retirement, Richard Bissell put Congo leader Patrice Lumumba and Sukarno in the same disposable category: “Lumumba and Sukarno were two of the worst people in public life I’ve ever heard of. They were mad dogs . . . I believed they were dangerous to the United States.”
[222]

Assassination plots against such men, Bissell conceded, may at times have shown “bad judgment,” but only when they were unsuccessful. He insisted that plotting to kill such “mad dogs” was “not bad morality.” He regretted only that certain CIA assassination plots had failed and become public.
[223]

The CIA’s coup plotting against Sukarno became public during the Eisenhower administration. In the fall of 1956, the CIA’s then-Deputy Director for Plans, Frank Wisner, said to his Far East division chief, “I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire.”
[224]
The Agency then fomented a 1957-58 army rebellion in Indonesia, supplied arms shipments to the rebels, and even used a fleet of camouflaged CIA planes to bomb Sukarno’s government troops.
[225]
The CIA’s covert role was exposed after one of its hired pilots, Allen Pope, bombed a church and a central market, killing many civilians. Pope was shot down and identified as a CIA employee.
[226]
Sukarno freed Pope from a death sentence four years later in response to a personal appeal by Robert Kennedy, when the Attorney General visited Indonesia on behalf of the president, thereby strengthening the bonds Sukarno felt with both Kennedys.

Unlike the CIA, President Kennedy wanted to work with Sukarno, not kill or overthrow him. In 1961-62, the president brokered an agreement between Indonesia and its former colonial master, the Netherlands, on the eve of war between them. JFK’s peaceful resolution of the Indonesian-Dutch crisis through the United Nations ceded the contested area of West Irian (West New Guinea) from the Netherlands to Indonesia, giving the people of West Irian the option by 1969 of leaving Indonesia. The CIA felt Kennedy was thereby aiding and abetting the enemy. As Bissell put it, “by backing Indonesia’s claim to sovereignty over West Irian, we may inadvertently help to consolidate a regime which is innately antagonistic toward the United States.”
[227]

Kennedy looked at the situation instead through Sukarno’s eyes. He said, “When you consider things like CIA’s support to the 1958 rebellion [against his government], Sukarno’s frequently anti-American attitude is understandable.”
[228]

Citing this statement, an adviser to the president noted: “This remark seems somehow to have worked its way back to Sukarno, who found the generosity and understanding that prompted it confirmed when he met the President himself.”
[229]
Through his empathy with an apparent ideological opponent, Kennedy was able to acknowledge the truth behind Sukarno’s words, establish a mutual respect with him, and prevent Indonesia and the Netherlands from going to war.