Oswald's Tale (94 page)

A man of many sides—he loved his animals:

Posner:
His favorite dog, Sheba, was left in the car. “People that didn’t know Jack will never understand this,” Bill Alexander told the author, “but Ruby would never have taken that dog with him and left it in the car if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail. He would have made sure that dog was at home with Senator and was well taken care of.”
⁵²

Yes, Posner must be absolutely right that Ruby was not planning to kill Oswald on Sunday at 11:21
A.M.
But that does not take care of why Ruby finally—for reasons considerably closer to his heart than the pain and turmoil awaiting Jacqueline Kennedy—did the deed and threw the cloak of a thousand putative conspiracies over the mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald, his life and his death.

PART VIII

OSWALD’S GHOST

1

The Punishment of Hosty and the Death of the Handler

De Mohrenschildt has figured prominently in our account; FBI Special Agent Hosty has been a passing figure. Yet, of all the men in security and intelligence whose careers would be blighted in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, no others stand out so prominently, and so a quiver of insight may be obtained by learning what happened to them.

The memorandum to which Priscilla Johnson McMillan will soon make reference is the “two- to four-page document” mentioned earlier that was dictated by Hosty at Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin’s suggestion after Oswald’s angry encounter with Hosty in Captain Fritz’s office.

McMillan:
Between two and four hours after Oswald’s [demise] on November 24, Shanklin summoned Hosty. Hosty recalls that Shanklin was standing in front of his desk and . . . took out both the memorandum and Oswald’s note. “Oswald is dead now,” he said. “There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this.” Hosty started to tear up the documents in Shanklin’s presence. “No,” Shanklin shouted. “Get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.” Hosty then took the note and memorandum out of Shanklin’s office, tore them up, and flushed them down a toilet at the FBI. A few days later, Shanklin asked Hosty whether he had destroyed Oswald’s note and the memorandum and Hosty assured him that he had.
¹

The HSCA reported that Shanklin, in 1963, denied he had any knowledge of the note. In fact until 1975, the Dallas FBI office kept secret the destruction of the note.
²

McMillan:
Hosty’s . . . answers on an internal FBI questionnaire were subsequently falsified either by Shanklin or by someone in FBI headquarters in Washington to admit “poor investigative work” in the Oswald case. Hosty received letters of censure from J. Edgar Hoover, was placed on probation . . . and demoted to Kansas City. Years later, a promotion that was recommended for him was blocked by Clyde Tolson, chief deputy of J. Edgar Hoover. Except for Shanklin and two others, every FBI agent who had anything to do with the Oswald case in 1962 or 1963 was censured, transferred, demoted, or barred from promotion, while Shanklin received several letters of commendation from Hoover.
³

It is very hard to believe that the note was as simple and direct in its contents as Hosty says it was. The irony, of course, is that Hosty was part of the legitimate FBI, as opposed to COINTELPRO, and so may have had almost as little to do with Oswald as he claims; but Hoover could not have known that to a certainty, since the working boundaries between daily FBI work and COINTELPRO adventures were not going to be defined with high clarity in inter-office memos—and besides, the evidence had been destroyed. That made Hosty a part of the detritus that J. Edgar Hoover had to hide under bureaucratic sanctity. So Hosty was chosen as Hoover’s patsy.

More is available when we look at the Baron. Recounting how he heard the news in Haiti that someone had killed Kennedy, he is pleased with his own acumen:

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
Now I do not consider myself . . . a genius. But the very first thought after we heard . . . [the news from] an employee of the American Embassy in Port au Prince, and he mentioned that the name of the presumable assassin is something Lee, Lee, Lee—and I said, “Could it be Lee Oswald?”

And he said, “I guess that is the name.”

MR. JENNER.
That occurred to you?

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
That occurred to me.

MR. JENNER.
As soon as you heard the name Lee?

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
As soon as I heard the name Lee. Now, why it occurred to me—because he was a crazy lunatic.
⁴

The Haitian government must have gone through quite a few changes of mind over the next weeks concerning its relation to De Mohrenschildt. We obtain more than a clue in George’s manuscript
I’m a Patsy.

. . . We learned that a letter was sent by someone influential in Washington to the officials of the Haitian government to drop me from the payroll and to exile me as fast as possible. Fortunately I had good friends and the latter did not happen. And later, little by little, we were ostracized by the United States Ambassador Timmons, then by the American businessmen and government employees with whom we had been on very good terms, and, finally, came the news of the investigation of all our friends and even acquaintances in the United States.

. . . At last, after a good long time, we were officially invited to come to Washington and help the Warren Commission in their investigation. Although we could contribute very little, we still accepted to go to Washington to testify. Although our depositions were supposed to remain confidential, all three hundred pages of irrelevant conversation were printed and promiscuously distributed.
⁵

Toward the end of his manuscript, he gives a more candid explanation of the process:

As the atmosphere of Port-au-Prince became oppressive . . . we were considering abandoning my survey . . . and returning to the States. But President Duvalier found himself a solution to this situation. He asked Dr. Herve Boyer, Minister of Finance, Secretary of Treasury, and a good friend of mine who had helped me get the survey contract, to invite me to his office and to have a chat with me. [Boyer] said decisively: “You are in the hot water. Everyone is talking about you and your wife. Do not abandon your survey but go back to the States and clear your name somehow. If you cannot, come back, wind up your work and leave the country.”

It so happened that on the same day our Embassy received a letter, addressed to me and my wife, from Mr. J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel of the Warren Commission. Mr. Rankin invited us to come to Washington, D.C., if we wished, and to testify . . . Of course, we were most anxious to cooperate as much as we could to solve this crime. But Jeanne refused to travel without our two dogs—Manchester terriers—and, after the exchange of wires, Mr. Rankin accepted this additional “dog expense.” . . .

I was the first to testify. The man who took my deposition was Albert Jenner, a lawyer from Chicago, who much later became well known in connection with the Watergate case . . . I have to admit that either he was much cleverer than I or that I was impressed by the whole setting and situation as it unfolded in Washington at the time. Anyway, Jenner played with me as if I were a baby.
⁶

In fact, it was a trial of nerves. He had to protect the CIA and he had to protect himself, and as we can recall, his
modus operandi
was to remind the Agency that he could certainly pull them in with him if they should be so rash as to disown him completely and thereby destroy his shaky purchase on a sinecure in Haiti.

At the conclusion of his stay in Washington, De Mohrenschildt may have looked to better his situation at a small dinner party:

Very tired by our testimonies, we were invited after our ordeal to the luxurious house of Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother and her stepfather, Mr. Hugh Auchincloss. This luxurious house was located in Georgetown and Auchincloss’ money originated out of some association of Hugh’s family with John D. Rockefeller, Sr., of the oil fame . . .
⁷

Almost in passing, De Mohrenschildt mentions that Allen Dulles was also there. Is it fair to suspect that Dulles asked the Auchinclosses to arrange the dinner? Dulles, having been all but forcibly retired from the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, would still have been in contact with many a CIA loop; Dulles was bound to have questions concerning Agency connections with De Mohrenschildt. Even an active director of the CIA will have a good deal of sensitive information concealed from him, and in this situation, relegated to the sidelines for more than two years, Dulles must have had his own share of concern about how closely CIA was involved, since it was on his watch, after all, that the Agency had tried to kill Castro.

Of course, if he and George had any private conversation that night, there would be no record of it. De Mohrenschildt contents himself with remarking that Allen Dulles “asked me a few questions about Lee.”

One of them was, I remember, did Lee have a reason of hating President Kennedy? However, when I answered that he was rather an admirer of the dead President, everyone took my answer with a grain of salt. Again, the overwhelming opinion was that Lee was the sole assassin.
⁸

De Mohrenschildt is, as ever, ready to divert us from the point:

I was still thinking of poor Lee, comparing his life with the life of these multi-millionaires. I tried to reason—to no avail. It seemed to me that I was facing a conspiracy, a conspiracy of stubbornness and silence. Finally, both Jeanne and Janet (Mrs. Auchincloss) got very emotional, embraced each other, and cried together, one over the loss of her son-in-law, the other over the loss of a great president she admired so much.

“Janet,” I said before leaving, “you were Jack Kennedy’s mother-in-law, and I am a complete stranger. I would spend my own money and lots of my time to find out who were the real assassins and the conspirators. Don’t you want any further investigation? You have infinite resources.”

“Jack is dead and nothing will bring him back,” replied she decisively.
⁹

As usual, there is no emotional sequence to De Mohrenschildt’s account. One thing happens, and then another, and each little matter seems to have very little to do with the next. The best way to forestall the development of a scenario is to keep your events episodic:

But we were still in the Auchincloss’ luxurious mansion, about ready to leave. “Incidentally,” said Mrs. Auchincloss coldly, “my daughter Jacqueline never wants to see you again because you were close to her husband’s assassin.”

“It’s her privilege,” I answered.

Hugh, who was a very silent man, asked me suddenly: “And how is Marina fixed financially?”

“I do not know. I just read that she received quite a lot of money from the charitable American people—maybe eighty thousand dollars.”

“That won’t last her long,” he said thoughtfully and, almost without transition, pointed to an extraordinary chess set: “This is early Persian valued at sixty thousand dollars.”

We said goodbyes amicably to the Auchinclosses and drove off back to our hotel. “That son of a gun Hugh has an income running into millions,” I told Jeanne thoughtfully.

“Such figures are beyond my comprehension,” she said sadly.
¹⁰

For his testimony before the Warren Commission, De Mohrenschildt was reimbursed with job security. Or, to be precise, he was and he was not. Forces were in play with counterforce.

Fortunately, the Haitian Ambassador in Washington was reassured by the Warren Commission that we were decent people. The Ambassador transmitted this message to President Duvalier and we could return safely to Haiti. But my contract became hopelessly harmed by the intervening publicity and by the peculiar attitude taken by the American Embassy toward us. And President Duvalier, the astute Papa Doc, knew through his informants, that our Embassy would not protect my rights any more. And the old fox was absolutely right; the payments for my survey began drying up and in later years I never received any cooperation from anyone in our Embassy or in the State Department in trying to recover the large balance of my contract still due to me.
¹¹

Still, he was able to hang on in Haiti until 1966, after which he and Jeanne came back to Dallas.

McMillan:
. . . his life had changed once again for the worse. He had failed to pull off the big coup in sisal or oil that he had counted on. His book on his Central American adventures had been refused by several publishers. And, as always, George was feeling financial pressure. Having spent his life among tycoons, he had never been able to earn as much as he felt he needed. His relations with Jeanne became bitter. They divorced, but then went on living together, estranged from everyone they knew. Jeanne had a job, while George taught French at a small black college in Dallas . . . A decade or so after the assassination . . . his spirits sank into depression . . .
¹²

Posner, picking up on this deterioration in De Mohrenschildt, does his best to render him permanently incompetent:

Posner:
. . . de Mohrenschildt was quite mad by the time he gave his final [Epstein] interview. For nearly a year before his death, he was paranoid, fearful that the “FBI and Jewish mafia” were out to kill him. He twice tried to kill himself with drug overdoses, and another time cut his wrists and submerged himself in a bathtub. After he began waking in the middle of every night, screaming and beating himself, his wife finally committed him to Parkland Hospital psychiatric unit, where he was diagnosed as psychotic and given two months of intensive shock therapy. After his treatment he said he had been with Oswald on the day of the assassination, though he was actually with dozens of guests at the Bulgarian embassy in Haiti the day JFK was killed. Despite de Morenschildt’s imbalance, Epstein and others still quote the final interview as though it were an uncontested fact.
¹³