Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (42 page)

Bush’s staff prepared a boilerplate response. And they attached to it this memo to Bush:

The attached suggested draft to Mr. DeMohrenschildt was written without knowledge of the flavor of your personal relationship with him. The tone may not be appropriate, but the message boils down to the fact that neither CIA nor the FBI appear to have been interested in Mr. DeMohrenschildt for a number of years.

On September 28, 1976, a letter likely reflecting his staff’s suggested language went out to de Mohrenschildt at his Dallas address.

Dear George:

Please forgive the delay in my reply to your September 5th letter. It took time to thoroughly explore the matters you raised.

Let me say first that I know it must have been difficult for you to seek my help in the situation outlined in your letter. I believe I can appreciate your state of mind in view of your daughter’s tragic death a few years ago and the current poor state of your wife’s health. I was extremely sorry to hear of these circumstances.

In your situation, I can well imagine how the attentions you described in your letter affect both you and your wife. However, my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years. The flurry of interest that attended your testimony before the Warren Commission has long since subsided. I can only suspect that you have become “newsworthy” again in view of the renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination and, thus, may be attracting the attention of people in the media.

I hope this letter has been of some comfort to you, George, although I realize I am unable to answer your question completely. Thank you for your good wishes on my new job. As you can imagine, I’m finding it interesting and challenging.

With his cordial response, Bush could have been strategically establishing a record—a tactic he has been known to employ. This note provides future investigators with alternative explanations for de Mohrenschildt’s disquiet: his daughter’s death and the attentions of the press, neither of which have anything to do with Poppy personally. And in his backhanded way, Poppy implants a whiff of doubt about de Mohrenschildt’s sanity.

For a man who knew what de Mohrenschildt knew, the note must have been terrifying.

DESPITE CIA DIRECTOR Bush’s assurances that de Mohrenschildt had nothing more to fear than hounding from the media, his life quickly took a turn for the worse. In fact, that turn began almost immediately after de Mohrenschildt’s letter arrived on Bush’s desk—and before Bush sent his saccharine reply.

Around this time, Willem Oltmans was passing through Dallas from the West Coast and called de Mohrenschildt’s apartment. He was surprised when Jeanne de Mohrenschildt answered the phone, as the couple had been divorced for three years and lived separately. Jeanne clearly was not sober. She told him that her ex-husband was in the hospital, in bad shape. In a subsequent call to George’s lawyer, Oltmans learned that de Mohrenschildt was in a mental hospital receiving electric shock therapy for a persecution complex.
⁴⁰

On November 9, 1976, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt had signed papers authorizing that George be committed to a mental institution for three months. In a notarized affidavit, she claimed that George had made four suicide attempts in the past, that he suffered from depression, heard voices, saw visions, and believed that the FBI and the Jewish Mafia were persecuting him—that is, his tormentors were everybody
but
the CIA, though it was CIA director Bush he had contacted to “remove the net.”

George was brought to Parkland Hospital, the same facility where JFK had been rushed thirteen years earlier. His doctor of record administered intravenous drugs and a second doctor ordered electroshock therapy.

Two things might shed light on the de Mohrenschildt divorce and Jeanne’s acquiescence in her ex-husband’s commitment to a mental hospital. One is her own familial intelligence connections, as discussed in chapter 5. The second is what appears to have been her own independent history with intelligence work. According to interviews conducted by Michael Kurtz, the dean of the graduate school at Southeastern Louisiana University and author of several books on the Kennedy assassination, Jeanne had been a friend of—and apparently at some point a coworker with—Richard Helms, who later would become the CIA director.
⁴¹
She was, according to Kurtz, also acquainted with James McCord, the ex-CIA man and future Watergate burglar; and David Atlee Phillips, the head of the CIA’s western hemisphere operations, whose area of responsibility included Cuba and who is believed by many to have been in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

A year after George de Mohrenschildt’s death, Jeanne would tell a journalist a completely different story about what precipitated George’s hospitalization. She claimed that a doctor had appeared in Dallas for a brief period and administered injections to him. Following those injections, she said, George suffered a nervous breakdown, at which point she decided to have him hospitalized. The doctor, she claimed, vanished into thin air.
⁴²

Cut Loose

Most people remember George H. W. Bush’s tenure as CIA chief, but few recall how short it was. He had been at the helm of the spy agency less than a year when his boss, President Gerald Ford, was defeated by the Democrat Jimmy Carter. Poppy, who obviously saw some urgency in staying at the agency’s helm irrespective of the party in power, actually flew to Plains, Georgia, to urge Carter to keep him on, but the new president was not persuaded.

This was, of course, a source of enormous frustration. Bush felt that he was just starting to reshape the agency. The head of French intelligence at the time agreed: “Even Mr. Bush, during his stay, was unable to change the methods of the CIA. He tried, certainly, and described to me at times the lengths to which he went to move this enormous bureaucracy in a direction that would have created a more effective intelligence apparatus. He had many valuable ideas. But it would have taken years, rather than the time he was given, to put them into effect.”
⁴³

From his exile, Poppy began plotting his comeback—and his operation to rescue his colleagues from the idealistic Carter and his CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner. But first, he needed a new command post. Within two months of his departure from Washington, he was hired as a seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year (about three hundred thousand in 2009 dollars) consultant to First International Bancshares of Dallas, which was Texas’s largest bank holding company. According to an SEC filing, he was to perform “such duties as may be prescribed or assigned by the board of directors.” What were those duties? When Poppy was asked that question some years later, he trotted out the same old answer: he could not recall.

In 1988, while Poppy was waging his successful presidential campaign, the
Washington Post
asked the man who hired him, company chairman Robert H. Stewart III, for a description of his job. Stewart declined to answer any questions.

The Cuckoo’s Nest

Meanwhile, in February 1977, just after Poppy left the CIA, the Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans was back in Dallas again. He had a conversation with de Mohrenschildt’s lawyer, who told him de Mohrenschildt was now out of the mental hospital. Oltmans then met for lunch with de Mohrenschildt and his lawyer.

Oltmans was shocked by the transformation of de Mohrenschildt.“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in three hours of closed-session testimony shortly after de Mohrenschildt’s death. “The man had changed drastically . . . he was nervous, trembling. It was a scared, a very, very scared person I saw. I was absolutely shocked, because I knew de Mohrenschildt as a man who wins tennis matches, who is always suntanned, who jogs every morning, who is as healthy as a bull.”
⁴⁴

At the lunch, according to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt spoke to him in hushed French, so that their dining companion would not understand. The Russian confessed that he had something troubling to share. Later, sitting in the library of the historically black Bishop College, where de Mohrenschildt now taught French classes, he began to unburden himself. “He said, ‘Willem, I have to tell the story as it really was. But don’t betray me . . . you are the only journalist I will trust. Don’t incriminate me in the Kennedy assassination. I don’t want to go to jail. How could we do it in such a way that I don’t go to jail?’”

Oltmans said that he then asked de Mohrenschildt, “Well, first tell me, did you do it or didn’t you do it?” He said de Mohrenschildt replied: “Yes, I am responsible. I feel responsible for the behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald . . . because I guided him. I instructed him to set it up.” At this point, it is certainly possible that George de Mohrenschildt was changing as a person, feeling guilt, perhaps alternating between candor and the instinct to embellish or lie. He could have been saying that his was a somewhat compartmentalized role, never knowing who some of the other players were.

At that point, “He begged me to take him out of the country,” Oltmans told the House panel, “ ‘because they are after me.’ ” With the approval of the head of Dutch national television, Oltmans and de Mohrenschildt flew to Amsterdam. As before, it becomes difficult to ascertain Oltmans’s motives in this process, as well as what larger interests he might have been serving.

On the trip, via Houston and New York, de Mohrenschildt purportedly began dropping small pieces of information. He claimed to know Jack Ruby. And he began providing fragments of a scenario in which Texas oilmen in league with intelligence operatives plotted to kill the president.

In Holland, where they arrived February 13, 1977, according to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt provided names of CIA and FBI people to a Dutch publisher and the head of Dutch national television, with other witnesses present. De Mohrenschildt, awaiting an offer of a deal from the publisher, did not go into greater detail. What happened next may have represented the moment when de Mohrenschildt could read the writing on the wall and knew his ultimate fate.

De Mohrenschildt spent a few days at Oltmans’s Amsterdam home, continuing to edit aloud his memoirs of his time with Oswald. Then Oltmans suggested it might do them good to get out of the house. He proposed a day trip to Brussels. When they arrived, Oltmans mentioned that an old friend of his, a Soviet diplomat, would be joining them a bit later for lunch. A few minutes later, they came unexpectedly on the Soviet man. De Mohrenschildt quickly excused himself and said he wished to take a short walk before lunch.

He never came back. Instead, he fled to a friend’s house, and after a few days, headed back to the United States. Later, among his effects would be an affidavit he had purportedly prepared, in which he accused Oltmans of betraying him. Perhaps, and this would be strictly conjecture, de Mohrenschildt saw what it meant that he, like Oswald, was being placed in the company of Soviets. He was being made out to be a Soviet agent himself. And once that happened, his ultimate fate was clear.

De Mohrenschildt’s affidavit—if he truly wrote it—registered distrust of Oltmans and others, and a fear that people were doing things to him, altering his address book, forging his signature on traveler’s checks. He also wrote: “I have a meeting with
Reader’s Digest
people on March 15th in New York City . . . The meeting is with Edward Jay Epstein, editorial writer, and the time was agreed upon with the Editor in Chief, Mr. Fulton Oursler, Jr.” It was almost as if he knew that he needed to produce a record.

De Mohrenschildt then flew back to New York and later boarded a Greyhound bus for Palm Beach. There, he joined his daughter Alexandra, then thirty-three, who was staying at the beachfront mansion of a relative, Nancy Pierson Clark-Tilton.
⁴⁵
De Mohrenschildt was installed in the guest room.

A Key to the Mystery

Within days, the Palm Beach County police would be poring over George de Mohrenschildt’s blood-spattered corpse. And the FBI would receive a lead about a man named Jim Savage. They did not pursue it very far, but if they had, they would have discovered Savage’s connections—right back to the FBI, and to a whole new subterranean level of the story that leads to Poppy Bush.

At de Mohrenschildt’s request, Savage, an executive with the Transcontinental Drilling Company in Houston, had been given the keys to the Russian’s car with the understanding he would drive it to Palm Beach. The friend of Oltmans’s who had delivered the car to Savage told the FBI that Savage had behaved strangely; among other things, he had seemed intent on avoiding a face-to-face meeting. Oltmans’s friend was instructed to leave the car in a parking lot and slip the keys under an apartment door.