JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (134 page)

[
777
]. Walker, August 12, 2006; October 6 and 16, 2006.

[
778
]. Ibid.

[
779
]. Ibid.

[
780
]. Ibid. Dorothy Walker said the number of shock treatments Ralph Yates received was either forty-one or forty-two.

[
781
]. Ibid.

[
782
]. Ibid.

[
783
]. Author’s interview of James Orvis Smith, uncle of Ralph Leon Yates, October 9, 2006. “J. O.” Smith, as he was known, helped the poverty-stricken Yates family for years by bringing them groceries. Author’s conversation with Ken Smith, cousin of Ralph Leon Yates, October 9, 2006.

[
784
]. Ken Smith, October 9, 2006.

[
785
]. Ibid.

[
786
]. Jones, November 27, 1963. In J. Edgar Hoover’s January 2, 1964, teletype to J. Gordon Shanklin, the FBI director made a point of repeating Dempsey Jones’s disclaimer. However, Hoover avoided citing Jones’s corroboration in the same FBI report that Ralph Yates had told him before the president’s assassination about the hitchhiker he dropped off at Elm and Houston, who talked about shooting the president from a building. Jones, November 27, 1963. Also JFK Record Number 180-10033-10242.

[
787
]. Interview of Larry Newman by Ralph G. Martin, cited in Martin’s
Seeds of Destruction: Joe Kennedy and His Sons
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 449.

[
788
]. Ibid., pp. 448-49.

[
789
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 378.

[
790
]. Ibid., p. 379. After the assassination, Dave Powers told Jacqueline Kennedy the story of her husband’s visit to Patrick’s grave, repeating his words, “He seems so alone here.” Jacqueline said, “I’ll bring them together now.” She had Patrick’s body reburied in Arlington National Cemetery alongside his father’s grave. Ibid., p. 39.

[
791
]. Ibid. Rita Dallas,
The Kennedy Case
(Toronto: Popular Library, 1973), p. 10.

[
792
]. Interview of David Powers by Ralph G. Martin, cited in
Seeds
, p. 448.

[
793
]. Dallas,
Kennedy Case,
p. 11.

[
794
]. Ibid. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 39. JFK’s final visit with his father has been described in firsthand accounts by two witnesses: Joseph Kennedy’s nurse, Rita Dallas, in her book
The Kennedy
Case
, pp. 9-11; David Powers in his and Kenneth O’Donnell’s book,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 39. Dallas remembered the visit as occurring two weeks before the assassination, whereas Powers recalled it as October 20, 1963, a date confirmed from the White House Appointments Book at the JFK Library. Author’s phone conversation with JFK Library archivist Stephen Plotkin, October 31, 2006.

[
795
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 39.

[
796
].
Harvey & Lee
, pp. 178, 193.

[
797
]. HSCA interview of Edward Browder by Mark Flanagan and Andy Purdy, January 12, 1978, p. 4. JFK Record Number 180-10077-10040.

[
798
]. “In it for the money” statement by Jack Ruby’s poker-playing friend in Kemah, Texas, James E. Beaird. Interviewed and cited by Earl Golz, “Jack Ruby’s Gunrunning to Castro Claimed,”
Dallas Morning News
(August 18, 1978). I am grateful to Earl Golz for telling me of his interview with Beaird and sending me a copy of his article.

[
799
]. Ibid.

[
800
]. Seth Kantor,
The Ruby Cover-Up
(New York: Zebra Books, 1978), p. 44.

[
801
]. Ibid.

[
802
]. Ibid., p. 45.

[
803
]. Ibid.
CIA Assassination Plots: A Report from the Inspector General on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro
(Prevailing Winds Research, 1994), pp. 16-17. This 1967 report by the CIA Inspector General was also published by Ocean Press in Melbourne (1996) after the report’s declassification. The QJ/WIN and ZRRIFLE references are on pp. 49 and 50 of the Ocean Press edition. After Davis’s release in Algiers with the help of QJ/WIN, he was apparently arrested again soon after in Morocco, this time under suspicion of having a connection with the Kennedy assassination. J. Edgar Hoover noted in a December 20, 1963, FBI document that Thomas Eli Davis “was being held by the Moroccan National Security Police because of a letter in his handwriting which referred ‘in passing to “Oswald” and to Kennedy assassination.’” Memorandum from FBI Director John Edgar Hoover to Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security, Department of State, December 20, 1963. JFK Record Number 124-10011-10187.

[
804
]. While attending Jack Ruby’s trial in Dallas, Dorothy Kilgallen became the first nationally known journalist to raise critical questions about the JFK assassination and the government cover-up. “She printed story after story of witnesses who had been threatened by the Dallas police or the FBI.” Lee Israel,
Kilgallen
(New York: Dell, 1979), pp. 380-81.

In March 1964, Kilgallen got Jack Ruby’s lawyer Joe Tonahill to convince Judge Joe B. Brown to allow her to see Ruby in private during a noon recess in the trial. Tonahill later confirmed the fact of this Kilgallen–Ruby meeting in correspondence with Kilgallen’s biographer, Lee Israel. Letter from Joe H. Tonahill to Lee Israel, April 18, 1978. Cited by Israel, pp. 354-55. Kilgallen never revealed what Ruby said to her while they were alone together, harboring it for a future book that she would never have the chance to write. As Israel noted, “Dorothy would mention the fact of the interview to close friends, but
never
the substance.” Israel, p. 355 (emphasis in original).

As Kilgallen’s questions about Kennedy’s murder deepened, she contacted Mark Lane and began “to bring to public attention, through her newspaper, the fruits of his investigation.” She cautioned Lane, “Intelligence agencies will be watching us. We’ll have to be very careful.” Mark Lane citing Dorothy Kilgallen to Lee Israel, September 20, 1976; cited by Israel, p. 378. However, undeterred by the government surveillance, she pressed on in her own investigation, making research trips to New Orleans and back to Dallas. She told a friend repeatedly, “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to break this case.” Carmen Gibbia citing Dorothy Kilgallen to Lee Israel, p. 390.

Following Kilgallen’s publication in her column of portions of Jack Ruby’s then secret testimony before the Warren Commission, the FBI undertook a full-scale investigation to determine how she obtained the transcript. In an interview conducted by the FBI and reported to the Warren Commission, Dorothy Kilgallen was quoted as saying that she “would die” rather than reveal her source’s identity. Kilgallen was direct and fearless in her refusal to cooperate with the FBI:

“She stated that she is the only person who knows the identity of her source and she will never reveal it . . . She stated that regardless of the consequences, she will never identify the source to anyone.” FBI memorandum dated August 24, 1964, on interview with Dorothy Kilgallen on August 21, 1964. Included as attachment to letter from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to J. Lee Rankin, general counsel, The President’s Commission, August 26, 1964. JFK Record Number 180-10061-10186.

On September 30, 1964, an internal FBI memorandum that was circulated throughout the Bureau’s hierarchy noted Kilgallen’s comment in her column that same day on the
Warren Report
: “I’m inclined to believe that the FBI might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them which does seem a waste of time to me.” FBI memorandum from A. Rosen to Mr. Belmont, September 30, 1964. JFK Record Number 180-10047-10339.

In the last column she would ever do on the Kennedy assassination, dated September 3, 1965, Kilgallen wrote: “This story isn’t going to die as long as there’s a real reporter alive—and there are a lot of them.” Cited by Israel, p. 388.

Dorothy Kilgallen died on November 8, 1965, in her Manhattan bedroom. Her body was found in her bed. Her death certificate stated she died from “acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication—circumstances undetermined”; in other words, from a toxic combination of drug pills and alcohol. Report of Death of Dorothy Kollmar (Killgallen) [
sic
], Office of Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York, by James L. Luke, Case #9333, November 8, 1965. JFK Record Number 180-10071-10433. A chemist in the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office told biographer Israel that he knew from a confirmative toxicological analysis that Dorothy Kilgallen died from a lethal dose of all three kinds of fast-acting barbiturates—secobarbital, amobarbital, and pentobarbital. Israel, pp. 424-25. A further important finding was that quinine, “which might have covered the bitterness of the secreted barbiturates” from Kilgallen’s taste, was found in her “brain, bile, and liver.” That fact, however, “was
not
reported in the official laboratory findings presented to the Department of Pathology.” Ibid., p. 425 (emphasis in original).

Three days after Dorothy Kilgallen’s death, friends asked her widower, Richard Kollmar, “What was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination?”

He replied, “I’m afraid that will have to go to the grave with me.” Israel, p. 426.

Before her last Dallas trip, Dorothy had told Mark Lane that she expected “to learn something important” on a visit to New Orleans. Lane asked Richard Kollmar if he might look at Dorothy’s folder because of its possibly containing information she had discovered “which could affect all of us in the future.” Richard said he planned “to destroy all that. It’s done enough damage already.” Mark Lane citing Richard Kollmar to Lee Israel, September 20, 1976. Ibid., p. 427.

In 1975, four years after Richard’s own death (an apparent suicide), the FBI was still calling on members of Dorothy’s family to ferret out any assassination papers she might have stashed away somewhere. Ibid.

Israel wrote in conclusion: “Nothing of what Dorothy gathered, surmised, or wrote during her private interview with Jack Ruby or on her Texas or New Orleans sojourns has ever come to light.” Ibid.

[
805
]. FBI interview of Jack Ruby, November 24, 1963. Hall (C. Ray) Exhibit No. 1.
WCH
, vol. 20, p. 39.