OK, PEOPLE ARE ASKING ABOUT THE WOMAN IN THE CAR (WHICH WAS ME) SEEN ASSOCIATED WITH LEE OSWALD...HERE IS PART ONE, WITH PART TWO RIGHT UNDER IT IN COMMENTS.... Mellen’s Magic Show (by Dr. Howard Platzman) How to Make Two (or Three) Women and an Old Car Disappear Whatever the merits of Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice -- and there are more than a few -- the author fails utterly to clarify the trip reputedly taken by Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and Lee Oswald to the Clinton-Jackson area of Louisiana in the late summer of 1963. Having declared that Clinton-Jackson is her specialty, her account is a monumental disappointment. Personal note: Joan and I met once, for a long (at least five-hour) discussion during the period in which she was researching her book. I find myself in the unsettling position of having to note several mysterious omissions from, as well as additions to, the final published account. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A man fitting Oswald’s description visited Lee McGehee, a barber, and then Reeves Morgan, formerly a state representative, both (by both witnesses’ testimony) in the early evening of late August or early September 1963. Oswald asked McGehee if there was work to be had at the East Louisiana State Hospital, a mental hospital located in Jackson. McGehee referred Oswald to Morgan and gave him directions to Morgan’s home. Rejecting the reports of all researchers and witnesses, Mellen pegs the visits as taking place on September 19, arguing that the weather was too cool for the visits to have taken place during the earlier timeframe. This despite the assertions by both McGehee and Morgan that the date could not have been past September 15. At the Garrison trial, asked four times if the date could have been as late as “mid-September,” Morgan each time declared: “I don’t believe it could have.” Mellen also doesn’t address the probability that the college students organizing for voting rights in Clinton would most likely have been in school by her late date. This is a small consideration, however, when compared with the chaos that mars the rest of her account. Most importantly, a consensus has been developing that the Jackson hospital was a hotbed of MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. After coming awfully close to confirming Garrison’s speculations about companion research being conducted in biological warfare – specifically, one centered on the weaponizing of cancer cells -- Mellen sidesteps the issue. Her discussion of the role played by Dr. Mary Sherman in this intrigue (Sherman’s mysterious death in 1967 lingers in New Orleans lore) simply goes nowhere. Laudably, she arrives at the dots, but, troublingly, she fails to connect them. McGehee, Garrison Trial Testimony Q: Now, Mr. McGehee, can you recall approximately when it was that you saw Leon Oswald? A: This was -- as near as I can remember, it was in the -- we had some cool weather in the last of August and the early part of September. I barber by myself, and when it is cool I turn the air-conditioning off and keep the door open. Q: Would that have been the latter part of August, early part of September, 1963? A: Right. Q: Now, at the time that Lee Harvey Oswald was in your barber shop, was anyone present besides yourself? A: No. Q: Can you recall approximately what time of day or night this was that he was in the shop? A: This was along toward the evening. Q: Were you able to see, Mr. McGehee, how Oswald came to the shop, whether he -- A: The door was open and I noticed this car drive up. It passed the door a little ways, not too far, where the back end was just a little past the shop, and I did not see the man get out, and the next thing I noticed, there was nobody on the street hardly, not anybody, as a matter of fact, and this man walked in the shop. Q: Could you describe the car for us at all? A: Yes, the car was -- it was an old car, it was battered, it was a dark colored car -- it might have been dark green -- but the make of it I just couldnt remember, it was an old car, real old. Q: Now, Mr. McGehee, to the best of your recollection and knowledge, was there anyone else in that car? A: Yes. Q: Can you describe that person? A: There was a woman sitting on the front seat -- this is after the man was getting a haircut I glanced at the car -- and in the back seat what I noticed was -- looked like a bassinet. Q: A baby bassinet? A: Right. Q: Now, Mr. McGehee, had Oswald entered the shop before this car pulled up? A: No, after. Q: Did you ever see that car leave in front of the shop? A: It eventually left after he left; I didnt notice if he got in the car, I didnt pay any attention. Q: Well, approximately how long after he left the shop did the car leave? A: Right away. I noticed -- I heard it pull off, I didnt pay no attention to it, it was gone. The street was empty and still, the barber states, except for the arrival and departure of one old car, which parked “just passed the door a little ways, not too far, where the back end was just a little past the shop. That car held a lady passenger, but he could only see the back of her head. The barber appears to be stating his belief that Oswald arrived in this car and left in it, though he didn’t actually see him do either. Notably, his testimony includes no mention of a black Cadillac, although Garrison’s case would be immeasurably strengthened by such a report. Morgan, Garrison Trial Testimony Q: (Exhibiting photograph to witness) Mr. Morgan, I will show you now a picture that the State has marked S-1 for purposes of identification, and ask you if you recognize the individual in that BY MR. SCIAMBRA: Q: When did this individual come to your home? A: Had it figured out as the latter part of August or either the first part of September, because I made no dates or no memorandums or nothing on it. Q: Was this in 1963? A: 63, 1963. … Q: Tell the Court what you told Lee Harvey Oswald that day that you talked to him in your home. A: I told him that I could not help him get a job at the hospital ahead of any of my constituents, at the East Louisiana State Hospital, but I was not going to try to prevent him from getting a job, and I told him all the procedures he would have to go through to get in position to get a job, about going and putting in his application and getting set up to take a Civil Service examination, and that you just didnt go over there and get a job and just go to work, you had to go through applications and take a Civil Service examination for a job in the electrical department or something like that. They did have some jobs over there maybe, but I didnt tell him all that, but to get into the electrical department or maintenance you had to have a Civil Service exam, and -- he was from New Orleans -- it wouldnt hurt if he was a registered voter up there, and I told him that I knew a fellow up there once trying to find out what he can from everybody around there, and I told him I knew a fellow up there whose first name was Oswald and I asked him was he any kin to him. Q: I take it then that the conversation that you had with Oswald was pertaining to a job at the East Louisiana State Hospital? A: That was practically all we discussed. Q: And approximately how long did you say you talked to Oswald that day? A: Well, it wasnt too long, I would say maybe 20 minutes or 25, just talked along there. I wasnt wanting him to get the impression I was trying to rush him off or nothing. Q: Was anybody at home when Oswald was at your house, besides yourself? A: Yes, sir, my daughter was there. Q: Anybody else? A: I dont remember whether my wife was there or not; I do know my daughter was there though, but I never could place whether my wife was there at the time or not. Morgan doesn’t mention a car at all or any witness other than his daughter, Mary, who was later interviewed by Andrew Sciambra, Garrison’s lead investigator, on June 3, 1967. In his report dated January 29, 1968, he writes: “I went back to the home of REEVES MORGAN to talk further with MR. MORGAN … and also to talk with his daughter, MARY MORGAN, who had been at home at the time of the OSWALD visit. MARY MORGAN…told me that when OSWALD was in the house talking with her dad, she happened to walk towards the screen door and went onto the porch and just casually noticed that there was a dark colored car parked under the tree in front of the house. It was rather dark and she didnt really pay much attention to the car… it was an old car and the model was somewhere in the Fifties. She says that she remembers seeing a woman in the car. She did not pay much attention to the whole situation and she did not go out to see OSWALD and the woman in the car drive away.” So, at each of the two stops in Jackson, the first reports are of an old car with a woman inside -- no mention of a Cadillac. Morgan Renovated However, Mellen relates more recent testimony – by Morgan and by his son, Van. Without crediting Bill Davy’s fine book, Let Justice Be Done, where Van’s statement is first reported, Mellen describes the boy (age not given) sitting in a tree playing “Tarzan” at the time Oswald arrived in a black Cadillac. Mellen repeats one line from the Sciambra statement, saying that Mary “did not pay much attention to the whole situation.” By “the whole situation,” Mellen must mean the matter of the car(s) and its (their) occupant(s), because Mellen describes the young girl as “anxious to get a look at the young man.” Indeed, the line she leaves out is “didnt really pay much attention to the car” – a bit of fudging. More importantly, if Mellen asked the now grown-up Mary Morgan whether she wanted to retract her early statement to Sciambra about the old car and the young lady, she neglects to mention Mary’s response. Surely she is familiar with the testimony. Mellen then adds to Mr. Morgan’s testimony: “Morgan had made up his mind. ‘A smart aleck white boy who is a nigger lover appeared in a black Cadillac,’ Morgan said later. When Morgan went outside to see Oswald off, the Cadillac sped off so quickly that he was almost run over in his own driveway.” “Morgan said later” raises three questions. When is “later”? To whom did he say this? And why didn’t he mention almost getting run over by a Caddy in his earliest statements and testimony? Checking the footnotes to this page, and counting down the lines, as the book’s odd footnoting format requires, reveals no source for this new information. The main question of course is: What happened to Mary Morgan? How did her earlier, detailed statement about seeing the old car and the woman passenger disappear? You would think a book so painstakingly footnoted might include a citation, at the very minimum, of this second old car witness. Where is the explanation for her disappearance? McGehee Renovated While repopulating the Morgan scene, Mellen also retells the barber’s story: “As he (Oswald) departs, McGehee, washing his hands, looks out the window. The green car is nowhere in sight. Suddenly a large black car with a big wraparound bumper pulls up from Church Street…Oswald is seated in back, his arms splayed across the back of the front seat. There are two persons in the front, and they are all laughing as the car, pulling onto State Road 10, passes in front of the barber shop on its way to Clinton. The statement that the old car is “nowhere in sight” suggests that it left before Oswald “departed.” Yet it was McGehee’s testimony that the old car “left after he (Oswald) left.” The car was parked very near to the shop, so a quick departure might be expected. The best that can be said of Mellen here is that the issue, as described by her, is vague and unresolved. Wonderland More confounding is that the updated testimonies appear to place a convoy -- consisting of an old car and a new one – at both Jackson sights. The eyewitness testimony at Clinton produces no such oddity. One is tempted to ask: where did the old car go during that long stay? With respect to the McGehee sighting, a Mellen footnote acknowledges that McGehee “told Moo Moo Sciambra (in a June 17 interview), tentatively, that Oswald had gotten into an old beat-up car, dark in color, a Nash or a Kaiser, with a young woman in the front seat and a bassinette in the back.” But, she goes on, “to the House Select Committee in 1978, McGehee said he saw Oswald neither exit the car nor enter it upon his departure from the barber shop. By the time he turned around after he was washing his hands, the car was gone. Note that McGehee told Robert Buras and Patricia Orr, interviewing him on January 19, 1978, that ‘a big black car pulled away shortly after Oswald left.’ He continues to believe that this is the car Oswald entered.” Well, he would have to believe this, wouldn’t he? Indeed, given Mellen’s report that McGehee had actually seen Oswald sitting in the car and laughing, her tentativeness seems unwarranted. But this is not the last we hear of the old car and the woman in Mellen’s account. Now it really gets bizarre. She first denies any connection between Oswald and the old car and the female passenger. Then, later on, a footnote speculates: if there was a woman with him, it would have been one, Gladys Palmer. This makes little sense since she has already stated rather emphatically that McGehee saw Oswald seated and laughing in a black Cadillac. That Mellen is even tempted to raise this possibility is revealing, but let’s play along. Mellen puts Oswald in a dating relationship with Palmer as early as May 1963 (Baker claims to have met Oswald in late April). According to Mellen, Gladys was over 40 (Lee was 23), but still hot. It would seem that Mellen is trying to keep one, Judyth Baker, out of her account, even if she has to find another love affair to crowd her out. Baker is the only woman ever to claim that she was the passenger in that old car and the only woman to declare that she was Oswald’s lover! A finding that Baker’s story is not persuasive might be intellectually responsible; failure to even consider Baker’s detailed account, even if only to dismiss it with a derisive paragraph or two, is, it seems to me, just plain indefensible. So Mellen is prepared, if she has to, to concede that there may have been a woman in the car who was associated with Oswald. The question then becomes: if it was Gladys, as Mellen suggests, what happened to her? Did she get antsy while Oswald was chatting up the barber, take the steering wheel, and simply drive off? Lucky for Lee that Caddy showed up! But wait, didnt Lee go up in the Caddy? In that case, who drove Gladys to the barber shop? And if Lee got into the Cadillac, who drove her away? And what was she doing there to begin with? Mellen appears to see none of the complications arising from the web of speculations she weaves. Curiously, Mellen describes an incident at a Lafayette Holiday Inn bar in which an Oswald impostor might have been involved. A belligerent patron who signed his bar tab Hidell swore his hatred of Kennedy. She tells this story and yet doesn’t even entertain the possibility that the Oswald seen with Gladys was her own impostor. Perhaps real Oswald did get in the Caddy and impostor Oswald got in the old car! This version would at least have the advantage of not stranding poor Gladys while the real Oswald drove off with his pals. Or maybe it was the impostor Oswald that drove off in the Caddy (having the last laugh at Mellen?). One is tempted to ask: whatever happened to Gladys? Having committed no crime, you might think she would have been teased out of obscurity to say she was the one. Is she still alive? Is she the third woman made to disappear conveniently, useful to justify her omission of Baker, discarded when no longer needed for that purpose. Truly, Mellen is confused. All this hocus pocus for Lee McGehee? I think not.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 17:49:06 +0000
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