Chapter 10

Brown Can't See Black

Chapter Two of Brown's Book Three is titled, "The Warren Commission" (pages 270- 87). For all these pages he has very few source notes. Without any indicated source he says "that phone calls from the White House were indicating to Chief of Criminal Homicide [is there another kind?] Fritz that he should shut the investigation down and leave it to the world to make the obvious conclusion that it was Oswald and Oswald alone" (page 271). Can it be believed that anyone would have thought of saying that either before Oswald was killed, when he was being charged with the crime and would be tried or after he was killed, when it happened automatically?

With no source but with the obvious need of his concoction that the police did it, he says the two major functions of the Commission were to discover who "committed the crime and to discover why the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald could be so easily killed in the custody of seventy Dallas police officers" (page 273). The last part is a conscious lie. He knew Oswald was not "in the custody" of all the police within hailing distance. With nothing omitted in quoting, he next says, "If one studies the stated priorities carefully, it would seem that question number two provides a clear answer to question number one."

There is in fact and in reason no connection between the two other than in Brown's need for what he does not have and cannot have, a case of even reasonable suspicion against the Dallas police as the assassin.

"For reasons not specifically documented . . . Johnson cajoled Earl Warren to take the chairmanship of the Commission" (page 273).

Whatever he may mean by "specifically documented" he is, as usual, wrong. And his thinking is consistent with what we have seen if he believed the reason for something so very wrong would be in the term he seems to want "specifically documented." Does he really think that Johnson would record the fact that he wanted very much to trade on Warren's name and on his being the Chief Justice of the United States?

That was in obvious fact his reason for his selection of all the members, to trade their on names, to appeal through them to specific areas of public and political opinion and to the media. It takes little analysis to perceive that Johnson resorted to the unprecedented in appointing on overwhelming majority from the minority party when all such bodies always have the party in power in the majority. It takes not much political sagacity to observe that neither of the two minority Commission Democrats was a follower of the martyred President and both were, in fact, his opponent on the basic of issues in political philosophy. Warren had the additional advantage of immobilizing liberals, whose darling he was as Chief Justice.

However, Brown to the contrary notwithstanding, it was "specifically documented." I published that document in a facsimile of the Commission record in Whitewash IV (page 24). Warren told his staff at his first meeting with them that he took the job to avoid "a war which could cost 40 million lives."

Does this sound like Warren and Johnson believed there had not been a conspiracy?

Or that Warren ever intended to conclude other than that Oswald was alone?

In his criticism of the Commission for not calling the witnesses he says it should have called, those he lists as the important ones not called are of all things, "Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Joseph Milteer or Sergio Arcacha Smith" (page 275).

Arcacha is so important Brown does not even mention him in his book.

Of course that does not mean that he would not be an "important" witness.

Just because he fled New Orleans the year before Oswald got there.

Just because the New Orleans anti-Castro community was rife with questions about his handling of funds when he headed the New Orleans Cuban Revolutionary Council.

Not just because he reportedly fled Logan Act charges. They have to do with stolen vehicles.

Not even because after he left the Cuban Revolutionary Council, he had to give up offices, Brown never mentions, in the building at 544 Camp Street, where it was on the second floor in the two-room office, Number Five.

Of Milteer, he has one earlier notation (on page 86) where he says, clearly not of his own knowledge and without any source, that he "lent his voice to a recording suggesting that Kennedy be killed in the fall of 1963 and authorities would arrest someone to divert suspicion from the real plotters." He said, also, again without source, that Milteer was connected with "various and sundry groups" that did not like Kennedy's policies.

I first reported on this so-called Milteer threat in Oswald in New Orleans, published late in 1967. I was interested in the non-investigation and is what was not in the Commission's record, including the tape of that recording.

The Miami police had an informer, Willie Somersett, who had been found so unreliable by the FBI that it cut him lose as a paid symbol informant. There was fear of a race riot in Miami and Milteer was connected with a few insignificant, little known irrational and racist political parties. The Miami police got Somersett's agreement to place a tape recorder in his refrigerator and when I got a transcript of what I picked up I published it in Frame-Up in 1971 (pages 468-
75). In the following pages I published available FBI reports in facsimile. The recording was made November 10, 1963. There is nothing in it other than big talk by those wanting to be regarded as big and as dangerous among their like-minded.. They were in fact blowing smoke and sounding big in generalities. They also talked about their tough guy who was talking about doing the job.

They call him Kenneth Brown. The FBI identified him as one Jack Brown, of Chattanooga, Tennessee. According to the tape he followed Martin Luther King, Jr. for miles and miles in an unsuccessful effort to kill him.

As I now, after almost thirty years and all the improvisations on this I have read, recall it, I was concerned because the information I had from Miami officials is that they gave dubs of the tape to the FBI and the Secret Service and neither gave it to the Warren Commission..

That the nobody, Milteer, wanted to make a macho impression is revealed when he boasts about how he violated the Mann Act. It makes it a crime to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. The Transcript has Milteer saying:

I got to the state line and I said, 'Listen, Toots, this is the state line, get out and I'll meet you over there,' she got out, walked across the line, got in my car in the other state. I did not transport her, there wasn't a fucking thing that she could do about it, I had her ass for a long time" (page 471).

This gives an idea of the kind of men they were.

Earlier, rather than talking about killing Kennedy in the fall of 1963 - and that on November 10 - they were talking about blowing up the Capitol (page 470).

Contrary to what Brown says, they agree that the fall was "the wrong time of the year" but "you take pleasant weather, he comes out on the veranda, and somebody could be in a hotel room across the way there and pick him off . . ." (page 474).

That would have been no mean feat, and this again represents that it was just big talk. "Across the way there from the veranda" was the first Ellipse, then the park to the river and there was no motel within vision of the White House veranda anywhere at all.

When Somersett brought up that Kennedy had a speech scheduled for Miami in a few days this vacuous talk followed:

Informant:	I don't know, I think Kennedy is coming here on the 18th, or something like that to make some kind of speech, I don't know what it is, but I imagine it will be on the TV, and you can be on the look for that. I think it is the 18th that he is suppose to be here. I don't know what it is suppose to be about.

Subject:	You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans, there are so many of them here.

Informant:	Yeah, well he will have a thousand bodyguards, don't worry about that.

Subject:	The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

Informant:	What?

Subject:	The more bodyguards he has, the more easier it is to get him.

Informant:	Well how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?

Subject:	From an office building with a high powered rifle, how many people [room noise-tape not legible] does he have going around who look just like him? Do you know about that?

Informant:	No, I never heard that he had anybody.

Subject:	He has got them.

Informant:	He has?

Subject:	He has about fifteen. Whenever he goes any place they [not legible] he knows he is a marked man.

Informant:	You think he knows he is a marked man?

Subject:	Sure he does.

Informant:	They are really going to try to kill him?

Subject:	Oh, yeah, it is in the working. Brown himself, Brown is just as likely to get him as anybody. He hasn't said so, but he tried to get Martin Luther King" (page 423).

What the assassination nuts liked in particular about this excerpt is the unheard of, the entirely original idea Milteer had that the President could be shot "From an office building" and excitedly point out that, more or less, is what happened, therefore this Milteer "plot" was the one that succeeded.

Milteer could have held other values as a witness with the Chief Justice the chairman. He could have wised the court up on how the Mann Act could be violated with impunity. As he saw it, with the means of which he boasted never tested in court.

What, in criticizing the Commission for not calling Ferrie as a witness, Brown does not mention, no doubt because he had it, too, in Oswald in New Orleans, is that Ferrie had actually said what could be taken as a threat against the President.

From unpublished Ferrie records, which I got in part from the Commission's files and in part from the Department of Justice, which disclosed to me some of those FBI records that the Archives had denied me, the Commission did not have the full Ferrie story. It did, however, know about what it withheld from the testimony of New Orleans vice squad detective Frederick S. O'Sullivan. As it describes O'Sullivan in its list of witnesses(R 494) he is an "Acquaintance of Oswald at Beauregard Junior High School, New Orleans." His testimony begins in Volume 8 on page 27. It is not that the list could have been more informative about O'Sullivan. In his testimony he is identified as of that vice squad. What was removed from his testimony when it was published is that Ferrie was an active vice squad case of crimes against boys.

Eastern Airlines had felt it had to dispense with his services. He'd been a pilot for it. Years earlier he had been expelled from a Catholic seminary for his personal practices.

While still flying for Eastern, Ferrie began to loose his hair. A fellow pilot who was a patient of my late step-brother Dr. Jack Kety, of Covington, about an hour from New Orleans, got him to go to Jack. Jack diagnosed alopecia. As I recall what Jack told me, it is something that could be contracted from sex acts. In any event, Jack was treating him successfully when Ferrie decided, his ego telling him that as it did about much in medicine, that he could doctor himself better. As a result, what Ferrie had developed was alopecia totalis. That took every hair from his body.

No doubt Ferrie would have been an impressive witness with his wig and false eyebrows of his manufacture looking like rug material.

He'd been a captain in the Civil Air Patrol, in the unit in which Oswald was briefly a member. That was a convenient means of meeting boys.

And what might have been even more exciting is that the FBI records the Commission withheld from me but John Mitchell personally ordered they be given to me indicate that it was O'Sullivan who recruited Oswald into the Civil Air Patrol. He was not asked about that when he testified.

There is more about Ferrie, the witness I brought to light in Whitewash II and about whom I published ever so much more in Oswald in New Orleans, two books Brown has included in his bibliography. That no doubt is why he did not ask me for any of the Ferrie information I have before limiting what he could say about Ferrie in criticizing the Commission for not calling him as a witness.

To a degree this is also true of Guy Banister. He and Ferrie were friends and they shared their extreme right-wing political views. Really extreme, even for there.

It seems that Banister was of no interest to the assassination lunatic fringe until there was controversy between his widow and his secretary and reputed mistress over possession of his files. Then Delphine Roberts, the former secretary, who had preserved silence, refusing to talk to even Jim Garrison, started all those stories that have since then fascinated this lunatic fringe. For not one of these stories is there know basis in fact.

I had heard, as it turned out incorrectly, that Aaron Kohn, who headed the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, had been instrumental in bringing Banister to the New Orleans police department. I asked Kohn about that. In his reply of March 14, 1969, this is what he wrote me:

Your information that I was instrumental in bringing the late Guy Banister to New Orleans is completely inaccurate. I knew Banister very casually in the mid or late 30's when we were both in the F.B.I. and had no contact with him thereafter. That is, not until 1954 when Mayor Chep Morrison brought him to New Orleans as an official in the Police Department, ultimately the Assistant Superintendent. In April, 1954, I had completed an 1845 page report of widespread corruption, brutality and incompetence in the New Orleans Police Department. Responsibility for these conditions was dropped in the Mayor's lap. Under tremendous, pressures to do something, the Mayor hired Guy Banister as the retiring Special Agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Chicago office. Banister subsequently told me that he was offered the job because Banister's brother had attended L.S.U. Law School with Morrison and they were still very close friends. He also said that the Mayor, counting on the brother's friendship and loyalty, had told him that one of his major responsibilities would be to discredit me in order to discredit the report. However, by 1958 the conclusions of that report had been confirmed through action of U.S. Internal Revenue and a couple of grand juries.

It was not known to me until after Banister's death that he came to New Orleans destined to create chaos and end his life tragically. In Chicago a medical examination had established brain damage, with a prognosis of deterioration and increasingly erratic conduct. That's exactly what did happen. He became gun happy. His abortive private investigative agency and his past prestigious official identification attracted the emotionally ill and the compulsive haters."

"Brain damage." Shades of Ruby?

Kohn did not go into Banister's firing when he held that high rank in the police department because that was well reported in the newspapers. He was indeed, "gun happy" and he beat someone up with his while on duty. Getting fired for that, however, did not change his liking for that kind of use of a gun.

In what Kohn described as his "abortive private investigative agency" he employed, as far as I could learn, the strangest collection of non-investigators one of whom I knew suffered physical afflictions that not only made him look strange - it reduced his mobility to slithering along without the use of his legs, not on them. Another, and these were all part-time, when he needed them, was Jack Martin. Banister pistol-whipped Martin in a café on the corner of that 544 Camp Street building where they'd gone there for a bite or a beer.

If his career did not qualify him as the kind of important witness Brown says he would have made for the Commission, perhaps his record for public violence and his irreversible "brain damage, with a prognosis of deterioration and increasingly erratic conduct," did.

This, of course tells much about Brown. About his knowledge and his judgment as well as of his ego, which towers as high as his subject-matter ignorance.

It also tells us the kind of assassination interest he has and it tells us the kind of witness he did not criticize the Commission for not calling.

Of those a convenient one is Admiral George Burkley. He was the President's personal physician. He also was the one physician at the autopsy who had been in the Parkland Hospital Emergency Room when they struggled to save the irreversibly dead President. Then, too, it was he who arranged for the widow to select the Bethesda Navy Hospital as the place for the autopsy to be performed, with not a single pathologist on its large staff qualified to do a forensic autopsy, the kind required in a crime of violence.

Of course, if Brown were not the subject-matter ignoramus he is, he would have realized that the Commission ran a risk in calling Burkley as a witness if it wanted facts and the truth.

If Brown had a genuine interest in all the facts about the crime possibly becoming public , there are few the Commission could have called and did not call as important as Burkley. With Brown's "Blue Death," his ordaining the Dallas police as the assassins, in a genuine inquiry all the information possible about the shooting is indispensable. This is particularly true of where bullet holes were visible on the body and possible trajectories.

The Commission's most basic assumption is that of the "magic" bullet, the one it says began its career when it entered the President at the base of his neck where the neck tapers into the shoulder. Placing it there enabled the Commission to believe it could conjecture that the exit was in the front of the neck, where Brown described reports of an entrance wound there as nonsensical. This does get a little tricky for Brown, who felt he could safely and honestly accuse the police of being the assassins without being specific about the point of origin of those bullets. He is specific in adopting as his own what Penn Jones alleged thirty years earlier, that one of the "Blue Death" Harry Weatherford, was atop the courts building with a rifle. That thinking is on the corner diagonally opposite the Texas School Book Depository.

Burkley had another unique importance as a witness. He had the official certificate of death.

The Commission had this death certificate, as I described it in Post Mortem, "An original and six pink copies." The Commission had that original and six pink copies but instead of introducing then into evidence it hid them where they would never be looked at within the mass of what was sent to the Government Printing Office to be published in those twenty-six volumes - in which they were not published.

I published that suppressed death certificate in Post Mortem (pages 308-9). It places that back wound "about the level of the third thoracic vertebra."

What the Commission also had and hid in the same massive file was the original of the second handwritten autopsy, the first having been burned as soon as it was known that Oswald was dead and there would be no trial at which evidence would be subject to cross-examination. It had the originals of several certificates by the chief autopsy pathologist, Dr. James J. Humes. The original body chart that is part of the autopsy report that differs from all the copies in that Dr. Burkley added ro it: "Verified GG Burkley," Post Mortem (page 262). This body chart places that wound precisely were the death certificate does.

One of those Humes certifications that I published in Post Mortem (page 524) states that he destroyed part of his autopsy records. On this Burkley also wrote, "accepted and approved this date, George G. Burkley, Rear Adm MCUSN Physician to the President." Burkley wrote the exact acceptance and approval on Humes' certification that he turned every piece of autopsy paper over, including "Autopsy notes and holographic draft of the final report." The facsimile reproduction of that unburned autopsy report is in Post Mortem (pages 508-23). Burkley initialed the first and the last pages. On its page seven (Post Mortem, page 515), what Humes wrote is his description of the massive wound on the right side of the President's head. He described it as "situated in the posterior scalp approximately 2.5 cm. Laterally to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance is a puncture wound tangential to the surface of the scalp." Later under the instructions, he crossed some of this out and changed it so that the wound's description reads "is a lacerated wound," instead. (The word"puncture" is also eliminated throughout.) These are the most substantive changes. I go into the strict prohibition of any such changes in Never Again! where I had the professional opinion and advice of a medical-records expert who became a friend, Mrs. Betsy Neichter.

With most scholars earning a Ph.D. degree would not preclude understanding of what is stated above and its meaning. But in criticizing the Commission for not calling Arcacha, Milteer, Ferrie and Banister as witnesses, real nut stuff, Brown does not criticize the Commission for not calling Burkley and asking him the questions obvious in the foregoing, like about the actual location of that back wound, the actual description of that massive head wound and why he certified and approved such changes along with the burning of the autopsy draft. Not, with the record beyond question, that Burkley also got those autopsy notes, if he can account for the fact that they are not in the Commission's files and if he could tell the Commission where they were?

The Arcachas, the Ferries, the Milteers and the Banisters so dear to the lunatic fringe should have been called, as Brown writes, but not Burkley and others like him?

Brown titles this Book "White Lies."

He appears not to be able to see the color black.