Part One
Copyright © 1999, 2000 by David Reitzes
A more comprehensive version of Part One of this article can be found at the Kennedy Assassination Home Page, along with a number of relevant primary source documents. Part Two contains some new information not included in the lengthier article.At the 1969 conspiracy trial of Clay Shaw, the prosecution brought forth eight witnesses from rural East Feliciana Parish, some 120 miles north of New Orleans. Taken in toto, their testimony seemed to be potent evidence that Clay Shaw had some provocative skeletons in his closet.This article originally appeared in JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, Volume V, Numbers 2 and 3, January and April 2000.
As a prelude of sorts, Jackson, Louisiana barber Edwin Lea McGehee testified that he had given Lee Harvey Oswald a haircut one evening in 1963. When the talk turned to job prospects at nearby East Louisiana State Hospital, McGehee said he suggested that Oswald pay a visit to a friend of his, State Representative Reeves Morgan, who himself worked as a guard at the hospital, as well as McGehee's friend Henry Earl Palmer, the local Registrar of Voters. (1)
Reeves Morgan testified that Lee Oswald had briefly visited him at his home around that time, and that he'd offered him some advice, though he was unable to help him otherwise. (2) State Hospital employee Mrs. Bobbie Dedon then identified Oswald as a man with whom she'd briefly spoken in 1963. In a January 1968 interview with the New Orleans DA's office, Dedon had added that "somehow she relates Oswald" with a former hospital employee named Estus Morgan, though she was unable to say why. (3)Morgan had died in an automobile accident in 1966.
Clinton, Louisiana Town Marshal John Manchester testified about his duties maintaining law and order during a 1963 voter registration drive sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Though Manchester did not recall Lee Oswald at the drive, he did recall a fairly new black Cadillac with two men in the front seat. When asked by Assistant DA Andrew Sciambra if he could describe the man on the passenger side, Manchester replied, "No, sir, I can't. Mister, I didn't talk to him. . . . I talked to the driver." The driver Manchester unhesitatingly identified as Clay Shaw. He even recalled asking the man behind the wheel where he was from, and "he was a representative of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans." (4) Shaw, of course, had been the managing director of the Trade Mart in 1963.
Registrar of Voters Henry Earl Palmer testified that at 10:30 AM on a summer day in 1963, he left his office to get a cup of coffee and noticed two white men standing in line to register with a number of black Clinton residents. There had been "two or three people between them." Andrew Sciambra began to ask, "So, in other words, you had no idea --" Palmer cut him off: "No idea." "-- whether they were with each other?" "That is right."(5) Palmer said he noticed an unfamiliar black Cadillac with two men inside. Of the man on the passenger side he could only say that "his eyebrows were heavy and his hair needed combing." When Sciambra displayed a photograph of David Ferrie, Palmer said, "I can't recognize the individual, but the hair and the eyebrows are similar."(6) He was more certain about the defendant, Clay Shaw, whom he positively identified as the driver of the Cadillac.(7)
It was after Palmer's 3:30 PM coffee break that the first white man reached the front of the line.(8) His name was Estus Morgan, but he "couldn't prove that he was in the Parish long enough" to register to vote, i.e., six months. He told Palmer "that he knew Reeves Morgan the State Representative and that he was interested in going to work at the East Louisiana State Hospital." Palmer advised that maybe his interviewee should "talk to Representative Morgan," and Estus Morgan departed. A few moments later, Palmer said, Lee Harvey Oswald entered his office. Oswald, too, he said, "wanted a job at the hospital in Jackson," but he too "couldn't give me any proof that he was living in the Parish long enough" to register. "I told him he did not have to be a registered voter to get a job at the Jackson Hospital. He thanked me and left."(9)
Next came Corrie Collins, the chairman of the local CORE chapter. He testified that he'd been outside the Registrar of Voter's office one morning in late August or early September 1963, when an unfamiliar black Cadillac with three white men inside drove up and parked. One passenger, whom he identified as Lee Oswald, got out of the back seat and stood in line to register.(10) Collins positively identified the driver of the car as Clay Shaw and the man in the passenger seat as David Ferrie.(11)
William E. Dunn, Sr., a CORE volunteer, also remembered the black Cadillac, and positively identified the driver as Clay Shaw: "I knows one man was setting behind the wheel, and maybe another one but I am not sure."(12) Dunn identified Lee Oswald as one of several white men he saw in line waiting to register around that time.(13)
To many, the testimony of these witnesses is the surest evidence that John F. Kennedy's alleged assassin had been personally acquainted with two men who denied knowing him, David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, during the summer of 1963.(14) Newly available evidence challenges that belief.
It was Registrar of Voters Henry Earl Palmer who initially came forward with the story of Oswald in Clinton. Palmer's NODA statements of May 1967 are consistent with his trial testimony in most respects, but a few key differences stand out.
Palmer initially claimed that Lee Oswald had signed his voting register, though the signature had been erased. "It looked like where Oswald had signed his name," Garrison investigator Anne Hundley Dischler told author Patricia Lambert in 1994. "You could make out the 'O' and, while I was looking at the signature, Henry Earl Palmer was saying to me that 'this is where Oswald signed.'"(15) "But when they turned up the next day to get a copy, Palmer told them the page was 'missing.'" He offered no explanation, and if the issue was ever raised again, the record is silent about it.(16)
Palmer said that during his interview with the alleged assassin, he told Oswald that in order to register, he would have to get a letter from someone, vouching that he had been living in town for six months. He "asked Oswald if he knew the Business Manager at the hospital or the Mayor of Jackson or Reeves Morgan the State Representative and Oswald said he did not know any of them."(17)
This strikes an odd chord, as Reeves Morgan said it was his idea for Oswald to register to vote in the first place.(18) In a 1967 statement, Morgan recalled informing Oswald that he couldn't help him get a job at the hospital ahead of any of his constituents. Oswald, that civic-minded young scholar, asked Morgan what a "constituent" was, and Morgan explained that it was someone who was "registered in his parish and was on the voting rolls."(19) Meanwhile, as previously noted, barber Edwin Lea McGehee said it had been his idea for Oswald to pay visits to Reeves Morgan and Henry Earl Palmer.(20)
By the time of the trial, the issue had been smoothed over, with McGehee advising Oswald to see Morgan, Morgan advising Oswald to see Palmer, and Palmer not bringing up Reeves Morgan's name.(21)
Another difference between Palmer's trial testimony and his earlier statements involves the second white man in the voter registration line, Estus Morgan, whom Palmer testified was "two or three" people away from Oswald at the time.(22)
In his earliest statement, though it is not stated explicitly, Palmer strongly implies that Oswald and Morgan were together. He describes "two white men in line with the colored people," who "were very conspicuous as they were the only two white people in the line. When he talked to these two people he learned they were Lee Harvey Oswald and Estes [sic] Morgan." "Oswald and Morgan," Palmer said at first, "were in the hallway of the building . . ." He "passed Oswald and Morgan" on the way out for his 10:30 coffee break, and when he returned, "Oswald and Morgan were still in line." "Mr. Palmer said that as he passed Oswald and Morgan . . . they were talking with some of the Negros [sic] in the line. Mr. Palmer said he stayed in the office until about 3:30 and then went to get coffee again passing Oswald and Morgan . . ."(23)
Palmer suggested to the NODA investigators that CORE worker Corrie Collins might recall the visitors in the black Cadillac. Collins did indeed remember the car, describing the driver as a large man wearing a hat and tie.(24) (Henry Earl Palmer originally recalled the driver wearing a hat, but later changed his mind.)(25)
Collins said, "two casually dressed men got out of [the] car" and got in line to register. One of them he vaguely remembered wearing "blue jeans," and the other was dressed all "in white." The man in blue jeans was familiar to Collins; his name was Estus Morgan.(26)
Either Palmer or Collins' 1967 statement could explain why an undated memorandum in the Garrison files specifies that Oswald arrived at the voter registration drive "in the company of white man Estus Morgan," and why Richard Billings made a note on May 23, 1967, that "two men exited from the car, joined the line, and tried to register. One of them appeared to be Oswald; the other man was identified as Estus Morgan."(27)
But Corrie Collins never identified the second man as Oswald; he didn't know who the second man was. As Anne Dischler ascertained immediately, the man "in white" was a friend of Morgan's by the name of Winslow Foster, an employee of the East Louisiana State Hospital. (Foster moved away from the area in 1969, and is believed to have died in the 1970s.) Because of his job at the hospital, he had to wear white, as Collins remembered.(28)
Patricia Lambert notes that Estus Morgan, like Oswald in Palmer's story, "wanted a job at the hospital; he, too, was trying to register to enhance that possibility; he, too, was told to see Representative Reeves Morgan, and he showed up at the registrar's office at the same time Oswald did. These remarkable similarities suggest that whoever was shaping the Clinton scenario simply appropriated the entire 'profile' of Estus Morgan, who really did appear at the registrar's office in 1963, and attributed it to Lee Harvey Oswald, who never appeared there at all."(29)
Collins was interviewed "on October 3, 1967, and Dischler identified Winslow Foster as the man in white that same day. On October 9, Dischler made her last working entry in her steno pads when she recorded additional information about Winslow Foster. Four days later, she wrote her final note: 'To New Orleans,' it reads, 'to turn in last report to Louis Ivon.' Without explanation, Garrison had abruptly removed" Dischler from the case. A contact in the DA's office told Dischler the investigation had to be "shut down because of threats against Garrison's family."(30) Patricia Lambert notes that "while Estus Morgan was conveniently dead, Winslow Foster was alive and still working at the hospital." All that was left was to interview him. By dismissing Dischler, "Garrison prevented that interview from ever taking place."(31)
In a memorandum of October 26, 1967, Andrew Sciambra stated that he had tape-recorded an interview with Collins, discussing the approximate date he remembered seeing the black car, as well as names of other potential witnesses. If Collins said anything at this time about Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie or Clay Shaw, Sciambra doesn't mention it. In fact, it sounds like Sciambra was striking out.(32)
In a third statement of January 31, 1968, however, Collins' memories seem to have undergone an abrupt change. He now described seeing only one man "get out of the car and go in the registration line," and he unhesitatingly identified this man as Lee Harvey Oswald. He also now recalled "two people in the front of the car." Was this a different black car? No, the Cadillac "was the only black strange car that he had seen during this period."(33)
When shown a photo of David Ferrie, presumably one of those which NODA investigators had been flashing since the previous June, Collins "said that he remembers seeing this man around Clinton somewhere but can't be sure where or when." Regarding a photo of Clay Shaw, Collins "said the face was familiar but [he] can't say for sure where he saw the man. He said he looks big enough to be the man behind the wheel but he would like to see a picture of him with a hat on and from the back." Estus Morgan still haunts the story, but now Collins only remarks that he saw Morgan in line at some point, and "doesn't know if it was the same day."(34)
At trial a year later, Collins was the only witness to positively identify all three men: Oswald, Ferrie and Shaw. Like Winslow Foster before him, Estus Morgan had vanished without a trace;(35) and where once Collins had spoken of Estus Morgan stepping out of the Cadillac in blue jeans along with a companion in white, now he had Oswald exiting the car alone, clad neither in blue jeans nor in white, but in "slacks. . . . I don't remember what color."(36)
William E. Dunn, Sr., a friend of Collins', had been the last witness to come aboard. In a statement to the DA's office on January 17, 1968, Dunn, seemingly without explanation, named an associate of David Ferrie, "Thomas Edward Beckham," as one of the men in the black Cadillac.(37) At trial, Dunn identified Shaw as the driver of the car, but now wasn't sure if there'd been anyone else in the car at all.(38)
Town Marshal John Manchester's earliest statement hadn't been terribly promising but for one extremely important detail. In 1967, Manchester had said, "I don't remember exactly how, but I remember finding out some way the car was from the International Trade Mart in New Orleans. It is possible that I could have checked it out through our Sheriff's office or I may have gone up and talked to the people in the car and got the information from them. It is hard for me to remember exactly how." "I feel that I must have walked up to the car and talked to the man on the driver's side, but I can't be sure and I really can't be certain." "I feel that Henry Earl Palmer must have told me to check it out, and I must have walked up to the car and talked to the man and he told me that he was from the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, but I can't be sure. I don't believe that a 1028 [vehicle registration check] was run on the car so the info must have been given to me by the man in the car."(39)
In 1978, Manchester would tell the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he'd asked the driver for some identification, and had been shown a driver's license bearing Shaw's name, something he never said in 1967-69. The best was yet to come, however.
In his memoirs, Jim Garrison writes that Manchester had "called in the limousine license plates to the state police and had them checked. The car, it turned out, was registered to the International Trade Mart."(40)
But Manchester said nothing whatsoever about a registration check at the Shaw trial, and neither Clay Shaw nor the Trade Mart owned a Cadillac. A friend of Shaw's, Jeff Biddison, did own a 1960 black Cadillac, however. Biddison testified that he had not loaned the car to Shaw in 1963,(41) and since Biddison did not work at the Trade Mart, obviously no registration check could have led there. Assistant DA James Alcock, in his closing arguments to the Shaw jury, gets the last word:
I want to make this abundantly clear at this time -- the State is not wedded to the proposition, the State is not bound by the proposition, and the State is not asking you definitely to believe that that black Cadillac on that day belonged to Jeff Biddison, a long-time friend of the Defendant, but it certainly is a curious coincidence that the Defendant knows Jeff Biddison, has used Jeff Biddison's car, and it was a black Cadillac . . . But the State is not saying necessarily that that was Jeff Biddison's automobile, because . . . unfortunately no one on that occasion got the license number of that car so we could check it down and tell you positively and stand behind it as to the owner of that automobile.(42)Is there any reason that Henry Earl Palmer and John Manchester might conceivably have fabricated their stories? We know now something the Shaw jurors didn't: that Manchester and Registrar of Voters Henry Earl Palmer were members of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan, and that Palmer held the title of Exalted Cyclops.(43) In his earliest statements, Palmer named Judge John Rarick as a potential witness to the black Cadillac incident; Rarick, later a Louisiana congressman and a little-known supporter of Jim Garrison's, was an arch segregationist described by one Clinton resident as the "spiritual leader" of the Louisiana Klan.(44) One of the gravest threats to the Klan at that time was the civil rights movement. That's where the Congress of Racial Equality and Lee Harvey Oswald come in.
In the mid-Sixties, CORE was at the forefront of the movement for nonviolent protest and desegregation in the South. Some of their greatest opposition was found in Louisiana. In 1960, CORE Freedom Riders were brutally beaten by members of the NOPD, and a number of CORE members were arrested and charged with "criminal mischief" for staging a sit-in at a "whites only" Woolworth's lunch counter. CORE led numerous sit-ins, picketings and boycotts in New Orleans, and in 1962, token integration was achieved. The group continued to protest the segregation that remained, and began organizing voter registration drives around Louisiana.(45)
In August 1963, CORE members marched in Iberville Parish, south of Baton Rouge, to protest the denial of voting rights for blacks in the parish. More than two hundred protesters were arrested. Later protest marches in Plaquemine were brutally dispersed by police. On September 30, 1963, ten thousand blacks and three hundred whites marched on New Orleans' City Hall to protest segregation; CORE's Oretha Castle addressed the crowd.
On March 7, 1964, five members of CORE staged a sit-in at the Audubon Regional Library in an out-of-the-way town called Clinton, to protest segregated conditions in state libraries. They were arrested, charged and convicted under Louisiana's breach of the peace statute. The convictions were not appealable under Louisiana law, but the five men sued the state, and the US Supreme Court overturned the convictions, noting, "This is the fourth time in little more than four years that this court has reviewed convictions by the Louisiana courts for alleged violations, in a civil rights context, of that state's breach of the peace statute."(46)
Researcher Jerry Shinley has come up with some intriguing items from CORE's Southern Regional Office records, culled from reports written by civil rights workers assigned to the voter registration drive in, of all places, Clinton. "Everytime a strange face enters into Clinton, La.," one report notes, "he is stopped and questioned by the town marshal," John Manchester.(47) "Henry Earl Palmer, registrar of voters and ace-high bastard, continues to obstruct Negro applicants vigorously," reads another.(48) He "is very unfriendly and unnerves most applicants."(49) One report notes that the gas bills at the home of a CORE supporter had been excessively high for two months. "The CORE chapter plans to circulate a petition to the mayor of the town requesting that a new meter-reader be employed; the present one is the Town Marshal, chief harasser of CORE workers and Negro citizens."(50) A CORE member was even arrested for "obstructing the highway" after John Manchester "swerved his car off the road in an effort to hit" him.(51)
In August 1963, at the instruction of Henry Earl Palmer, John Manchester arrested a CORE worker for refusing to leave the courthouse, which housed Palmer's office. The CORE volunteer had been escorting black citizens inside and helping them register.(52) In September 1963, Clinton officials attempted to have CORE's chairman placed under an injunction prohibiting all actions of CORE. He had been arrested by Clinton authorities on several occasions for his civil rights activities.(53) His name was Corrie Collins.
Klansmen Palmer and Manchester might well have had their reasons, then, to link CORE with the world's most notorious Communist, Lee Harvey Oswald. But would CORE workers Collins and Dunn have colluded with such ultra-racists in their testimony?
Hugh Aynesworth and onetime Garrison investigator Bill Gurvich journeyed to Clinton to interview Collins: "A deputy took us to his house and barged right in and sat down in the living room as Collins' father, Emmett 'Snowball' Collins looked at the three of us with fear in his eyes." "He told us his son now lived in Baton Rouge and worked at the Post Office there." In Baton Rouge, Aynesworth found that Collins was working under an assumed name. "We tried to find his home, but to no avail. We never found Corrie, but it was simple to see how he had to testify to what Manchester and the other scrub-nuts wanted him to."(54)
On the other hand, it's possible that Collins and Dunn stood to gain from going along with the Klansmen. When Collins was interviewed by the HSCA a decade later, he seemed to display anything but bitterness towards John Manchester, for example, whom he said he knew "very well, even worked for him when I first came home from Vietnam."(55)
The question that keeps arising, however, is how the Ku Klux Klan could benefit from the claim that Lee Oswald merely stood in line at a CORE voter registration drive. Since Jim Garrison's death in 1992, a number of previously unknown documents have turned up amidst his private papers, and one such document may well be the "smoking gun" that answers that question. In a memorandum of January 22, 1968, Andrew Sciambra writes, "Mr. Palmer informed me that John Manchester has recently told him that right around the time the black Cadillac was in Clinton, he remembers seeing a boy who fit Oswald's description coming out of a CORE meeting in Clinton and when he left the CORE meeting, Manchester followed him and the car went in the direction of Jackson, Louisiana."(56)
Recall how quickly the Fair Play for Cuba Committee folded -- in only a matter of weeks -- once it had been linked, however superficially, with the alleged assassin of President Kennedy.
The Louisiana Klan also had no love for Clay Shaw. The prominent New Orleans liberal was close friends with philanthropists Edgar and Edith Stern, who contributed generously to liberal causes and were vocal in their support of the civil rights movement. The Sterns were reputed to be ardent supporters of the Anti-Defamation League, a group hated and feared by the radical right both then and now.(57)
In 1979, the HSCA released their Final Report, stating that the committee had interviewed the witnesses and were "inclined to believe" that Oswald had been in Clinton "in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw." Ironically, though only a single witness had positively identified David Ferrie at the Shaw trial, the HSCA had no qualms about linking Ferrie to the infamous black Cadillac. Why? Could it have been because HSCA General Counsel G. Robert Blakey needed Carlos Marcello associate Ferrie as a "Mob connection" to Oswald for his personal theory that the Mafia killed Kennedy? From the evidence, there seems to be little other reason.
Next: Oswald in Jackson, and a new look at one of the most provocative conspiracy witnesses of all.
Part Two of Impeaching Clinton
You may also wish to see:
Oswald in Alice, Texas: A Comparison to the Clinton Witnesses
NOTES:
1. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 9-12, 31-33.
2. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 40-45.
3. Andrew J. Sciambra, January 29, 1968, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
4. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 59-60.
5. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 79-80.
6. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 83-85.
7. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, p. 85.
8. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 86-90.
9. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 90-93.
10. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 104-07.
11. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 110-11.
12. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 7, 1969, pp. 6-11.
13. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 7, 1969, p. 10.
17. Andrew J. Sciambra, June 1, 1967, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
18. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 43-44.
19. Andrew J. Sciambra, June 1, 1967, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
21. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 12, 44, 92.
22. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 78-79.
23. Andrew J. Sciambra, June 1, 1967, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
25. Andrew J. Sciambra, June 1, 1967, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
32. Andrew Sciambra, October 26, 1967, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
33. Andrew J. Sciambra, January 31, 1968, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
35. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, pp. 104-11.
36. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 6, 1969, p. 115.
37. Frank Ruiz and Kent Simms, Memorandum of January 31, 1968; Lambert, p. 197 fn.
38. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 7, 1969, p. 10.
39. Andrew J. Sciambra, undated 1967 affidavit.
40. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (New York: Warner Books, 1991), p. 124.
41. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 25, 1969, p. 4.
42. Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 28, 1969, p. 117.
45. Information on CORE and the struggle for civil rights in Louisiana is drawn primarily from two sources: The Civil Rights Movement and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., US Information Service, and A House Divided, A Teaching Guide on the History of Civil Rights in Louisiana, accessed 1999..
46. Brown v. Louisiana, 383 US 131, accessed 1999.
48. Ibid., Reel 4, Frame 627, Summary Report, April 1965; Shinley.
49. Ibid., Reel 4, Frame 492, Weekly Report August 1-4 [1963]; Shinley.
50. Ibid., Reel 4, Frames 549-50, Field Report, January 27-February 9, 1964; Shinley.
51. Ibid., Reel 4, Frames 546, Field Report, January 13-26, 1964; Shinley.
52. Bufile 44-22889, New Orleans file 44-1852; A. J. Weberman Web site, accessed 1999..
53. A. J. Weberman Web site, accessed 1999.
55. A. J. Weberman Web site, accessed 1999.
56. Andrew Sciambra, January 22, 1968, Memorandum to Jim Garrison.
You may also wish to see:
Oswald in Alice, Texas: A Comparison to the Clinton Witnesses