30 Years And 50 Years

 

By Mark Howell

 

Flashback: It was 30 years ago this week that millions of TV viewers first encountered a growling, chained alligator named Elvis who lived as a pet-cum-protection device aboard a boat docked in Miami along with its owner, Sunny Crockett, otherwise known as actor Don Johnson of “Miami Vice.”

 

 

The croc was ostensibly a retired mascot of the Gators who’d been fed a clock in a frat prank, after which it could forever be heard ticking. To his terrified visitors, Crockett explained the creature’s orneriness on its career in customs during which it consumed a flight bag full of LSD while inspecting a boat headed to Key West.

 

 

Don Johnson, 64 this year, is also, of course, the smoothie who introduced presidential candidate Gary Hart to party girl Donna Rice at his a Christmas-eve blow-out at his Aspen pad. Those were the days.

 

 

Not so long ago, three media figures in Key West put on a one-day seminar at Florida Keys Community College concerning the assassination President Kennedy. The event was well attended and received excellent evaluations, but we assumed that interest in the assassination would peak after its 50th anniversary last year and then fade. Such has not been the case.

 

 

Now it’s the turn of the Warren Commission, whose flawed inquiry into the assassination under the direction of Chief Justice Earl Warren has reached its 50th anniversary this month. The JFK Historical Group is holding a conference in Alexandria, Virginia, on Sept. 26-28 featuring such speakers as Ed Hassam, author of “Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the unsolved murder of a doctor, a secret laboratory in New Orleans and cancer-causing monkey viruses are linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination and emerging global epidemics.”

 

 

Gayle Nix Jackson, the author of “Orville Nix: The Missing JFK Film,” will also be presenting at this conference, whose press release reads like a suspense novel in itself.

 

 

“The Warren Report 50 Years Later: A Critical Examination: What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then” is the full title of the event presented by the JFK Historical Group, an extended family of modern scholars including David Denton, Ed Tatro, Walt Boyes, William Boyes, Ben Boyes and Casey Quinlan.

 

 

To beheld at the Crowne Plaza Old Town Hotel in Alexandria, Va.

 

 

Keynote Speaker will be Dr. Cyril H. Wecht of Pittsburgh, a forensic pathologist, attorney and medical-legal consultant as well as author and lecturer.

 

 

Wecht has organized and conducted postgraduate medical-legal seminars in more than 50 countries, performed approximately 17,000 autopsies and supervised, reviewed or has been consulted on approximately 30,000 postmortem examinations — which is why his career included serving as a consultant to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office on the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination and the Sharon Tate/LaBianca cases, the death of Elvis Presley, the O.J. Simpson case and the JonBenet Ramsey case as well as other high-profile cases involving Mary Jo Kopechne, Sunny von Bulow, Jean Harris, Dr. Jeffrey McDonald, the Waco Branch Davidian fire and Vincent Foster.

 

 

Dr. Wecht has been vocal in his criticism of the Warren Commission’s findings and the single-bullet theory.

 

 

Also speaking at the conference will be Sara Peterson and K.W. Zachry, whose research continues to concentrate on how and why the Warren Report’s supposed “evidence” is inaccurate, incomplete and manufactured.

 

 

K.W. Zachry’s grand parents lived in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and shared with her all of the local newspapers from the event. She has since discovered that there are still many people who possess details about the greatest mystery of the 20th Century.

 

 

Also speaking at the conference is Francis Gary Powers Jr., born in 1965, in Burbank, Calif., the son of a famous dad and his wife, Claudia E. “Sue” Powers. Powers Jr. is the founder and chairman emeritus of the Cold War Museum, which he founded in 1996 to honor Cold War veterans and preserve Cold War history. In this capacity he created mobile exhibits on the Cold War and U-2 Incident that killed his dad and coordinated donation activities that total more than $3 million in financial, artifact and in-kind donations plus negotiating building space at Vint Hill Farms, the former Cold War-era Army communication base located 40 miles from Washington, D.C. He is currently chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee for the Cold War Theme Study and is working with the National Park Service and leading Cold War experts to identify historic Cold War sites for commemorating, interpreting and preservation.

 

 

Powers is married and has one son.

 

 

Another speaker, Richard Bartholomew, is an editorial cartoonist who was the first to report a suspicious automobile fitting the description of a getaway car seen by several witnesses leaving Dealey Plaza in his hometown of Dallas on that bright but dark day in November, 1962. His research on the JFK assassination includes establishing the methods by which the FBI and the Warren Commission concealed and obfuscated latent fingerprints from the alleged sniper’s nest.

 

 

Peter Janney, also present at this once-in a lifetime conference, grew up in Washington, D.C., during the Cold War. His father, Walter Janney, was a senior career CIA official and his family intimately involved with many of Washington’s social and political elite, including the family of Mary and Cord Meyer, key players in the life of JFK, as well as other high-ranking CIA officials such as Richard Helms, Jim Angleton, Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald and William Colby.

 

 

The aforementioned Gayle Nix Jackson is the granddaughter of Orville O. Nix Jr. who shot a home movie in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, that is less well-known than the Zapruder film but perhaps just as important. His film shows the grassy knoll area (from where he always believed shots were fired) throughout the assassination sequence beginning with the motorcade turning right onto Houston Street from Main Street. The FBI kept his film for three days and his camera for more than five months. When his film was returned, he felt it looked “different” and when his camera was finally returned, it came back in pieces. The FBI had taken it apart to “study” it, said Nix. He sold the copyright to UPI in 1963. It was subsequently returned to Gayle Nix Jackson and family in 1990. Only then was it discovered that the original film was missing.

 

 

Another of this forthcoming conference’s extraordinary panoply of witnesses to the events that would culminate in the Warren Commission is Judyth Vary Baker, once a promising science student who dreamed of finding a cure for cancer but strayed from a path of mainstream scholarship at the University of Florida to a life of espionage in New Orleans with Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

 

Her work in cancer research as a teen and young adult led to later involvement in a biological warfare project aimed to eliminate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. In 1963, her decision to protest the use of unwitting prisoners for a dangerous cancer experiment destroyed her cancer research career. Her relationship with the accused Kennedy assassin, whom she and others say was involved in the anti-Castro effort, has become the subject of documentaries, plays and books since she first spoke out to 60 Minutes in 1999. Her book “Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald” (2010) argues the innocence of Oswald and provides witnesses to her affair with Oswald and documentation of their relationship, which began in New Orleans in April 1963 and continued until Oswald’s last telephone call just two days before the assassination of President Kennedy.

 

 

In her memoir, she offers extensive documentation of how she came to be involved with cancer research at such a young age, the personalities who recruited her to move to New Orleans in 1963, how she was hired there – along with Lee Oswald – by Reily Coffee Co. and fired the same afternoon Lee was arrested for disturbing the peace on Canal Street. It also explores how she became a participant in the development of a biological weapon that Oswald was to smuggle into Cuba to eliminate Castro.

 

 

Judyth at this month’s Warren Commission conference will, from first-hand, tell all she knows about the Kennedy assassination, her love affair with Lee over the summer of ’63, her conversations with him as late as two days before JFK’s death, his role as a deep-cover intelligence agent who was framed for an assassination he was actually trying to prevent, and how he was silenced by his old friend Jack Ruby.

 

 

Howelings can hardly wait.

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