27-04-2014, 09:32 PM
November 28 (Thursday)
Phone conversations:LBJ - Sen. James Eastland, 3:00 PM
LBJ - Sen. James Eastland, 3:21 PM
Senator Eastland, Judiciary Committee Chairman, agreed in this call to drop committee hearings, in favor of the President's Commission.
LBJ - Lou Deschler, 3:40 PM
LBJ - Gov. Frank Clement, 6:30 PM
Marina gives her first real interview to the FBI (SAs Wallace Heitman and Anatole Boguslav). Marguerite Oswald is released from protective custody. Prior to that date Marina was shielded and interviewed only by DPD (first days) and the Secret Service.
"Friends of the Attorney General" said he wasn't even thinking about what he would do with his future, but "he has developed the highest high regard for Johnson because of the hard work and loyalty the Texan gave Kennedy while vice president." (AP)
Statement by Texas Highway Patrolman Hurchel Jacks: "We were assigned by the Secret Service to prevent any pictures of any nature to be taken of the President's car on the inside."
In an interview with the FBI today, Sheriff Decker basically declines to discuss the assassination further.
FBI report on activities of David Ferrie, 28 Nov 1963. This report and those on successive pages focus on the "goose hunting" trip to Texas Ferrie and three companions made in a rainstorm late in the evening after the JFK assassination. They spent a few hours on Nov 23 at an ice-skating rink in Houston, where Ferrie made several phone calls.
Marguerite Oswald (being held by the Secret Service in the Inn of the Six Flags several miles outside of Dallas) is released today from custody after making repeated demands for freedom and threatening to secure legal counsel. She wants to say goodbye to Marina and her grandchildren, but the federal authorities prevent her. An interpreter from the Secret Service comes to Marina's motel room door and tells Marguerite: "We are interviewing her, and she is on tape. She will get in touch with you." "So I never saw Marina after that time," Marguerite says.
Silvia Odio confides to her friend, Lucille Connell, that she knew OSWALD from meetings of Cuban exiles, and considered him brilliant and clever. She had learned from a source in New Orleans that OSWALD should not be trusted -- that he was probably trying to infiltrate Cuban groups in Dallas as a "double agent." Odio also tells the same thing to her psychiatrist, Dr. Burton Einspruch. Connell contacts the FBI and passes along Odio's story to them.
Gilberto Alvarado is being held at a CIA safe house in Mexico City, where he is undergoing intensive interrogation in collaboration with the FBI. Alvarado has claimed that he was inside the Cuban consulate when OSWALD visited, and has said he personally saw a Cuban official give Oswald $6500.00 in cash on September 18. There is considerable doubt about his allegation, because the FBI says it can prove Oswald was in New Orleans on September 18. TKAT
The Secret Service reports today that three shots were fired - the first hit the President, the second hit Governor John Connally of Texas, and the third struck the President. There were no other shots according to the Secret Service.
At 3:21 PM today, LBJ calls Senator James Q. Eastland, a Mississippi Democrat, to get his cooperation in shutting down a proposal for a Senate committee hearing which will produce a record of the fact surrounding the assassination. LBJ's initiative will prove successful.
LBJ, in a Thanksgiving Day message, called for a "new American greatness" to arise in JFK's memory. Johnson announces that the Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, will be renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center (better known as Cape Kennedy). Residents voted in 1973 to change the name back to Cape Canaveral.
Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann (a conservative Texan who helped plan the Bay of Pigs) cabled Dean Rusk, "In reading Oswald's rather complete dossier...I did not get an impression of a man would would kill a person he had never met for a cause, without offers from the apparatus to which he apparently belonged, when there was nothing in it for him." He suggested Havana as a likely suspect. "Castro is the kind of person who would avenge himself in this way. He is the Latin type of extremist who reacts viscerally rather than intellectually..." (Conspiracy 441)
In a Teletype to the Director and the Dallas office dated today, the New Orleans FBI office reports that the investigation of Jack S. Martin's allegations is being concluded and notes that "all allegations against [David] Ferrie stem from Jack S. Martin who was previously confined to the psychiatric ward of Charity Hospital, New Orleans, for character disorder. Martin is well known to New Orleans office and is considered thoroughly unreliable." This Teletype also sets forth additional information obtained during a second interview with Ferrie from earlier today. In it, Ferrie has again denied that he has ever had any contact with Oswald. The FBI report of the interview notes, however:
David William Ferrie reinterviewed today and advised at time of Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba he was very much embarrassed and concerned over lack of air cover provided and severely criticized President Kennedy, both in public and private. Ferrie stated he has never made any statement that President Kennedy should be killed with any intention to do so and has never at any time outlined any plan or made any statement how this could be done or who should do it. Ferrie said he is very outspoken and may have used an offhand or colloquial expression, "He ought to be shot" in expressing his feelings concerning Cuban situation. Ferrie said he has also been critical of any President riding in open car and has stated anyone could hide in the bushes and shoot a President.
(House Select Committee Hearings Vol. IX, 106; FBI airtel from New Orleans to Director and Dallas office, Nov. 28, 1963, David W. Ferrie file.)
The FBI and Secret Service investigation into the possibility that Oswald and Ferrie had been associated in the Civil Air Patrol comes to an end a few days after the allegations are reported. A Secret Service report concludes that "information furnished by Jack S. Martin to the effect that David William Ferrie associated with Lee Harvey Oswald at New Orleans and trained Oswald in the use of a rifle" was "without foundation." It states further that "Jack S. Martin, who has the appearance of being an alcoholic, has the reputation of furnishing incorrect information to law enforcement officers, attorneys, etc."
Richard Helms sent a cable to CIA station chief Winston Scott in Mexico City: "For your private information, there is distinct feeling here in all three agencies [CIA, FBI and State] that Ambassador [Mann] is pushing this case too hard...and that we could well create flap with Cubans which could have serious repercussions."
Cable sent from the Mexico City CIA station to headquarters on November 28, 1963.
[ ********** ] REPORTED 27 NOV AFTER SYLVIA DURAN FIRST ARREST WAS PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE THAT THERE GREAT DEAL DISCUSSION OF THIS IN EMBASSY. SHE BACK IN OFFICE 25 NOV AND SEEMED QUITE PLEASED WITH HER PERFORMANCE. HER ACCOUNT INTERROGATION CONTAINED LITTLE NEW EXCEPT POLICE HAD THREATENED HER WITH EXTRADITION TO U.S. TO FACE OSWALD. SHE HAD NO FEAR OF CONFRONTATION. [ ******** ] DESCRIBES HER AS VERY INTELLIGENT AND QUICK-WITTED.
OF ASSASSINATION ITSELF [ ********* ] SAID THERE ALMOST NO DISCUSSION IN EMBASSY. STAFF MEETING 23 NOV VERY SHORT AND SOMBER WITH GENERAL IMPRESSION BEING ONE OF SHOCK AND DISBELIEF. HEARD NO EXPRESSIONS OF PLEASURE.
[ *********** ] SEEN NIGHT 27 NOV HAD NOTHING TO ADD TO ABOVE. INDEED HER VERSION MUCH LESS DETAILED. NEITHER [ ****** ] NOR [ ******** ] HAD ANY PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OSWALD PRESENCE CUBAN EMBASSY AT ANY TIME. [MEXI 7115 of 11-28-63, at RIF #104-10404-10159]
The report above clearly comes from human informants inside the Cuban Embassy. This cable and others [see also MEXI 7615 of 1-2-64, at RIF #104-10404-10130] show that there were two informants, one male and one female, who worked there. Their identities are not revealed, at least in these cables of the days following the assassination, where their identities are redacted.
NYT reported that French press had trouble believing that Oswald acted alone. "Questions asked in the street were: Who was really responsible for the assassination? Is this a secret organization opposing desegregation behind it all?'...The part played by Jack Ruby, the night-club operator charged with killing Oswald, also seems strange to French newspapers."
The conservative French newspaper, Le Figaro, charged Dallas authorities and federal agencies investigating the assassination with "contradictions, obscurities, intentional omissions and deliberate lies."
Oswald Planned to Ride by Scene, taken from the Dallas Morning News, 11/28/63.
Oswald was reported in a used furniture store that occupies a tall, weather-beaten green frame building at 413 E. Jefferson. About the same time, spectators at a service station further west up the street saw him run into a vacant lot, where police say the killer discarded his newly acquired jacket and three pistol shells. Then followed a chase in and out of alleyways in the Jefferson - Beckley - Cumberland - Zang area. About 1:45 p.m. Julie Postal, cashier at the Texas Theater at 231 W. Jefferson saw a hurrying stranger rush past her into the theater. To this day, she can't recall whether or not he bought a ticket. "I was so upset listening to the radio about the President and all," she said. (Brewer rushed up, Postal called the police and the story continues): The cashier immediately called police - who had just sped en masse to a false alarm at the Dallas Library branch on Jefferson, further to the east. The police sirens wailed again.
Oddly enough, it was at the library that McWatters - bus driver who, unknowingly, had Oswald as a passenger earlier - had his second brush with fate. His bus pulled up at the intersection as a swarm of 10 or 15 police cars zeroed in on the library. "I couldn't imagine what was going on," McWatters said. "Little did I know!"
Police went in the Texas Theater to the machine-gunning clatter of a movie called "War Is Hell." They found their man hiding in a middle-section seat. Three officers dragged him to a waiting unmarked car where two others had the motor gunning. Fifteen minutes later, the assassin of President Kennedy was safe in a jail cell.
NYT reported, "An unskilled occupation from which he was dismissed for incompetence accounted for about 5 months of Lee H. Oswald's time in Dallas last fall and winter. His pay was about $50 a week...A downtown graphic arts concern hired Oswald last October. He had been referred by the State Employment Commission. He was given a discharge notice late last March and his employment ended in early April. His employer, who said he preferred not to be identified, said Oswald had been hired as a trainee...He didn't show any competence or hope of developing competence,' he said. Oswald's job was to develop photostatic prints, described by the employer as an unskilled occupation.' Oswald seemed to have trouble with the exact size called for, the employer said. He said Oswald told him he had just been discharged from the Marine Corps, in which he won a Good Conduct Metal. The employer did not check on that. Actually, Oswald had been discharged three years earlier. The employer said he believed Oswald had been paid about $1.45 an hour and occasionally might have worked more than 40 hours a week....Published reports that Oswald was dismissed for Communist leanings are not true, the employer declared. A fellow worker had reported seeing Oswald carrying a Communist newspaper. However, the employer said, he took no significant notice of that. Oswald, he said, came to work on time, returned to work from lunch on time and, was so remote that nobody had any feelings about him."
NYT on the SS reenactment in Dealey Plaza: "The purpose was 'to test whether it could be done the way we believe it was done' an official source said. There were many witnesses to the re-enactment and almost as many versions of it, the source said. The consensus was that the shooting began after the President's car had made the turn from Houston Street into Elm Street. That was confirmed late today [27th] by Governor John B. Connally Jr., who was wounded in the shooting, at a news conference at the hospital. No results of the test were announced."
Walter Lippmann wrote, "The first need of the country is to take to heart the nature of this unspeakable crime...there is a searing internal crisis within the American spirit which we have first to realize and then to resolve." (NYT)
Houston Chronicle reported: "Oswald, who had been interviewed by the FBI only six days before [the assassination], became important to the police only after he missed an employee roll call soon afterwards. 'He was the only one who couldn't be accounted for,' Detective Capt. Pat Gannaway said. The taxi driver who took Oswald to the rooming house has not been found, or authorities have not disclosed his name....Witnesses - there were plenty of them - said Tippit stopped a bushy-haired man about 30, wearing a white cotton jacket. This didn't sound like Oswald, but several witnesses later confirmed that he was the man...An elevator operator said Oswald carried the package to the deserted storeroom from which the shots were fired...Was Ruby hired, or perhaps forced, to carry out the almost suicidal killing of Oswald? 'Ruby would do anything for a buck,' said Police Lieutenant George Butler. 'I don't buy the story he was emotional and did it for his country.'...Where was Oswald when the mail-order rifle was delivered to the post office box last March? Homicide Captain Fritz and Wade said they do not know....The FBI said a letter ordering the rifle in Oswald's handwriting was sent March 20 to Klein Sporting Goods, Inc., Chicago. The letter was signed 'A. Hidell.' It has been assumed Oswald was in Fort Worth at that time, not Dallas....Another mystery - how could Oswald afford the Mexico City visit he made in Sept. 26 to Oct 3.?"
Dallas Morning News editorial by Suzanne La Follette: "Note Lee Oswald's upraised, clenched fist [in a photograph], the Communist symbol of the triumph of Marxism by revolution violence."