John Judge has died

[Magda Hassan]

A lovely remembrance of John Judge from Bill Kelly.

John Judge RIP - Dec. 14 1948 - April 15 2014

JOHN JUDGE RIP December 14 1948 - April 15 2014[/FONT]

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By Bill Kelly [/FONT]

I met John Judge in the fall of 1969 outside the University of Dayton Cafeteria at the Kennedy Union where he was manning a table and passing out literature for Conscious Objectors next to a US Marine Corps recruiting table. One of the papers on his table was a copy of Jim Garrison's interview in Playboy, which I began to read and he told me to keep it, beginning our great life-long adventure together. [/FONT]

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When we first met I was a freshman and he had just graduated, but he stuck around campus as a political agitator. My class was the first freshman class that didn't have mandatory ROTC for men, a requirement that was lifted after Judge and others protested the forced military commitment, and won. [/FONT]

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John Judge was born in Washington DC on December 14, 1948. John attended a special school in Washington where his exceptional intellect and high IQ were recognized early and cultivated, though John's sense of rebellion must have started early, as he seemed to shun the suit and tie and Ivy League business models and attended the out of the way and less academically recognized University of Dayton, Ohio, a Catholic college run by the Marinast order, and where the Dayton Flyers basketball the biggest sport in the region. [/FONT]

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While more liberal and less strict than say the Jesuits, the Marinasts had been running a tight ship since 1850, really do have ivy covered walls, and were quite reluctant to change the way things were done, especially in their Engineering Research and Development, which received many millions of dollars in research grants from the military, and Wright-Pat Air Force Base had a big presence on campus. [/FONT]

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Once John got me interested in the assassination of President Kennedy, he took me over to the UD library, the newest and largest building on campus, which housed a complete copy of the Warren Commission volumes of testimony and exhibits, which I began to read, taking special interest in the Cuban connections. [/FONT]

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It was at Dayton when I first began to identify, locate and attempt to interview witnesses. The first was Mrs. Margrete Hoover, of Martinsburgh, Pa., a small town off the Pennsylvania Turnpike where Cuban exile Julio Fernandez had taken up residence and taught Spanish at the local high school. Mrs. Hoover had discovered some burnt trash that she suspected was from her estranged husband, as she thought the names "Ruby" and "Lee Oswald" were women he was seeing, but her daughter determined that the burnt trash had blown over from the neighbor's yard, where it was apparent Fernandez had been burning his trash and papers. [/FONT]

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When Mrs. Hoover told her brother that on the night of the assassination her neighbor was awake all night and burning papers in his backyard some of which mentioned the names of "Ruby" and "Lee Oswald," he notified the Pennsylvania State Police who investigated, as did the FBI. Knocking on the door of the neighbor, Julio Fernandez, admitted burning papers in his backyard, but denied knowing Ruby or Oswald and proclaimed himself an anti-Communist patriot, one who then quickly quit his job and disappeared from Martinsburg to an undisclosed location.

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I found Mrs. Hoover's name in the public phone directory and John Judge said we should call her, so he took me over to the offices of the student body president in Kennedy Union, where he said we could use the phone to make the long distance and at the time, otherwise a prohibitively expensive phone call.[/FONT]

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Mrs. Hoover confirmed most of what was in the Warren Commission documents, and that word on the streets of Martinsburg was that Fernandez had fled to Rye, New York. And she also mentioned that I wasn't the only person still interested in the incident and Fernandez two men in black suits came by knocking on her door asking about it. [/FONT]

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One of John's radical and revolutionary friends Kevin Keefe was a six for six Icabod Crain type character who was elected student body president. Kevin went around campus in bare feet and a robe, like Jesus Christ, and used his office to bring in a series of special guests Paul Krasner, the editor and publisher of the satirical Realist magazine, radical educationalist Michael Hoffman and at the urging of Judge Mae Brussel, who brought up the assassination of President Kennedy as a subject worthy of our interest. [/FONT]

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After Mae's well attended lecture, I assisted by carrying her bag of books to the parking lot, about a block away. Once there, we were approached by a man who called out to Mae and sheepishly said hello, and then asking Mae, "Don't you know who I am?"[/FONT]

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Under the street light in the parking lot Mae looked and squinted and said, "You look like Lee Harvey Oswald." [/FONT]

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"A lot of people say that," the guy responded. "I'm Don Norton." [/FONT]

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"Oh, Don!" Mae said, "thank you so much for your letters and support. I put your money to good use."[/FONT]
"That's my conscience money," Norton said. [/FONT]

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John then invited Norton to accompany us back to his house where Mae was spending the night, and since I was a young, seventeen year old college freshman with a heavy date on the other side of campus, I left them at the parking lot while they went back to John's living room to talk some more. [/FONT]

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While I now wish I had accompanied them, I did find out a lot more about Don Norton, and the fact that there are two Don Nortons Don P. Norton and Don O. Norton, and then yet another Don Norton who wrote a defense industry history. Don O. Norton was a supposed Oswald look-a-like and East Coast fisherman, while Don P. Norton was a homosexual piano playing private at a officers club when he was recruited by military intelligence to report on gay military officers. Don P. Norton said he met the real Oswald in Mexico and obtained documents and money from him that he delivered to Canada. He later became a subject in the Garrison investigation. [/FONT]

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John Judge also had me accompany him to nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College, Glen Helen park, Ruth Paine's brother, Dr. Paine and a documented Oswald sighting investigated by the Dayton Police intelligence squad. [/FONT]

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Founded by Horace Mann - the Father of American Education, Antioch was a rural, radical college that was light years ahead of education reform at the time no grades, co-ed dorms, important internships and a non-violent Quaker-like tradition whose graduates include the Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ruth Hyde Paine, whose brother lives in Yellow Springs today. [/FONT]

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John took me to Antioch for a nighttime seminar being given on the history of Vietnam by a recently returned CIA station chief or so he was described, and it was a fascinating lecture, as he explained that this was a nationalistic revolution not a communist one, and that we had backed the wrong regime we had trained and educated Ho Chi Min and when he asked for it, we should have supported him rather than the corrupt Catholic Diems. I later attended graduate school at the Antioch College Baltimore satellite campus Center for Strategic Policy and Action, where we were once again lectured by former CIA officers and analysts. But in 1970 I didn't know any of this and was just a confused teenager, eyes wide open, who was being led around by John Judge.[/FONT]

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A few years later, in the spring of 1972, school was out except for a few special programs, so John and I were pretty much alone in the cafeteria eating lunch when John looked up from his newspaper and said, "Get a load of this!" [/FONT]

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He then began reading the short, one column three inch news report on the Watergate burglary. [/FONT]
"These are the same guys who killed Kennedy!" John said on the spot. [/FONT]

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Back to the library where before the day was out we had put together good profiles of the Watergate burglars, and called Mae, probably from Kevin Keefe's office. [/FONT]

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While Keven Keefe was long gone, John Judge's Dayton sweetheart Kathy was also politically active and was elected student body president, possibly the first women to do so. After graduation Kathy moved to New York City where she lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park and across the street from the Dakota, where John Lennon was killed. Kathy saw Lennon moments before he was shot, was an ear witness to the murder and was an important source for the cover-story news article I wrote for the Atlantic City Sun the next day. Even after they broke up, John and Kathy stayed close and John visited her every Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday for many years. [/FONT]

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At some point, I don't even remember if it was in the late 70s, John took me to my first JFK conference at the NYU Law School where we met with Mae, and John introduced me to Penn Jones, the scrappy editor and publisher of the Midlothian, Texas Mirror news. We also hooked up with Kevin Keefe, who was now an assistant to Sri Chinmoy, the spiritual advisor to the United Nations. "It's going to be a good year for all of us," Kevin said optimistically. Actually Kevin says that every time I see him, sometimes decades apart.[/FONT]
Walking around the NYU law school class rooms I sat in on one lecture by Fletcher Prouty, who was making caulk diagrams on a blackboard on the nature of covert operations how and why they work, how there are multi-levels of connections and communications and how they are designed to protect the identity of their actual sponsors. [/FONT]

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Near the end a press conference was called where Ralph Schoeman held up copies of some official FBI documents that he said proved conspiracy records that tie one of the Cubans arrested with Oswald in New Orleans to Teamster Union officials in Puerto Rico. I took a copy of the documents and got Schoeman's address near Princeton and wrote up an FOIA request for some more records. [/FONT]

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This was not my first request for JFK Assassination records from the National Archives, I had previously written and asked about a film that George deMohrenschildt had made on a walking trip through Central America, where he arrived in Guatemala when the Cuban brigade was preparing to invade Cuba, but I received a letter from Mr. Marion Johnson that the film was never entered into evidence or the archives. [/FONT]
This time, I received a number of documents that clearly indicated that person arrested with Oswald in New Orleans was only 17 years old at the time, and was not the same person of the same name mentioned in the FBI Teamster Union documents from Puerto Rico, a much older man. So I called Ralph Schoeman on the phone and arranged to visit him near Princeton from my Ocean City home and drove up to see him. [/FONT]

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Ralph and John Judge went back a long way, and John gave me some deep background on him, as he did with everybody. Although he was married to Temple University professor Joan Mellen at the time, she wasn't there and I wouldn't meet her for many years, but Schoeman was very polite to receive me and review the documents I had, and agreed that he had been mistaken and there were indeed two different men with the same name.[/FONT]

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While John Judge knew and associated with Carl Oglesby, Bob Katz and those involved in the Assassination Information Bureau (AIB 1322 18[SUP]th[/SUP] Street, NW) I only visited their DC office with John on one occasion, and we found it open but no one there, so I never got to meet them, but knew how they had helped spark Congress to form the HSCA an amazing achievement. [/FONT]

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From Dayton I knew John Moore, a Congressional aide from Colorado who knew Gary Hart and saw to it that I met with a lawyer from the Schweiker-Hart subcommittee, that looked into some of the intelligence connections to the assassination of President Kennedy, and I had shared records with Richard Sprague, the first chief counsel to the HSCA, but for the most part, I stood back and observed these committees work. [/FONT]
When the HSCA issued its report, then locked its records away for 50 years, I sat down with John and we discussed how much new stuff was in the reports, but the real evidence was being locked away, and that was a wrong that had to be righted. [/FONT]

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So John and I went to the National Archives building for the first time and read the engraving on the wall outside: "The Past Is Prologue," and went in and asked the man at the desk about the JFK assassination records, and he got on the phone and in a few minutes a man appeared Marion Johnson, who was responsible for the JFK assassination records. [/FONT]

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I only had a few questions for Mr. Johnson, the first being why are the records locked away for 50 years and not say 20 or 100? Why 50? [/FONT]

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And is response was that 50 years is the amount of time it is estimated that the people mentioned in the documents are dead. [/FONT]

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Well to me that was an anachronism which means "against time," since if they were dead, they couldn't answer any questions or correct the official records if it was wrong. [/FONT]

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My second question to Mr. Johnson was how do we change that requirement and get them released. [/FONT]
The answer an Act of Congress. [/FONT]

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Well while that seemed impossible at the time, we sat down again and went over everything and decided to form a not for profit lobby organization to work towards the release of the HSCA records which we called the Committee for an Open Archives (COA). We officially applied for non-profit status, opened a post office box and had a in stamp made with the name and address to put on envelops, and began making the rounds of Congress, without much success. Nobody was interested. [/FONT]

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Then when Mae Brussell died, John said that he had promised her he would use her extensive archive and library as the foundation for a West Coast research center in Santa Cruz, near Carmel, where Mae lived. John recruited me to drive a U-Haul truck full of his books and belongings from DC to Santa Cruz. Our last stop in DC was a office of radical Guatemalan activists who were opposing the dictatorship there. John was helping them raise funds. [/FONT]


It was a wonderful cross-country trip, we met many interesting people and when we got to Santa Cruz, set up the Mae Brussel Research Center in a small three bedroom rancher a few blocks from the beach, where you could hear the seals bark from the backyard. While on the West Coast we hooked up with Paul Krasner, who Larry Flint had named editor and publisher of the radical color glossy Rebel Magazine, which included an article by Mae on the Nazis at Dealey Plaza. Eventually Mae's daughter took over the MBRC and John moved back east after a short West Coast hiatus.

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After the NYU conference the next important conference on the JFK assassination was the ASK conference in Dallas where a panel was formed on freeing the records and to form a more permanent organization based in Washington. While the ASK conference(s) were well organized and attended, they were put together by a for-profit group who really weren't interested in the assassination and just wanted to make a profit. We wanted to form our own organization and organize our own conferences, not to make money, but to further the research, free the files and determine the truth. [/FONT]

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There were two meetings to plan the new organization in Dallas, and John Judge arranged for us to use the main room of the Capitol Hill Quaker Meeting House for two consecutive days, over which the foundations of COPA were laid out. A larger general organization meeting was held at a DC hotel in Chinatown, and the Coalition on Political Assassinations became a reality. [/FONT]

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But it wasn't until the early 1990s when interest in the assassination began to increase, mainly because of the mainstream media preoccupation with the making of Oliver Stone's film "JFK," even before the film was finished. After Stone gave a luncheon speech at the National Press Club, John Judge and I met with him privately at his hotel room, where he asked us what he could do to help us, other than give us money. [/FONT]

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We had discussed this among ourselves and decided that Stone could do one thing to help release the JFK assassination records. We recalled for Stone how at the end of the movie Executive Action they ran a little trailer listing the mysterious deaths, a very controversial subject. We told Stone that if he at the end of his moive, make mention of the fact that the JFK files were sealed from the public for 50 years, that alone would call attention to the issue. And indeed it did, much more than anyone anticipated. [/FONT]

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The movie motivated enough citizens to contact their Congressman to complain about the secret JFK assassination files that Congress was inspired to pass the JFK Act of 1992, which came about just as COPA was expanding and holding national conferences in Washington. [/FONT]

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For many of these years John lived in Philadelphia, where he worked for various Quaker Peace groups, mainly as a consular for conscious objectors. Though not a lawyer, John was an expert in military law and the draft, and counsel those who wanted to legally avoid the draft and Vietnam because of their personal beliefs. [/FONT]

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While most people would think of John Judge as a radical revolutionary who distained the government, he was a non-violent activist who worked through the system always applying for permits for protests and demonstrations, filling out the tax forms and doing the right thing by law. [/FONT]

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Others who I met through John Dick Gregory for instance, were not so formally inclined, and had no qualms about demonstrating without a permit, handcuffing themselves to the CIA's front gate or getting arrested for a good cause. A few years after Judge introduced me to Dick Gregory I ran into him at Union station, both of us on the way to catch a train. He asked me how Judge was doing and when I asked him, he agreed to attend the next conference in Dallas. [/FONT]


TO BE CONTINUED - BK [/FONT]

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Washington, DC - John Patrick Judge passed away at the age of 66, just as he had lived with courage in the midst of pain. An internationally acclaimed researcher, writer and speaker, as well as a lifelong anti-militarist anti-racist activist, and community organizer, Judge died on April 15 due to complications from a stroke suffered in early March.[/FONT]

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Judge's primary areas of research were the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as totally unique research which he conducted on-the-ground about the massacre in Jonestown, Guyana. He is a co-founder of the Coalition On Political Assassinations (COPA), and organized COPA's annual conference in Dallas. The 2013 COPA conference drew more than 300 researchers and activists to Dallas on the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's death. Amid the national furor when the feature film "JFK" came out in 1992, Judge was one of the key public proponents behind the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board. One of his last efforts was to press for release of some of the thousands of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination records still kept classified by the CIA and the FBI.[/FONT]

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As co-founder of 9/11 Citizens Watch, Judge also did investigative research on the background and details of the attacks of September 11, 2001. He worked with family members of the victims to push for a federal investigation and closely monitored the work of the 9/11 Commission.[/FONT]

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Judge was also a co-founder of CHOICES, an organization engaged since 1985 in countering military recruitment in DC area high schools and educating young people about their options with regard to the military. Beginning with the war in Viet Nam, Judge was a life-long anti-war activist and supporter of active-duty soldiers and veterans.[/FONT]

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From 2005 to 2007, Judge served as Special Projects Assistant to Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. One of his many undertakings in Congress was to advocate on behalf of active-duty soldiers who received harsh sentences for declaring themselves conscientious objectors and others who claimed to have been tortured in military brigs. He helped write the Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush which Representative McKinney introduced in December 2006, before leaving office.[/FONT]

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At the time of his death, John Judge was working on creation of a Hidden History Museum and Research Center in Washington, DC, to educate a new generation about covert operations, and to support the work of investigative journalists and researchers looking into the National Security State and the rise of secrecy, government plans for extra-Constitutional jurisdiction during emergencies, and threats to civil liberties and international relations. Some of his writings can be found at judgeforyourself.org.[/FONT]

Acclaimed nationally and internationally for his vast store of historical knowledge, Judge wrote: "Under the evil genius of Allen Dulles, whose espionage attacks on the Soviet Union date back to the 1920's, $200 million in Rockefeller and Mellon funds was directed into the hands of Hitler's spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and his 350 Nazi spies, who formed and founded our Central Intelligence Agency in 1947."[/FONT]

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An avid public speaker, Judge never spoke about himself but rather, humbly retained a tireless devotion to the search for truth beyond the official government or mainstream media record. Until his final days, Judge was a seeker of truth and justice of the first order. He is irreplaceable in the annals of serious research and documentation.[/FONT]

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John Judge is survived by his long-time companion and life partner, Marilyn Tenenoff, and thousands of friends and admirers across the country and around the world. A celebration of his life will be held in late May. [/FONT]

[/FONT] In lieu of flowers, tax-deductible donations can be made to support the preservation of Judge's books and archives in a new Museum of Hidden History, P.O. Box 772, Washington, DC, 20044.[/FONT]

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There's usually a nasty plot behind what seems so decent.
It's often greed or selfish hate, in ancient times and recent.
John Judge's aim is just to find the truth and then to show it.
So we can change the world by letting all the people know it."
(from a poem by Susan McLucas)[/FONT]

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