Phil Ochs at Dealey Plaza ?
By William E. Kelly, Jr.
"Captain Fritz questioned him and said the President had been killed…Oswald replied, 'people will forget that within a few days and there would be another president.' Oswald felt the State was so unfeeling that grief for its fallen leader would be short-lived. He could not have been more wrong. 'A man so-filled with life even Death was caught off guard,' as the folk-singer Phil Ochs described JFK, and when he died, will never be forgotten." - Gary O’Brian Oswald’s Politics [1.]
“A man so filled-with
life even Death was caught off guard,” is just one of the things Phil Ochs said
of JFK.
Ochs also claimed knowledge of a plot to kill the president
before it happened, and according to his college room mate and best man Jim
Glover, Ochs was a witness to the assassination as “a national security
observer” at Dealey Plaza .
In following the assassination of President Kennedy for as
long as I have I thought I had heard it all, but one of the more bizarre
conspiracy theories I’ve come across is the idea that Phil Ochs had expressed
foreknowledge of the assassination, was present at Dealey Plaza as “a national
security observer,” and kept those facts secret in fear for his own life.
Ochs then committed suicide on April 9, 1976 at the age of 35, a death some believe
should be considered suspicious.
I took a particular interest in this theory because I had
started to compile a list of those who had expressed foreknowledge of the assassination,
and in reviewing their backgrounds, tried to determine if they actually knew about
the plot to kill the president from those who could have actually been involved.
Phil Ochs was a new name to that list. [2]
I also took particular interest in this allegation because I had actually knew Phil Ochs for a few hours one night when I was a teenager, and I thought that it would be pretty simple to determine whether he was in Dallas that day or not.
Boy was I wrong.
I crossed paths with Phil Ochs at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago in late August
1968 when we were both roaming among the rooms reserved for the Eugene McCarthy
campaign on the 15th floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
While much is lost in the fog of the riots that occurred, I
clearly remember Ochs on the last night we were there, sitting on the floor in
the hall playing a guitar and singing, serenading a dozen or so McCarthy volunteers,
myself included. And while Ochs and I didn’t personally meet or talk, we sat a
few feet from each other for a few hours while he played guitar and sang and I listened
and, at seventeen years old, had my first alcoholic drink - a whiskey on the
rocks. A few hours later the Chicago
police raided the 18th floor and busted us all, an event that would make the news
and a few paragraphs in the history books. [3]
So after I developed an interest in the assassination of
President Kennedy, I was quite surprised to learn that Phil Ochs had expressed
foreknowledge of the assassination and may have actually been at Dealey
Plaza as a “national security
observer” to the murder.
The source of this particular conspiracy theory, folk singer
Jim Glover, is a free spirited musician and folksinger who still performs
today. I had met Jim on John Simkin’s Education Forum, [4] and he is now a
Facebook friend.
Jim Glover first called my attention to the Dealey
Plaza photograph that he says includes
his old friend Phil Ochs, standing on the Houston street
sidewalk behind a few Dallas cops peering
up towards the top floors of the Texas School Book Depository with weapons
drawn. [5]
Since such positive photo identification has been often shown
to be false or inconclusive, I have not relied on it in my analysis, which is
based on the background of Phil Ochs, his known contacts and associations as an
attempt to determine if he could have had foreknowledge of the plot to kill the
president if in fact it was a “national security” event.
An unofficial internet profile of Ochs notes that he was, “Born
in El Paso , Texas
on December 19, 1940 , Phil
and his family moved frequently during the first few years of his life. His
father, Dr. Jacob Ochs, had been drafted by the US Army and assigned to various
military hospitals in New York , New
Mexico and Texas .
In 1943, Dr. Ochs was shipped overseas, returning two years later with a
medical discharge. Upon his return, he was immediately institutionalized and
didn’t return to his family for another two years. During that time, he was
subjected to every ‘treatment’ imaginable, including electroshock ‘therapy.’ When
he finally returned to his family in 1947 he was but a shell of his former
self, described by Phil’s sister as “almost like a phantom.” Beginning in the
fall of 1956, Phil Ochs began attending Staunton
Military Academy ,
the very same institution that future ‘serial killer’/cult leader Gary Heidnik
would attend…. During Phil’s two years there, a friend and fellow band member
was found swinging from the end of a rope (…ruled a suicide). Following graduation,
Phil enrolled at Ohio State University, but not before, oddly enough, having a
little plastic surgery done to alter his appearance (doing such things,
needless to say, was rather uncommon in 1958)…”
It was at Ohio U in Columbus
where Oaks met folksinger Jim Glover, who became his roommate, taught him how
to play guitar, gave Ochs his first guitar, losing it on a political bet, and
together they formed the folk duo the “Singing Socialists,” later changing the
name to the “Sundowners.”
Glover quit school and moved to New
York City , becoming a part of the Greenwich
Village folk music scene, which was then just beginning to
blossom. Shortly thereafter, just before graduation in 1962, Ochs too quit
school and joined Glover in New York
where he too became part of growing, restless counter-culture of that era.
As the epitome of the 1960s-era protest singer Phil Ochs was
known for writing songs fused with meaning and anti-establishment themes, including, "I Ain't Marching Anymore",
"Changes", "Love Me, I'm a Liberal", "Outside of a
Small Circle of Friends", "Power and the Glory", "There but
for Fortune", and "The War
Is Over". [6]
FLASHBACK 092068 CHICAGO DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION
Although I find it hard to believe, as I write this, the Disc
Jockey (on WXPN FM) plays “Draft Dogger
Rag” - in honor of the anniversary of Ochs’ April 9, 1976 death, which
gives you a good example of the irony and wit he used to get across an
unpopular notion - the political hypocracy of Washington. [7]
Oh, I'm just a typical American boy from a typical American town
I believe in God and Senator Dodd and a-keepin' old Castro down
And when it came my time to serve I knew "better dead than red"
But when I got to my old draft board, buddy, this is what I said:
CHORUS
Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my ashma's getting worse
Yes, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, and my poor old invalid aunt
Besides, I ain't no fool, I'm a-goin' to school
And I'm working in a DEE-fense plant
I believe in God and Senator Dodd and a-keepin' old Castro down
And when it came my time to serve I knew "better dead than red"
But when I got to my old draft board, buddy, this is what I said:
CHORUS
Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my ashma's getting worse
Yes, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, and my poor old invalid aunt
Besides, I ain't no fool, I'm a-goin' to school
And I'm working in a DEE-fense plant
Hearing his sharp, distinctive voice flashed me back to the
1960s as I recalled that song being played on the radio - usually late on a Sunday
night when “Meatball Fulton” spun the discs and told the tales from the underground
on Philadelphia’s WXPN, (who were still playing Ochs songs in 2013), or you
could sometimes hear Ochs on Dave Herman’s Marconi Experiment, but they were the
only programs I knew of that would play Phil Ochs’ songs. [8]
“I believe in God and
Senator Dodd and a-keepin’ ol’ Castro down…..”
Hearing his voice immediately threw me back once again to Ochs
singing in the hotel hall in Chicago ,
a momentary flashback to the evening the Vietnam Peace Plank had lost and the
McCarthy volunteers, mostly high school kids (like me) or college students
suddenly had nothing to do, as the campaign was officially over. Out in the
hall Ochs began to sing, possibly “The War is Over,” and a bar tray on wheels
came down the halI was given a whiskey highball on the rocks, and sat down on
the floor with the others and listened to Phil Ochs play the guitar and sing in
his sharp, distinctive voice.
Then I went and laid down in a back room and while I was
asleep, all hell broke loose, the Chicago Cops stormed the 15th floor and
busted everybody - me included - roused out of bed and beat with a billy club
by cops - tear gas cut my eyes and blood dripped down my face. The subdued
hotel hall party suddenly became a combat zone, and that was the last time I
saw Phil Ochs.
I do remember, about a year later, buying his album that
showed Ochs’ grave stone on the cover and indicated that he died in Chicago . It contained songs about our Chicago
experience, including “William Butler Yeats Escapes from Grant Park Unscathed.”
[9]
And now, according to Jim Glover, there he is in the photo
at Dealey Plaza, a blurry, ghostly figure of a young man standing back against
the Dal-Tex building in a photo obviously taken just shortly after the
assassination of the President, with policemen with weapons drawn looking
towards the assassin’s lair in the upper floor windows of the Texas School Book
Depository building.
Like a fly on the wall, the casually dressed young man seems
to be just standing back taking it all in. Is that really Phil Ochs, the folk
singer? If so, what’s he doing there? Was he really there as a “national
security observer?”
What is a “national security observer”?
And how, I wondered, could a radical leftist protest singer
like Phil Ochs become involved with the “national security state”?
It was a question that I was surprised Jim Glover could
answer so quickly, and to my satisfaction.
WIKI OCHS
But first I wanted to check to see what the internet had to
say about Phil Ochs.
Of course Wiki is not a reliable or citable source for
college papers, books or serious research, but it is a good place to start. As
some speculate it has CIA ties, and posts questionable
assertions regarding the assassination of President Kennedy, I thought it a
good place to get the official, mainstream story before diving into the truth.
The Wiki entry confirmed my own recollections of Chicago in
’68, Jim Glover’s association with Ochs in college and the effect of the
assassination on Ochs.
Of Chicago Wiki says: “Despite warnings that there might be
trouble, Ochs went to Chicago both
as a guest of the McCarthy campaign and to participate in the demonstrations.
He performed in Lincoln Park , Grant
Park, and at the Chicago Coliseum, witnessed the violence perpetrated by
the Chicago police against the
protesters, and was himself arrested at one point.”
Yea, some point.
As for school, the Wiki entry notes: “when he graduated
[from Staunton Military Academy , Va. ]
Ochs returned to Columbus (Ohio )
and enrolled in the Ohio State
University …to study journalism and
developed an interest in politics, with a particular interest in the Cuban
Revolution of 1959.”
In regards to Jim Glover, it says that, “Glover taught Ochs
how to play guitar, and they debated politics…Ochs and Glover formed a duet
called ‘The Singing Socialists,’ later renamed ‘The Sundowners,’ but the
duo broke up before their first professional performance and Glover went
to New York City to become a folksinger.” [10]
UNDERCOVER IN COLUMBUS
So I sent my new Facebook friend Jim Glover a PM - Personal
Message and asked him how he met Ochs, what Ochs doing at Dealey
Plaza and how Ochs was connected to
“the national security state?” [11]
Jim Glover:
“Phil first picked up
the guitar when we were in college and Steeb Hall roommates (at Ohio State University in Columbus , Ohio ).
We were both in the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corp…. I was a private ROTC
Army, Phil was ROTC Air Force Sergeant….It was a military culture because ROTC
was mandatory and Phil was a sergeant in the Air force and I was private Army
cadet.... He liked to pull rank on me and I resented it…but we had a ball
anyway.”
“At first Phil was
Gung Ho...’Commies’ were the bad guys and he seemed like it would take a lot of
work to turn him around, but I did in short order. It was kinda like I ‘sheep
dipped’ him for his future mission. He bragged about his photographic memory
and how at [Staunton , Va. ]
Military Academy he was friends with Barry Goldwater's son. In 74 he told me he knew
John Dean there too when he also confessed he was working with an up and coming
young Air Force officer…”
“Phil (got a lot of
his song ideas from the newspapers and) read me stories about how the mob fixed
the election, about Lee Oswald defecting to Russia, and about how U2 pilot
(Gary) Powers should have taken his suicide pill and on and on. He also was mad
at me for going to a demonstration to protest Wernher Von Braun speaking on
campus. I was prejudiced about Nazis I guess and Phil was pissed that one of
the students who talked me into it was a Socialist Worker's Party guy. It was
around then he spilled the beans about a big red scare surveillance program on
campus and the first time I heard the term was when Phil said I was ‘Fair
Game.’"
“Our last quarter at
Steeb Hall he got super radical all of a sudden …wrote articles in defense of
Castro for the Steeb Hall newsletter he put out himself called ‘The Word’ and
made all the mimeographed copies. He also reported for the Ohio State Paper ‘The Lantern’. His first song was about the Cuban invasion - ‘The
Bay of Pigs ,’ which we would sing as the Singing
Socialists. After we did a Republican big wig house party an angry white man
came up and asked us if we were Communists...Phil was a bit worried and wanted
us to change our name to the "Sundowners" because it was more
‘euphonious’. I went along....Trouble is it took all the fun out of it for me.”[12]
ROTC, COINTELPRO & CHAOS
Reserve Officer Training Corps
(ROTC) was also, at one time, mandatory for all freshmen male students at the
University of Dayton, Ohio, before I got there, but student protests ended the
practice. Many students however, continued to voluntary take the ROTC program and
I took classes in military history and strategy with the ROTC professors and
cadets.
When college students began to organize anti-Vietnam war protest
demonstrations, it was the ROTC students who were recruited to infiltrate the
protesters as undercover informants and in some cases, instigators and
agitators who drew students out of the crowd so they could keep track of them. Sometimes
they were sent from one campus to another. [13] This was the FBI’s COINTELPRO
program, which was first revealed in the early ‘70s after anti-war activists
broke into the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office, stole COINTELPRO files and
distributed them to the newspapers and magazines. And like the assassination of
President Kennedy, that crime, what the professionals in the trade call a
“black bag job,”
The CIA also ran a
similar operation CHAOS, but since they were not legally able to conduct
operations in the continental United States, the FBI’s undercover network as
used against the Klu Klux Klan, targeted student protesters and they were supplemented
by the US Army intelligence, usually the Army Reserve units, whose surveillance
of the civil rights demonstrations is also well documented. (See: MLK ,
Memphis ). [15]
The FBI and military’s use of undercover informants and
agitators is also exemplified at Kent State, where one such agitator is now
believed to have provoked the Army reservists into shooting students, [16] and
in the case of the Camden 28. [17] The Camden , NJ
anti-Vietnam activists were assisted and provoked by an FBI informant and
instigator - ex-USMC undercover operative Bob Hardy, who like Oswald and Ochs,
fits the covert operative personality profile. [18]
So if Phil Ochs was a Staunton
(Va. ) Military
Academy graduate [19] and Air Force
ROTC sergeant involved in undercover surveillance of radical college students,
he certainly could have continued his association with the military-intelligence
network that had previously conducted surveillance of campus radicals.
GOODBYE COLUMBUS
Columbus is the Ohio state capitol, and the film location of
a popular early 70s date movie - Goodbye
Columbus, based on a Philip Roth novel, first published in the Paris Review, which gives a colorful insight into
the sports-jock world that prevailed before the bloom of the counter-culture
and the Vietnam War created a political divide. [20]
If the Secret Service
were preparing for a presidential visit to Columbus, Ohio, they would check
with the Protective Research Section (PRS )
to see if there were any threats to the president in that vicinity. From the
files they would learn that Columbus
was the home of prominent Hustler magazine pornographer Larry Flint, who also
published Rebel, a glossy magazine
that included articles on the JFK assassination by Mae Brussell, the housewife
researcher and Yippster humorist Paul Krasner. Flint
himself became the victim of an assassination attempt. [21]
The government files would also reflect that Columbus ,
Ohio is also the headquarters of an obscure
semi-quasi-government intelligence agency - The Defense Industrial Security Command
(DISC), [22] which deserves attention in regards to the security of such
corporate entities as Texas
defense contractors Bell Helicopter, General Dynamics and Collins Radio and the
roles their employees played in the assassination drama. [23][24][25].
When Gordon Novel was sought for questioning by the New
Orleans grand jury in 1967, he avoided the subpoena by fleeing at first, to
Columbus, Ohio, where the governor himself (Rhodes) refused to extradite him, and
then to McLean, Virginia, near where the CIA
headquarters is located. Something peculiar was going on in Columbus, as well
as McLean. [26]
In summary, Phil Ochs, after graduating from an elite Virginia
military academy, served as a sergeant in the Air Force ROTC at Ohio
State University ,
where he spied on campus radicals and was encouraged to infiltrate student
protest groups. He may have switched ideological sides, but appears to have maintained
his association with the US
military intelligence officers that he worked with in college. They must have
took note of the fact that one of their ROTC cadets was playing guitar, writing
protest songs and articles and fermenting unrest, which was becoming something of
a popular campus pastime and cultural phenomenon, one they certainly would have
wanted to keep tabs on.
PHIL OCHS AND BOB DYLAN
In looking through the published literature on Bob Dylan,
there is frequent mention of his association with Phil Ochs, such as when Dylan
biographer Bob Spitz writes, “Phil Ochs stumbled over to Dylan’s table, worked
up over some secret government conspiracy or another.” [27]
So Ochs was himself considered a conspiracy theorists before
it was popular and then went nearly a full decade without seeing Dylan, who
went on to fame and fortune, while Ochs continued to write and sing protest
songs, an out of date and almost obsolete musical genre that was totally
overrun by rock and roll and then the drones of disco. While Dylan seemed to
roll with the punches, and go his own way, Ochs seems to have been stuck in a
rut, though he kept writing songs and singing away.
Both Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan did write songs about similar
subjects, including the Civil Rights movement, the John Birch Society and
assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
It is quite clear that if Medgar Evers’ murder by a sniper
was properly investigated and prosecuted, JFK wouldn’t have been killed the way
he was. It was only because of a young, assist. DA that justice was served in
Evers’ case, and his widow was part of the second inauguration of President
Obama in 2012.
Dylan sang his song “Just a Pawn in their Game” at the March
on Washington when Martin Luther
King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Anthony Scaduto, in Dylan
- An Intimate Biography, [28] compares and contrasts the Ochs and Dylan
songs about the assassination of Medgar Evers:
“A comparison of the way Dylan and Phil Ochs each handled
the murder of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, points it up. Ochs, and
everyone else writing the Broadside song, saw the killing as simply a story to
be set to music. The tradition is old and honorable. Ochs, in The Ballad of Medgar Evers, tells how
Evers, as a boy of fourteen in Mississippi ,
saw a friend hung because of his color. The lynching was branded on his brain.
And then, quite simply, without melodrama, Ochs writes about the killer who
waited in ambush and shot Evers down. And when they buried him the nation
gained a killer but lost a man. Dylan however, handled it differently in Only a Pawn in their Game. He
immediately establishes that a bullet fired from ambush takes Evers life, but
from there he takes it several large steps forward. The man who fired that
bullet is not to blame. He is only a pawn in the game, a game in which the politician
preaches to the poor whites that they’re better than blacks, and the politician
rises to power on his demagoguery while the poor white remain ‘on the caboose,’
at the bottom of the heap. Governors, sheriffs, soldiers, all the law
enforcement crowd - and the preachers and educators - teach him that his white
skin is a protection, teach him to walk in a mob and to lynch blacks. And they
buried Evers ‘as a king’ but when the man who fired the gun eventually dies,
his epitaph will be that he was only a pawn in their game.”
PHIL OCHS
AT DEALEY PLAZA
Jim Glover:
“Phil was into the
investigation of the plot before Dallas .
He came over to my apt when (my wife) Jean was gone to tell me that there was a
plot to kill President Kennedy. He asked me if I knew anything and that he was
going to the FPCC to find out more. Phil said he was working for the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee in order to find out more about the plot and I said I would
let him know if I heard anything ... I kinda remember we were supposed to meet
somebody in a subway station but they never showed so I never met the Fair Play
for Cuba guys, but many years ago I called VT Lee of the Veterans for Peace and
he told me ‘Oh yes Phil was working with us.’”
“Before Phil went to Dallas he said his Mom told him to get a haircut
(good advise) and he said he went there with one of the Gambino boys... one his
age.”
“I now believe
anyone who went there to watch or report were being set up in case the ‘Oswald
all alone’ thing did not pass, the next patsies would be us Castro sympathizers
and then the Mob... or both. I know it sounds twisted, but that is why
they had to stick to Oswald ‘the lone nut’ who I now believe…. was really
working to kill Castro….”
“Phil did not say who
told him to go to Dallas and it probably saved our lives because I
would have talked. All my life I got in trouble because I talked, so they used
me for that. Phil did say he was working for ‘National Security Domestic
Division’ of ‘something like the CIA ’ and
that FBI Hoover was the bad guy. Soon after that two men identifying themselves
as FBI came over and asked me if I knew where Phil was...Of course I thought
they really knew, but I lied and didn't even tell them about the Kennedy plot
to protect Phil.”
“It was a few months after
“Next he said he was in
Dallas as a ‘national security observer,’ a new role to me but it made
sense….About his Dallas trip he only told me once and that was that he was
standing on the street and when JFK was shot he went towards the scene and saw
the commotion ..... I don't remember him saying he was standing in the street
keeping watch on Elm and Houston when the Limo passed but a few weeks ago I
found him there, a bit blurry but it is in (the film) ‘The First Shot’. Phil
did say he thought it was a Para-Military operation.”
“I asked him if he
could prove he was there and he said he was being filmed standing by the garage
door of the Dal/Tex building. He also went over toward the crowd and saw a lady
crying….Phil told me it was a paramilitary squad that did it…Soon after I told
his story during a solo set at the Gaslight and Phil found out he said ‘Are you
trying to get me killed?!’ So after that I was more cautious about talking...but
I never was quiet. Phil told me that he was warned - he did not tell me who, he
was warned that if he talk they would say that he was crazy.” [29]
DYLAN AND JFK ASSASSINATION
According to his biographer: “Dylan was on his way uptown to
[his and Och’s manager Albert] Grossman’s office on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963 , when John
F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas . ‘I
watched it at my manager’s office,’ Dylan later told me. ‘The next night,
Saturday, I had a concert upstate,…There was a really down feeling in the air.
I had to go on stage. I couldn’t cancel. I went to the hall and to my amazement
the hall was filled. Everybody turned out to the concert. The song I was
opening with was The Times They Are
A-Changin’ and I thought, ‘Wow, how can I open with that song? I’ll get
rocks thrown at me.’ That song was just too much for the day after the
assassination. But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there … I
know I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the
country and they were applauding that song. And I couldn’t understand why they
were clapping or why I wrote that song, even. I couldn’t understand anything.
For me, it was just insane.’” [30]
“When he returned to the Village he, Suze and Carla sat and
watched the national tragedy through the rest of the weekend and into the
Monday morning funeral. Like so many across the nation, they were engrossed in
the events unfolding before them: the murder of Oswald, the funeral, the
continual replays of the death of Kennedy, the confirmation of a new president,
the widow refusing to change her blood-soaked dress because she wanted the
world to see her husband’s blood, to see what they had done. Through it all
Dylan sat and watched and said little, just feeling the emotion of it. He drank
a little wine, and played Berlioz’s Reguiem
over and over.”
“Phil Ochs also felt it in Bob: ‘Oh, yea, I was overcome
with it. Yeah, that feeling was everywhere. I was almost destroyed with that
very same thing. You’re sticking your neck out, a public figure, and there’s an
obvious fear. You’re political and obviously the bad guys are on the loose and
maybe gonna kill anybody who’s out front, and you get scared. Bob never talked
about it, but it was there.”
“Although many felt it in Dylan at the time, he denies it
today. ‘I didn’t feel it any more than anybody else,’ he told me. ‘We were all
sensitive to it. The assassination took more of the shape of a happening. I read
about those things happening to Lincoln ,
to Garfield , and that it couldn’t
happen in this day and age was not too far-fetched. It didn’t knock the wind
out of me. Of course, I felt as rotten as everyone else. But if I was more
sensitive about it than anyone else, I could have written a song about it,
wouldn’t I? The whole thing about my reactions to the assassination is
overplayed.’”
“Yet, despite Bob’s denial, the murder did have an enormous
effect on him. He signaled that feeling to very close friends, and a couple of
weeks after Kennedy’s death, Dylan gave a disastrous speech that indicated how
much the assassination had troubled him. He went to the grand ballroom of the
Hotel Americana in New York to
accept the Tom Paine Award of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for his
work in the civil rights campaigns….”
“…Dylan began to think of Kennedy’s murder, which had been
deplored by speaker after speaker that night and he said: ‘I’ll stand up and be
uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest. I just got to be, as
I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy - Lee Oswald - I don’t
know exactly what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I,
too - I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it could have gone that far -
I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say that I saw
things that he felt, in me - not to go that far and shoot…’ Some members of the
audience began to boo and his, and Dylan went forward: ‘You can boo, but
booing’s got nothing to do with it - it’s uh - I just uh - I’ve got to tell
you, man, it’s the Bill of Rights, it’s free speech and….’ Someone broke in and
said his time was up and Dylan later claimed the chairman began kicking me
under the table, and he finished up by quickly saying he accepted the award in
behalf of James Foreman and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and
he went off amid boos and some applause, beat it out of there.”
Dylan said, “All I can say is politics is not my thing at
all. I can’t see myself on a platform talking about how to help people. Because
I would get myself killed if I really tried to help anybody. I mean, if
somebody really had something to say to help somebody out, just bluntly says
the truth, well obviously they’re gonna be done away with. They’re gonna be
killed.” [30 Continued]
“CRUCIFIXION”
In a tribute to JFK,
Phil Ochs wrote "That Was the
President," and in the dust jacket liner notes commented: "My
Marxist friends can't understand why I wrote this song and that's probably one
of the reasons why I'm not a Marxist. After the assassination, Fidel Castro
aptly pointed out that only fools could rejoice at such a tragedy, for systems,
not men, are the enemy." [31]
Ochs also wrote another song that is said to be inspired by
the assassination of President Kennedy - “Crucifixion.”
[32]
Wikipedia has a page devoted to just to the song that says Ochs
wrote "Crucifixion" during a two-hour car ride in the middle of his
November 1965 concert tour of the U.K. According
to Ochs's manager, Arthur Gorson, Ochs “was ‘wary’ of how his audience
might react to the new song because it did not have an explicit political
message. He needn't have worried; his first public performance of ‘Crucifixion’
was greeted by a standing ovation.”
Wiki: “The song is about the rise and fall of a hero, and
the public's role in creating, destroying, and deifying its heroes….’Crucifixion’
usually is interpreted as an allegory likening the life and assassination
of U.S. President John F. Kennedy to the career of Jesus,
although the song may refer to other heroes as well. In 1973, Ochs
explained ‘Crucifixion’ to Studs Terkel. In the distant past, Ochs said,
the people would sacrifice a healthy young man to the gods; today, things were
the same. The Kennedy assassination, in a way, was destroying our best in some
kind of ritual. People say they really love the reformer, they love the
radical, but they want to see him killed. It's a certain part of the human
psyche — the dark side of the human psyche.” [33]
Wiki also notes that the first recording of
"Crucifixion" was released in 1966 by Jim and Jean, “a musical
duo made up of Ochs's college friend Jim Glover and Glover's wife,
Jean Ray.” [34]
“In March 1967, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and
journalist Jack Newfield met Ochs, on a plane and Ochs sang
‘Crucifixion’ for them. When Kennedy realized the song was about his brother,
tears came to his eyes.” [35]
ALICE SKINNER
The line in the Wiki entry on Ochs mentions that: “When
Kennedy was assassinated on November
22, 1963 , Ochs wept. He told his wife that he thought he was going
to die that night. It was the only time she ever saw Ochs cry.”
If his wife Alice Skinner saw him cry on 11/22/63 - the day JFK was killed, she would
know if he was in Dallas or not. She
would know, but however, she has since passed away.
Jim Glover says that Ochs flew home from Dallas
late that afternoon, and believes that Ochs wrote the song, “One Way Ticket
Home” about that flight. That’s why, he notes, his wife says she saw him cry “that
night.”
Ochs told Glover that on the flight home he sat on the plane
with a British photographer/filmographer, possibly the same one who filmed him
standing on the Houston Street
sidewalk. [36]
Another thing that stood out, besides his wife saying that
he cried that night, is the Wiki reference to Suzie Rotolo being a witness to
the Ochs-Skinner wedding, when Jim Glover served as the best man.
“In 1962, Phil Ochs married Alice Skinner, who was pregnant
with their daughter Meegan, in a City Hall ceremony with Jim Glover as
best man and Jean Ray as bridesmaid, and witnessed by Dylan's
sometime girlfriend, Suze Rotolo….” [37]
SUZE ROTOLO - BOB DYLAN
Suze Rotolo was quite a Greenwich Village
character, artist, writer, sister to the secretary of folk archivist Alan
Lomax, the girl on the cover of Dylan’s popular “Freewheelin’” album, Bob
Dylan’s ex, and an illegal visitor to Cuba . [38]
Suzie Rotolo quite coincidently - earlier came into the story when it was noted that she attended a summer
youth camp with Elliot and Steve Kenan, twins from Philadelphia
who also became unwittingly entwined in the assassination saga. It really is a
“small circle of friends.”
Elliot Kenan is a folk guitarist who once ran the Guitar
Workshop in Philadelphia , while his
twin brother Steve was a Temple University
student and the publisher of the official programs for the Philadelphia
and Newport Folk Festivals. [39]
The Guitar Workshop, originally in North Philadelphia near
Temple University, later moved to Sanson Street, just around the corner from
Rittenhouse Square, the Heights-Asbury/Greenwich Village hippie hangout where
there was a reported Oswald sighting in the summer of ’63. That Oswald event occurred
when those involved in the Quebec
to Guantamano Peace March held a protest demonstration there. Oswald was also
reported seen at an earlier Canadian stop on the march, so there might have
been a member of the march who closely resembled Oswald, or he could have been
mistaken for one of the Kenin twins, who resembled Oswald in a number of ways. [40]
There are other questionable aspects of this march related
to the assassination, including the fact that the previous San
Francisco - Moscow Peace March by the same left wing “ban-the-bomb”
peacenik sponsors, passed through Minsk
when Marina and Oswald were living there. [41] After leaving Philadelphia ,
the Quebec to Guantamano marchers
went to Washington D.C.
where one of the more ludicrous episodes occurred. One of the marchers - black
amateur boxer Ray Robinson, got into a fist fight wrestling match in a parked
car with former CIA employee James B.
Wilcott, who later testified about Oswald’s possible clandestine double agent
activities in Japan .
[42]
Steve Kenin is also an interesting character. After visiting
Cuba , being photographed
with Castro, and writing a series of articles about his Cuban adventures in the
Temple University
student newspaper, Steve Kenin was in New York
when Castro visited, and like Jim Glover and Phil Ochs, dropped out of college shortly
before graduating. Kenin then traveled around Mexico
on a motorcycle. In Mexico City he
fell in with a group that stayed at the Quaker hostel Casa d Amegos, where
Oswald was also said to have visited. FBI reports indicate Kenin met Oswald and
Mexican attorney Homo Bono told Anthony Summers that he saw Kenin give Oswald a
ride to the Cuban embassy on the back of his motorcycle, both seeking visas to Cuba .
[43]
Tony Summers and other researches have also questioned
whether Steve Kenin is the mysterious LICOZY3 - a Philadelphia
college student in Mexico City who
the Cuban G2 tried to recruit as an agent but instead served as a double-agent
under CIA -FBI control. [44]
There is also the question of whether another young American
student - folksinger Chris Smither, who was at the University
of Mexico City at the time, had any
run-ins with Oswald or Kenin or related characters. [45]
Another questions is whether the FBI’s COINTELPRO or the CIA ’s
CHAOS programs included the surveillance and infiltration of student groups or the
folk music political protesters of whom Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan were the
principal exponents at the time.
Ochs’ FBI file, over 400 pages, indicates that they took
Ochs seriously, and considered him a threat, though there seems to be no
indication that the FBI knew of his continuing association with the Air Force
Intelligence or Air Force Reserves Intelligence. [46]
The question that is especially important - did Phil Ochs
maintain his association with the US Air Force intelligence officers who ran
the undercover ROTC operations against student radicals when he was in college,
and who were they? Who ran Phil Ochs
when he was “working undercover” as an infiltration agent? If not the FBI, was
it military intelligence or the CIA ? [47]
As a witness at Och’s wedding, Bob Dylan’s former girlfriend, Suze Rotolo is a solid link between Phil Ochs and Dylan, whose relationship with Rotolo is best personified by the photo of them walking down 'Positively'
The relationship between Dylan and Rotolo was said to have
been intense, and their impending breakup may have sparked Dylan’s
cross-country road trip in which he and some friends drove from New
York City to San Francisco ,
stopping various places along the way, including Oswald’s old neighborhood in the
French Quarter in New Orleans and Dealey
Plaza in Dallas .
While there are other road trips of note that are a part of
the assassination lure - such as the Huma Bunker Raid [49], Ruth Paine’s summer
vacation [50] (which wound up at Oswald’s apartment in New Orleans), and the
caravan that included Marita Lorenz that reportedly went from Florida to Dallas
with a cache of arms [51]. Bob Dylan’s cross country trip is illustrative since
it included stops at relevant assassination sites in Louisiana and Texas.
Peter Karman, a British writer and reporter for the London
Daily Mirror, had introduced Dylan to Suze and Carla Rotolo. Carla was
secretary to legendary folk collector Alan Lomax, and her sister Suze and Dylan
who would hit it off, famously. Then as they were breaking up, Dylan would take
off on this cross country tour. [52]
“Hey,” Dylan reportedly said to Karman, “wanna ride
cross-country with us? Gonna do some concerts, ramble ‘round the country. Show
ya some of the places I been, like Central City, Atlanta ,
Greenwood . Hit New
Orleans for the Mardi Gras, even.”
Leaving New York
for San Francisco , the station
wagon included Dylan, Paul Clayton, who drove most of the time, Dylan’s “road
manager” Victor Maimudes and Karman, who was later replaced on the trip by Bob
Neuwirth. [53]
First they dropped in unannounced to visit American
historical icon Carl Sandberg, who Dylan wanted to meet because Woody Gunthre
had spoken highly of him. Dylan gave Sandberg a copy of his new album, “The Times They Are ‘a Changin’,” and
then they drove to New Orleans, where they were kicked out of a couple of
French Quarter bars near Oswald’s old neighborhood.
Then they went to Dallas
where, as recounted by Anthony Scaduto in Dylan
- An Intimate Biography, they asked directions to Dealey
Plaza .
“…On entering Dallas ,”
Scaduto relates, “Dylan had an urge, ‘Let’s go see where Kennedy was killed.’
They drove around looking for the Texas Book Depository and Dealey
Plaza , four months after the
murder, lost in downtown Dallas . ‘Where’s
Dealey Plaza ?’
Dylan asked, leaning out the window, and no one knew, four people, and five,
and six, and none of them knew the place. At last, that’s what they said. The
seventh man they asked, answered, ‘You mean where they shot that bastard Kennedy?’
Dylan didn’t answer, and the Texan gave them directions. For about a half hour
they wandered around the murder scene, Dylan grim and silent, and then back in
the car and on their way, and all of them shouting out the windows, condemning
all Texans as assassins.”
When they got to San Francisco, Dylan hooked up with Joan
Baez, and they visited her sister, who was married to Richard Farina, (author
of the novel “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me”), and had been in the Cuban
mountains with Castro when he was a struggling revolutionary. [54]
Also in San Francisco, at the Monterey International Pop
Music Festival a few years later, David Crosby of the Byrds tells the crowd
that the Warren Report is a lie & that JFK was killed a conspiracy, and
dedicates a reworded version of the song, "He Was a Friend of Mine,"
to JFK. [55]
Albert Maher, Bob Dylan and Pete Foreman
ALBERT
LASATER MAHER
Back in New York .
Dylan began to associate with Albert Maher, [56] another Castro activist from Texas ,
who had been to Cuba ,
protested the banning of travel to Cuba
in New York City , was evicted from
a Congressional House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearing on Cuba
in September 1963, and returned to Cuba
after it was made illegal, with Suze Rutolo.
When Dylan accepted the 1964 Tom Paine award, he did so in
the name of the American students who traveled to Cuba ,
especially those who went after such travel was banned by the government.
Robert Sheldon in his biography of Dylan writes: “…In spring
1964, Life magazine showed Dylan in
his surliest mood with Geno Foreman and Albert Maher. Maher, a Harvard
Square radical who had visited Cuba
in 1963, traveled in 1964 on some Dylan concert tours out of his own romantic
radicalism and admiration for the singer. Maher was the son of John F. ‘Big
John’ Maher, a millionaire Houston
industrialist. The son’s radicalization began at fifteen, when he read Castro,
then accelerated in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs . In early
1964, Dylan hung out with Maher sporadically. Some months after Bob and Suze
spit up, she and Maher began a long relationship.” [57]
Winsip Custer wrote, “So like a similar personality, Albert
Lasater Maher, who like C. Wright Mills [author of “Listen Yankee” (Ballentine, 1960)] was the descendant of a prominent Texas trailblazer
and rancher…” John F. Maher. [58]
According to Custer, “Maher's father, John F. Maher, was
shown in the 1979 SEC report of Zapata Corporation to own 5.9% of
the common stock -- 527,964 shares and was domiciled at 2131 San Felipe,
Houston, the address for Hobby Communications, the company of former Texas
Governor William P. Hobby whose family was intermarried with U.S. Ambassador to
El Salvador and San Antonio, TX businessman, Henry Catto. Catto's wife,
Jessica Hobby Catto, a prominent San Antonio environmentalist served on
the Board of Trinity University, a Presbyterian related college, on whose board
serves such notable personalities as former U.S. President, George Herbert
Walker Bush and Presbyterian pastor, Louis Zbinden.” [59]
So after breaking up with Dylan,
Suze took up with Al Maher, who Dylan dedicated his Tom Paine Award. Al is the
son of a Houston , Texas
industrialist with ties to Hobby Communications and the Zapata Oil corporation
DYLAN & OSWALD
Back in New York Dylan also hung
out with Geno Foreman [60] “… a zany motorcycle maverick, Bostonian who
appealed to Dylan….” whose father, Clark
Foreman, [61] organized a formal dinner party fund raiser for the Emergency
Civil Liberities Committee (ECLC) at the Americana Hotel Grand Ballroom, and
gave Dylan the Tom Paine Award for his social activism for civil rights.
As it has been reported: "By
1963, Dylan and Baez were both prominent in the civil rights movement, singing together
at rallies including the March on Washington
where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Dylan performed
‘Only a Pawn in their Game’ and ‘When the Ship Comes In’... His next album,
‘The Times They Are a-Changin’, reflected a more sophisticated, politicized and
cynical Dylan….. By the end of 1963, Dylan felt both manipulated and
constrained by the folk-protest movement. Accepting the ‘Tom Paine Award’ from
the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at a ceremony shortly after
the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a drunken, rambling Dylan questioned the
role of the committee, insulted its members as old and balding, and claimed to
see something of himself (and of every man) in assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald..."
Dylan later tried to explain: “When I spoke of Lee Oswald, I
was speaking of the times. I was not speaking of his deed, if it was his deed,
the deed speaks for itself. But I am sick so sick at hearin ‘we all share the
blame’ for every church bombing, gun battle, mine disaster, poverty explosion,
and president killing that comes bout, it is so easy to say ‘we’ an bow our
heads together. I must say ‘I’ alone and bow my head alone for it is I alone
who is livin’ my life.”
Dylan also wrote a long letter-poem, an apology of sorts, to
the members of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC), which
was distributed with an accompanying letter by Corliss Lamont. [62. See for
complete speech transcript, letter and poem to ECLC].
Author of numerous pamphlets on various political and
philosophical issues, ala Tom Paine, copies of Dr. Corlis Lamont’s “Crime
Against Cuba” was specifically requested by Lee Harvey Oswald when he wrote to
the New York office of the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), an office targeted by both the CIA
and FBI. The CIA had requested a copy of the
FPCC letterhead that they were preparing to use in a psychological operation
against the group, one coordinated with the FBI who planned on a “black bag
job” or an illegal break in of the FPCC New York office. [63]
Oswald had obtained copies of Lamont’s pamphlet, stamped
them with the 544 Camp Street , New
Orleans address, and distributed them on the streets
of New Orleans and at the wharf
dock where the USS Wasp aircraft carrier was docked.
When he was arrested for creating a disturbance with the
Cubans Oswald requested to see an FBI agent, and met Special Agent Quigley.
Oswald gave Quigley a copy of the Lamont pamphlet and told him that his FPCC
activities were directed by one “A.J. Hidel.” [64]
Lamont distributed his pamphlets himself through a New York
Post Office box and received an order from the CIA
for 50 “Crime Against Cuba” pamphlets, which some have suggested may have ended
up with Oswald in New Orleans, though this contention has been disputed as
there was more than one printing of the pamphlet. [65]
Jim Glover claimed that Ochs said that he had learned of a
plot to kill the president and was “working with the FPCC to find out more
about it,” and that one day they were to meet someone from the FPCC in the
subway but they didn’t hook up. Glover said that he later contacted V.T. Lee
who confirmed that, “Phil was with us.” [66]
V.T. Lee was also Oswald’s correspondence contact at the New
York FPCC.
So Phil Ochs had attended an exclusive Virginia
military academy with Barry Goldwater, Jr. and John Dean, served as a
lieutenant in the Air Force ROTC at Ohio State, was pals with Bob Dylan and
those who went to Cuba illegally, including one whose father had interest in
the Zapata corporation, and he associated with V.T. Lee and the FPCC in New
York City, any one of which could have put him into position to learn of a plot
to kill the president.
But there’s more, including Phil Ochs support of the victims
of the coup in Chile
and his folksinging foray with Shawn Phillips, which would twice put him in the
orbit of David Atlee Phillips.
PHIL OCHS - SEAN PHILLIPS
Shawn Phillips, a Fort Worth, Texas folksinger of that era, wrote
a song called "For JFK RFK & MLK " and also covered Phil Ochs’ song “I’m Tired,” which according to Jim
Glover, was never officially released. So Glover contacted Sean Phillips, via
Facebook, and asked him how he got the song and Phillips replied that Phil, “taught
me the song one night after we had made the rounds of the cafes for basket
money. We were both staying at a mutual friend’s Apt. Needless to say, we were
both a tad wired from the evening, ya know, one of those all nighters. Cheers,…
Shawn "[67]
It turns out that David Atlee Phillips was Shawn's Uncle,
brother to Shawn's father, James Atlee Philips. [68]
Wiki: “In August 1971, Phil went to Chile ,
where Salvador Allende, a Marxist, had been democratically elected in
the 1970 election. There he met Chilean folksinger VÃctor Jara,
an Allende supporter, and the two became friends….[69]
“In October, Ochs left Chile
to visit Argentina .
Later that month, after singing at a political rally in Uruguay ,
he and his American traveling companion David Ifshin were arrested and detained
overnight. When the two returned to Argentina ,
they were arrested as they got off the airplane. After a brief stay in an
Argentinian prison, Ochs and Ifshin were sent to Bolivia via
a commercial airliner where authorities were to detain them. Ifshin had
previously been warned by Argentine leftist friends that when authorities sent
dissidents to Bolivia ,
they would disappear forever. When the airliner arrived in Bolivia ,
the American captain of the Braniff International Airways aircraft
allowed Ochs and Ifshin to stay on the aircraft and barred Bolivian authorities
from entering. The aircraft then flew to Peru where
the two disembarked and they were not detained. Fearful that Peruvian
authorities might arrest him, Ochs returned to the United
States a few days later.”
“Ochs was personally invited by John Lennon to
sing at a large benefit at the University
of Michigan in December 1971 on
behalf of John Sinclair, an activist poet who had been arrested on minor
drug charges and given a severe sentence. Ochs performed at the John
Sinclair Freedom Rally along with Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, David
Peel, Abbie Hoffman and many others. The rally culminated with Lennon
and Yoko Ono, who were making their first public performance in the United
States since the breakup of The Beatles.”
[70]
Ochs decided to travel. In mid-1972, he went to Australia and New
Zealand He traveled to Africa in 1973, where he
visited Ethiopia , Kenya ,
Tanzania Malawi, and South Africa .
One night, Ochs was attacked and strangled by robbers in Dar
es Salaam , Tanzania ,
which damaged his vocal cords, causing a loss of the top three notes in his
vocal range The attack also exacerbated his growing mental problems, and
he became increasingly paranoid. Ochs believed the attack may have been
arranged by government agents—perhaps the CIA .
Still, he continued his trip, even recording a single in Kenya ,
"Bwatue". [71]
“On September 11,
1973 , the Allende government of Chile
was overthrown in a coup d'état. Allende died during the bombing of the
presidential palace, and Jara was publicly tortured and killed. When Ochs heard
about the manner in which his friend had been killed, he was outraged. He
decided to organize a benefit concert to bring to public attention the
situation in Chile
and raise funds for the people of Chile .
The concert, ‘An Evening with Salvador Allende’, included films of Allende;
singers such as Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Bob Dylan; and political
activists such as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark….”
Bob Spitz, in Dylan, A
Biography, wrote: “Pete Seeger, for
one, had informal ties to members of the now-deposed Allende government and
performed several Chilean folk songs in his repertoire. For Phil Ochs, the
revolution meant a more personal and tragic loss. Ochs had maintained a close,
albet long-distance, friendship with folksinger Victor Jara, who was often
described as ‘the Bob Dylan of Chile .’
As a result of the coup, Jara had been classified an enemy of the state, then
dragged into Santiago’s National Stadium where he was tortured and finally
executed by members of General Pinochet’s ruling junta.”
“Ochs was severely shaken by the news of Jara’s death.
Immediately, he set out to organize a concert to benefit Chilean refuges, and
in no small part, to embarrass CIA
officials, whom he blamed for the coup. ‘I’m going to pull this thing off if
it’s the last thing I do,’ he told a friend one night over drinks at Max’s Kansas
City . ‘I’ve already lined up the Felt Forum.’”
“Ochs was in no shape to promote a folk concert, much less
sing in one. His career had been in a kamikaze nosedive, brought on by his
self-destructive fantasy. He struggled with alcoholism, manic depression,
paranoia bordering on madness, and, worse perhaps, he had lost his voice as a
result of having been mugged in Africa . Unable to sing,
Ochs masqueraded as a political radical until the Chilean benefit materialized,
and his Janus-like personality found a new focus.”
“The trouble was, nobody gave a damn about Phil Ochs or his
concert. As an activist, he was a Model A in an era of hatchback sedans. He was
an old hippie, struggling to keep the movement alive at a time when it was
already considered long dead and buried. Politics was anathema to a generation
of budding art-rockers who were content to entrust it to the politicians…”
They needed a draw, and saw that Canadian native American
Indian folk singer Buffy St. Marie was playing at the Bottom Line, where Ochs
ran into Bob Dylan at the bar. Phil talked Dylan, even though they hadn’t seen
each other in a decade, into returning to his apartment where he did his best
to convince Dylan to perform at the Chile
benefit.
“You’re that kid from Minnesota
who wrote that song about South American miners, right?...Well, I’m giving a
benefit for those miners in two weeks and you’re gonna be there!”
“(Dylan) admitted he knew nothing of the events in Chile
or their repercussions. That was an invitation for Phil to roll out a five-hour
chronicle of South American history in song and sketches. He literally put on a
one-man show for Bob, describing the Marxist regime of Salvador Allende in all
its splendor, how it transformed Chile
into an allegory for humanitarianism despite CIA
interference, and gave the country its first real glimmer of hope. Then, for an
encore, he reenacted a perfect recitation of Allende’s ill-fated inaugural
address. Bob was overwhelmed by Phil’s performance and pumped him for more
information about Chile, until the sun came up, the wine ran out, and the two
men went their separate ways…..The Chilean benefit signaled a momentous shift
in Bob’s career.”
Lola Cohen: “Bob came over to the apartment, and we were
downstairs in that bunker. And Phil had Salvador Allende’s inaugurations speech,
his inaugural address. And he read it. And it was just—we were just blown away,
and we were silent. And it was very—you know, very moving. And he told us about
VÃctor Jara and that he had to do this to avenge VÃctor’s death for his wife
and child.” [72]
Jim Glover: “Yes... Phil, Dylan, Dennis Hopper and I went
out for a drinking lunch before the concert. When Dylan asked me if I was in
the Union I said I used to be but they never did me much
good... Phil started crying right there... I always suspected Dylan knew Phil’s
secret role which is the real reason he could not blow the whistle and in those
days whistle Blowers besides the Pentagon Papers guy were rare. In 74’…. he
said they told him if he talked they would say he was crazy….. [73]
The (Chile )
concert was a big success, as Bob Spitz, in Dylan,
wrote: “… Dave Van Ronk smiled proudly when Bob walked in - proud, not so
much that he decided to do the right thing by the Chilian refugees, but that he
bailed out his friend Phil Ochs. Von Ronk dragged Bob off to the balcony, where
they reminisced and traded slugs from a bottle of wine. By late afternoon, both
men were asleep on the other’s shoulder. Then, around six o’clock , they crept off to the Iron Horse, a commuters
tavern in Penn Station, where they hooked up with actor Dennis Hopper and
proceeded to get shit-faced drunk. When the concert finally started and Ochs
introduced his pals from the stage, it resembled a benefit to combat chronic
alcoholism. Bob and Van Ronk looked like a couple of derelicts who had wondered
in off Seventh Avenue . They were off their nut. By the
time they got to the final, a jug of wine had been uncorked on stage, and the
ensemble broke into ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ Van Ronk had to keep whispering the
lyrics into Bob’s ear.”
“The Chilean benefit signaled a momentous shift in Bob’s
career. What a relief it had been not to be a spokesman or a prophet, but just
Bob again. Just one of the guys who had gotten good and drunk and jammed with
some friends….” [74]
PHIL OCHAS AS CIA AGENT JOHN BUTLER TRAIN
“I is someone
else.” - Rimbaud [75]
In his autobiography Bob Dylan wrote: “….someplace along the
line Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet Arthur
Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letters called, ‘Je
est un autre,’ which translates into ‘I is someone else.’ When I read those
words the bells went off. It made perfect sense…”
In 1975 Ochs began to “freak people out by claming he was
really a CIA agent named John Train and that
‘Phil Ochs’ had to be killed.”
Dave McGowan wrote that shortly after his successful “War is
Over” rally in 1975 Ochs,
“began compiling curious lists, with entries that clearly were
references to US biological warfare research: ‘shellfish toxin, Fort Dietrich,
cobra venom, Chantilly Race Track, hollow silver dollars, New York Cornell
Hospital …” and as John Train, McGowan noted, “proclaimed himself to be a CIA
operative and presented himself as a belligerent, right-wing thug.” He would be
dead within a year.
“It is suggested that Ochs/Train may have indeed been a spy
with two personalities – personalities that are at complete odds with one
another but personalities that don’t know the other exists. It is important to
note that the Ochs family spent time at military bases in his early life and…while
Ochs considered himself a leftist, man of the people, he loved American Western
films, and the idea of a strong America .
He seemed a man torn in two diametrically opposite directions.” [76]
As one internet account reports: “Ochs was founder of the
Yippee party, sang with protesters, and
appeared as a witness for the trail of the Chicago Seven. His lyrics were considered so
inflammatory that he was banned from the air-waves. The FBI did not refrain from
amassing a huge file on him, and the feeling that he was never alone unnerved
him. He wrote "take everything I own, take the tap from my phone, and
leave my life alone, My life alone! He was tarred as a communist and a threat
to national security. His friends said Ochs was convinced he would be
assassinated. He was driven to drink by the radio black-listing his music and
the ongoing surveillance and harassments and his nerve gave out. He lived in a
perpetual state of paranoia. His vocal cords were crushed by thugs. He
developed a right wing pseudo personality called John Train who he wrote about.
He also made reference to his Pseudo personality in song fragments in an album
never recorded….” [77]
Wiki: “In mid-1975,
Ochs took on the identity of John Butler Train. He told people that
Train had murdered Ochs, and that he, John Butler Train, had replaced him.
Train was convinced that someone was trying to kill him, so he carried a weapon
at all times: a hammer, a knife, or a lead pipe. Ochs's friends tried to help
him. His brother Michael attempted to have him committed to a psychiatric
hospital. Friends pleaded with him to get help voluntarily. They feared for his
safety, because he was getting into fights with bar patrons. Unable to pay his
rent, he began living on the streets. After several months, the Train persona
faded and Ochs returned, but his talk of suicide disturbed his friends and
family. They hoped it was a passing phase, but Ochs was determined.” [78]
Brother Michael Ochs: Basically, Phil was a manic
depressive. And the manic binge he went on, probably out of desperation,
frustration, etc., he went too far, and he never got back. He became, as we do,
we get depressed afterwards, and he couldn’t see the next mountain due to the
valley he was stuck in. And we tried to get him help. And he finally went to a
shrink, but then, a week later, he killed himself. [79]
One of his biographers explains Ochs's motivation: “By
Phil's thinking, he had died a long time ago: he had died politically in
Chicago in 1968 in the violence of the Democratic National Convention; he had
died professionally in Africa a few years later, when he had been strangled and
felt that he could no longer sing; he had died spiritually when Chile had been
overthrown and his friend Victor Jara had been brutally murdered; and, finally,
he had died psychologically at the hands of John Train.” [80]
THE REAL JOHN TRAIN
In his book “Family of
Secrets” Russ Baker details how, in New York in late April 1963, Lee Harvey
Oswald’s “best friend” George deMohrenschildt, met withThomas Devine, as CIA
operative code named WUBRINY/1, at the offices of John Train, whose investment
banking firm oversaw CIA propriety
companies. [81]
When Devine ostensibly “retired” from the CIA
in 1953 he formed the Zapata Oil company with George H.W. Bush, and when they
sold it, Bush went into politics while Devine joined the investment firm of
Train, Cabot and Associates, whose primary partner was John Train.
Train is described by Baker as “a longtime enthusiast of
foreign intrigues,” who worked for three presidents.
The 1975 CIA memo reads:
“Through Mr. Gale Allen…I learned that Mr. George Bush, DCI
designate, has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY / LPDICTUM which was involved
in propriety commercial operations in Europe . He became
aware of this project through Mr. Thomas
J. Devine, a former CIA Staff Employee
and later, oil-wildcatting associate with Mr. Bush. Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil [sic] which they
eventually sold. After the sale of
Zapata Oil, Mr. Bush went into politics, and Mr. Devine became a member of the investment firm of Train, Cabot and Associates,
New York …The attached memorandum
describes the close relationship between Messrs. Devine and Bush in 1967-68
which, according to Mr. Allen, continued while Mr. Bush was our ambassador to
the United Nations.”
Russ Baker writes: “The writer of the above-mentioned CIA
memo had appended an earlier memo from agency files, describing Thomas Devine’s
role in a CIA project codenamed WUBRINY.
Devine was ‘a cleared and witting contact in the investment banking firm which
houses and manages the proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” (BRINY was actually a
Haiti-based operation engaged by a corporation, code-named SALINE, that was a
whole owned by the CIA . SALINE, like many CIA
proprietaries, was in turn operating inside a ‘legitimate’ corporation,
whose employees were generally unaware of the spies in their midst.) In this
case, the cover corporation was run by
investment banker, John Train, a sponsor and longtime
enthusiast of foreign intrigues, backing the Afghan rebels during the
Regan-Bush years. 9 Train was enormously well connected, and received
appointments from president Reagan, Bush Senior, and even Bill Clinton.” [82]
Note 9: “An article by Richard Cummings… asserts that Paris Review cofounder and editor Peter
Matthiessen was a CIA agent whose literary
activities served as a cover for his intelligence work. Also, the Review’s longtime editor George Plimpton
‘was an agent of influence’ for the CIA ….invariably
paid for (his) services.’” [83]
Russ Baker Note 42: “Members of this club include David
Rockefeller and John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribute.”
“There were two others present. One was C. Frank Stone III ,
chief of operations for the European section of the CIA ’s
clandestine wing. The other was M. Clemard Joseph Charles, the general manager
of the Banque Commerciale D’ Haiti .”
“This ‘contact report’ was declassified in 1998 but went
unnoticed at the time. The purpose of the 1963 meeting, it said, was to prepare
for the impending arrival from Dallas of George de Mohrenschildt, who was
described as a business contact of Haitian banker…’Mr. Charles.’”
According to Baker, de Mohrenschildt arrived the next
afternoon, “at the New York
offices of the investment banking firm of Train, Cabot, inside an entity
code-named SALINE, 44.” [85]
“This was in fact the covering organization for operation
WUBRINY, and WUBRINY’s chief agent and operator, WUBRINY/1 - who was none other
than Thomas Devine. 45” [86]
In January 1968, Devine (WUBRINY1) and George H.W. Bush Sr
went to Vietnam
together. [87]
So the real John Train was an investment banker who ran CIA
propriety companies, was a co-founder of the Paris Review, and in April of 1963, (when Oswald was shooting at
Gen Walker and Ochs was infiltrating the FPCC), Train was associated with both G.
W. Bush’s business partner at Zapata - Thomas Devine as well as Oswald’s good
friend George deMohrenschildt.
When G.H. Walker Bush and Thomas J. Devine sold their
interest in Zapata, Bush got into politics and Devine joined Train’s firm in New
York City in whose offices they met in April of 1963,
with George deMohrenschildt.
The son of one of the new Zapata investors, John Maher, of Houston ,
protested the Cuban travel ban in New York
and at a Congressional hearing in Washington ,
and was pals with Bob Dylan, and took his ex-girlfriend to Cuba
after the government banned Americans from traveling there.
The Ballad of JOHN BUTLER TRAIN
By © Mark Tindall [88]
Follow me now, follow me close,
Follow my every step
My name is John Butler Train
(Don’t think that we have met)
Don’t you ever forget
VS
Bipolar light and bottled mind
Smoking on the stage
Words woven deep in political threads
Wisdom of the sage
Hammer, knife or plain lead pipe
Or demon drink my friend
Farewell Dylan, Lennon and Co.
Going round the bend
Homeless street, without a cent
Tom, Sanders, manage me
Ochs is dead, I murdered him
Who wants to murder me
Look ahead , now look around
CIA and FBI
Play the song, sing out loud
While I live and die
CODA:
Phi Ochs , where have you gone? John Butler Train
My name is John Butler Train
Follow my every step
My name is John Butler Train
(Don’t think that we have met)
Don’t you ever forget
VS
Bipolar light and bottled mind
Smoking on the stage
Words woven deep in political threads
Wisdom of the sage
Hammer, knife or plain lead pipe
Or demon drink my friend
Farewell Dylan, Lennon and Co.
Going round the bend
Homeless street, without a cent
Tom, Sanders, manage me
Ochs is dead, I murdered him
Who wants to murder me
Look ahead , now look around
Play the song, sing out loud
While I live and die
CODA:
Phi Ochs , where have you gone? John Butler Train
My name is John Butler Train
THE DEATH OF PHIL
OCHS
“In January 1976, Ochs moved to Far Rockaway, New
York , to live with his sister Sonny. He was
lethargic; his only activities were watching television and playing cards with
his nephews. Ochs saw a psychiatrist, who diagnosed his bipolar disorder.
He was prescribed medication, and he told his sister he was taking it. On April 9, 1976 , Ochs hanged
himself.”
Congresswoman Bella Abzug (Democrat from New
York), an outspoken anti-war activist herself who had appeared at the 1975
"War is Over" rally, entered this statement into the Congressional
Record on April 29, 1976: “Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago, a young
folksinger whose music personified the protest mood of the 1960s took his own
life. Phil Ochs—whose original compositions were compelling moral statements
against war in Southeast Asia —apparently felt that he
had run out of words.” [89]
Wiki: Years after his death, it was revealed that the FBI
had a file of nearly 500 pages on Ochs. Much of the information in those files
relates to his association with counterculture figures, protest
organizers, musicians, and other people described by the FBI as
"subversive". The FBI was often sloppy in collecting information on
Ochs: his name was frequently misspelled "Oakes" in their files, and
they continued to consider him "potentially dangerous" after his
death. [90]
Indeed, I will wager, even before I request them, that Phil
Och’s Air Force ROTC and Intelligence File will be withheld as a matter of
“national security.”
GOD
and SENATOR DODD
Phil
Ochs, Oswald and Senator Dodd
In “Draft Dogger Rag” Ochs wrote that, “I believe in God and
Senator Dodd and a keepin’ old Castro down…..”
[91]
Senator Pat Dodd of
Dodd also held Congressional hearings of the Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee on banning mail order pistols and specifically targeted Seaport Traders, from whom Oswald allegedly ordered his pistol from.
Dodd also ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and in the summer
of ’63 investigated the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee. [92]
One of Dodd’s staff members was arrested in Cuba
and then again in Hyannis port, Massachusetts
for an arms violation when JFK was there.
In 1976, shortly after the death of Phil Ochs, Sen. Dodd’s
son U.S. Rep. Christopher Dodd (D. Conn.) was instrumental in the establishment
of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). [93]
CONCLUSION
Whether or not Phil Ochs was filmed and photographed at
Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, he had a number of associations
with those who, if the assassination was not the work of a deranged loner but
that of a domestic covert intelligence operation, could have given him
foreknowledge of the plan to assassinate President Kennedy.
Phil Ochs had associations with organizations and
individuals that should be further explored including contacts he made at different
times and places, including:
1) Staunton
Virginia Military
Academy , where he was enrolled as a
cadet with later White House Watergate attorney John Dean and Barry Goldwater,
Jr., son of Sen. Barry Goldwater, who also attended the school and whose
security chief (Hugh McDonald) would write a number of pulp paperback books on
the assassination of president Kennedy, alluding to a conspiracy.
2) Ohio
State University ,
Columbus , Ohio ,
where he served as a sergeant in the Air Force ROTC and spied on campus
radicals while himself becoming one.
3) As
a protest singer in NYC Ochs was directed to become affiliated with the FPCC,
and knew V.T. Lee, with whom Lee Harvey Oswald also communicated.
4) Originally
from Texas , Ochs often performed
with Ft. Worth , Texas
folk singer Shawn Philips, son of James Atee Phillips, brother of David A
Phillips.
Besides being in a position to obtain foreknowledge of a 1963
plot to kill the president from his associations with the above, Phil Ochs
later developed connections with those somehow affiliated with the
assassination - including David Atlee Phillips, Zapata stock holders Art and
John Maher of Houston, and Zapata corporate founder Thomas Devine and his CIA
associate John Train, who have direct connections to the assassination through
their April 1963 meetings with George deMohrenschildt.
Further research needs to be done in the review of the two
biographies of Phil Ochs, the documentary films on the subject as well as Ochs
official FBI (COINTELPRO), CIA and Air Force
Intelligence files.
It would also be interesting to know, possibly from his
brother or daughter, if Phil Ochs received treatment for his mental and
psychotic problems in the years before he died, to see if they were in any way
connected to the MKULTRA doctors who were doing similar type of experiments on
students, prisoners, soldiers and employees, and whether Ochs was one of those
subjects.
This is a work in
progress. Stay tuned for the next episode
of this continuing saga…..when we hope to answer some of the still outstanding
questions.
The Ballad of Billie Sol
By Phil Ochs
Billie Sol was a man
From the giant Texas
land
He put the Chamber of Commerce on a limb
They voted him the best
And the government did no less
Until the I.O.U.'s of Texas
fell on him
Stand tall, Billie Sol, we don't know you at all
We've taken down your pictures from the wall
Well, we don't want to handle an agriculture scandal
We have got to face elections in the fall
I remember when
Bill had influential friends
He celebrated Christmas every day
He filled texas banks with his fertilizer tanks
Influential friends don't die they only fade away
Stand tall, Billie Sol, we don't know you at all
We've taken down your pictures from the wall
Well, we don't want to handle an agriculture scandal
We have got to face elections in the fallThe democrats deny
And Orville Freeman sighs
He said "Everyone around was fair and square"
But He was no more convincing
than Ezra Taft Benson
As resignations cropped up everywhere
Stand tall, Billie Sol, we don't know you at all
We've taken down your pictures from the wall
Well, we don't want to handle an agriculture scandal
We have got to face elections in the fall
And now I'd like to say
that crime sure doesn't pay
But if you want to make some money on the sly
Well you can always rent
The U.S.
Government
It's the best one that money can buy.
Stand tall, Billie Sol
We don't know you at all
We've take down your pictures from the wall
Well, we don't want to handle
and agriculture scandal
We have got to face elections in the fall
SOURCES, FOOTNOTES AND
NOTES:
Footnotes to Phil Ochs in Dealey
Plaza ?
1. O’Brian,
Gary . Oswald's Politics.(Trafford Pub. 2010 p. 128 ) BKnotes: I
disagree with O’Brian’s analysis because he assumes Oswald was the assassin, so
his analys is actually an analysis of the motives of the framed Patsy. Ochs,
Phil. Song title?
2. Ochs
now among the list of those who expressed foreknowledge of the assassination.
For more on those who expressed foreknowledge see: http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/08/foreknoweldge-and-jfk-assassination.html
3. 1968
Democratic National Convention, Chicago incident and Ochs is mentioned in the
Walker Report - the official report on the causes and prevention of violence,
which included a number of Warren Commission attornies, and has a special chapter
devoted to the point which included Ochs (and the author), and specifically mentions
Ochs. I used the official reports of this incident to test my memory of what I
recall occurred and while most of it is as I remember, I thought that it
happened on the 18th floor. What is scary is among the ways the military
determined which floor articles were being thrown - beer cans, ashtrays and
smoked fish, they did so through the scopes of rifles! I now believe that this
incident too, was started by an undercover agitator associated with the
military. Walker Report:
4. Education
Forum links: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12124
5. Photo
from film a) Dal-Tex Houston Street ,
12:35 pm 11/22/63 ; and b) enlargement photo. Provided by
Jim Glover.
6. Ochs,
Phil. Basic Background http://www.whale.to/b/phil_ochs.html
7. Ochs,
Phil. Discography - “Draft Dogger Rag” http://www.cowboylyr...-rag-11443.html
8. WXPN
- Meatball Fulton link http://www.blogtalkradio.com/meatball-fulton WMMR - Dave Herman. The Marconi Experiment http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMMR
Ochs’ songs were often banned from radio, but University of Pennsylvania
station featured Fulton’s radical show that included readings from Abby
Hoffman’s “Steel This Book” and the “Anarchist Cookbook,” as well as Ochs’
songs, while Herman’s “Album Oriented Rock” included Ochs records when they were
released, exposing a lot of people to Ochs’s music, including me.
9. Ochs’
album cover and lyrics to WBY at Grant Park.
10. Wiki Entry
- http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/04/phil-ochs-wiki.html
11. Glover, Jim
- Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jim.glover.5815
12. Glover, Jim
- Emailed recollections http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/04/jim-glover-on-phil-ochs.html.
13. ROTC on
campus http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/04/jim-glover-on-phil-ochs.html
14. COINTELPRO
- Media FBI breakin. A Heroic Burglary Remembered. Stolen FBI files exposed FBI
campaign of blackmail and intimidation of activists. By Allan M. Jalon. LA
Times, March 8, 2006 [http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles/2006/fbi_burglary_pennsylvania.php
] Also see: Washington Post, March 24,
1971 “documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local
police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore
College to spy on campus and black
activist groups in the Philadelphia
area.” (BK Notes: Michael Paine attended Swarthmore, where his wife Ruth Hyde
Paine’s papers are archived at the college library.)
15. CHAOS CIA
- US Army Reserve Memphis links
16. Kent
State Agitator
18. Covert
Operative Personality Profile - (COPP) http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/08/covert-operational-profile.html
19. Staunton
Va. Military Academy
http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/05/staunton-military- academy.html
20. Roth, Phil. “Goodbye Columbus” novela first
published in the CIA ’s Paris Reviewhttp://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/03/philip-roth-80th-birthday/63274/
21. Flint,
Larry. Rebel Mag. http://larryflynt.com/
22. DISC -
Defense Industrial Security Command
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2011_cr/disco.htm Responsible for security at
defense industry instillations, especially those that after WWII moved to Texas
for reasons of “national security.”
23. Bell
Helicopter - Oswald’s chief benefactor Michael Paine worked at Bell Helicopter,
where Nazi Gen. Dornberger was VP security.
24. Gen
Dynamics - Former FBI agent
I. Hale worked security at Gen. Dynamics. His
sons, (one of whom also killed the daughter of Gov Connally) broke into the
Vegas apartment of Judith Campbell Exner and his wife from the Texas Employment
Commission, got Oswald jobs (including Chiles/Jaggers/Stoval). [Also see: F.
Korth & TFX ]
25. Collins
Radio - Tippit’s friend Carl Mather worked for Collins Radio, the company that
supplied radios for Air Force One and SAC.
26. Gordon
Novel - New Orleans operative who
fled to Ohio and Virginia
when subpoenaed by grand jury. Left behind a letter to his CIA
case officer that mentioned the JMWAVE company that paid insurance to Alabama
National Guard airman killed at Bay of Pigs . Novel
participated on Huma Bunker raid.
27. Spitz, Dylan, A Biography, McGraw-Hill, 1989) p. 432
28. Scaduto,
Anthony - Dylan - An Intimate Biography
(Signet 1971) ,p. 186-7, 188, p. 197),p. 205)
29. Glover,
Jim. Emailed recollections.
30. Sheldon, Robert
No Direction Home - The Life and Music of
Bob Dylan (Beech Tree, p. 188, 197, 205) Re: Dylan on 11/22/63 - Scaduto, p. 186.
31. Ochs, Phil.
Liner notes re: “That Was the President.”
32. “Crucifixion”
- the assassination made Phil Ochs cry, attributed in footnotes to Michael
Schumacher.
33. Wiki
“Crucifixion.”
34. Jim &
Jean’s Glover version of ‘Crucifixion.’
35. Newfield,
Jack - RFK Cries Newfield, Jack (2002). Somebody's Gotta Tell It: A Journalist's Life on the Lines. (New
York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 176–178.) Re: Ochs and RFK.
36. Grover, Jim
Re: British film maker flew home with Ochs with film of Dealey
Plaza ?
37. Alice
Skinner, Phil’s wife, friend of Suze Rotolo. Wiki reference- “In 1962, Phil Ochs
married Alice Skinner, who was pregnant with their daughter Meegan, in a City
Hall ceremony with Jim Glover as best man and Jean Ray as
bridesmaid, and witnessed by Dylan's sometime girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. Phil
and Alice separated in 1965, but they never divorced.”
38. Rotolo,
Suze (2008), A Freewheelin’ Time: A
Memoir of Greenwich
Village in the Sixites (NY,
Broadway Books, P. 249.)
39. Elliot
& Steve Kenin. Basic background. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/BillKelly/QuakerandLHO.html
40. Oswald at Rittenhouse
Square links to docs. Dallas
City Archives. http://jfk.ci.dallas.tx.us/box7.htm
19. Letter by an unknown author Photocopy of a letter to Henry Wade
concerning the attendance of Lee Harvey Oswald at a meeting in Philadelphia
of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee 11/26/63 .
41. The March
in Minsk . Did Lee or Marina meet
the marchers? Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA).
42. Robinson
and Wilcott fight in DC car.Documents on Kenin in Mexico
City . Summers, T./Kelly, W. Interviews w/ SK. http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2011/08/man-on-motorcycle-in-mexico-city.html
43. LICOZY3.
See: Russo, Gus “Live By the Sword” Footnote: http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2011/08/oswalds-quaker-connection- in-new.html
44. Chris
Smither from New Orleans , at
University of the Americas
in Mexico City 1963. Smither bio.
45. COINTELPRO
and Ochs, Phil - FBI File (Over 400 pages)
46. Who ran
Phil Ochs? Air Force Intelligence?
47. “Freewheelin’”
album cover.
48. Huma Bunker
Raid The
Houma Bunker Raid Revisted
49. Ruth
Paine’s summer vacation. (Carrol Hewett, Barbara Lamonica)
50. Lorenz,
Marita.
51. Dylan’s
Cross-Country Trip Scaduto, Anthony. Dylan
- An Intimate Biography (1972 Signet NY, p. 197), they asked directions to
Dealey Plaza. http://hyderabadin.org/wiki-Bob_Dylan
52. Karman,
Peter. British journalist, is quoted in Dylan bio but strangely does not appear
to have written about Dylan or the roadtrip himself.
53. Farina,
Richard. “Been Down So Long It Looks Like
Up To Me” (x” ) Ref to IRA and with Castro in Cuba .
54. Monterey
Pop - Croby, David. “He Was a Friend of
Mine.” The original version of this American traditional song was first
recorded by Alan Lomax from a prisoner. http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/05/he-was-friend-of-mine-traditional-song.html
55. Maher,
Albert, Lasater. From Houston to Cuba .
For the full text of Albert Lasater Maher's testimony before the HUAC:
http://winsipcuster.blogspot.com/2011/08/smedley-butler-william-ayers-albert.html
56. Sheldon,
Robert. Re: Foreman, Geno. No Direction
Home - The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Beech Tree Books, Morrow, NY 1986,
57. Custer,
Winsip. Re: Foreman, Clark (Father); Foreman, Pete (Son) See: “Smedley Butler, William Ayers, Albert
Lasater Maher and the Rough Road To Enlightenment.” Also see: Disillusionment And The Genesis Of
Enlightenment CPW News Service. Smedley Butler, William
Ayers, Albert Lasater Maher ... - winsip custer
58. Maher, John
F. Owned 5.9% of Zapata in 1979, Hobby Communications. Ibid. Albert Lasater
Maher, father, “John F. Maher, was shown in the 1979 SEC
report of Zapata Corporation to own 5.9% of the common stock -
527,964 shares and was domiciled at 2131 San Felipe, Houston, the address for
Hobby Communications (Houston Post, TV and radio stations), the company
of former Texas Governor William P. Hobby whose family was intermarried with
U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador
and San Antonio , TX
businessman, Henry Catto. Catto's wife, Jessica Hobby Catto, a
prominent San Antonio environmentalist served on the Board of Trinity
University, a Presbyterian related college, on whose board serves such notable
personalities as former U.S. President, George Herbert Walker Bush and Presbyterian
pastor, Louis Zbinden.”
59. Foreman, Geno.
Friend of Bob Dylan. See photo of them with Maher.
60. Foreman, Clark,
father of Geno and director of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee - ECLC.
61. Dylan’s
complete ECLC Speech, letter from Corlis Lamont, and Dylan’s letter-poem to
ECLC members. http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/04/bob-dylans-remarks.html
62. Newman,
John. Oswald and the CIA (1995, Carroll
& Graff, p. 644 appendix) Re: COINTELPRO v FPCC doc http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/05/newman-on-fpcc.html
63. Newman,
John. Oswald and the CIA . Re: Oswald and Quigley.
64. Re: Lamont’s
pamphlets and the CIA . Comments in response
to an earlier version of this story caused me to revise it in regards to the
origin of the copies of the pamphlets Oswald acquired.
65. Glover,
Phil. Re: Ochs and V.T. Lee and FPCC.
66. Phil Ochs
and Shawn Phillips. Shawn Phillips wrote a song called "For JFK RFK & MLK " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J4gnrKQ-EM
67. Shawn Phillips
and James Atlee Phillips.
69. With Lennon
et al.
70. Australia
and attack in Africa
71. Spitz, Bob. Dylan - A Biography, McGraw-Hill, 1989)
p. 432
72. Cohen,
Lola. Re: Felt Forum benefit Felt Forum, Dylan, BS p. 437
73. Glover,
Jim. Re: Benefit Concert for Chile Chile Spitz, Bob (Dylan, A Bio, McGraw-Hill, 1989) p. 432 Chile
trip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWmaF1DEEoA
74. Spitz, Bob.
Ibid.
75. Dylan, Bob Re:
Rimbaud: Chronicles (Simon &
Schuster, 2004, p. 288)
76. McGowan,
Dave. Re: John Butler Train.
77. Whale
profile of Phil Ochs http://www.whale.to/b/phil_ochs.html
78. Wiki - Re: Train,
Death. http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/04/phil-ochs-wiki.html
79. Ochs,
Michael. Phil’s brother, quoted in film and on line.
80. See: 1969
Ochs Album Cover of grave stone.
81. ). Baker,
Russ. “Family of Secrets”
(Bloomsbury, 2009, p. 12-13) notes that it was researcher Jerry Shinley who
discovered the Nov. 29, 1975 CIA memo that
details George Bush Sr.’s association with former CIA
officer Thomas J. Devine, which is also mentioned and quoted in detail in Joan
Mellen’s “Our Man in Haiti” (Trineday, 2012)
82. Baker,
Russ; Re: Devine. Thomas. WUBRINY/1 and deMohrenschildt and Train. Baker, Russ.
Re: SALINE, p. 14. Also see: Mellen, Joan. “Our Man in Haiti ”
(Trineday, 2012, p. 98).
83. Cummings,
Richard. “An American in Paris ,”
American Conservative (Feb. 16, 2004 )
notes. Also see: (Baker, R. p. 105)
84. Hugh
Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
(Cambridge , MA ,
Harvard U.
Press, 2008)., p. 106, and Francis Stoner Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and
the Cultural Cold War (London, Granta, 1999)
85. Baker,
Russ. Footnotes Re: Kickerbocker Club.
86. Baker,
Russ. Note 44: “HSCA Segregated CIA
Collection, box 14 ‘Contact Report WUBRINY Haitian Operations (NARA
record number 104-10436-10014 and 104-10070-10076). Available at Mary Ferrell
Foundation.”
87. In Note 45
Baker: “Though Devine is not identified by name in this document, he is in
another CIA document, ‘Memornadum: MESSRS.
George Bush and Thomas J. Devine,’ January
30, 1968 (NARA
record number 104-10310-10271). Available through Mary Ferrell Foundation. That
document identifies Devine specifically as working in operation BRINY and
claims that he began working in this capacity that June. No documents have
surfaced showing anyone else being part of the very small operation WUBRINY.
Indeed, all the available evidence indicates that Devine was the main or even
only member of WUBRINY, and therefore the person code-named WUBRINY/1, the
designated top dog of the operation. If, in fact, Devine and WUBRINY/1 were
synonymous, then the CIA memo noting that
Devine joined WUBRINY in June was in itself an attempt to hide the involvement
of Poppy’s business associate in the April meeting with deMohrenschildt.”
88. Mellen,
Joan. “Our Man in Haiti ”
(p. 263) Re: Devine and Bush in Vietnam .
89. Ballad of
John Butler Train.
90. Bella
Abzug. Congressional Record. April 29,
1976 .
91. Wiki on
Ochs FBI f
92. Ochs, Phil.
“Draft Dogger Rag.”
93. Evica,
George Michael. And We Are All Mortal
(Trinday, 2012) Re: Senator Pat Dodd.
94. Tanenbaucm,
Robert K. Dodd. Re: Rep. Pat Dodd See: Corruption
of Blood (Signet, 1992).
95. Conclusions.
Ochs, the son of a medical doctor who was drafted into the US army in 1943 and
was the victim of sever trauma, also seems to have suffered from mental
disease, especially at the end of his life, and may have been the subject of
the same MKULTRA doctors who developed Jessica “Candy Jones” Wilcox (See: “The
Control of Candy Jones,” Playboy Press, 1976).
96. Ochs was
friendly with a number of supporters of Chile
president Alllende, who was assassinated during a CIA
instigated 1972 coup, in part orchestrated by David Atlee Phillips. Ochs
organized a benefit concert for coup refugees that included Bob Dylan, Pete
Seeger and Dave Van Ronk.
97. “John
Butler Train” the CIA agent Ochs claimed
killed him at the Chelsea Hotel
on the first day of Summer 1975, may be based on a real CIA
agent, New York City investment
banker John Train of Train, Cabot, who George deMohrenschildt visited in late
April, 1963 regarding his Haitian business.
98. At the time
of deMohrenschildt’s visit Train employed CIA
agent Thomas Devine (WUBRUNY1) who had sold his interests in the Zapata
corporation - which he had formed in 1953 with George H.W. Bush.
99. Among those
who assumed ownership of Zapata after Bush and Devine left was John Maher, of
the Hobby Corp., whose son Art Maher was a pro-Cuban activist associated with
Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and in 1963 protested the ban on travel to Cuba, was
thrown out of a HUAC hearing on such travel and then broke the law by traveling
to Cuba.
TWO BOOKS ON OCHS:
Eliot, Marc Death of A
Rebel: Staring Phil Ochs and a Small Circle of Friends. (Garden City, NY Anchor
Press, 1979, 1989)) pp. 61-63; p. 148
Schumacher, Michael - There
But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs (NY, Hyperion, 1996). pp. 58, 67,
92. 45.
DOCUMENTARY FILMS ON OCHS:
http://article.wn.com/view/2011/03/31/x91Phil_Ochs_There_but_for_Fortune_x92_a_sobering_look_at_a_/
http://article.wn.com/view/2011/03/31/x91Phil_Ochs_There_but_for_Fortune_x92_a_sobering_look_at_a_/