Still on the Case
Conspiracy Buffs live in a world of uncertainty, haunted by goat’s heads, a pristine bullet, and bouncing skulls. But the most haunting uncertainty of all is this: who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
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At the same time, he was approaching anti-Castro Cuban-exile groups, declaring that he shared their feelings, boasting of his marksmanship and his Marine training in guerrilla warfare, and telling them that he wanted to be sent on a paramilitary mission to Cuba.
Then, in August 1963, one of the anti-Castro activists he had been soliciting came upon Oswald distributing pro-Castro pamphlets in his role as one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee. A fight ensued. Oswald was arrested and jailed. Demanded to see an FBI agent. Told the bureau he was willing to inform on the pro-Castro movement.
Just what was he up to? And on behalf of whom? That’s where the address 544 Camp Street becomes so interesting. It’s at the heart of the paradox of O.’s simultaneous pro-Castro and anti-Castro activity. The address first surfaced in the case when it was found rubber-stamped on one of the pro-Castro tracts Oswald was handing out. It identified 544 Camp Street as the headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And yet not only did the building at that address never house the FPCC but it also swarmed with right-wing anti-Castro groups and was the headquarters of a right-wing ex-FBI agent named Guy Banister, who was that very summer recruiting people to infiltrate pro-Castro movements.
What was Oswald up to? As far back as 1964, Warren Commission staffers were scratching their heads over that and writing memos to each other about the possibility that Oswald’s paper FPCC group was a front set up to infiltrate the Pro-Castro movement on behalf of the anti-Castro group based in 544 Camp Street.
They never were able to resolve it. When the staffers presented their memo on Oswald in New Orleans to the harried chief counsel of the Warren Commission, it came back with these words scrawled on it: “At this stage we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.”
Subsequent Senate and House assassination investigations tried to reopen the doors to 544 Camp Street but found only doors within doors.
“We have evidence,” then-Senator Richard Schweiker declared, “which places at 544 Camp Street intelligence agents, Lee Oswald, the mob, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles.”
Yes, behind those doors Oswald had gotten himself entangled in some of the darker strands in the fabric of American life. And yet what does it all prove? Perhaps there is a clue behind another set of doors — The Doors of Perception.
Consider this passage from Huxley’s classic account of the psychedelic experience, based on his mescaline trips:
The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin . . ., which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale [italics mine] to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other end. And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. . . .
“If you started the wrong way,” I said in answer to the investigator’s question, “everything that happened would be proof of the conspiracy against you. It would be self-validating. You couldn’t draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot.”*
This last paragraph strikes me as a good description of the mind of the assassination buff as well as of the assassin.
Up until now there have been three theories relating to Oswald’s strange immersion in the subcurrents swirling around 544 Camp Street: (1) he was a pro-Castro activist infiltrating anti-Castro movements on behalf of Cuban agents, (2) he was an agent of anti-Castro forces using a pro-Castro front to infiltrate Cuba, perhaps to kill Castro, and (3) he was a pro-Castro activist being cultivated and set up as a patsy by sinister anti-Castro-mob-intelligence world operatives.
These contradictory theories have one thing in common. They all make Oswald a pawn in someone else’s game.
If, however, we go through the doors of perception and look at New Orleans through the eyes of an “Enlightened” O., another way of thinking about the ambiguities suggests itself.
Look at New Orleans through the eyes of an O. whose favorite TV program as a child was I Led Three Lives. Who may have absorbed the dark conspiracy-obsessed consciousness of that Huxley passage. Someone who has been a U.S. Marine, then a Soviet citizen, then a U.S. citizen again. Someone for whom change of identity has become second nature, someone who has seen the world from both sides and been disillusioned by both. Someone who — with his doors of perception opened — thinks he sees through it all. Someone for whom the only pleasure now is in the posing, the plotting, and the counterplotting. Look at O. as a pre-assassination buff. Not a lone nut but a lone mastermind, deploying identities the way Penn Jones deploys gunmen. What a paradise New Orleans would have seemed that steamy summer to someone like that, with its murky web plot and counterplot.
How convenient 544 Camp Street would have been. So many strands of intrigue so close at hand, so many strings so easy to pull.
How inconvenient for my purposes that 544 Camp Street has disappeared from the face of the earth. How I wanted to walk its halls and get a feel for its atmosphere. But the building was torn down some years ago to make way for a new federal court building. The old building’s exact location at the corner of Lafayette Street is now a concrete plaza empty except for a large, abstract, federally subsidized sculpture.
And yet that sculpture . . .
The best way to describe the sculpture would be to call it a sixteen-foot twisted helix of black painted steel. Military-industrial-complex-size damaged chromosomes. Its title: Out of There. Hard to believe its creator did not know the significance of the place in which his work was installed. A better monument to the tortuous doubling and redoubling of the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald could not be imagined.
I wander south on Camp Street, passing comatose derelicts, disintegrating warehouse buildings, and dingy rooming houses. Come upon the Crescent Street Garage, where O. used to drop in and read gun magazines in the office. Next to the Reily Coffee Company, where he was employed, greasing coffee-grinding machines. The garage was also, according to the testimony of a mechanic, a depot for unmarked FBI Secret Service cars. The mechanic said that he saw envelopes pass between agents in unmarked cars and Oswald.
Back up the street, past Out of There, to the all-night drugstore on the corner of Canal. Another O. hangout that summer. Horrible glaring fluorescents that must have been around since that summer, truly a depressing place, the nature of whose clientele can be surmised from a scrawled sign over the prescriptions counter: “Due to Uncertainties All Drug Sales Are Final.”
Due to uncertainties, I push through the sweaty atmosphere back toward my hotel, mired in the maze of uncertainties surrounding O.’s Camp Street summer. His sojourn there suggests that everything proves nothing. Provides support for almost every conspiracy theory; proves none.
And so there it is. After all these years. Theories, uncertainties, possible connections, suspicious coincidences. Yes, the Warren Commission investigation was inept and incomplete, relied on information supplied by agencies with a stake in covering up their role. And yet, twenty years later several minor and one major congressional inquiry down the line, there is only more uncertainty.
I speak to Robert Ranftel again. This time about the dismaying question of whether it is time to call it quits, admit defeat, and give up the whole intractable case. Perhaps even concede that — in the absence of any proven alternative — Oswald may have acted alone; the Warren Commission, for all its bungling, might have gotten it right after all.
“What about the mob-hit theory,” I ask Ranftel. “Isn’t there any hope for that? I mean the House Committee pretty much endorsed it?”
“Well, mob-hit theory is where the action is now,” Ranftel says, “Everybody’s writing their mob-hit book. Did you see the latest — Contract on America [by David Scheim, subtitled The Mafia Murders of John and Robert Kennedy]?
“Do you think the mob-hit theory is just another buff trend?”
“I think the organized-crime theory is sort of a halfway house out of the Kennedy case for a lot of buffs,” he says.
“A halfway house?”
“Well, it solves a lot of problems. You look at the typical mob hit. It’s a murder that goes unsolved. And the people who did it typically never talk. So you can almost use the fact that the JFK case remains unsolved as evidence it was a mob hit. It allows a lot of people to walk away from the case and say we’ve brought it as far as it can go. You see a lot of assassination buffs now turning into organized-crime buffs.”
A halfway house out of the case. Ranftel’s phrase suddenly clarifies for me a persistent subtext I thought I’d been picking up in my conversations with some of the best of the buffs. Take Paul Hoch, for instance. Almost universally regarded as one of the most careful and meticulous researchers in the game. A computer programmer by profession, he specialized in looking into an area of ambiguity and searching the thousands of cubic feet of declassified documents in the archives until he found the single document that clarified the point in question. He was still working on the case — publishing the Echoes of Conspiracy newsletter —his work now was filled with echoes of echoes. Reports of reports. Clippings. There seems to be no edge, no direction, no sense that any of this was leading to anything.
“I get the impression that you’re shifting from being an assassination investigator to something more like a commentator,” I told Hoch.
“I think that’s true. A historian might be more accurate. I try to keep the record straight.”
“But what about solving the case?” I asked.
“I just don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know if it’s to late now.”
My Library
