I Was Mandarin...
Did Dallas policeman Roscoe White pull the trigger on President Kennedy, or is he pulling our leg?
(Page 5 of 5)
The Ghoulish Green Book
It was late that night by the time Ricky reached the old house, which had been partially destroyed by fire. After breaking the lock on the front door, he searched the house by flashlight, first the downstairs and then the attic. Behind a piece of plywood he saw a heavy aluminum canister, sealed tight. “My heart was beating something awful,” Ricky recalled. “I’m a pretty stout old boy, but I had to use a crowbar to pry it open.”
What he found were his father’s Marine Corps dog tags, negatives of old family photographs, a faded green textbook with newspaper pictures pasted over the pages, and three cables covered in protective plastic. The cables professed to be orders from Naval intelligence, addressed to Mandarin, using Roscoe White’s serial number. A cable dated October 1963 instructed Mandarin that his next assignment was “to eliminate a national security threat to worldwide peace.” At the bottom of the cables was the code name RE-rifle, which was strikingly similar to ZR/RIFLE, an ultra-secret CIA project during the Kennedy administration to recruit assassins to murder foreign leaders.
The green book, or the witness-elimination book, as it came to be called, frightened Ricky White more than all the other pieces of evidence put together. Though the contents of the book hardly supported such a conclusion, Ricky saw it as proof that his father had murdered repeatedly. This was some sort of ghoulish scrapbook, apparently compiled at random and embellished with numerical code and hieroglyphics. Inside the front cover was his father’s name and serial number, and the words “players or witnesses.” Pasted to each page were old newspaper photographs. Some were easily identifiable—Ruby, Oswald, Jack and Robert Kennedy—but others were faces without names. One of the more obscure faces turned out to be the late Perry Raymond Russo, who once testified that he had attended a meeting in New Orleans where the plot to assassinate President Kennedy had been discussed; also in attendance was Lee Harvey Oswald. Written below the picture were the words, “Big Mouth you talked after all.”
On another page was a copy of the famous Mary Moorman photograph, taken at the instant the president’s head was blown open. An X drawn across a spot behind the stockade fence marked the place where Mandarin would have stood. Below the picture were these words: “Mandarin kills K uses 7.65 mauser in assassination.” For three days after the assassination, the Dallas police, the district attorney, and even the CIA believed the murder weapon was a Mauser. One of the pieces of evidence that Ricky turned over to the research team was his father’s 7.65 Mauser.
The contents of the canister stunned Ricky White. It was nearly a week before he told any member of the team what he had discovered, and even then he didn’t mention the green book. But Joe West seemed to know that Ricky was hiding something. West confronted Ricky one night after they had interviewed an old friend of Roscoe’s. Ricky remembers feeling emotionally overwhelmed and on the verge of tears. At that moment, he decided to show West the canister and its contents—all except the green book—and to give it to West for safekeeping. But rather than share this new evidence with other members of the team, West took it to Houston and locked it in his safe-deposit box. He eventually supplied the others with copies of the cables, but the originals remained locked in his bank box until Matsu filed a lawsuit. West countersued, charging that he had been libeled and his life had been threatened.
When Gary Shaw discovered that his partners had been right all along, that Joe West was a loose cannon, he terminated his relationship with the Houston investigator. But it was too late. Joe West—and his new associate, the Reverend Jack Shaw—were pursuing a separate investigation. Apparently West had appointed himself custodian of the evidence. Gary Shaw and his partners had Ricky and the green book, but West had the cables. And even more important, with Jack Shaw on his team, West had Geneva.
“One Hell of a Woman”
From the start the team had worked too slowly for Joe West’s taste, not being aggressive enough with potential witnesses and missing what he regarded as obvious clues. West outraged Ricky by claiming that Roscoe White’s old friend Bill X was a member of the assassination squad. Shaw and his partners worried that West would compromise their investigation and maybe subject the JFK center to a slander suit. Such petty considerations did not bother Joe West, who vowed he would pursue Kennedy’s killer until his dying day. “Like a mighty army marching across the land,” West proclaimed, “when justice is done, that will be my payday.”
From his Mafia informant, who told him that five Mafia big shots were in Dallas on the day of the assassination, West had already extrapolated another gunman on the grassy knoll. Even before Geneva identified Charles Nicoletti as the man she had met in New Orleans, West had come to the conclusion that Nicoletti was one of the Kennedy assassins. On May 11 he called a press conference in Galveston to make this startling announcement. But this was just a warm-up for the big event.
In mid-September 1990 West sent out press releases announcing another press conference and hinting that at long last he was about to produce the smoking gun. It seemed that a second Roscoe White journal had surfaces. Geneva had found it two weeks earlier, found it quite by coincidence when she happened to knock over a book titled Presidents of the United States. It was hidden under “Kennedy, John F.” Funny, Geneva hadn’t mentioned it to me, though I had interviewed her at her home just a few days after this astonishing discovery. She hadn’t even mentioned it to the other members of her family. Instead, she had turned the journal over to Jack Shaw and Joe West. And though it wasn’t exactly a quid pro quo, she simultaneously received a payment of $5,300, part of it a gift from the film producer Oliver Stone and the remainder from Jack Shaw’s ministry.
Standing with his back to a banner proclaiming “Truth, Inc.,” West told several dozen reporters that he was only a certified legal investigator licensed by the State of Texas—not a documents expert—so he couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of this new piece of evidence. But the fact that he had gone to all this trouble to make it public suggested otherwise. The night before the press conference, Jack Shaw had spoken of this breakthrough as “one of the most historically important events of the twentieth century.” Apparently Shaw changed his mind, because the next morning he pleaded with West to postpone the announcement until experts could examine the document. But West’s mind was made up, and wild mustangs couldn’t have dragged him off the rostrum. Halfway through the press conference Shaw slipped out of the room and flew back to Dallas.
Almost everyone who saw the journal believed that it was a fraud, John Stockwell, the CIA-agent-turned-author, pronounced the work “a crude fabrication,” pointing out that though the journal was supposedly written between 1957 and 1971, it appeared to be written in the same felt-tip pen. Felt-tip pens weren’t used until the early sixties. A more obvious flaw was a mention on the next to last page of Watergate—apparently Watergate was to be Roscoe’s last assignment, which he refused. The problem with this—other than believing that a man who had killed the president and numerous others would dig in his heels at the idea of taking part in a two-bit burglary—is that the break-in at the Watergate apartment complex didn’t occur until ten months after Roscoe White died. The scandal that we now know as Watergate wasn’t called that until weeks after the break-in. When I mentioned this to Joe West after the press conference, he became indignant and gave me a lecture about how the term “watergate” is more than two thousand years old and appears in the third chapter of the Book of Nehemiah.
The new journal fractured the tentative harmony within the White family. “That’s not my daddy’s handwriting,” Ricky protested. “And that’s not the way he wrote.” There was a whiny, cringing, self-pitying tone to the prose, strikingly unlike Rock White’s lean, spare style. The language was turgid, overburdened with regrets for what a rotten husband he had been, and gushing with appreciation for Geneva—”God thank you for Geneva. I’ve got one hell of a woman. Thank you thank you God.”
Ricky and Tricia believe that Geneva created the journal. I think that’s a sound supposition. Given her nearly hopeless financial situation and the constant admonitions of others, imploring her to come up with some new piece of evidence—something else—the creation could be viewed more as an act of desperation than a hoax.
Maybe it shouldn’t, but this latest journal tends to discredit all the other evidence. If the entire Roscoe White story is a hoax—and that is a distinct possibility—it is a hoax created by someone with an impressive knowledge of assassination details, a good grasp of intelligence operations, and some insight into organized crime. Maybe Roscoe White himself perpetrated the deceit. Or maybe it was the work of his mysterious friend Bill X, with some help from Geneva.
Considering all the bizarre happenings since 1963, the scenario appears rather tame. If you want to fault the Roscoe White story, fault it first for its lack of imagination.
My Library
