When I began studying the Kennedy assassination, back in 1983, my naivety was considerable. It would be a few years before I fully hooked into the diffuse network of assassination researchers, and my hit-and-miss efforts to locate that fraternity produced some bizarre results during the 1985-87 period. Consulting periodical directories and other sources, I collected intriguing references to journals with the word ‘conspiracy’ in their titles. Silly me, I actually thought someone using that word was both serious and devoted only to assassinations and the like. What followed was an enlightenment.
Among the first items I received in the mail were numbers 34-37 of Conspiracies Unlimited, an eight-page, paperback-sized newsletter put out by R. Hertz of St. Paul, Minnesota. On the first page of no. 34 was an article by a Chicago-based ‘conspiracy researcher’ going under the name of Paul de Rasanov. It dealt with the ‘Nazi-Satan Gold Conspiracy complex’ and did not seem to be a joke, although it is often hard to tell with such literature. One section revealed:
‘The real powers want to replace Christianity as a world influence with a homosexual religion discovered by Havelock Ellis in the 1880s which has the strange name of ‘Eonism’. The goal of this religion is to take over all religious movements by placing cross-dressers, those who dress professionally like the opposite sex, in all positions of authority. Using gold as their weapon, these ‘Eonists’ plan to bring about the downfall of the whole Judeo-Christian, political-religious power structure. The best way to do it is, of course, to weaken the currencies of the capitalist countries and force the price of gold ever higher and higher.’
Author! Author!
Getting over my initial disappointment — being a semi-discrete transvestite and not a florid drag queen, I obviously had been left out of the conspiracy — I discovered that editor and publisher Hertz had exotic tastes. One article concerned the inevitable Illuminati, another tackled the apparent (to Hertz) CIA connections of the suicide-prone cult led by Jim Jones in Guyana, and still another reviewed Edward Jay Epstein’s summary of Kennedy assassination theories from an old issue of Esquire. So Conspiracies Unlimited was interested in the assassination after all, but only in the context of an amateurish, credulous exploration of ‘the unknown’.
My next shock involved Conspiracy Digest, which originated in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn is just outside Detroit, and I was then unaware that it has a reputation for nuttiness going back to the days of automobile mogul Henry Ford, who amused himself by publishing the Dearborn Independent, a rag that pushed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (This is all covered in Robert Lacey’s biography, Ford.) Anyway, it turned out that the publisher, Alpine Enterprises, no longer existed. An attachment to a July 20 1985 letter from one Lloyd Miller, of ‘A-Albionic Consulting and Research’, revealed that Alpine had gone bankrupt, and some of its assets had been picked up by the folks at A-Albionic, of Ferndale, Michigan. I never did find out what the ‘A’ stood for.
At the top of a mail-order list put out by A-Albionic was the slogan ‘The British Empire is the Central Phenomenon of World History Since the Decline of the Vatican’, and its back issue list contained references to such articles as ‘Secret Societies as tools of British Intelligence’ (November 1984), ‘Rockefeller/British Conflict Over Germany’ (January-February 1985), and ‘The Jews and the Crown’ (March 1985). In addition, the May 1985 issue boasted of ‘Richard Landkamer’s letter to William Buckley questioning nature of [Yale University club] Skull and Bones membership and possible involvement of Bones and Buckley in Kennedy assassination’. Among the books on sale at A-Albionic was an anonymously authored tome entitled The Secret of Who Ordered Kennedy’s Death, as well as Britain’s International Assassination Bureau: Permindex, by three guys named Goldman, Kalimtgar and Steinberg, supporters of Lyndon LaRouche. There was more.
The Conspiracy Tracker, published in Patterson, New Jersey, was up to issue 21 when I approached it, and its list of back issues featured these gems: ‘Did Masons kill JFK, Pope John Paul 1, Princess Grace?’ (no. 4) and ‘Discover how UFO beliefs are being manipulated to create social change — and how this ties into the final secret of the Cabala.’ (no. 7)
Sure, all the above was funny for a time, yet the sheer quantity of the stuff ultimately unnerved me. I became a little apprehensive but not about gold conspiracies, or Freemasons, or Skull and Bones. Rather, I worried over the scope and influence of the social stratum that was fearful of such things. Good grief, I had not even touched on California yet. Worse, it was becoming more ugly, and these ugly elements were reaching out to touch me. In some fashion I have yet to discern, my name turned up at the Metairie, Louisiana, headquarters of the ‘Sons of Liberty’, who duly sent me their Fall 1987 catalogue. It was fifteen tabloid-sized pages crammed with the titles of books and pamphlets that would make any ‘progressive’ faint: ‘Our Nordic Race’, ‘Ethnic Group Differences’, ‘Jews Want to Dominate Negroes’, ‘Watergate: Jewish Conspiracy to Seize U.S. Government’, ‘Censorship in the U.S. — I Accuse the Jews’, and ‘Racial Chaos and Criminal Anarchy — the Prelude to Black Revolution’.
There were entries for scores of books on secret monetary conspiracies, Freemasons, Illuminati and fluoridation of drinking water. A mountain of manuscripts by a Dr. John Coleman merited a section by itself, and one of his essays was ‘Secrets of the Kennedy Assassination Revealed’. (Coleman, by the way, was an anglophobe, since another of his studies was ‘Cecil Rhodes: Conspirator Extraordinary’.)
Happily I have not received anything more from Sons of Liberty. I did, however, acquire an unsolicited package from the ‘Newsletter Ministry’ of Birmingham, Alabama. No Kennedy material there, but everything else: anglophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism and so on. Believe it or not, this literature insisted that the skyscraping obelisk of the Washington Monument was really a masonic phallic symbol.
Standard banking conspiracy goofiness
One way the Louisiana and Alabama people could have sniffed me out was through the Canadian Intelligence Service — an organ of Ron Gostick’s Canadian League of Rights — to which I subscribed for a number of years. Personally, I doubted that, because the Service is a far cry from the fire-breathing material to be found in the Deep South. Indeed, its timidity as a vehicle for hate and extremism was the only thing that allowed me to hold my nose over it for so long. ((What finally caused me to abandon this observation post was the lack of ultra-rightist activities to observe: endless reprints of boring articles by ex-Rhodesian Ivor Benson.)
The Service did, however, share with the Louisiana crowd a small interest in the Kennedy assassination. Its September 1988 issue carried a report that had an exceedingly intricate history. At an unidentified point, something called Financial News Analysis alleged that Kennedy had tried to wrest control of the issue of currency from the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. central bank. The means he used was ‘Executive Order 1110’, signed by him on June 4, 1963, and — we are told — rescinded by Lyndon Johnson the following November 23. This legend was picked up by the Michael Journal, of Rougemont, Quebec, for its issue of September-October 1987, the Southern Libertarian Messenger (of Florence, South Carolina) spotted it in the Michael Journal, the Upright Ostrich (of Milwaukee, Wisconsin) took it from the Messenger, and at last the Canadian Intelligence Service discovered it in the Ostrich.
The allegation is the standard banking conspiracy goofiness to which far-rightests are vulnerable, but what is intriguing here is the impressive path it took, worming its way through at least five marginal publications in the space of a year. God knows who started the rumour, but the June 1989 issue of the Service had a little more information, provided by a U.S. reader. Back on January 16 1975 the bulletin of the Christian Heritage Center in Louisville, Kentucky discussed a speech made by one Joan Van Poperin before a ‘Freedom Forum’ in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on September 26 1974. Van Poperin talked about Kennedy issuing ‘U.S. Notes’ backed by the Department of the Treasury and not the Federal Reserve System, and she cited as proof two letters from the Department of the Treasury, at least one of them being in response to a September 20 1971 inquiry from red-necked Louisiana Congressman John Rarick. (This time E.O. 1110 was not mentioned.)
There is, then, a yawning pit of occult irrationalism awaiting anybody who strays too far from the basic facts of the Kennedy assassination. Multiple riflemen are one thing, but ‘Eonist’, masonic, British bankers are quite another — not to mention Lyndon LaRouche and his vision of narcotics trafficking based at Buckingham Palace. Perhaps I have become over-sensitive about the harm that can be done by occult thinking, but I still wince whenever anything interpretable as such crops up among assassination researchers.
Actually no interpretation at all is needed for the August 1987 issue of R.B. Cutler’s Grassy Knoll Gazette, which quotes extensively from The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins, which appears in both the A-Albionic and Sons of Liberty listings. The excerpt involves a purported 1773 meeting of businessmen that was convened in Frankfurt by Mayer Amschel Bauer (who later took the name Rothschild). Bauer is portrayed outlining a Protocols-like plan of world domination.
And UFOs too?
There is also an occasional unexpected strain of UFO enthusiasm among assassination researchers. In Volume 2 of the Forgive My Grief series by Penn Jones Jnr (Midlothian, Texas: Midlothian Mirror, 1967), one finds a review of a pro-Warren Commission book, The Scavengers: Critics and the Warren Report, by Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller. The reviewer, former FBI agent and Ramparts contributor, William Turner, is particularly annoyed (p. 163) over the way Lewis and Schiller take a cheap shot at Sylvia Meagher by pointing out her considerable collection of UFO books. (Hey, I figure either the books are there, or they are not.)
The trophy for flying-saucer passion, however, goes to the writer calling himself Paris Flammonde. In addition to his book on the Garrison affair, The Kennedy Conspiracy (New York, Meredith, 1969), he has turned out at least two volumes on UFOs, The Age of Flying Saucers (New York, Hawthorn 1971) and UFO (sic) Exist! (New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976). (The latter is dedicated to Sylvia Meagher and Bernard Fensterwald Jnr.) The biographical blurb on the dust jacket of the first of the UFO books says Flammonde ‘was for a number of years the producer of The Long John Nebel Show’, which has acted as a ‘clearing house’ for UFO reports and information’. On that basis, it appears that Flammonde was more of a UFO man than a JFK one.
Flammonde has another occult distinction. His book The Kennedy Conspiracy is the only work that seriously tries to discuss David Ferrie’s involvement in a semi-underground religion, the ‘Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America’. Flammonde traces this obscure, amorphous movement back to 1885 — the second reference to the 1880s we have seen in this survey — and asserts (p. 38) that one branch of it, mostly in the eastern and southern United States is ‘totally controlled and peopled by homosexuals’. The only problem here is that Flammonde provides no hint of where he acquired that information, so this is not much better than Paul de Rasanov raving about ‘Eonism’.
De Morenschild and the psychic
Probably the saddest intrusion of the occult into the realm of the Kennedy assassination involves a Dutch journalist, Wilem Oltmans. According to his own rendition of events, published in the U.S. nudie magazine Gallery for April 1977, Oltmans was in contact with ‘a serious and famous Dutch clairvoyant’ named Gerard Croiset in 1967. Croiset wanted to talk about the assassination and described a vision of a conspirator who had manipulated Oswald. Croiset’s description is reputed to have led Oltmans to George de Morenschild, the White Russian exile, petroleum geologist, and CIA contact who befriended Oswald in Texas during 1962-63. Oltmans kept in touch with de Morenschildt as the years passed, and things came to a climax in 1977 when he went to Texas and brought de Morenschildt back to Holland with him.
This is a controversial episode. Oltmans strongly denies an accusation by Michael Eddowes that he was plying de Morenschildt with pharmaceuticals. Instead he implies he more or less rescued de Morenschildt, who had just been confined to a mental institution by his family and had undergone drug therapy. Either way de Morenschildt was not in good mental shape. Oltmans took de Morenschildt to the clairvoyant Croiset on March 3 1977, and Croiset supposedly agreed this was the man he saw back in 1967. What de Morenschildt had to say about all this is unclear, since Oltmans seems to be the only one left talking. (Oltmans thinks he was in the process of confessing.)
On March 5 de Morenschildt vanished, reappearing a couple of weeks later at the home of his daughter in Manalapan, Florida. On March 29 he was found dead there, the official verdict being a self-inflicted firearms wound. Between psychiatrists on one side and a psychic on the other — and even if the CIA were not involved — he did not have much of a chance.