Mr. Willis passed away in Dallas on January 27, 1995, from leukemia.
On November 22, 1963, Phil Willis took a series of photographs around Dealey Plaza just before and just after the assassination of President Kennedy. Several of those photos were deemed important to the investigation into the slaying; twelve of them became part of the official record. Willis himself appeared before the Warren Commission, as did his daughter Linda Kay.
In the British television documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Mr. Willis said that all the Warren Commission was interested in hearing was that three shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository. He said he never doubted that, but added, "I am very dead certain at least one shot, including the one that took the President's skull off, had to come from the right front. And I'll stand by that to my death. Over my mother's grave."
One of the Willis photographs that raised suspicion on the part of Warren Commission critics was #8, which appeared to show Jack Ruby in front of the Texas School Book Depository building at the time of the assassination. Willis himself believed the man looked like Ruby. Recent reports, however, indicate it may have been another man.
Phil Willis was also a decorated war hero who was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked by the Japanese. His patrol captured the first prisoner of war taken by the United States in World War Two, on December 8, 1941.
After the war, he served two terms in the Texas legislature.
Fog-shrouded morning of fall
Brightness breaking through the clouds
Bringing a sun-dappled afternoon
And false hopes of spring
On the threshold of winter
Trapped in the unrelenting progression of history
Crosshairs of cruel fate
Burn Z-313 into memory
Blood on the nation as the harpies sing:
"Death. Death.
Kill the head and the body will die."
Convulsions
And convolutions
Disintegration
And a future denied
Orphaned children
Seeking a place to connect
Still unfound
Martin Blank
Richards says she intends to complete Volume Two of the newsletter, but adds that its future beyond that is uncertain.
"People don't know I am still going to honor my commitment," she told Fair Play recently. "Most probably assume I have fallen off the face of the earth."
The expense of keeping JFK Honor Guard going simply got to be too much, Richards says, leading her to halt publication late last year. Since that time, Richards has begun learning the Internet and establishing a foothold there with The JFK Place, a gopher site accessible from the front page of each issue of Fair Play.
Richards describes JFK Honor Guard as a people-oriented publication. "Those who contributed to it were more likely to be those who wouldn't write for the more 'research oriented' JFK newsletters...[it's] a place for the rest of us to participate" in JFK discussions, she said.
The eleventh issue of JFK Honor Guard's second volume is complete and awaiting a mailing date. The twelfth issue, Richards says, "will include information about the great help Internet can be to researchers, and will describe JFK Place, in addition to making note of news of the research community."
...Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret." The War Department was in charge of the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices. It also assumed charge of the subsequent conspiracy trials. Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid 1930's were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain.
Accordingly, all previous accounts of the assassination were based on official Government statements and press releases angled, slanted and otherwise doctored to suit popular consumption, and on the sketchy (although voluminous) trial reports published by the official court reporters. Thus a towering edifice of so-called history was erected on sand. It made popular reading, but it lacked the exacting foundations of true historicity. How could the facts be known or assessed when the War Department withheld them from inquiring historians and even from such authorized investigators as senators and congressmen on contemporary Congressional Committees?
...The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln Murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered.
Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts."
...For seventy years the War Department kept the official files on the assassination conspiracy, the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth, and the trial of Booth's accomplices under lock and key. One might assume that during the Reconstruction Era some legitimate purpose was served in this. But in decades long after the Civil War, what "national security" was protected by the military censors? As of 1890, for example, what strategic plans, operations, or weapons were safeguarded by this secrecy?
...In respect to the Lincoln murder case no modern intelligence device could be compromised. What could be compromised is the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.
...Says the pamphlet issued by the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.: "Confusion and mystery still surround the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and we probably will never know all the facts. One thing is sure...his murder was part of a larger conspiracy."
But the facts of the murder conspiracy are lost to history. Probably they will never be unearthed. All participants in the great conspiracy are now dead. The last surviving witness to Lincoln's assassination...died in 1956. (He was five years old when his godmother took him to see the President at Ford's Theater...)
What follows doesn't prove anything at all. It is offered simply because as readers, these selections once had an impact on us. Although an explanation to the Kennedy assassination may seem implied by the last passages, no conclusions should be drawn from this otherwise disparate collection of excerpts.
First a lift from the Introduction (p. 7) to Photographic Whitewash, by Harold Weisberg.
May 30, 1967
I believe deeply that our society is not safe when a murdered President can be
dishonored with a palpably inadequate and entirely unsatisfactory official
investigation by the government that succeeded him, by a dubious inquest that
is not unfairly designated a "whitewash." No president and the institution of
the presidency are ever safe when this can happen, and it did happen. All of
the basic institutions of our society are thus in jeopardy.
To write critically of this fake inquest is not an attack on society or what has come to be called "The Establishment." The contrary is true. Our society, our concepts of law and justice, presuppose error. We know that courts and judges will err. The organization of our justice, in acknowledgment, provides a mechanism for correction of error, for justice.
Is a president less in the eyes of the law of "The Establishment" than an outcast, a nobody, an unclaimed derelict, to find whose murderer authority never ceases searching? We assume that no murder may be unsolved--except this President's. That the government never intended solving. It sought only explanation that it could persuade a world, already subject to monumental public relations persuasion, to accept. It substituted contrived statistics for reality, unwarranted speculation for fact...
What from the very first has been lacking in the aborted accounting of the assassination has been the working of normality. In every other crime the law can work its course. In our country, that requires two separate sides. The government is denied the right or power to pretend it alone protects the accused while prosecuting him. It did this with Oswald, unstintingly doing the opposite while proclaiming his rights were being safeguarded. It never at any time considered the possibility that anyone else may have committed the crime or was in any way involved in it. This, perhaps, is the greatest dishonor, the worst disgrace. When, as often happened, there was indication of proof of his innocence of the charge of murder or sign of his government connections, the investigators went suddenly blind, or walked past the open door to truth. At every turn in the investigation, there was abundant evidence of the innocence of the accused. It was avoided or ignored or, when this was impossible, twisted or misrepresented.
* * *
Now a snippet from Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact, Chapter 10, "The Interrogation Sessions" (p. 237)
From his arrest on Friday to his death on Sunday, Oswald declined to conceal his face; he never appeared cowed or ashamed but maintained his personal pride and dignity and seemingly full confidence in his ultimate vindication. He charged on a number of occasions that he was being railroaded, that he was "a patsy," and that he was the victim of a frame-up. He was pitifully unsuspecting of the fate that he was to meet in the police basement. Some police officers and Dallas officials saw this as arrogance and resented his failure to panic or grovel. Was his behavior characteristic of guilt, or of innocence? There is no objective test which can be applied, and the answer will depend on one's personal pre-disposition toward Oswald and one's private attitudes toward the nightmarish events that transpired in Dallas. What can be said without uncertainty is that the Warren Commission did not at any stage of its work appear to regard seriously the possibility that Oswald was the victim of a frame-up. The Commission has calmly accepted the explanation that no transcript of the interrogation was made. Fritz testified that he had no tape recorder, his past requests to his superiors for one having been denied. He was not asked why he had not borrowed a tape recorder; the FBI and Secret Service agents who were present at the interrogations were not asked why they had not offered one to Fritz. It is not necessary to belabor this issue: the point is that the Commission was uncritical, unskeptical, and complacent in dealing with the Dallas police--not on this question alone but also on other aspects of the case, including flagrant discrepancies or contradictions in the testimony and the suspect conduct or explanations of certain officials.
* * *
Next, an excerpt from Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence, by Philip Melanson ...from Chapter 11, "Beyond Disinformation."
Unlike many events that cry out for valid explanation, for historical clarity, those involving what Allen Dulles termed "the craft of intelligence" are more difficult to fathom. The document that might be the Rosetta Stone of accurate understanding may not simply be locked in someone's vault awaiting posthumous exposure: it may be nonexistent. Moreover, the impetus for secrecy and disinformation does not fade completely with the passing decades, as demonstrated by the CIA's interactions with the House Committee in 1978.
In 1963 Alpha-66 was one of the most violent CIA-backed Cuban exile groups. Its members were in Dallas and well armed at the time of the assassination. It had openly defied President Kennedy's ban against launching raids on Cuba from the United States. The group continued its activities and was still conducting strikes against Castro in the early 1980s. In the summer of that year a five-man assassination squad, allegedly sent from the United States to kill Castro, was captured in Cuba. Alpha-66 not only took credit for the foiled attempt but did so at a press conference in Miami. Said one Cuban diplomat, "What got Castro mad was not just that the hit squad was sent after him, but that Alpha-66 was allowed to hold a press conference in Florida promising to try again, all without any sign of concern from the U.S. government." If Alpha-66 and its offshoots still enjoyed Agency patronage in the 1980s, any incriminating secrets involving the Kennedy assassination would most likely be perceived by the CIA as a potential threat to its ongoing operations. The cover-up would continue.
All of this notwithstanding, there is more we can learn, and need to learn, about Oswald and this crime against U.S. democracy. Like presidential elections, the darker side of our political process, assassinations, profoundly alter not only the succession of leadership and the distribution of political power but the course of public policy and history. If the U.S. Secret Service is to effectively protect our political leaders, it must understand the various root causes of these assaults: lumping Oswald with Squeaky Fromme and John W. Hinckley, Jr. as fitting "the profile" of U.S. assassins (lone, deranged drifters) is too simplistic for effective protective research. It is also essential in a democracy that institutions and agencies of government be held publicly accountable for their performance and actions, an accountability that should not be avoided by official secrecy and disinformation.
Finally, if some cabal successfully conspired to subvert the democratic process by disenfranchising citizens' ballots with bullets, this fact must be confronted. Doing so will serve history and democracy well, even if criminal justice cannot now be achieved. We can begin to comprehend a great deal more about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, about the sources of violence that threaten our political system, and about the nature of covert power and politics when we know the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald: U.S. intelligence agent-provocateur.
* * *
Just for fun, here's a bit from the oddly titled If You Have A Lemon, Make Lemonade, by Warren Hinckle...a few paragraphs from Chapter 6, "Give Us This Day Our Daily Paranoia."
My eyebrows ached from rising at the ooo-la-la life styles of the CIA types we found submerged in the intelligence swamp surrounding the assassination, and I began to wonder what the heralded CIA "connection" was all about.
Silly boy, an espionage-wise and cynical friend said to me, did you think the CIA was running a tennis club?
My friend was from a distinguished Eastern seaboard family. He had worked for the CIA for ten years...I must warn the reader that his interpretation is about as favorable to the CIA as it is possible to be under the circumstances. He put it to me thus:
"The movies have fancied up the spy business, and the adventure-hungry academics who joined the agency have given it an Ivy League frosting, but the filling is rotten like a cream puff filled with pus. In some ways, it has to be like that. Spies must operate in the scum-belt of humanity cinching the world; the scum attracts the weak, and weakness is the backbone of intelligence. Without weakness and greed there would be no spies or counterspies. The system depends on the bribe and blackmail--those are the basic tools of intelligence, the pen and pencil, the hammer and sickle--but they can only be applied to the soft spots. If you can't find a soft spot, you make one. That's why agents employ the corrupt to compromise the weak, when necessary. Where else would the fishermen of espionage search for their minnows but in the pools of miscast and misfit humanity? These people have no existence to be proud of, so they are willing to change it for the purposes of a job. And, they are expendable.
"It is a rotten business, to be sure, but the name of the game is results--and a satisfactory result is just maintaining the status quo. You shouldn't be surprised that a lot of people have to spy, and people even have to die, and a lot of dredge go under the bridge unnoticed, just to keep things the way they are--between nations, and between intelligence establishments. Those people in the business who still have consciences tell themselves that in a rotten world, it becomes necessary to spread a little more rot, just for the limited but desperate purpose of keeping the whole shebang from collapsing of its own dry rot."
I asked if he thought if the CIA would go so far as to kill the President.
Negative, my friend said. Highly unlikely, anyway. "Intelligence is not in the business of overthrowing the government. If the CIA ever bumped a President, they'd have a war with the Pentagon for ultimate power. They need the President as a buffer; the executive is something to influence and manipulate, not destroy. Even a hostile President isn't that much trouble for the CIA. These guys have got staying power. Look how long Hoover has hung around, and he didn't have half the shit on people that the Agency has in its files."
Well, then, I asked, could individual agents, or their hangers-on have done it?
"Of course. It wouldn't surprise me. Oswald obviously had an intelligence background. And the CIA in the sixties was spread as thin and was as long and as screwed up as a tapeworm. If it wiped its ass it couldn't be sure if it was its own hand that was doing it.
"The CIA kept all those poor Cubans on the string for years after the Bay of Pigs--it had them running around all over the place, using the CIA's guns and money for God knows what. Most of them ended up in narcotics or smuggling of some kind. It's not unlikely that, either, that some agency guys would work out a deal on the side with them. Opium smuggling was standard operating procedure for CIA and Air America guys in Southeast Asia. It was a goddamn fringe benefit.
"But you can be sure of this. If any of the CIA people, regulars or fly-by-nights, were involved in any way in the assassination, the CIA would cover it up. And that isn't just a matter of complicity--it's a matter of survival for them. Even the involvement of minor agents acting unilaterally would open such a public can of worms that the Agency could never go fishing the same way again.
"Now, I'll bet this too: The CIA would take care of those people privately. Their eyeballs would be on somebody's cuff links. But at the same time the agency would do anything they had to--even kill--to keep the lid on."
* * *
Lastly, a bit from Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers....
Who planned the assassination? In the closing stages of the Assassinations Committee's mandate, some staff members felt that, while Mafia marksmen may have carried out the assassination, it could only have been orchestrated by someone in American intelligence, someone with special knowledge of Oswald's background. As they pondered this, investigators gave renewed attention to the senior CIA officer who co-ordinated the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro--William Harvey.
William Harvey died in 1976...As far back as 1959, he was one of only three officers privy to plans to send false defectors into the Soviet Union. 1959 was the year of Oswald's suspect defection. Genuine defection or not, Harvey almost certainly knew about it in detail.
Subsequently, Harvey was the man who conceived and planned the CIA's Executive Action program, the contingency plan for foreign assassinations. He was closely in touch with men of the same ilk as Lucien Sarti, and the Corsicans now alleged to have been the gunmen in Dealey Plaza.
Next, as head of Task Force W, Harvey was in direct charge of anti-Castro operations, in personal touch with mobsters Santos Trafficante and John Roselli, inciting them to murder Fidel Castro. He became a close friend to Roselli.
Harvey was a "can-do" operator. During the Castro plots, he personally hired a U-Haul truck to deliver rifles, explosives, and radios to Roselli in a Miami parking lot. He was also an instinctive freelance. Harvey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee, [and] he was a party to concealing the Castro assassination plans from his own boss, CIA Director John McCone.
Harvey's gung-ho anti-Castro activity not only alarmed his CIA bosses, it drove him into direct confrontation with the Kennedys. According to one former official, Harvey "hated Bobby Kennedy's guts with purple passion." His braggadocio in sending commando teams into Cuba at the height of the 1962 missile crisis--jeopardizing international negotiations--incurred Robert Kennedy's wrath. ("Maurice Bishop", of course, was involved in similarly provocative operations, designed specifically to flout administration policy.)
In spring 1963, as a direct result, Harvey was transferred to a posting in Italy. The intent, according to an authoritative account by David Martin, was to make sure "he would never again be likely to have an active interest." Yet Harvey was still meeting with Roselli, in the United States, as late as June 1963; and I [Summers] have learned that he visited anti-Castro camps in Florida, at a time when he was theoretically already in Rome. According to new, unresearched information, initial approaches to hire assassins in Europe were made in Rome--sometime before the recruitment approaches allegedly made to the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles.
Assassinations Committee staff discussed Harvey with former CIA personnel, including a former senior officer from the Mexico City station. "The feeling of some of the CIA people we talked with," says one Committee staffer, "was that Harvey was heavily involved with the organized crime figures. The feeling was that he was out of control and may have worked with organized crime figures to murder JFK. He behaved as if he was all-powerful...He may have been the key in accomplishing the assassination."
* * *