Phil Ochs at Dealey Plaza?
By William E. Kelly, Jr.
"Captain Fritz questioned him and said the President had been killed…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.]
Phil Ochs said JFK was “a man so filled-with life even Death
was caught off guard.” [2]
In following the JFK assassination 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 that protest singer Phil Ochs had expressed foreknowledge
of the assassination, was present at Dealey Plaza as “a national security
witness,” and kept those facts secret in fear for his own life.
He 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 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 or not he was in Dallas
that day.
Boy was I wrong.
I crossed paths with 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 18th floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
I clearly remember Ochs was 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, a witness to the murder.
The source of this particular conspiracy theory is folk
singer Jim Glover, who I had met on John Simkin’s Education Forum [ www. ], [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 Houston street
sidewalk and peering up towards the top floors of the Texas School Book
Depository. [5]
Phil Ochs was the epitomie of the 1960s-era protest singer, known
for writing songs fused with meaning and anti-establishment themes, including, "I Ain't Marching Anymore",
"Changes", "Crucifixion", "Draft Dodger Rag",
"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 CONVENSTION
Although I find it hard to believe, as I write this the Disc
Jockey (on WXPN FM University of Pennsylvania station) plays “Draft Dogger Rag” - in honor of the
anniversary of Ochs’ April 9, 1976
death. [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 asthma'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 (on WMMR - first AOR
- Album Oriented Rock show), 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’ old 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 18th 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.
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. [9]
Like a fly on the wall, the casually dressed young man seems
to be just standing back taking it all in. Was that really Phil Ochs, the folk
singer? If so, what’s he doing there?
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, it’s a good place
to get the official story.
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 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 was Ochs doing at Dealey
Plaza and how was he 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 surveillace 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. 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,” remains unsolved today. [13][14]
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 [19] graduate 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. [20]
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, 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. [21]
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. [22]
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), [23] 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
of their employees in the assassination story [24][25][26].
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, where the CIA
headquarters is located. Something peculiar was going on in Columbus, as well
as McLean. [27]
So Phil Ochs, after graduating from an elite Virginia
military academy, served as a sergeant in the Air Force ROTC at Ohio
State University
in Columbus, where he spied on
campus radicals and was encouraged to infiltrate student protest groups. He may
have switched ideological sides, but appears to have later 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 social 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 tome secret government conspiracy or another.” [28]
So Ochs was himself considered a conspiracy theorists before
it was popular and then went 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 Civil Rights, 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, [29] 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 Dallas
that Phil showed up at our new apt at Leroy St. He asked where I was and I told him about
what I saw when I was forced onto the Shadow Bus after an airport stop in
Texas….Phil said ‘I told you not to go" and I said we were trying to find
you but nobody knew where you were.’"
“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.” [30]
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.’” [31]
“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 red
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 aid 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 eh 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.”
“CRUCIFIXION”
In a tribute to JFK,
Phil Ochs wrote "That Was the
President," and on the dust jacket 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." [32]
Ochs also wrote another song that is said to be inspired by
the assassination of President Kennedy, which he called “Crucifixion.” [33]
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.”
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 that got me noted 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 the day JFK was
killed, she would know if he was in Dallas
or not. She would know.
Now in search of Alice Skinner, one thing that stood out to
me was the Wiki reference to Suzie Rotolo as 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
I was already familiar with Suzie Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s one
time girlfriend, because she - quite coincidently - came into the picture by reportedly
attending a Jewish summer youth camp with Elliot and Steve Kenan, twins from Philadelphia
who also became unwittingly entwined in the assassination story.
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. [38]
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. [39]
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. [40] After leaving Philadelphia,
the Quebec to Guantamano marchers
went to Washington D.C.
where one of the more ludacrist episode 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.
[41]
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 in order to travel around Mexico
on a motorcycle. In Mexico City,
Kenin fell in with a group who stayed at the Quaker student 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.
[42]
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. [43]
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. [44]
Kenin’s possible association with Oswald, or an Oswald
look-a-like/imposter at Rittenhouse Square
and Mexico City, certainly raises
new questions that have yet to be answered.
One of the 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.
And the question that is especially important is - did Phil
Ochs maintained his association with the US Air Force intelligence officers who
ran the undercover ROTC operations against student radicals when he was in
college?
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 Fourth street in Greenwich
Village in NY which graced the cover of Dylan’s “Freewheelin’” album, and the
song, “Boots of Spanish Leather,” said to be dedicated to her. [45]
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 the
French Quarter in New Orleans and Dealey
Plaza in Dallas.
ROAD TRIP
VIA DEALEY PLAZA
While there are other road trips of note that are a part of
the assassination lure - such as the Huma Bunker Raid [46], Ruth Paine’s summer
vacation [47] (which wound up at Oswald’s apartment in New Orleans), and the
caravan of Cubans that included Marita Lorenz that reportedly went from Florida
to Dallas with a cache of arms, [48] Bob Dylan’s cross country trip is
illustrative since it included stops at relevant assassination sites in
Louisiana and Texas.
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 Pete Karman, a British writer and reporter for the
London Daily Mirror who was later replaced on the trip by Bob Neuwirth. [49]
Peter Karman 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. [50]
“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.”
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”), who had been in the Cuban
mountains with Castro when he was a struggling revolutionary. [51]
Also in San Francisco, at the Monterey International Pop
Music Festival, David Crosby of the Byrds tells the crowd that the Warren
Report is a lie & that JFK was killed by many guns in a conspiracy, and
dedicates the song, "He Was a Friend of Mine," to JFK. [52]
Back in New York.
Dylan began to associate with Albert Maher, [53] another Castro activist from Texas,
who had been to Cuba.
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.”
So after breaking up with Dylan, Suze took up with Al Maher,
the son of a Houston, Texas
industrialist who had been to Cuba
and supported Castro, and who Dylan dedicated his Tom Paine Award.
DYLAN & OSWALD
Back in New York Dylan also hung
out with Geno Foreman [54] “… a zany motorcycle maverick, Bostonian who
appealed to Dylan….” whose father, Clark
Foreman, [55] 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..."
[56 - For transcript of complete speech,
Corlis Lamont’s note and follow up letter-poem]
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.” [57]
CHILE COUP BENEFIT CONCERT
Wiki on Ochs and Chile:
“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 Víctor Jara,
an Allende supporter, and the two became friends….[58]
“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.”
[59]
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". [60]
“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 severly 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 unti 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.” [62]
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 justblown away,
and we were silent. And it was very—you know, very moving. And he told us about
Víctor Jara and that he had to do this to avenge Víctor’s death for his wife
and child.” [63]
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….. He could not prove he
was in Dallas anyway because the
lost tapes and films did not come out till 12 years later. That was no accident
either. Grossman was managing Phil when he was in Dallas
and I found out that Grossman had Peter Paul and Mary booked for a concert at SMU
in Dallas that day but it was
cancelled two weeks before with no return date in the notice.” [64]
The 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….” [65]
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…..”
Senator Pat Dodd of Connecticut, the
first Senator after Joe McCarthy to be censored by the Senate for using
campaign contributions for his own use, held Congressional hearings of the
Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee on banning mail order pistols and specifically
targeted Seaport Traiders, from whom Oswald allegedly ordered his pistol
from.
Dodd actually ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and in
Summer of ’63 investigated the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee.
One of Dodd’s staff members was arrested in Cuba and for an
arms violation at Hyannisport, Mass. When JFK was there. Sen. Dodd’s son
Christopher Dodd (Conn.) was
involved with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). See:
Tanenbaucm. Corruption of Blood.
Ochs also wrote songs about articles he read in the
newspapers, including songs on the Bay of Pigs, the John
Birch Society, General Walker and the assassination of Medgar Evers. [66]
Also see: Evica, George Michael. And We Are All Mortal (Trinday, 2012) Link to Evica on Dodd.
Tanenbaum, Robert K. Corruption
of Blood (Signet, 1992).
PHIL OCHAS AS CIA AGENT JOHN BUTLER TRAIN
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 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.” [67]
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. [68]
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.”
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.”
“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.” [69]
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.” [70]
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. [71]
SEAN PHILLIPS
Sean Phillips 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 Grover
contacted Sean Phillips, via Facebook, and asked him how he got the song and he
replied he and Phil wrote it together. Then he corrected himself, explaining: "He
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 friends Apt. Needless to say, we
were both a tad wired from the evening, ya know, one of those all nighters.
Cheers.,… Shawn " [72]
It turns out that David Atlee Phillips was Shawn's Uncle,
brother to Shawn's father, James Atlee Philips. [73]
CONCLUSION
Whether or not Phil Ochs was at Dealey Plaza at the time of
the assignation and is in the photo as Jim Glover contends, Phil Ochs had a
number of close associations with others that would have possibly given him foreknowledge
of the assassination, and links to the perpetrators - including contacts he
made at the Virginia Military Academy, Air Force ROTC at Ohio State University
(Columbus, Ohio), while assisting Chile coup refugees, and the “young and
upcoming” Air Force lieutenant he said was working with in 1974 (Michael
Dugan?) as well as Sean Phillips, David Atlee Phillips’ nephew.
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.
SOURCES:
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.
Footnotes to PO in DP
1. O’Brian,
Gary Oswald's
Politics.(Trafford Pub. 2010 p. 128 )
2. Ochs,
Phil. Song title?
3. 1968
Democratic National Convention, Chicago.
Reminiscences
4. Education
Forum - link:
5. Photo
from film a) Dal-Tex Houston Street,
12:35 pm 11/22/63
6. Ochs,
Phil. Discography link:
7. Ochs,
Phil. “Draft Dogger Rag” link:
8. WXPN
- Meatball Fulton link /WMMR - Dave
Herman link
9. Dealey
Plaza photo from film “The First
Shot.”
10. Wiki Entry
- Phil Ochs link
11. Glover, Jim
- Facebook link
12. Glover, Jim
- Emailed recollections
13. ROTC on
campus
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’s papers
are archived at the college library.)
15. CHAOS CIA
- US Army Reserve Memphis links
16. Kent
State Agitator
18. Staunton
Va. Military Academy
link
19. Campus
Radical Files
20. Roth, Phil.
“Goodbye Columbus” novel & film links
21. Flint,
Larry. Rebel Mag.
22. DISC -
Defense Industrial Security Command first mentioned in unpublished manuscript.
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.
24. Gen
Dynamics - Former FBI agent Hale worked in security at Gen. Dynamics. His sons
broke into the Vegas apartment of J.C. Exner and his wife got Oswald jobs from
the Texas Employment Commission.
25. Collins
Radio - Tippit 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 subpoened 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, Bob
Dylan (McGraw Hill, NY.)
28. Scaduto,
Anthony - Dylan - An Intimate Biography
(x) Song comp.
29. Glover,
Jim. Emailed recollections.
30. Dylan on 11/22/63
31. Ochs, Phil.
Liner notes re: “That Was the President.”
“Crucifixion.” - the assassination made Phil Ochs cry,
attributed in footnotes to Michael Schumacher, Ochs cried = Schumaker
“Crucifixion” Wiki link
Re: Ochs and RFK. Newfield, Jack - RFK Cries [21][22]21 Newfield,
Jack (2002). Somebody's Gotta
Tell It: A Journalist's Life on the Lines. (New York:
St. Martin's Press. pp. 176–178.)
Gates, Anita (June 7, 1998). "The Private Side of a Political Story".The NY Times.
Alice Skinner -
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.”
Where is Alice Skinner today? And is she related to Barbara
Skinner sisters from Booklyn/Cape May.
X2 Glover version of ‘Crucifixion’
32. Suze Rotolo
- Rotolo, Suze (2008), A Freewheelin’
Time: A Memoir of Greenwich
Village in the Sixites (NY,
Broadway Books, P. 249.)
33. Elliot
& Steve Kenin. Basic background.
34. Oswald at Rittenhouse
Square links to docs.
35. The March
in Minsk. Did Lee or Marina meet
the marchers?
36. Robinson
and Wilcox fight in DC
37. Records on
Kenin in Mexico City. Interview w/
SK.
38. LICOZY3.
See: Russo, Gus “Live By the Sword” (
“x”) “Brothers In Arms” (‘y”)
39. Chris
Smither in Mexico City
40. Freewheelen’
- Rotolo, Suze (“X”) Link to album cover photo.
41. Huma Bunker
Raid link:
42. Ruth
Paine’s summer vacation
43. Lorenz,
Marita.
44. Dylan’s
Cross-Country Trip Scaduto, Anthony. Dylan
- An Intimate Biography (1972 Signet NY, p. 197), they asked directions to Dealey
Plaza.
45. Karman,
Peter. British journalist, is quoted in Dylan bio but strangely does not appear
to have written about Dylan or the roadtrip himself.
46. Farina,
Richard. “Been Down So Long It Looks Like
Up To Me” (x” ) Ref to IRA and with Castro in Cuba.
47. Monterey
Pop - Croby, David. “He Was a Friend of
Mine.”
48. Maher,
Albert. Houston, Tx., Cuba.
49. Foreman,
Geno
50. Foreman,
Clark
51. ECLC Speech
and letter link:
52. Dylan’s
Explanation : source to bio.
53. Wiki on Oakes
and Chile
54. With Lennon
et al.
55. Australia
and attack in Africa
56. Spitz, Bob.
Dylan (‘x”)
57. Felt Forum
benefit Felt Forum, Dylan, BS p. 437
58. Linda Cohen
59. Jim Glover
Benefit Concert for Chile
Chile Spitz, Bob (Dylan, A Bio, McGraw-Hill, 1989) p. 432
60.
61. Senator
Dodd
62. John Butler
Train. McGowan, Dave.
63. Michael
Ochs
64. Death
65. Bela Abzug.
Congressional Record. April 29, 1976.
66. Wiki on
Ochs FBI files.
67. Sean
Phillips
68. Uncle Dave.
James Atlee Phillps.
69. Outstanding
Questions.
- Wiki
- Scaduto, Anthony Dylan
- An Intimate Biography (Signet 1971) ,p. 186-7, 188, p. 197),p. 205)
- Robert Sheldon in his biography of Dylan No
Direction Home - The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Beech Tree Books, Morrow,
NY 1986, p. 259 - ),
- Bob Spitz, in Dylan, A
Biography, McGraw-Hill, 1989) p. 432
