A BRIEF HISTORY OF COPA - Updated
There at the conception, I can accurately describe the
origins and early history of COPA – the Coalition on Political Assassination.
Having a profound interest in the assassination of President
Kennedy, and disenchanted with the sealing of the records of the Warren
Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), I
co-founded the Committee for an Open Archives (COA )
with my old college mate John Judge.
We had attended the University of Dayton, Ohio together, and
after focusing my History and Latin American Studies research on Cuba and the
Bay of Pigs, I began to notice the common attributes and same players involved
in the assassination of President Kennedy and Watergate. With John Judge and
many others, we had lobbied Congress to reinvestigate the assassination, but were
annoyed when the HSCA sealed their records away for 50 years in 1978.
There were many conferences on the assassination over the
years and decades, and a number of significant organizations that led to the
HSCA investigation, including one founded by Mark Lane and another
Assassination Information Bureau out of Boston, which opened a DC office for
awhile.
But with the impending release of Oliver Stone’s movie
"JFK" and a new flurry of books on the subject, the most popular
conferences were held in Dallas, the most significant organized by Gary Shaw at
the Omni Hotel. Shaw may have had a hand in the establishment of the
Assassination Information Center (AIC), which ran out of storefront mall in the
West End district behind the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD).
After Shaw’s original conference, a professional conference
company from Texas organized and presented two, may three conferences under the
title ASK. During the second conference, at which there were some conflicts
between the organizers and researchers and presenters, it was then suggested
that instead of paying a commercial, for-profit firm to attend conferences, so
they can make money off of us, we considered forming our own
researcher-oriented organization and hold our own conferences.
On the last day of the three day ASK conference, those who
expressed obvious dissatisfaction with the way the ASK conferences were run
were invited to a special lunch meeting at the West End Pub. About a dozen or
so people attended, and put some tables together so business could be discussed
while we had lunch.
John Newman, Bill Turner, John Craig, myself and others
discussed the vision of what a new organization of assassination researchers
would be like and what it could accomplish. After much discussion, John Newman
gave an inspiring speech and endorsement, emphasizing that with the passage of
the JFK Act of 1992 and the establishment of the Assassination Records Review
Board (ARRB), such an organization would necessarily be based in Washington
D.C., where the expected Congressional hearings would be held, the National
Archives (NARA ) were located, and
where all the future action would be. "We need researchers with boots on
the ground in Washington," is the way Newman put it.
That’s about all that was decided at the first meeting in
Dallas, but word quickly spread through the ASK participants and lists of names
and contact numbers were passed around and collected.
The first meetings in Washington D.C. were held over the
course of a two-day, Saturday-Sunday weekend at the Quaker Meeting House on Capitol
Hill, as arranged by John Judge. This group of about two dozen, invited
individuals, sat facing each other around tables arranged in a square.
Dr. Cyril Wecht chaired the first meetings, asking everyone
to take turns introducing themselves, their name, where they were from and
interest in the organization and why it should be formed.
This group, primarily professionals – lawyers, doctors,
academics, with research into political assassinations being the primary bond
between them, laid the groundwork for the formation of the organization.
From New Jersey I drove to DC with Bob Danello, a Cherry
Hill, N.J. police lieutenant who had previously joined the Committee for an
Open Archive (COA ) and had a keen
interest in the assassination of JFK, the Cuban angles in particular. He was a
big COPA supporter and silent benefactor.
At the table I sat next to Professor Peter Dale Scott, who I
met for the first time. Also present were others who I would come to know well
over the next decade or so – Jim Lesar of the Assassinations Archives Research
Center (AARC), FOIA attorney Dan Alcorn, Bill Davis, of the Christic Institute
and John Newman, among others.
The first meeting, on Saturday, included two guys from
Philadelphia, one of whom was invited and the other a hanger on, who began to
disrupt the meeting by agitating other participants, espousing weird ideas,
expressing opinions on every topic and monopolizing the discussion. John Judge
was the hatchet man who made sure those who disrupted the first session were not
at the second, and things ran a lot more smoothly the second day.
I went to lunch on the first day of the meetings with Bill
Davis, who I knew was a Catholic Jesuit priest with the Christic Institute, a
radical, pro-active organization that had Dan Sheehan file a RICO suit against
those involved in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Most of the participants on both days walked around the
corner from the Quaker Meeting House to a row of bars and restaurants, and
settled on The Hawk & the Dove, where we took up most of the tables in a
back room, continuing the discussions from the meeting.
As the least known and most quiet participant, my most
notable contribution was in the last session on the second day, when someone
finally asked if there any other items that need to be considered and I said
that we still had to come up with a name for the organization.
Sitting next to Scott, I had scribbled a series of
acronymns, trying to find one that made sense and was easy to say. At first
"political assassination" was all I had to work with but after awhile
it came down to Committee on Political Assassination or Coalition on Political
Assassination – COPA. Which I passed to Scott to have him make the suggestion,
which was accepted without debate.
A few months later another major, two day, series of weekend
meetings were held at a hotel in DC’s Chinatown, where further details of COPA
were ironed out. There were probably close to a hundred people at this series
of meetings, which included a number of important individuals who were not at
previous meetings, like Jim DiEugenio of Citizens for Truth in the Kennedy
Assassination (CTKA), a California based group of researchers, Gary Aguilar and
Tink Thompson, among others.
At one of these meetings it was decided to make COPA a
coalition of the three existing organizations – Lesar’s Assassination Archives
and Research Center (AARC), the Committee for an Open Archives (COA ) and Jim DiEugenio’s CTKA, with the idea that
other non-profits organizations with similar goals and ideals would be included
later.
The first Governing Board consisted of Gary Aguilar, MD,
Daniel S. Alcorn, Esq., Walter Brown, Ph.D., Jim DiEugenio, James Lesar, Esq.,
Phil Melanson, Ph.D., John Judge, Janette Rainwatear, Ph.D, Josiah Thompson,
Ph.D., Professor Peter Dale Scott and Dr. Cyril Wecht.
The Advisory Board included Gaeton Fonzi, Patrick Fourmy,
Robert Groden, Ed Lopez Soto, David Mantick, M.D., Ph.D., Sarah McClendon,
Wallace Milan, John Newman, Ph.D., Michael Parenti, Ph.D., Dick Russell, Wayne
Smith, Ph.D., Oliver Stone, Robert Tanenbaum, Esq., William Turner, Jack White.
When Peter Dale Scott later resigned from the Governing
Board, he was replaced by Carol Hewett, Esq., who later went over to LANCER.
There was a lot of enthusiasm in the air with the belated
establishment of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) and of COPA’s
new role of citizen overseers of the Review Board, with the first and second
COPA national conferences in DC being the best and most significant.
Held at the Washington Sheraton and Omni Shoreham Hotels in
consecutive years (1994-1995), the early COPA conferences had committees that
reviewed abstracts that were submitted for presentation and a series of
speakers that were carefully planned out.
The main speakers addressed hundreds of people in the main
ballroom, while other presentations were made by researchers in side rooms,
with Judge Tunheim, the head of the ARRB, addressing both DC conferences and
recognizing COPA as the primary research organization that was monitoring the
work of the Review Board.
Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, John Armstrong, Dick Russell,
Bill Turner, Phil Melanson, Cyril Wecht and others who had written or were
writing books on the assassination spoke in the main room, while Ed Haslem,
Frank Debenedictis, Martin Shackelford, Hal Verb, Carol Hewett and myself gave
additional talks or held panel discussions on special subjects in the side
rooms.
It was at the second conference at the Omni when I was
called over to a side table where Prof. George Michael Evica and Debra Conway
were talking. They told me that they were thinking of starting another
organization, "to educate the next generation of researchers," and I
said that COPA needed more organizations to enlarge the umbrella of groups we
worked with and increase our numbers and power. I didn’t realize that Debra
would start a privately held for-profit organization JFK LANCER that would end
up competing with COPA in holding annual conferences in Dallas for the next
decade.
It was at the second COPA meeting when I met personally with
Wayne Smith, who I asked about his experiences working in the Havana embassy
when Castro came to power. Smith told me that he worked there with David Atlee
Phillips, and participated in an amateur acting troupe with Phillips. He also
knew Col. Kael, David Morales and other Havana characters who became entwined
in the assassination mythology.
It was out of that COPA conference that Wayne Smith began to
organize a series of meetings between COPA members and the Cubans, held in Rio
and the Bahamas.
[For transcripts of some of these talks see: Cuban Archives
].
One of the most important COPA conferences was held in
Dallas at the Hotel Lawrence and Union Station in November 1998, the 35th
anniversary of the assassination. While the speakers on the Grassy Knoll were
terrific, the news media chose to ignore us, though I did tape record the
speeches and typed out a transcript that I later posted on the internet [See:
The Event that Didn’t Happen].
COPA was in disarray however, and more and more COPA members
were defecting to JFK Lancer, which was holding competing conferences in Dallas
at the same time. So with the ARRB dissolving and Lancer taking members, the
three COPA organizations were strapped for money. AARB, which has a huge
archives that needed storage rent, and CTKA, which published PROBE magazine, so
there was an effort by some members of the governing board to dissolve COPA.
While I understood the motivations behind the move, I urged
those on the governing board – Dr. Gary Aguliar, Jim DiEugenio and Cyril Wecht,
to try to keep COPA going because the situation may change in the future and we
could never start from the beginning again. By this time John Judge, COPA
secretary with no voting power, didn’t care if COPA kept flying or crashed, as
he was discusted with all the work he was putting in and getting only grief –
from those who didn’t have enough time to make their presentations, didn’t want
to pay for the dinner, felt they were slighted for some reason or another, etc.
he took all the heat.
Although I thought my arguments to keep COPA going may have
made a difference, I later learned that when the move to dissolve COPA was
made, COPA attorney Dan Alcorn said that an on-going civil suit with the
Department of Defense had been filed under COPA’s name – COPA vs. DOD, for the
US Army After Action Reports from Memphis during the assassination of Martin
Luther King. They didn’t dissolve COPA at the time because of the suit, which
turned out to be pretty significant.
Although the Appeals Court ruled against COPA, the Army
ended up leaking the After Action Report (AAR) Summary to a Memphis newspaper,
and the negative publicity from the COPA suit is acknowledged as the reason
behind the release of the previously secret records. [See: Phil Melanson].
Phil Melanson, John Judge, Dan Alcorn, Dr. William Pepper
and other COPA members took an active role in the Martin Luther King
assassination civil trial, which developed evidence of a conspiracy and won in
court in Memphis.
When Lesar and the AARC and DiEugenio and CTKA left COPA,
the Coalition continued but instead of a coalition of organizations it became
an association of individual members, and was supported primarily by them, with
a few special patrons.
Led primarily by Dr. Cyril Wecht as President and John Judge
its director, COPA has continued to hold annual regional conferences in Memphis
in April and Los Angeles in June and Dallas in November, and the Hidden History
Museum was officially incorporated as a non-profit in Washington D.C.
But with the death of COPA director John Judge shortly after
the 50th Anniversary of the assassination in November 2013, the
future of COPA is once again up in jeopardy, and its original board and long
time members must decide its fate.
Please make the following corrections to your article.
ReplyDelete1. JFK Lancer is a resource company. Our goal has always be to provide our community with the resources needed. To not take advantage of a resource such as JFK Lancer was a poor business decision. Additionally, since JFK Lancer is a company and not an organization, no one can "join".
2. The discussion between George Michael Evica was me asking him to be the editor of the "Assassination Chronicles" magazine, a position he accepted. Later he became the Chairman of our conference in Dallas as well. JFK Lancer was already in existence.
2. JFK Lancer began holding a conference because of two reasons. My experience in holding events and the exhortation from many researchers who were leaders in our community.
3. JFK Lancer was incorporated so that my partner, Tom Jones, and I could make decisions without having a board and also to protect our families in case some irrational person or persons sued us. Our contract with each other included a clause that neither of us would receive a salary or any payment for our time. We would receive only payment for expenses. My husband took care of my expenses for many years. At this time we have two paid part-time people who began after my severe health problems. We also pay a bookkeeper and tax preparation professional annually. Neither Tom or I are paid.
Lastly, but critical to this discussion, in my position as president of JFK Lancer I offered many solutions to the situation of two conferences in Dallas. I was always turned down by the leaders of COPA no matter how generous my offers. Their failure to capitalize on another group/company incurring the expenses of a conference was out of my hands.
Sincerely,
Debra Conway