The Underwood Hoax
11 December 2008
11 December 2008
By Max Holland
On October 28,
Bloomsbury USA published Brothers in Arms, Gus Russo’s second book on the
Kennedy assassination, co-authored with Stephen Molton. The book came
well-blurbed, with Diane McWhorter, Joe Califano, and Daniel Schorr singing its
praises.
Bloomsbury’s
press release boasted that Brothers in Arms contained “explosive new
information” about the role of Castro’s Cuba in the assassination. One of the
specific disclosures was advertised as coming from “deathbed interviews” of
Marty Underwood, “one of LBJ’s closest confidantes, a man who also was in
charge of Johnson’s international security arrangements.” At LBJ’s behest,
Underwood allegedly went on a secret mission to Mexico City in 1968 to find out
what the CIA really knew about Cuban involvement in JFK’s assassination.
Underwood’s “revelations, supported by his contemporaneous notes, reveal a
shocking truth that was too dangerous to be disclosed . . . until after his
passing.”[1]
Next
month, Washington Decoded will review Brothers in Arms in
full, and examine all its allegations in light of the available evidence. This
month is devoted solely to the backstory about Marty Underwood’s shocking
truth.
If it weren’t so
pathetic, the backstory might actually be amusing.
Death of a President and Birth of a
Fabricator
Underwood’s
penchant for telling tall tales first became evident in 1967, with publication
of William Manchester’s The Death of a President.
Manchester
interviewed Underwood on June 21, 1965 for the book, which was originally
envisioned as the Kennedys’ authorized account of the assassination. How and
why Manchester came to interview Underwood, who was the advance man for only
the Houston leg of the Texas trip, is not precisely known. The advance men for
the Fort Worth and Dallas legs, Jeb Byrne and Jack Puterbaugh, were not interviewed,
although their recollections would seem to have been even more valuable to
Manchester’s narrative. The only plausible explanation for why Byrne and
Puterbaugh were ignored is that Manchester believed Underwood was present
during the devastating aftermath, in particular, the moment when Lyndon B.
Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One.
But Underwood was
not there.
Manchester put
Underwood on the airplane, and even identified him in the iconic picture of the
swearing-in that was taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton.
The spectators who were to be framed
in Stoughton’s lens were a lopsided group. [Presidential physician George]
Burkley stood behind someone else . . . there were [press secretary Mac]
Kilduff and his two pool reporters [Newsweek’s Charles Roberts and UPI’s
Merriman Smith]. There was [Martin] Underwood, and there were three Kennedy
secretaries—Evelyn [Lincoln], Mary [Gallagher], and Pam [Turnure]—each of whom
was led in by Jack Valenti and Lem Johns.[2]
It was
conceivable, of course, that Manchester made this mistake on his own,
becauseThe Death of a President had more than its share of factual
mistakes. But another passage in the book made it clear that the source of the
false claim had to be Underwood himself.[3]
According to this
passage, Underwood was sound asleep in Houston’s Rice Hotel, 600 miles [sic]
away, when the shots were fired in Dallas. In the mistaken belief that he was
an important part of the presidential entourage, the hotel’s staff roused
Underwood out of bed and rushed him to the airport, where he just managed to
catch a scheduled flight to Dallas. “Afterward [Underwood] would have only the
haziest recollection of how he had got there . . . . He was nowhere near as
important as the Rice management had thought him to be. Except as a dazed
witness to the upcoming [swearing-in] ceremony he was useless.” [4]
Not only was
Underwood not captured in Stoughton’s famous picture—nor in any
of the 21 stills made immediately before, during, and after the
ceremony—Underwood was not even on board the airplane, as a manifest prepared by the Secret Service in February
1964 proves.[5] Manchester was deceived by Underwood, who
in his spare time actually studied and collected information about how con men
operated, according to Jeb Byrne, one of his advance team colleagues from the
1960s. One of the lessons Underwood learned, apparently, was how to
construct a lie out of a kernel of truth. In this instance, Underwood did
actually rush from Houston to Dallas. But he returned to Washington
aboard Air Force Two, not the airplane carrying a new president and the
body of John F. Kennedy.[6]
Among his peers,
Underwood, who was divorced for a second time in 1962, had a reputation even
back then for embellishing his peripheral role as an advance man, always making
him more central to events than he was. When queried about why Underwood
inserted himself in this iconic moment, Harold Pachios, who worked alongside
Underwood as an advance man in the 1960s, recalled in October 2006 that
Underwood was a “lonely guy who battled a drinking problem . . . and wanted to
be important.”[7]
Putting himself
aboard Air Force One, at a moment of national trauma, would not be
Underwood’s last fabrication, and far from his worst. In the years to come, he
would hoodwink two of the biggest names in American journalism.
Putting on the Post
In 1971,
a Washington Post staff writer named Richard Cohen got wind of
Underwood, who was then living in Towson, Maryland, and working for Democratic
Governor Marvin Mandel. Underwood’s stories were so colorful that Cohen, who
covered Maryland state politics, ended up writing an article on the affable,
voluble advance man. The long profile appeared in the “Outlook” section of
the Post on August 8, 1971, and stated, among many other
things, that Underwood
orchestrated mobs in Mexico City,
stared down admirals in the Pacific, [and] rode on Air Force One the
time Bill Moyers had the plane dive over the Mekong Delta to draw hostile fire.[8]
Underwood’s
fascinating yarns made for an entertaining feature article. It was replete with
colorful quotes—always recounted by Underwood—that were supposedly uttered by
such well-known Democratic presidential operatives as Ken O’Donnell, Jack
Valenti, and Moyers. The only problem was that the article was littered with
untruths and exaggerations—not mistakes by the reporter, but falsehoods fed to
a credulous Cohen by Underwood.
In February 2006,
about a year before his death, Jack Valenti, a special assistant to LBJ from
1963 to 1966, was asked to read the 1971 Washington Post article.
Valenti was one of Johnson’s closest aides, and really was aboard Air
Force One on the flight back to Washington. He wrote the following after
reading Cohen’s profile.
I suggest that you send this article
to Bill Moyers. Marty is so full of shit I was more amused than angry. He was a
sub-level aide [during the trip to Texas]. Every quote of me is false . . . . I
do believe Moyers will get a kick out of Marty’s hallucinations.[9]
The errors, large
and small, are too numerous to list. Underwood was described as one of the
few staffers who rode Air Force One back to Washington with LBJ on
November 22.The article also asserted Underwood subsequently “won the confidence
and friendship of a president [Johnson] who dispensed both sparingly.”[10]
But the record shows that LBJ only knew
Underwood as one of several advance men, though he probably was Johnson’s
favorite. The president’s daily diary, which lists every significant encounter
Johnson had while in office, reveals that Underwood met with Johnson a total of
five times: twice in 1966, twice in 1967, and once in 1968. Only one of these
meetings occurred in the Oval Office, and none of them were with the president
alone. In two instances, Underwood was simply listed as being among groups of
140 and 250 people who were in the same room as the president. Another
time he hitched a ride back on Air Force One after advancing a
presidential trip to Tennessee. And Underwood’s one meeting in the Oval Office,
to discuss the president’s travel plans with Secret Service agents and two
presidential aides, lasted a total of 10 minutes.[11]
Misleading the Sun
Eight years after
the Post article, Underwood was the subject of a cover story
in Sun, theBaltimore Sun’s Sunday magazine. This profile was not
unlike Richard Cohen’s piece in that its focus was Underwood’s exploits as an
advance man for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In hindsight though, the real
significance of this article is that it illustrated how Underwood weaved his
tales over time for the press. He had familiarized himself with enough actual
minutiae—probably from reading William Manchester carefully—to make his
detailed but fictitious accounts fit with known facts that were easily
verifiable. Yet each time Underwood told his story about November 22, 1963, his
own role grew a little bigger and grander, almost as if he could not help
himself.
No longer content
with the drama of being rushed from Houston to Dallas to board
(supposedly) Air Force One after the assassination, in 1979 Underwood
put himself for the first time in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting.
Underwood told the Sun writer, “I was in the motorcade that day in
Dallas . . . . With all the noise in Dealey Plaza I honestly never heard
the shots that killed the president. I only knew something was very wrong when
our car suddenly speeded up.”[12]
Underwood’s
role in the assassination’s aftermath also received a little more filigree in
1979. He correctly noted that Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had
dictated the oath of office to Marie Fehmer, one of LBJ’s secretaries, but
also inserted himself into the middle of that action:
“In that
awful agony of the assassination, nobody knew the words for the presidential
oath . . . . Bobby Kennedy’s office in Washington was called and Nick
Katzenbach read back the oath. Marie Fehmer . . . typed out the oath on
two 5-by-7 cards. However, she left a blank space on both cards where the name
of the new president would appear.”
“To avoid
any possible error at such a critical time, I took the cards from Marie and
penciled in the blank spaces on both cards the name, ’Lyndon Baines
Johnson.’One was given to Johnson and another to Judge Sarah Hughes, an old
friend of [Johnson’s] who had been brought on board to administer the oath . .
. . When it was done, I took back the cards and simply put them in my pocket. I
wasn’t thinking about history then. I just took back the cards. I still have
them and some day I’ll turn them over to the Johnson Library in Texas.”[13]
Another
passage in the Sun profile worth noting concerned President Johnson’s
trip to Mexico City in 1966, a visit which Underwood advanced. This passage is
especially interesting in light of Underwood’s later claims involving Win
Scott, the longtime CIA chief of station in Mexico City. According to
the Sun article,
A trip to Mexico
City . . . established Marty Underwood as the “genius of the tribe” among
advance men. It was apparent to him that President Johnson wanted a crowd there
that would exceed the number who had turned out to greet President Kennedy . . .
. In Mexico City he was told that it would be impossible to produce a
crowd with only two days’ notice. Mr. Underwood persisted and went to the
Central Intelligence Agency man in the American Embassy and asked him who the
real strong man in Mexico was. That would not be President Ordaz, the CIA man
said, but Interior Minister Luis Echevarría.
“I went to
Echevarría,” Mr. Underwood says . . . . [Echevarría] swung around in his
chair . . . and opened up a wall panel which concealed six telephones. He used
five of them and turned back to me and said, ’You will have your crowd.’”[14]
In
Underwood’s hands, the truth was like clay, ready to be molded according to the
exigencies of the moment. Thus, what started out as a simple and probably
accurate description of his one-and-only encounter with Win Scott could be
eventually transformed, given enough time and an over-trustful listener, into a
clandestine mission undertaken at the behest of a president.
Deluding the Folks Back Home
In 1991, the next
time Martin Underwood foisted his increasingly tall tales on a newspaper, the
victim was his hometown paper, the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa.
Underwood told the
reporter that “constant rumors” of an assassination attempt had prompted him to
ask Ken O’Donnell to have the limousine’s bubble-top flown to Dallas, whereupon
the president refused Jackie’s pleas to use it.[15] Underwood also became more specific
about the fib he had told Sun magazine: now he asserted he rode “just
four vehicles behind the convertible carrying” President Kennedy on the fateful
day.[16]Simultaneously, Katzenbach and Marie Fehmer
were written completely out of his revised untruth. Underwood confided that
Bobby Kennedy himself had dictated the wording of the oath to Underwood, “who
wrote them on postcards he’s saved to this day.”
JFK had been scheduled to make
two speeches on November 22, one in Dallas and one in Austin, and Underwood
also told the hapless reporter that he had the only extant copies because “Bobby
Kennedy [had] ordered them destroyed.”[17] Finally, after the swearing-in
ceremony, a distraught Ken O’Donnell had given Underwood a “treasured
keepsake”—the tie clasp Kennedy was supposedly wearing when he was
assassinated.[18]
Such falsehoods
and fairy tales, for the most part, were self-serving buncombe that hurt no
one. But for the first time, Underwood also ventured into telling some darker
lies.
Underwood
expressed the belief that the Mafia was involved in a Cuban conspiracy to kill
Kennedy in retaliation for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. “At least one of the
three or four shots came from the Mafia,” he told the Dubuque reporter, but FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover had covered up the Mafia’s involvement. Why? Because
Hoover had wanted to control the Secret Service and “Kennedy had told Hoover he
would be out after the election,” Underwood asserted, oblivious to the illogic
of it all.[19]
Enter Russo
Although
Underwood’s fabrications were mostly harmless, or so obscure that they went
unnoticed, in 1993 that started to change.[20] The precipitating factor was Underwood’s
first meeting with an assassination researcher named Gus Russo. Eventually, via
Russo, the Maryland fabulist would come into contact with two of the most
prominent names in journalism.
When he first met
Underwood, Russo had just finished spending 20 months working as one of
two main reporters for a PBS Frontline documentary entitled, “Who
Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” It would air for the first time on the 30th
anniversary of the assassination, to great and deserved acclaim. Russo had
never once heard the name “Marty Underwood” during
the Frontlineinvestigation, or for that matter, during the 25 previous
years he had spent researching the JFK assassination on his own. But over the
course of a few lunches, he quickly became enthralled with Underwood’s
supposedly inside dope about LBJ and Hoover, JFK’s liaisons with Marilyn Monroe
and Judy Campbell, the alleged rigging of the 1960 West Virginia primary, and,
of course, the November 1963 trip to Texas.[21]
Russo had reason
to doubt Underwood from the very beginning. As a student of the assassination,
Russo knew that the passage in Manchester’s book about Underwood’s presence
aboard Air Force One was false. But instead of Russo taking it as a
warning sign, Underwood turned it into an opportunity to dupe Russo. Underwood
asserted that Manchester was responsible for the error. Indeed, Underwood said
he had gotten so angry when he read The Death of a President that he
protested the error to Manchester. Russo ended up convinced about
Underwood’s fidelity and respect for the truth, even though Underwood was the
actual perpetrator of the lie and the only thing Manchester was guilty of was being
gullible.[22]
In the fall of
1996, the famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh came into contactwith
Russo. Hersh had been working on an exposé of John F. Kennedy since 1992 for
Little, Brown publishers, and in July 1996, had sold the television rights in
advance to Lancer Productions, an independent producer of documentaries. From
the fall of 1996 onwards, Hersh and Lancer employees, including Gus
Russo, collaborated on the research and reporting. Hersh would publish
his book, and Lancer was to produce a documentary based on the book for ABC
News.
When Hersh “hit a
wall” trying to corroborate a story about the Mafia, a Kennedy mistress named
Judy Campbell, and the West Virginia primary in May 1960, Russo told the
veteran journalist that he just happened to have a source who knew all about
it. His name was Marty Underwood.[23]
Perhaps as no
surprise—the charge was serious, after all, and this was the big time—Underwood
repeatedly put off meeting Hersh, despite Hersh’s strong expressions of
interest in what Underwood had to say. Finally, after Underwood had run out of
excuses, a lunch was arranged and Underwood wove his tale before Hersh, Russo,
and a Lancer producer. Underwood said that in April 1960, Ken O’Donnell had
assigned him to tail Judy Campbell on a train from Washington to Chicago and
make sure she delivered a package to Mafia boss Sam Giancana.
The story
subsequently appeared in Hersh’s 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot. Judy
Campbell was more than the president’s sex partner, wrote Hersh. She was also
JFK’s bagman, and her story about delivering money to Chicago
was buttressed during research for
this book by Martin E. Underwood, a political operative for Richard Daley, the
Chicago mayor, who lent Underwood to the Kennedy campaign in 1960. Underwood
worked closely with Kenny O’Donnell, who told him in April 1960 to take the
overnight train from Washington to Chicago and keep an eye on [Campbell].
Underwood dutifully spent the night on the train and . . . watched [Campbell]
early the next morning give the satchel to the waiting Sam Giancana.[24]
This canard never
got quite the attention it deserved because of a controversy over some forged
documents that Hersh almost included in The Dark Side of Camelot. That was
unfortunate, especially because Hersh demanded to be judged not on the forgeries he left out of his book, but by what he put
in. By itself, Campbell’s fable had no credibility—her account of her
relationship with JFK had become more elaborate with every telling—but together
with Underwood’s story, Hersh considered the matter settled. If Hersh had
bothered to check out Underwood’s supposed corroboration, he would have
discovered Underwood had a penchant for telling reporters what they wanted to
hear, and that the story was absurd. The first time Underwood ever talked to
O’Donnell was in September 1960, five months after the Campbell’s alleged bag
job.[25]
But Underwood’s
corroboration acquired a life of its own. On December 4, 1997, ABC News
broadcast a two-hour Lancer-produced documentary, Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years, based on Hersh’s book.
The stench of a bad story should have become unbearable after Underwood refused
to repeat his lie on camera, citing one excuse after another. But during the
program, the late Peter Jennings, then the ABC anchorman, evenly explained that
“a Democratic campaign worker, Martin Underwood, has, for the first time,
corroborated Campbell’s account. Though he declined to be interviewed on
camera, he confirmed that he was asked to shadow her on the train and that he
watched her deliver the satchel to Giancana.”[26] Appearing on television threatened the
one thing Underwood had successfully avoided up to 1997: vast exposure and
ridicule.[27]
Proof that both
Russo and Hersh had been duped came in the 1998 report of theAssassination Records Review Board (ARRB), a special
federal panel created in 1992 to make available all records pertaining to the
Kennedy assassination. The ARRB investigated Underwood’s story as part of its
mandate, and the former advance man recanted when sitting across from a
government lawyer instead of reporters who were all ears and buying lunch.
Underwood “denied that he followed [Judy Campbell] on a train,” the ARRB
observed in its 1998 final report, “and [said] that he had no knowledge about
her alleged role as a courier.”[28]
An unchastened
Hersh moved on to other stories. But a deeply-invested Gus Russo was just
getting started.
The ARRB Gets to the Bottom
Despite all the
warnings, not to mention proof, that Underwood was a serial bamboozler, Russo
was not deterred. He readily accepted Underwood’s explanation for why he had
retracted everything he had told Russo since 1993. The ARRB “tried to interview
Marty, who consistently dodged their calls,” Russo later wrote. “They
threatened a subpoena. Marty called me and told me that if they persisted he
would have to lie to them and say I had completely misunderstood him. A
subpoena followed, and Marty eventually met with senior staff and told them
exactly that.”[29]
Freed from the
constraints imposed by Hersh and ABC, Russo now devoted his energies to
propagating Underwood’s biggest whopper of them all: that Cuba was involved in
the Kennedy assassination.
Russo had
first heard the outlines of this conspiracy theory back in 1994, during one of
his periodic lunches with Underwood. “Marty mentioned his friendship with the
late CIA Mexico City station chief Win Scott . . . who had played a critical
role in the investigation into [Lee Harvey] Oswald’s time in Mexico
City. “[Win] Scott, Marty said, was ‘probably the best friend I
had.’”[30] It took months of prodding from Russo,
however, before Underwood finally disclosed the rest of the story Russo was
eager to hear.
Underwood claimed
that in 1968, President Johnson had sent him on a secret mission to Mexico
City. LBJ wanted to know what Win Scott knew about “Cuban blowback,” since the
president had learned the CIA had tried to assassinate Castro in 1962-63. The
CIA station chief allegedly took Underwood to a safe house outside of the city,
and divulged what he had dared not tell anyone: that a “known Castro henchman”
had been in Mexico City when Oswald was there two months before JFK’s murder,
and this same henchman had also been in Dallas on November 22. His name,
Underwood later wrote on a postcard to Russo, was Fabián Escalante. Eventually,
Underwood also gave Russo photocopies that purported to be Underwood’s handwritten
notes from his 1968 meeting with Win Scott, written on White House
stationery.[31]
Russo wrote up
Underwood’s account, and prepared to mount an all-out investigation of this new
and explosive angle. By 1996, of course, Russo was working with Lancer
Productions and Hersh. Russo was crestfallen when “Marty . . . said he never
intended for the episode to be made public. He said he thought we were only
having lunch chatter, and he was right. [Underwood] asked me to not use the
material until after his death, and I reluctantly agreed.”[32]
Despite
Underwood’s stipulation, however, Russo could not resist sharing this
supposedly dramatic information with the ARRB on “deep background.”
Consequently, at the same interview during which the panel’s lawyer asked
Underwood about the Judy Campbell fable, Underwood was peppered with questions
about his alleged secret meeting with Win Scott.
At first, it was
effortless for Underwood to deny everything. He claimed that Russo had
simply misunderstood him, and he had no memory of telling Russo about any 1968
notes.[33] What Underwood did not know, going into
the meeting, was that Russo had gone well beyond spreading the story; Russo had
also provided the ARRB with copies of Underwood’s
notes on White House stationery. When the Review Board’s lawyer
produced these documents, Underwood’s memory abruptly improved. He explained
that “he had written the notes . . . for [Russo] to use for Hersh’s book.” The
notes were on White House stationery because “he ha[d] a lot of extra White
House stationery left over from his work with President Johnson.”[34]
Underwood
subsequently sent the ARRB the genuine notes from his 1966 trip to
Mexico City, the only time he actually went there as a White House advance man
during the Johnson years. These typewritten notes fully documented his
activities, and mentioned a brief meeting with CIA station chief Win Scott.
There wasn’t the slightest reference to the JFK assassination though, because
Underwood hadn’t been dispatched by LBJ to look into the circumstances
surrounding the president’s murder. All Underwood had sought from Scott was his
influential help in arranging a rousing
welcome for LBJ, who was making a state visit to Mexico in April 1966 and
yearned for a reception that was bigger and better than the one accorded
President Kennedy in 1962.[35]
Long before the
provenance of Underwood’s notes came under deserved scrutiny, of
course, there was no reason to believe this nonsensical story. Win Scott was
never “probably the best friend [Underwood ] had.” Moreover, the idea that
Lyndon Johnson would have secretly dispatched Underwood, who he only knew as
a good
advance man, on such a sensitive mission to Mexico was preposterous on its
face. The notes Underwood provided to Russo, purportedly written in 1968, were
concocted by Underwood in the 1990s, and the con almost got out of control. The
ARRB asked Underwood to testify under oath, presumably to settle the matter
once and for all. But “due to health problems,” he was never available.[36]
Endgame
In 1998, Russo
came out with his first book about the assassination, Live By the Sword.
For the most
part, Russo did not exploit the supposedly sensational material he had
received from Underwood; rather, the book used Underwood’s run-of-the-mill
fables though Russo presumably knew better. Russo wrote that Underwood
telephoned Washington “to demand” that the limousine’s bubble-top be available
because of threats to the president. Aboard Air Force One, Russo wrote,
“[t]he ever-present, ever-prepared, Marty Underwood jotted down the oath [of
office] on two 5” x 7” index cards, and handed them to his [sic] old friend
Judge Sarah Hughes, who swore Johnson in as president.” Over the telephone,
Robert Kennedy allegedly “instructed Underwood to destroy all remaining copies
of the speech JFK was to give that night in Austin.”
And in a new twist,
Underwood inherited not JFK’s tie clip, but the St. Jude and St. Christopher
medals the president allegedly had left hanging in the shower stall of his Fort
Worth hotel room on the morning of November 22.[37]
Still, the book
did contain a reference to Underwood’s “good friend,” CIA station chief Win
Scott, who allegedly warned Underwood that Dallas “might be the site for an
attack on the president.” There was also an allusion to Cuban agents,
operating out of Mexico City, who were allegedly able to move seamlessly across
the border with Texas.[38] But Russo desisted from naming
names—specifically, Fabián Escalante’s—because of his promise to the man he
called Marty.
When Underwood
died in March 2003, his obituary in
the Baltimore Sun dutifully—but erroneously—noted that the former
advance man “was riding in the Dallas motorcade when president was
assassinated.” Afterwards, he “helped obtain the wording for the
presidential oath of office.”[39] That obituary might have satisfied
Underwood’s yearning to be an important person in history, but Gus Russo was
still bent on giving him a bigger role.
Now
free to distribute Underwood’s contrived notes, Russo made them available
to Wilfried Huismann, a German filmmaker who (in collaboration with Russo)
produced a 2006 documentary entitled Rendezvous mit dem Tod (Rendezvous with Death).
According to the film, and a book by the same name, Underwood’s “authentic”
notes “proved” that on the day of the assassination, a Cuban intelligence
officer named Fabián Escalante flew in and out of Dallas, thus making Castro’s
Cuba complicit in the assassination.[40]
Now Russo,
in another collaboration, has recycled the Underwood story in a new book. Next
month, Washington Decoded will examine whether there is more
to Brothers in Arms than Underwood’s figment.
In the meantime,
it’s useful to keep in mind Goethe’s observation about falsehoods and
deception.
We are
never truly deceived by others, said the German poet. We only deceive
ourselves.
[1] News from Bloomsbury, Brothers in
Arms, October 2008.
[2] William Manchester, The Death of a
President: November 20-25, 1963 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 321.
[3] Twelve years after deluding Manchester,
Underwood again claimed he was on Air Force One during an interview
that was conducted for the Johnson Library. Marty Underwood Oral History, 14
June 1977, Lyndon B. Johnson Library (LBJL), 5. On the errors in Manchester’s
book, see Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House
Conversation of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren
Commission, and the Aftermath (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 307-311,
324-376.
[4] Manchester, Death of a President,
317.
[5] Warren Commission Document 387; Richard B. Trask, That Day in Dallas:
Three Photographers Capture on Film the Day President Kennedy
Died (Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 1998), 46-51.
[6] Holland interview with Jeb Byrne, 9
December 2008. Byrne worked with Underwood on LBJ’s 1964 presidential campaign.
Passenger List 86970, 22 November 1963, White House Trip Reports, LBJL.
[7] Holland interview with Harold Pachios, 7
October 2006.
[8] Richard M. Cohen, “The White House
Scout: Or, Fixing Faucets and Other Delights,”Washington Post, 8 August 1971.
[9] Valenti e-mail to Holland, 18 February
2006. In his 1975 memoir, Valenti only had positive things to say about
Underwood, calling him “affable and effective . . . a thorough-going
professional.” They had worked closely together on the Houston leg of the
November 1963 Texas trip, and Valenti even recommended Underwood as a possible
White House aide after Johnson won the 1964 election. Jack Valenti, A Very
Human President (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 29, 213.
[10] Cohen, “White House Scout,” 8
August 1971.
[11] Daily Diary, 5 September 1966; 16
September 1966; 15 March 1967; 15 August 1967; 6 March 1968, LBJL.
[12] F. de Sales Meyers, “One Step
Ahead of ’Earthquakes’ and a President,” Baltimore Sun, 22 July
1979.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid. The article incorrectly
stated that LBJ visited Mexico City in 1968. His only visit there as president
was in 1966.
[15] Steve Webber, “Living
Among Legends,” Dubuque, Iowa Telegraph Herald, 22 September 1991.
The bubble-top always accompanied the limousine because it was used to shield
the occupants against inclement weather. Despite Underwood’s insinuation
to the reporter, it was not capable of protecting anyone in the limousine, save
from rain, a rotten egg, or a tomato. Warren Report, 43.
[16] The fourth car behind the presidential
limousine actually carried Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell and his wife;
Representative Herbert Roberts (D-Texas), and a driver. Richard B.
Trask, Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of
President Kennedy(Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 1994), 616.
[17] Both speeches were printed in the 1963 volume of Kennedy’s official presidential papers.
[18] The Kennedys frequently gave away tie
clasps, fashioned after the president’s PT-109 boat, but JFK was not wearing
one on November 22.
[19] Webber, “Living Among
Legends,” 22 September 1991.
[20] In the early 1990s, Underwood also told
a whole passel of lies about the assassination to Harrison Livingstone, author
of a conspiratorial and deservedly-obscure book. Harrison Edward
Livingstone, High Treason 2, The Great Cover-up: The Assassination of
President John F. Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 438-443.
[21] Gus Russo, Live by the Sword: The
Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK(Baltimore, MD: Bancroft Press,
1998), viii; Gus Russo and Stephen Molton, Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys,
the Castros, and the Politics of Murder (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008),
479-480. Judy Campbell later married, and she was known as Judith Exner when
the information surfaced in 1975 about her affair with President Kennedy.
[22] Holland interview with Russo, 1998.
Again, Underwood’s 1977 oral history proves he was the source of the
untruth. “So then the assassination comes along and I ride back onAir Force
One,” he told the interviewer. Underwood Oral History, LBJL, 5.
[23] Russo and Molton, Brothers in
Arms, 482.
[24] Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of
Camelot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 4, 304-305.
[25] Underwood Oral History, LBJL, 1.
[26] Max Holland, “The Docudrama That Is JFK,” The Nation, 7 December
1998.
[27] According to Russo, Underwood was
incensed when his corroborating account appeared in Hersh’s book. Wrote Russo,
“My perception was that Marty was speaking on background, not agreeing to have
his name or story used. Sy disagreed, maintaining that Marty had no problem
with having the story used in his book or [the ABC] film.” Russo and
Molton, Brothers in Arms, 482.
[28] Assassination Records Review
Board, Final Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1998), 112, 135-136.
[29] Russo and Molton, Brothers in
Arms, 482.
[30] Ibid., 480. Before peddling his story
about Win Scott to Russo, Underwood used a variation of it on another
assassination researcher, Vincent Palamara, in October 1992. Palamara e-mail to
Holland, 12 April 1998.
[31] Russo and Molton, Brothers in
Arms, 480-481.
[32] Ibid., 481.
[37] Russo, Live by the Sword, 281,
286, 305.
[38] Ibid., 281.
[39] Sheridan Lyons, “Martin
Underwood, 88, State Employee, Advance Man for Two US Presidents,” Baltimore
Sun, 25 March 2003.
[40] Wilfried Huismann, Rendezvous mit
dem Tod: Warum John F. Kennedy sterben musste (Munich, Germany: Pendo
Verlag, 2006), 223-225.
© 2008 by Max Holland
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