In the fall of 2013, with the approaching 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I started getting interested in the state of the research into the assassination as well as identifying materials I could use for a short unit on the JFK assassination in my junior U.S. History class.
I was especially interested in the New Orleans connection because that’s where I grew up and I was very aware of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation which filled the local newspapers. If you’d like to know about the New Orleans connection take a look at Oliver Stone’s JFK if you’d like a brief introduction. I was wondering what sense could be made of all this after fifty years.
But what triggered the idea that I might actually want to research the assassination myself was a telephone conversation with my parents on my birthday, November 22. Yes, my birthday is the same date as the date of Kennedy’s assassination. I turned 7 on November 22, 1963. I have to tell you it was a very somber birthday party. For many years, if I had perchance forgotten, I could always remember it was my birthday if I simply turned on the radio because at some point somebody would say “Today is the [fill in the appropriate number] anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
After I told my parents that I had been exploring the Kennedy assassination, my father told me of a story he had recently read on NOLA.com.
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JFK assassination conspiracy: David Ferrie was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw in New Orleans
David Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol experience was what made him important to Jim Garrison’s investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald joined Ferrie’s squadron at Moisant Airport in 1955. (Eastern Airlines archive)
By John Pope, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
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on November 15, 2013 at 12:26 PM, updated November 15, 2013 at 1:00 PM
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No doubt about it, David Ferrie was odd. Starting with his appearance: He had no hair, so he glued on eyebrows and wore a red wig.
And then there was his background, a history of failure at one job after another. Ferrie, a Cleveland native, had been a candidate for the Catholic priesthood but was discharged for what was termed “emotional instability”; a teacher who was fired for taking students to a brothel; and an Eastern Air Lines pilot, based in New Orleans, who was sacked after two arrests on morals charges. He also claimed to be a psychologist, based on a degree from a diploma mill, according to The Saturday Evening Post.
In New Orleans, Ferrie joined the Civil Air Patrol’s Cadet Squadron at Lakefront Airport. He taught aviation there, but after a cadet he had trained was killed in a plane crash in 1954, Ferrie was reassigned.
Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol experience was what made him important to Jim Garrison’s investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. After the plane crash, Ferrie was transferred to a smaller squadron based at what was then called Moisant Airport. Lee Harvey Oswald joined Ferrie’s squadron in 1955.
In 1993, the PBS program “Frontline” acquired a group photograph showing Ferrie and Oswald at a Civil Air Patrol cookout in 1955. While it does cast doubt on Ferrie’s claim that he never knew Oswald, Michael Sullivan, the show’s executive producer, said it doesn’t prove that the two were together in 1963 or were part of an assassination conspiracy.
Ferrie, who was an avowed anti-Communist, became involved with anti-Castro organizations in New Orleans in the early 1960s. He also started working for Guy Banister, a private investigator who had been an FBI agent and assistant superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department. The two worked with the lawyer of reputed Mob figure Carlos Marcello in an attempt to block Marcello’s deportation to Guatemala.
Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, said Ferrie and Oswald visited Banister’s office frequently in 1963, according to Anthony Summers’ book, “Not in Your Lifetime.” However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations termed her statements unreliable.
Garrison was convinced that New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw was a leader of the assassination plot. In an application for a warrant to search Shaw’s French Quarter home, Ferrie was listed as a guest at meetings there, along with Oswald, to plan the conspiracy. Shaw denied that such meetings occurred.
Rumors about Ferrie swirled after the assassination, most notably the one that he had been hired to fly gunmen out of Dallas after the shooting. Ferrie told the FBI that he did, indeed, go to Texas that day, but he said that he drove to Houston, not Dallas, to inspect an ice rink there and look into the feasibility of opening one in New Orleans. From there, Ferrie told The States-Item, he drove to Galveston and Alexandria.
The FBI picked up Ferrie for questioning, but he was released because there was no evidence of his involvement in the assassination. According to a source quoted in a 1967 article in The Saturday Evening Post, “The FBI squeezed Ferrie dry, found nothing there and discarded him.”
But because of Ferrie’s connection with Banister and the anti-Castro community, Garrison became convinced that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a vast right-wing conspiracy that included the man with the outlandish wig.
In an interview with The States-Item in February 1967, Ferrie called Garrison’s inquiry “an utter waste of time,” and said Oswald’s personality led him to be a loner, not someone involved in a murder plot.
Four days later, Ferrie was found dead in his squalid second-floor apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. He was 48.
Garrison, who declared Ferrie was “one of history’s most important individuals,” asserted that Ferrie had taken his own life. But an autopsy showed he died of a hemorrhage caused by a ruptured blood vessel at the base of his brain.
In Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK,” Ferrie was played by Joe Pesci, who wore an appropriately outrageous wig.
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My father and mother were particularly interested in the part about the cadet that Ferrie had trained who was killed in a plane crash in 1954. Because they knew a Civil Air Patrol cadet who was killed in a plane crash in 1954 and that was a boy named Charlie Kerr who was in my mom’s senior class at Metairie High School. And, as far as they knew, Charlie was the only Civil Air Patrol cadet who died in 1954. But they had never heard of any connection between David Ferrie and Charlie Kerr.
My father went online to see if he could find out some more and found the same information on the Wikipedia article on “David Ferrie.”
After a Ferrie-trained cadet pilot perished in a December 1954 crash, Ferrie’s annual re-appointment was declined. He was asked to be a guest aerospace education instructor at a smaller squadron at Moisant Airport, and lectured there from June to September 1955. On July 27, 1955, 15-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald joined this squadron.
The citation for this passage was Oswald, David Ferrie and the Civil Air Patrol, House Select Committee on Assassinations, Volume 9, 4, p. 110. But nowhere in this document is there any mention of a Ferrie-trained cadet pilot perishing in a December 1954 crash.
Now the name David Ferrie was one I knew very well, as would anyone who lived in New Orleans in the late 1960s. I remember seeing his face in the Times Picayune newspaper and getting all freaked out by his obviously fake eyelashes. And I can remember talk that Ferrie was supposed to have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s getaway pilot. The guy scared me! And I remembered how he had died mysteriously just as he was going to be arrested, one of many mysterious deaths associated with the JFK assassination.
My interest piqued, I decided to see if I could find some more on this Kerr-Ferrie connection and what if anything this had to do with the JFK assassination. I started contacting people by email and phone and the research just grew into the idea of a book on Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans in 1950s and 1960s. In the process I interviewed by telephone and email over eighty former cadets in the New Orleans and Moisant Cadet Squadrons of Civil Air Patrol between March 2014 and June 2015.
While some of the people I contacted were excited to contribute – believing it was high time the “true” story be told – many more were hesitant and suspicious and had to be won over. Some had had bad experiences with other researchers and they wanted to make sure this was not just another book on the JFK assassination. From the start I received an inestimable amount of help from John Ulmer, a former member of the New Orleans Cadet Squadron who did an unbelievable amount of cold calling while I came up with potential telephone numbers.
To explain to people who were concerned about what I intended to do with all this (sometimes very personal) information, I came up with this Statement of Purpose which seemed to satisfy almost everyone who read it with regard to the kind of book I was trying to write.
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On Wednesday, May 29, 1968, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison announced at a press conference that when Lee Harvey Oswald joined the Civil Air Patrol, he was initiated into the Central Intelligence Agency by David Ferrie. Such claims, although never supported by any hard evidence, continue to circulate, perpetuated by the mystery which continues to shroud the New Orleans and Moisant Squadrons of Civil Air Patrol of the 1950s.
These two squadrons have received a lot of attention from investigative bodies because of the involvement of Oswald and Ferrie. But the purpose of these investigative bodies –whether the FBI, the Warren Commission, the New Orleans District Attorney’s office, or the House Select Committee on Assassinations — was never to tell the full story of these squadrons. They never attempted to place Oswald and Ferrie within the context of the greater community of cadets and seniors that comprised these squadrons.
Furthermore, the interviews of former CAP cadets and seniors conducted by these investigative bodies are filled with contradictions and ambiguities that they never really attempted to resolve. Each of these agencies had its own agenda that did not always encourage the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And the interviewees undoubtedly had their own reasons for not revealing everything that they knew. Unfortunately these unresolved tensions have left a field day for JFK conspiracy theorists to imagine all kinds of scenarios about what was really going on in both the CAP in the 1950s and the subsequent cover-up.
Lost in this confusion is the quite real history of the young men and women who made up the New Orleans and Moisant Squadrons from the late 1940’s to the early 1960’s, the story of a generation of teenagers set in segregated New Orleans and Jefferson Parish during the height of the Cold War. This history must cover the very positive impact the CAP had on this generation as well as the important activities that the CAP engaged in, like search-and-rescue operations. But the history also needs to be quite transparent when it comes to anything related to Oswald and Ferrie to avoid any suspicion of a cover-up. Any good history must strive to resolve all the inconsistencies in the official record as well as to provide plausible explanations for why and how the inconsistencies originated.
Some former CAP cadets have expressed concern that I may be more interested in digging up “dirt” on the CAP than doing a history. I am not certain what “dirt” they are referring to, but if it is related to Ferrie and Oswald I again emphasize that transparency is critical. Without being totally open about Ferrie and Oswald, it would be very hard to tell the positive story of the CAP. Any “dirt” that is strictly a matter of individual indiscretions unrelated to the main themes of the history of the two squadrons would, I think, distract from the real story. If there are touchy areas where interviewees prefer to talk off the record or to remain anonymous, I would certainly honor such requests in a professional manner.
Currently I anticipate that this subject matter could readily be turned into a publishable manuscript that would break down into chapters thus:
I. Redefining Civil Air Patrol after World War II
II. The New Orleans Cadet Squadron
III. Drill, Drill, Drill!
IV. Enter David Ferrie
V. The Moisant Cadet Squadron
VI. Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder
VII. The Mysterious Lee Oswald
VIII. Friendship, Marriage and Just Hanging Out
IX. David Ferrie, Second Time Around
X. The Falcon Cadet Squadron
XI. The FBI Investigation
XII. The Garrison Investigation
XIII. The Legacy
All these chapters will be fully documented with endnotes as in a proper work of scholarship. However, I do not anticipate that the scholarship would get in the way of a good read. I further believe that the resulting book would be one that you could be proud to pass on to your children and grandchildren. Furthermore, all the evidence gathered for this project will be made publicly available for both purposes of transparency and to aid future research. Proper releases forms will be collected from all interviewees.
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One of the big motivating factors for a lot of the people who agreed to be interviewed was interest in having some kind of reunion. Through the efforts of many former cadets, we were amazingly able to organize a reunion of people who had been in the New Orleans Cadet Squadron between 1947 and 1965. The reunion was held in the Walnut Room at Lakefront Airport on June 14, 2015, attended by well over 100 people including the former cadets themselves and their spouses, children, and grandchildren. Diane Stevens O’Sullivan put together a wonderful booklet for the reunion, filled with short biographies of former cadets supplemented with tons of old photographs.
Throughout the interviewing process I sensed a certain resistance from certain people who were in a position to know certain things to open up on certain issues. It was the kind of opening up I thought I would need to write a book that would interest a wider audience. I thought that the reunion might be just what it would take to break the ice with these people. But, as it turns out, the reunion seemed to have had the opposite effect. I sensed a lot of suspicion on the part of some of the people I met at the reunion and a lack of interest in what I was doing. For me, the reunion was rather the death knell of the project.
The most difficult issue that I had to deal with was, curiously, not Lee Harvey Oswald. I did find some interesting material on Oswald as a teenager in New Orleans that would definitely make an interesting chapter or two in the book, but nothing to tie Oswald to the plot to assassinate Kennedy.
Rather the hardest problem was what to do with David Ferrie who was idolized by so many of the former cadets and yet was quite clearly a misogynistic pederast. Some people who knew Ferrie started opening up to me about the sordid details of his pursuit of teenage boys that confirmed what I had already learned from declassified federal documents. Anybody familiar with all the revelations about rampant pederasty among Catholic priests and Boy Scout leaders in recent decades would easily recognize in Ferrie a classic pederast. And yet overwhelming his former cadets refused to hear anything negative about Ferrie and rejected accusations he was a pederast. Quite unlike the Boy Scout leaders and Catholic priests accused of pederasty, who are overwhelmingly condemned, Ferrie was put on a pedestal.
As to why Ferrie was so protected, I sensed something other than wanting to avoid embarrassment. I think former cadets really did think that whatever negative Ferrie may have been involved in, the positive far outweighed the negative and there was just no need to harp on the negative. I would hear over and over again about how Ferrie was the smartest man they had ever met and an amazing flight instructor, how he pushed young men to take on challenges they never thought they could handle, how he changed young men’s life for the better and led them on the path to success. And, indeed, the people who had been a part of Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol, as a cohort, were amazingly successful by any objective standard.
So what was I left with? The story of a highly successful bunch of teenage boys and girls in the New Orleans area in the 1950s and 1960s, with this very odd kid Lee Harvey Oswald who would later be accused of killing President Kennedy, and the most amazing pederast ever. Now what kind of book is that? I started thinking this actually sounded a lot like that classic New Orleans novel, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces! My book should be a novel rather than a history! Anyway at the time I didn’t feel I was up to writing a novel.
That said, I still get emails from some of the cadets I got to know by email, telephone, and in person, asking about how the book is coming, emails I sheepishly leave unopened. But with the website up and going, I am motivated to return to the subject and at least write a couple of chapters of the book and see where it goes.