Why does Mary Ferrell have such a bad rep?

[Sean Coleman]

Title self explanatory - why does she get dissed so much (by reputable researchers too) ? Thought she was a stalwart? 

[Vince Palamara]

2 minutes ago, Sean Coleman said:

Title self explanatory - why does she get dissed so much (by reputable researchers too) ? Thought she was a stalwart? 

I know Harry Livingstone excoriated her in his third book KILLING THE TRUTH. I think Harry and others were suspicious of her, despite her impressive archive. As with Gary Mack, there were questions as to her beliefs and motive(s).

[Pat Speer]

36 minutes ago, Sean Coleman said:

Title self explanatory - why does she get dissed so much (by reputable researchers too) ? Thought she was a stalwart? 

Mary Ferrell was a conservative who had an interest in the assassination. People who failed to save up 1/10 as many documents as she, and failed to provide 1/10 as much help to their fellow researchers as she, found her insufficiently liberal, and insufficiently supportive of their pet theories, and thereby suspicious. 

It's jealousy. It can be argued that the work of Mary Ferrell and the Mary Ferrell Foundation has done more to move the case forward than any one book, or any one author. The idea that she was a gate-keeper out to hold back the investigation doesn't hold water, or even make sense.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Pat Speer

[Vince Palamara]

3 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

Mary Ferrell was a conservative who had an interest in the assassination. People who failed to save up 1/10 as many documents as she, and failed to provide 1/10 as much help to their fellow researchers as she, found her insufficiently liberal, and insufficiently supportive of their pet theories, and thereby suspicious. 

It's jealousy. It can be argued that the work of Mary Ferrell and the Mary Ferrell Foundation has done more to move the case forward than any one book, or any one author. The idea that she was a gate-keeper out to hold back the investigation doesn't hold water, or even make sense.

Pat- I respect your opinion quite a bit. What is your take on Harry Livingstone AND his book KILLING THE TRUTH?

[Pat Speer]

17 minutes ago, Vince Palamara said:

Pat- I respect your opinion quite a bit. What is your take on Harry Livingstone AND his book KILLING THE TRUTH?

I could barely read it. It was mostly paranoid nonsense. While I never met Harry, I know a few who have, and they all assured me the man had a screw loose. I mean, anyone who was written off as a nut by Lifton, Groden, Conway et al, was probably a nut. 

There were signs of this, moreover, from early on. 

From patspeer.com, Chapter 18c:

A 6-11-80 article published in the Bangor Daily News suggests Livingstone was not a healthy camper. I know this seems a cheap shot, but stick with me here. This article was on Livingstone at a time virtually no one knew who he was, written in his local paper. The article, it follows, was his idea, or at least written with his full cooperation. And yet, look what it reveals: "The federal government has stipulated that certain sensitive material concerning the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 cannot be released to the public and media until the year 2039. One man who claims to be living in secrecy and fear for his life in eastern Maine, claims to have gotten some of that material through an underground source with connections in the Pentagon. Harrison Edward Livingstone, one of hundreds of private citizens who are involved in researching the assassination, carries his completed but rough manuscript of his book with him wherever he goes...He has kept on the move in recent years in several states, because he said he believes he's a 'hunted man.' In one of those states, he says, his car was fitted with an explosive device. In July 1979, a plane was to carry a team of reporters of the Baltimore Sun to Dallas, where they were to rendezvous with Livingstone. The plane was accidentally rammed by a jet fuel delivery truck on the airport apron. Livingstone says this was no accident. The incident caused the occupants to be confined in the plane for three hours, but what is stranger is that neither the newspaper or Livingstone could locate the investigative team for two days. In July and November 1979, the Baltimore Sun published two stories, containing purported new information and a lot of speculation, which Livingstone claims to have stimulated. 'But nobody read it...the wire services probably didn't pick it up, and one of the stories ran on a Sunday features page,' Livingstone said. Livingstone is convinced that some of the government's official autopsy photographs have been forged by an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency so they would be consistent with the so-called 'single-bullet, single-gunman' theory." 

Edited August 1, 2022 by Pat Speer

[Larry Hancock]

Vince,  not to jump in but I had some extended personal experience with Harry - who even  persuaded me to provide funding for Madeline Brown's book (back when I was new and eager and ...more than a little naive).   Based on many exchanges with Harry I can say that he was an emotional guy,  very committed to his own world view and very much suspicious of anyone who he perceived getting in the way of that.  I never saw any sign that he really played well with others although he did do some groundbreaking interviews and deserves credit for that work.  My take is that his response to Mary was very personal and consistent with his being very much an independent actor.  Anyone "connected" or having any sign of being part of an "establishment" of any sort just escalated his native skepticism - and Harry never kept those sorts of opinions to himself.

[Vince Palamara]

3 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

I could barely read it. It was mostly paranoid nonsense. While I never met Harry, I know a few who have, and they all assured me the man had a screw loose. I mean, anyone who was written off as a nut by Lifton, Groden, Conway et al, was probably a nut. 

There were signs of this, moreover, from early on. 

From patspeer.com, Chapter 18c:

A 6-11-80 article on Livingstone by Maureen Williams found in the Bangor Daily News suggests Livingstone was not a healthy camper. I know this seems a cheap shot, but stick with me here. This article was on Livingstone at a time virtually no one knew who he was, written in his local paper. The article, it follows, was his idea, or at least written with his full cooperation. And yet, look what it reveals: "The federal government has stipulated that certain sensitive material concerning the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 cannot be released to the public and media until the year 2039. One man who claims to be living in secrecy and fear for his life in eastern Maine, claims to have gotten some of that material through an underground source with connections in the Pentagon. Harrison Edward Livingstone, one of hundreds of private citizens who are involved in researching the assassination, carries his completed but rough manuscript of his book with him wherever he goes...He has kept on the move in recent years in several states, because he said he believes he's a 'hunted man.' In one of those states, he says, his car was fitted with an explosive device. In July 1979, a plane was to carry a team of reporters of the Baltimore Sun to Dallas, where they were to rendezvous with Livingstone. The plane was accidentally rammed by a jet fuel delivery truck on the airport apron. Livingstone says this was no accident. The incident caused the occupants to be confined in the plane for three hours, but what is stranger is that neither the newspaper or Livingstone could locate the investigative team for two days. In July and November 1979, the Baltimore Sun published two stories, containing purported new information and a lot of speculation, which Livingstone claims to have stimulated. 'But nobody read it...the wire services probably didn't pick it up, and one of the stories ran on a Sunday features page,' Livingstone said. Livingstone is convinced that some of the government's official autopsy photographs have been forged by an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency so they would be consistent with the so-called 'single-bullet, single-gunman' theory." 

Yikes! Wow!

[Vince Palamara]

3 minutes ago, Larry Hancock said:

Vince,  not to jump in but I had some extended personal experience with Harry - who even  persuaded me to provide funding for Madeline Brown's book (back when I was new and eager and ...more than a little naive).   Based on many exchanges with Harry I can say that he was an emotional guy,  very committed to his own world view and very much suspicious of anyone who he perceived getting in the way of that.  I never saw any sign that he really played well with others although he did do some groundbreaking interviews and deserves credit for that work.  My take is that his response to Mary was very personal and consistent with his being very much an independent actor.  Anyone "connected" or having any sign of being part of an "establishment" of any sort just escalated his native skepticism - and Harry never kept those sorts of opinions to himself.

Hi, Larry! Well said. Yes, I had several dealings with Harry. He was a tortured soul. George Michael Evica said "he needs a hug" and actually tried to befriend him, despite their differences. It worked for a time. Harry did some great work in the medical evidence field but a) his reputation overshadows his work and b) since his books came out before kindle and even Amazon hit in a major way, he is (in some respects) forgotten today, despite two best-sellers.

[Ron Bulman]

Regarding the dictabelt tapes, "It was facilitated by efforts to debunk the acoustics evidence purportedly of the shooting, which it appears was planted by Dallas assassination researcher Mary Ferrell (a covert intelligence operative) and her crony Gary Mack as a poison pill to sabotage the HSCA's case by destroying the credibility of its report."  Page 268.  Political Truth, The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy.  

[Joseph McBride]

About Mary Ferrell from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

THE GATEKEEPER

 

After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened.

According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events. Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly self-effacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to the HSCA.

As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Agency of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.”

Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a German-born Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.” It was at a February 22, 1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt, that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a poopoo”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” [italics in original].

Mary Ferrell was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy (Lowrey put it more strongly: “She hated John Kennedy; it was no secret”), and she admitted in 2000, “I didn’t even care enough to go down on Elm Street to watch the motorcade.” A feature on Ferrell in the Dallas Morning News on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983 mentions that she was downtown that day “but didn’t bother interrupting her lunch” to see Kennedy. The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.”

The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater. Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.”

Some of the explanation for what that newspaper described as Ferrell’s “compulsion” to serve as a repository and clearing house for assassination research can be found in another paradox about Ferrell. Her obituary in the Morning News referred to how she “worked more than thirty years as a legal secretary for a law firm and also in the Governor’s office in Austin.” She was a conservative who kept close to the power center of that era in Texas by working for Democrats, including Governor Dolph Briscoe in 1973-74, and she was “a close personal friend” of John Connally, Lowrey noted.

Ferrell was even closely connected to those who determined the route of the Dallas motorcade. It was in 1964, soon after the assassination, according to Lowrey, that Ferrell became a legal secretary in downtown Dallas to Eugene M. Locke, who headed the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney and Neely and was also the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas. (Ferrell claimed on various occasions that she did not start working for Locke until 1967 or 1970. Locke died in 1972.)  In addition to heading a major law firm and having oil, land, and construction interests, Locke in his official position with the state party helped plan the presidential trip to Dallas. A crucial meeting that helped decide on the route of the motorcade -- violating Secret Service regulations by causing it to make a sharp turn from Houston onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository, slowing the motorcade to eleven miles an hour in the kill zone -- was held in Locke’s office, although Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell apparently was responsible for the final decision that determined the route. (See more on Locke and that meeting in Chapters 15 and 16.) Lowrey suggested, though without having proof, that Ferrell could have helped her soon-to-be-employer Locke with those arrangements. That seems more of an educated guess when one considers that her husband, Hubert (Buck) Ferrell, who worked for Eagle Lincoln-Mercury in Dallas at the time of the assassination, supplied some of the cars for the motorcade, and that Mary Ferrell said her own car was used in the motorcade when “They quickly ran out of cars.” According to assassination researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, who interviewed both Ferrells, Mary supplied her own recently purchased 1964 Ford Mercury Colony Park station wagon for the motorcade, and it was used as one of the “VIP” cars.

My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.”

Ferrell’s production to the HSCA of the tape made that allegedly contains audio impulses demonstrating that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza seemed suspiciously timely to me. It seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated  by Ferrell to discredit it in due course, like a planted mine sure to go off and destroy everything that surrounded it. Anomalies and ambiguities surrounding the tape itself made the HSCA’s belated “discovery” and endorsement of four shots dubious. That was probably seen by Blakey and others on his staff as a convenient late-arriving fig leaf with which to cover themselves by suggesting a conspiracy while not investigating its participants fully and honestly. The problems surrounding the tape were manifold, including debatable photographic evidence of the police motorcycle with a stuck microphone that supposedly recorded the sounds, claims by some skeptics that the tape actually was recorded about a minute after the assassination, and above all the inherent difficulties of interpreting the sound impulses allegedly found on the tape and synching those impulses with films of the assassination (including the altered Zapruder film). These problems would keep various experts, conspiracy theorists, and lone-nutters alike busy for years of debate, sometimes switching sides back and forth to add to the confusion. That may have been the point of the whole exercise initiated by Mary Ferrell with the collusion of Gary Mack. In the process, many studies were made, and much ink was consumed, but the subject only became more intractable, as, indeed, it seemed to me almost from the beginning, given the near-impossibility of reconstructing credible gunshots from a belatedly produced Dictabelt recording made in part with a police microphone of uncertain location.

By so badly muddying the waters, the claim by the HSCA about shots being recorded on the tape most probably was intended to distract attention from the actual likelihood that more than four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. This was among the more sophisticated and effective disinformation ploys launched against the finding of the truth of what happened in November 1963, but just one of the many obfuscatory maneuvers that began the first day and continue to the present. “All this stuff that went to the HSCA from the nucleus of people revolving around Mary Ferrell probably was concocted by mixing it with half-truths,” Lowrey noted. “Their MO is propping up a story and then shooting it down -- damn effective.” The HSCA Report, while saying that there were two gunmen, nevertheless claims that a single shot from the Grassy Knoll, the closer of the two alleged firing locations, missed, and blames Oswald (who was in the second-floor lunchroom of the Depository at the time) for firing all the shots that hit Kennedy, Connally, and bystander James Tague. Researcher Jack White, who continued to believe that “shots are recorded on the tape,” nevertheless aptly called the HSCA Report “a half-horse, half-zebra, half-assed kind of report.”

The HSCA, in my view, largely succeeded in disproving the (naive) notion that this case could be investigated fairly by a government up to its eyes in direct involvement in the planning, execution, and coverup of the crimes themselves. Like the Warren Commission investigation before it, the HSCA investigation also turned up a wealth of evidence and fresh leads that, ironically, cast doubt on its own conclusions. A further problem was that some of the HSCA’s work product, including reports of witness interviews, did not reach the public until the 1990s, delaying both its utility and its ability to cast doubt on the HSCA’s own conclusions. The material was sealed until after the film JFK helped provide the impetus for the establishment of the ARRB, which helped free six millions of pages of previously classified material in U.S. government files. That material has proven invaluable in filling in some of the important gaps in our information about the case and in calling attention to previously hidden aspects of these events.

Despite the flaws of the HSCA investigation, with all the genuine revelations that were being made about the case in the 1970s, as well as all the controversy engendered by true and false leads, the seeds of doubt were being widely sown again throughout the land. If I had been led astray from the initial evidence I heard with my own ears on the afternoon of November 22 and from my sense that first evening that Oswald was telling the truth in denying involvement in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit, I was now beginning to reclaim my first impressions as the truth.

[Allen Lowe]

3 hours ago, Joseph McBride said:

About Mary Ferrell from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

THE GATEKEEPER

 

After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened.

According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events. Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly self-effacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to the HSCA.

As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Agency of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.”

Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a German-born Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.” It was at a February 22, 1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt, that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a poopoo”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” [italics in original].

Mary Ferrell was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy (Lowrey put it more strongly: “She hated John Kennedy; it was no secret”), and she admitted in 2000, “I didn’t even care enough to go down on Elm Street to watch the motorcade.” A feature on Ferrell in the Dallas Morning News on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983 mentions that she was downtown that day “but didn’t bother interrupting her lunch” to see Kennedy. The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.”

The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater. Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.”

Some of the explanation for what that newspaper described as Ferrell’s “compulsion” to serve as a repository and clearing house for assassination research can be found in another paradox about Ferrell. Her obituary in the Morning News referred to how she “worked more than thirty years as a legal secretary for a law firm and also in the Governor’s office in Austin.” She was a conservative who kept close to the power center of that era in Texas by working for Democrats, including Governor Dolph Briscoe in 1973-74, and she was “a close personal friend” of John Connally, Lowrey noted.

Ferrell was even closely connected to those who determined the route of the Dallas motorcade. It was in 1964, soon after the assassination, according to Lowrey, that Ferrell became a legal secretary in downtown Dallas to Eugene M. Locke, who headed the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney and Neely and was also the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas. (Ferrell claimed on various occasions that she did not start working for Locke until 1967 or 1970. Locke died in 1972.)  In addition to heading a major law firm and having oil, land, and construction interests, Locke in his official position with the state party helped plan the presidential trip to Dallas. A crucial meeting that helped decide on the route of the motorcade -- violating Secret Service regulations by causing it to make a sharp turn from Houston onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository, slowing the motorcade to eleven miles an hour in the kill zone -- was held in Locke’s office, although Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell apparently was responsible for the final decision that determined the route. (See more on Locke and that meeting in Chapters 15 and 16.) Lowrey suggested, though without having proof, that Ferrell could have helped her soon-to-be-employer Locke with those arrangements. That seems more of an educated guess when one considers that her husband, Hubert (Buck) Ferrell, who worked for Eagle Lincoln-Mercury in Dallas at the time of the assassination, supplied some of the cars for the motorcade, and that Mary Ferrell said her own car was used in the motorcade when “They quickly ran out of cars.” According to assassination researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, who interviewed both Ferrells, Mary supplied her own recently purchased 1964 Ford Mercury Colony Park station wagon for the motorcade, and it was used as one of the “VIP” cars.

My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.”

Ferrell’s production to the HSCA of the tape made that allegedly contains audio impulses demonstrating that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza seemed suspiciously timely to me. It seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated  by Ferrell to discredit it in due course, like a planted mine sure to go off and destroy everything that surrounded it. Anomalies and ambiguities surrounding the tape itself made the HSCA’s belated “discovery” and endorsement of four shots dubious. That was probably seen by Blakey and others on his staff as a convenient late-arriving fig leaf with which to cover themselves by suggesting a conspiracy while not investigating its participants fully and honestly. The problems surrounding the tape were manifold, including debatable photographic evidence of the police motorcycle with a stuck microphone that supposedly recorded the sounds, claims by some skeptics that the tape actually was recorded about a minute after the assassination, and above all the inherent difficulties of interpreting the sound impulses allegedly found on the tape and synching those impulses with films of the assassination (including the altered Zapruder film). These problems would keep various experts, conspiracy theorists, and lone-nutters alike busy for years of debate, sometimes switching sides back and forth to add to the confusion. That may have been the point of the whole exercise initiated by Mary Ferrell with the collusion of Gary Mack. In the process, many studies were made, and much ink was consumed, but the subject only became more intractable, as, indeed, it seemed to me almost from the beginning, given the near-impossibility of reconstructing credible gunshots from a belatedly produced Dictabelt recording made in part with a police microphone of uncertain location.

By so badly muddying the waters, the claim by the HSCA about shots being recorded on the tape most probably was intended to distract attention from the actual likelihood that more than four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. This was among the more sophisticated and effective disinformation ploys launched against the finding of the truth of what happened in November 1963, but just one of the many obfuscatory maneuvers that began the first day and continue to the present. “All this stuff that went to the HSCA from the nucleus of people revolving around Mary Ferrell probably was concocted by mixing it with half-truths,” Lowrey noted. “Their MO is propping up a story and then shooting it down -- damn effective.” The HSCA Report, while saying that there were two gunmen, nevertheless claims that a single shot from the Grassy Knoll, the closer of the two alleged firing locations, missed, and blames Oswald (who was in the second-floor lunchroom of the Depository at the time) for firing all the shots that hit Kennedy, Connally, and bystander James Tague. Researcher Jack White, who continued to believe that “shots are recorded on the tape,” nevertheless aptly called the HSCA Report “a half-horse, half-zebra, half-assed kind of report.”

The HSCA, in my view, largely succeeded in disproving the (naive) notion that this case could be investigated fairly by a government up to its eyes in direct involvement in the planning, execution, and coverup of the crimes themselves. Like the Warren Commission investigation before it, the HSCA investigation also turned up a wealth of evidence and fresh leads that, ironically, cast doubt on its own conclusions. A further problem was that some of the HSCA’s work product, including reports of witness interviews, did not reach the public until the 1990s, delaying both its utility and its ability to cast doubt on the HSCA’s own conclusions. The material was sealed until after the film JFK helped provide the impetus for the establishment of the ARRB, which helped free six millions of pages of previously classified material in U.S. government files. That material has proven invaluable in filling in some of the important gaps in our information about the case and in calling attention to previously hidden aspects of these events.

Despite the flaws of the HSCA investigation, with all the genuine revelations that were being made about the case in the 1970s, as well as all the controversy engendered by true and false leads, the seeds of doubt were being widely sown again throughout the land. If I had been led astray from the initial evidence I heard with my own ears on the afternoon of November 22 and from my sense that first evening that Oswald was telling the truth in denying involvement in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit, I was now beginning to reclaim my first impressions as the truth.

Enough wacky theories. As Pat pointed out, Ferrell’s documents have done more to advanced the course of assassination research than anything else. I keep getting tempted to read your book, but then you rehash the Zapruder nonsense and call out O’Donnell as being in on the plot. That’s the most bizarre idea of all. You’ve baked your credibility, which is a shame, as from what jim says there is some valuable stuff in your book. 

Edited August 1, 2022 by Allen Lowe

[Anthony Thorne]

Both things can be true.

Ferrell’s documents have proven very helpful.

Also, Ferrell could have put on the helpful act to keep tabs on researchers for someone else.

If you wanted to keep tabs on researchers, would you send someone helpful into their midst, or someone unhelpful? Who do you think would have more luck?

Also, if you were a researcher, who would you be more likely to talk to? Someone who was always around helping out? Or someone who was never around, and who was never that helpful?

It’d be interesting to see whether people think the intelligence agencies wanted to keep tabs on researchers, or whether they didn’t. And also - if they did - who you think they might have sent to keep tabs on things.

All this does depend, I suppose, on whether you think the people who planned the assassination, and the groups who worked to cover it up afterwards, were of a conspiratorial bent, or not. Possibly opinions might differ there.

Joseph, that network of chemists, scientists and industry advisors you allude to as being in the background of the party where George De and Marina and others circulated, opens up a very deep trail, rabbit hole and narrative that has been desperately overlooked by most researchers. Just as a note - Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize winning scientist, later was the key figure pressing for anthrax attack funding in the 90’s. His Defense Science Board colleague Norman Augustine - the future Lockheed head - went into panic mode in the late 80’s following a series of studies predicting a domino effect of defense reductions affecting national security investments as the Cold War was coming to a close. It was circa this period that Lederberg and Augustine joined a company board with Dick Cheney.

Ferrell’s documents have proven undoubtedly useful, but I ask again if people think the intelligence community was indifferent to what researchers of the era were up to, or whether they wanted to carefully monitor in the long term what was going on. And if it was the latter, how were they going to do that again?

Edited August 1, 2022 by Anthony Thorne

[Pat Speer]

OK, let's try this again. Mary Ferrell was like a Godmother to Debra Conway, who kept the JFK assassination investigation moving forward through conference after conference after conference, most (if not all) put together with input from Larry Hancock. When I first got into this 19 years ago, it was the only game in town, well, almost. The only other regular conference was COPA, which was not nearly as well organized nor nearly as accessible as Deb's and Larry's Lancer conferences. For someone with an interest in the case, who wanted to learn more, and meet people like Bill Newman, Buell Frazier, James Tague, and Aubrey Rike, there was Lancer, and that was it. If not for the Lancer conferences, the Lancer website (which sold invaluable CD-roms containing information and documents not available elsewhere) and the books put out by Lancer, the momentum created by the film JFK would have slowed to a crawl. 

So it's ludicrous to me to wonder if Mary Ferrell was secretly spying on the research community, or keeping tabs on researchers for the CIA, or working as a gatekeeper. She was the spiritual leader of the research community. Without her, and her influence on Deb, there would have been chaos, only chaos, with anonymous dweeb after dweeb floating pet theories on the internet, or in self-published books, that made little impact outside their own minds.

So enough with this stuff about Ferrell being a spy out to contain or destroy the research community. It's like accusing Churchill of being a poopoo. 

P.S. Through my activities on this forum, and my attendance at numerous conferences, I have come in contact with almost every top researcher and writer on the Kennedy assassination. And they're a disorganized bunch, with most primarily interested in promoting their own research, most of which was performed decades ago, and much of which has been brought into question in the decades that followed. The Lancer conferences were a different story--they were a place where fresh research and fresh ideas could gain an audience. Not all of it was worth the time, but many of the baby steps forward that the investigation has made, and continues to make, over the past 3 decades, were first revealed at Lancer conferences.  

[Jonathan Cohen]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

So enough with this stuff about Ferrell being a spy out to contain or destroy the research community.

Thank you to Pat and Allen Lowe for injecting some common sense into these paranoid and preposterous allegations about Mary, who I feel lucky to have known personally. 

[Joe Bauer]

36 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Thank you to Pat and Allen Lowe for injecting some common sense into these paranoid and preposterous allegations about Mary, who I feel lucky to have known personally. 

Just a thought or two, a question or two.

True or false:

Did Ferrell dislike and/or even hate JFK up through 11,22,1963? 

She purposely chose to ignore JFK's motorcade visit through her city? She instead had lunch out somewhere else during it?

If Joseph McBride's research into Ferrell's background regards all the connections and associations she had with many seriously anti-Kennedy groups and for many years are credibly true, doesn't this validate suspicion as to her supposed conversion to this full time, passionate JFK truth seeking mission matriarch?

Did she ever publicly say what changed her negative views on JFK personally before 11,22,1963 to then dedicating her later life to this massive work, time and expense commitment to help so many JFK truth seeking and conspiracy believing researchers?

I would really like to know what Ferrell honestly felt toward JFK before 11,22,193 and why.

Mae Brussell made a similar huge study commitment that involved years of deep, hard work research on her part to finding truths regards not just the JFK assassination, but so many other secret power groups and their activities which she discovered were often nefariously contrary to our democratic foundational tenets and constitutional laws.

However, there was never a question as to her past political and moral beliefs and associations before 11,22,1963. She was who she was all the way through her huge commitment truth seeking life and research work effort.