Historic CIA "Artichoke" Meeting Reveals Agency Asset Inside Warren Commission
Declassified document provides unprecedented roadmap into CIA's mind control research; also reveals new info on Warren Commission psychiatric expert, who was also a secret CIA-Artichoke consultant.
Introduction
It was July 9, 1964, a little over six months since President John F. Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas, Texas. The former director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, sat in a room inside the National Archives Building on Constitution Avenue for seven hours (minus a break for lunch) with Warren Commission (WC) fellow member, John J. McCloy, three psychiatric experts, and half a dozen other WC staff. Their agenda? A discussion about the possible motives of Kennedy’s purported assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
One of the psychiatric experts, Dale C. Cameron, was involved in a secret agreement with the CIA for “the administration and treatment of referrals” from the Agency to the government hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, for which he was superintendent, that is, chief administrator. Dulles knew him, certainly. Another one of the experts was a young psychiatrist from the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, David A. Rothstein. When Dulles looked at him, trademark pipe perhaps in hand, he possibly thought, I don’t really know that fellow.
But Dulles likely knew the third psychiatrist very well. But he had to pretend he didn’t know him. Dr. Howard Phillips Rome was head of psychiatry at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic; the former chairman of the Medical Advisory Group to the Administrator of the Veterans Administration; former “head psychiatrist” [PDF pg. 155] for the U.S. Navy, and later consultant in Psychiatry to the U.S. Navy’s Surgeon General; and now, he was President-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. Still, on the record, in front of McCloy and company, Dulles would not indicate he knew this doctor — at least he gave no indication at the meeting that he knew him. Only people with certain clearances knew everything about this doctor.
I am confident Dulles knew Rome, one of the biggest names in American psychiatry, because Rome was also a clandestine consultant to the CIA’s top secret ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA programs. It was Rome who would provide the Warren Commission with the theory, backed by his psychiatric credentials, that Oswald killed the president in part so he, Oswald, could be seen as a “great man.” (For Dulles’ briefings on CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE, see footnote 3 below.)
According to journalist Tad Szulc at The New Republic (TNR), the session’s transcript was classified until 1971, but actually it was declassified in August 1968, according to a copy of the full executive session transcript that I have obtained. (See the end of this article for an embed link to download the entire 247 page document.)
This article continues my investigation into how the CIA controlled the psychiatric “expert'“ testimony provided to the Warren Commission. By itself, my findings constitute prima facie evidence of the CIA’s interest in controlling the findings of the Warren Commission. In combination with decades of research by others into the connections between Oswald and the CIA, the evidence linking the CIA with psychiatric experts who worked for the Warren Commission helps cement a clear-cut case of CIA interference in the official, initial investigation into JFK’s murder.1
Before I continue, I want to thank Dr. Casimir Klim for his willingness to provide some assistance for this article, including Rome’s CV, and also for his 2024 landmark article, published at Stat, which first described the connection between the CIA and the Mayo Clinic in the 1950s. The priority for that discovery is all his.2
The Mayo Clinic
“During the two-day visit at [redacted - but certainly, as discussed below, the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota] the writer was able to introduce for discussion many subjects of interest to ARTICHOKE3 and other programs of interest to us. These discussions, while mostly general in nature, were at times sufficiently pointed to obtain some specific answers or opinions. — CIA Artichoke Conference at the Mayo Clinic, April 7 or 8, 1955 (Link to CIA document, see PDF pg. 4)
[Redacted, but likely Dr. Howard P. Rome] stated he was studying mushrooms in a general sense and had noticed several articles in the literature describing the use of mushrooms as an intoxicant, particularly among primitive Siberian tribes. He thought this was very important and felt a study should be made. He suggested that perhaps mushrooms which were toxic possibly used at dinner if worked in combination with LSD or mescaline might produce unusual results.” — CIA Artichoke Conference at the Mayo Clinic, April 7 or 8, 1955 (Link to CIA document, see PDF pg. 18, italics and material in brackets added)
[Redacted, but likely Dr. Howard P. Rome] stated he felt if he were given the problem he would try to produce an amnesia through the use of a series of differently-acting psychogenic chemicals or chemicals that act upon different areas of the brain. He stated he thought that by switching the chemicals back and forth both prior to the interrogation, during the interrogations and following the interrogation it might be possible to produce a form of amnesia. — CIA Artichoke Conference at the Mayo Clinic, April 7 or 8, 1955 (Link to CIA document, see PDF pg. 22)
The Warren Commission
Dr. [Howard] Rome: Let me try this on you for size. Here is a man [Lee Harvey Oswald] who in a variety of ways has been made a cuckold, and had his nose rubbed in his impotence, literally and figuratively…. He gives as much money as he is able to give to her [Marina, his wife], and then he takes up the only evidence of masculinity that he has ever been able to demonstrate, his rifle, with him, and now he is going to demonstrate that he really is a man under these circumstances…. Obviously these conjectures are highly speculative. There is no question that they are based on inference, incomplete information, conjecture.
Mr. [Allen] Dulles: We have asked you gentlemen to make them, ...
Mr. [Norman] Redlich: ...I think Mr. Dulles is quite right that we have asked for this, and that my comments are really directed on the use that we make of your speculations and conclusions based on the information that we have provided to you. What in your opinion should we do with the type of analysis that you have provided us today?
— From transcript of July 9, 1964 Meeting of Warren Commission Members with Psychiatric Panel, as reproduced in The New Republic, September 27, 1975, pgs. 45-46 (material in brackets added, but the ellipses, and all ellipses made within quotes throughout the article are in the original, except for bracketed ellipses)
For a bright person to be handicapped in the use of language is an especially galling experience. It seems to me that in Oswald's instance this frustration gave an added impetus to his need to prove to the world that he was an unrecognized “great man".
— From letter, Dr. Howard P. Rome to Wesley J. Liebeler, Assistant Counsel, Warren Commission, September 8, 1964
Oswald's search for what he conceived to be the perfect society was doomed from the start. He sought for himself a place in history — a role as the "great man" who would be recognized as having been in advance of his times.
— From Chapter 7, Warren Commission Report, “Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives” (pg. 423)
Part One
Three Psychiatrists Come to Washington
It was a very pleasant summer day in Washington, D.C. The weather was cooler than normal, and the humidity was not too uncomfortable. Recently fired CIA director Allen Dulles and the chairman of the CIA-cutout known as the Ford Foundation, John J. McCloy, had arrived for a special meeting of the Warren Commission to discuss the psychological motivations that may have inspired Lee Harvey Oswald, the purported lone killer of John F. Kennedy, to turn to assassination.
The date was July 9, 1964. The meeting dragged on for seven hours, with a lunch break between 1 and 2 o’clock. Besides Dulles and McCloy, there were six WC staffers present — all white males, by the way. It is interesting that the two heaviest hitters on the Commission, Dulles and McCloy, were the Commissioners selected to work with the psychiatrists on Oswald’s psychological motivations.
According to an account of the meeting given in the September 25, 1975 issue of The New Republic (TNR), which included a partial transcript (PDF pgs. 35-39 ), the staffers included WC General Council, J. Lee Rankin; Rankin’s “special assistant” Norman Redlich, as well as “staff members Wesley J. Liebeler, Albert E. Jenner, Jr., W. David Slawson, and Howard Willens” (PDF, pg. 35).
But the stars of the meeting were three psychiatrists. Dr. Dale C. Cameron was the Superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s, a U.S.-government run mental hospital in Washington D.C. Also present was “Dr. Howard P. Rome, then professor of psychiatry in the Mayo Foundation (connected with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota) and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association; and Dr. David A. Rothstein, then staff psychiatrist at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (MCFP) in Springfield, Missouri” (Ibid.).
Surprisingly, I learned by reading the full transcript (PDF pg. 7) of this meeting that from 1954 to 1960 — therefore covering the period when the CIA came to the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota (U of Minn) — Dr. Cameron had been a clinical professor of psychiatry at U of Minn. This was during the period when Cameron was also serving as Medical Director for the Minnesota Department of Welfare. At first, Cameron forgot to tell the WC commissioners and staff about the affiliation, but he rectified that after Rome introduced himself.
It is highly likely that Cameron and Rome knew each other during this period, and that they were even colleagues. The psychiatry training at the university was done as part of a working relationship with the Mayo Clinic. Was their appearance together as two of the three main WC psychiatric consultants a coincidence, or did it represent something more? Did Cameron hesitate in revealing his U of Minn connection because he knew it could lead to uncomfortable questions about CIA affiliations or secret work undertaken? That’s my hunch, anyway, because, as I will show next, the University's psychiatry department had some serious connections to the CIA.
Even if Cameron never knew Rome while at the University of Minnesota (and that’s unlikely), he may have had other CIA contacts during this period. According to an Agency document on MKULTRA institutional connections, the University of Minnesota was affiliated with MKULTRA and/or ARTICHOKE, namely via work on MKULTRA subprojects 5 and 25. According to a set of declassified documents on subproject 5, the the head of the psychiatry department at the University was aware of the CIA work there. That department head was Dr. Donald W. Hastings. Hastings was “cleared through TOP SECRET and aware of the real purposes of the project,” according to a memo signed by Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of the Chemical Division of CIA’s Technical Support Services, which was in charge of MKULTRA. (See PDF pg. 23.)
Subproject 5 appears to have been an ARTICHOKE-related set of experiments that focused on the use of hypnosis for a number of purposes, including the induction of anxiety, the learning of new material, enhancement of observational skills, the experience of undergoing polygraph examinations while hypnotized, and the recall of “hypnotically acquitted information by very specific signals” (Link, PDF pg. 24-25). The project was ultimately transferred from the University of Minnesota to Denver University. From my read of the available documentation, Dr. Rome did not appear to be familiar with the work of this project.
Subproject 25 also seems to have been related to hypnosis techniques, but there is less that has been declassified about it. In the available documentation, even part of its full cover name is itself redacted. ("The cover title of the project will be 'Hypnotic Techniques [two to four words redacted]," one document states. It appears to have been active during the time of ARTICHOKE conference at the Mayo Clinic in 1955. Both the University of Minnesota-related MKULTRA subprojects were funded via unidentified institutional cut-outs.
[Addendum, June 10, 2025: I have subsequently discovered a fascinating article from the Chicago Sun-Times. Dated September 13, 1977, its headline was “Hypnosis Study Linked to CIA.” The article confirms that Donald Hastings was the psychiatry department head cleared “TOP SECRET”. The other person cleared with him was Alden Sears, a psychology professor from York College in Nebraska sent by the CIA’s cut-out, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, to work on the CIA hypnosis projects at the University of Minnesota.
Sears denied any knowledge of working for the CIA, and said he only worked for the Geschickter Fund. The bulk of the Sun-Times article examines the credibility of his denial. (For the record, I originally discovered the “Hypnosis Study” article at the website for The Vidette, Illinois State University’s student newspaper, which apparently had reprinted the Chicago Sun-Times story. The article was downloaded from the Vidette Digital Student Archives, part of Milner Library at Illinois State.)
Hastings claimed to have no knowledge of Sears’ hypnosis work (for Subprojects 5 and 25). But Hastings did admit that he had a “TOP SECRET” clearance, “because he helped recruit employes [sic] for the CIA”! It’s quite possible that both Cameron and Rome were initially recruited for the CIA work via their psychiatry department head, Donald Hastings. — End addendum]
The main point here is that the head of the psychiatry department at the University of Minnesota, the leader of both Rome and Cameron’s department while they taught at the University, was himself a Top Secret cleared CIA asset.
Putting Together the Expert Panel
In October 2024, I wrote an article showing how the Warren Commission had hired two CIA-connected psychiatrists associated with St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The first hire was Dr. Winfred Overholser, who had recently retired from his position as the long-time head of St. Elizabeth’s. When Overholser developed “complications from heart disease,” Cameron, his successor at the D.C. hospital, took his place as a psychiatric and/or medical consultant to the Commission. Overholser died on October 7, 1964, nine days after the public release of the 888-page Warren Report.
In my October 2024 article, I described how Overholser had links with the intelligence world going back to World War II, where he headed a secret “truth serum” study for the Office of Strategic Services. Additionally, and more to the point, both he and Cameron had been privy to secret agreements between the CIA and the hospital they led, agreements about the disposition of Agency patients. The impetus to hire Overholser apparently came from either John J. McCloy or Earl Warren, as discussed in my earlier article.
While like Overholser and Cameron, Dr. Rothstein was a government psychiatrist, he appears to have no known link to the CIA or the intelligence world. He got his job as psychiatric consultant to the WC after he wrote a letter to Warren Commission head, Chief Justice Earl Warren, describing his special expertise in the psychopathology of would-be presidential assassins, the knowledge of which he had gained from his position at MCFP. Rothstein interviewed ten patients who had been criminally committed to MCFP for, possibly among other things, threats to kill Kennedy and/or Eisenhower. He wrote up his findings in a paper, “The Presidential Assassination Syndrome.”
On June 4, 1964, Rothstein sent a letter to Warren in his position as head of the Commission. Rothstein believed his “psychological insights derived from these [MCFP] patients… may indirectly throw some light on the psychiatric functioning of Lee Harvey Oswald….” (PDF, pg. 4)
A comment on a routing slip for Rothstein’s letter and essay enclosure, apparently sent to J. Lee Rankin and Howard Willens, said, “The work of this government psychiatrist from Springfield is so pertinent that I think we shall make him part of our effort….” (It’s not clear to me who actually wrote this — see PDF, pg. 2).
Willens appears to have sent Rothstein’s letter on to Wesley Liebeler, who was working on the issue of Oswald’s alleged “motive” for the assassination. Willens wrote a comment on the routing slip for the letter: “The wheels of Government turn slowly, but they turn relentlessly in search of truth” (PDF, pg. 3).
The third psychiatric member of the special group gathered at the July 9 meeting, Howard Rome, was not a government employee. He was a very prominent psychiatrist, who had just been elected to the presidency of the American Psychiatric Association, the premier psychiatric institution in the nation. (He had not yet assumed the office and was at this point APA’s “president-elect.”)
Interestingly, according to a copy of Howard Rome’s curriculum vitae, forwarded to me from Dr. Klim, Rome was a consultant to the Pentagon’s National Security Agency from 1965-1966. Perhaps this was a recall or clerical error by Rome when he was constructing his CV, assembled apparently sometime in the late 1970s, because according to the full transcript of the meeting with WC staff, Rome told the latter that he was at that time (July 1964) “a consult [sic] to the National Security Agency” (see PDF pg. 7). One wonders why the NSA needed a psychiatrist on staff.
I don’t know how Rome came to be a consultant for the Warren Commission. But one thing I do know, when he sat in that room for many hours with Allen Dulles, it’s highly probable that Dulles knew exactly who he was, that is, a consultant for the CIA’s top secret interrogation program, Project ARTICHOKE, and likely also MKULTRA itself.
The ARTICHOKE program, the successor to the CIA’s Bluebird project, expanded the the CIA’s Cold War interrogation experiments to include hypnotism, electric shock, LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines, and other substances, such as the purported “truth drug” Sodium Pentothal, with the aim of achieving total control over another human being. ARTICHOKE in particular was obsessed with creating amnesia in its subjects, which, as we have seen from the quote earlier in the article, Dr. Rome was apparently quite aware.
Further along, I will provide a sample of the kind of CIA ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA operations that Rome was briefed on and for which he provided input. A future article will explore the April 1955 CIA visit to the Mayo Clinic in far more detail.
Since I am making rather incredible claims in this article, I want to point out that this is not conspiracy theory. I am writing a serious history of events that happened 60-70 years ago. It is based on documentary evidence, and even more, unlike most such articles, I am also providing downloadable documents and/or links to the relevant evidence.
The plan for the rest of this article is as follows: first I will review why I conclude Dr. Rome was the psychiatrist described in the CIA report. Then I will discuss a related event where the CIA tried to recruit an anesthesiologist at nearby University of Minnesota during this same period. Following that I will review the panoply of different topics that were addressed in the CIA talks with the Mayo Clinic doctors. I will then turn to what was discussed at the meeting between Dulles, McCloy, and various WC staffers with Rome, Cameron and Rothstein. The article will conclude with a brief analysis concerning the impact of Rome et al.’s contribution to the Warren Commission, and the significance of their participation.
“Neither Confirm nor Deny”
In my October 2024 article, I initially identified Dr. Bryant Welch, with whom Dr. Overholser had corresponded, as another psychiatrist who may have been involved with the Warren Commission in the construction of Oswald’s psychological profile, as Bryant had admittedly done work doing profiles for the CIA of foreign government leaders. To date, I have not found further evidence of Welch’s work, if any, with the WC.
Additionally, when I wrote that first article on CIA-linked psychiatrists working with the Warren Commission, I had no idea that Howard Rome had been associated with the CIA. Hence, it was a shock when I when I sat down a few weeks back and reread Casimir Klim’s article about the Mayo Clinic’s historic links with the CIA. Klim’s article was published at Stat in April 2024. It did not mention Rome by name, but it was clear that Rome was one of the doctors involved in the Mayo Clinic’s work with the CIA.
I reached out to Dr. Klim, who had recently ended a four-year residency with the Mayo Clinic, and he informed me that he had filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the CIA on Dr. Rome and other Mayo personnel from the 1950s. Some of these requests are apparently still pending. But Dr. Klim told me that the FOIA on Howard Rome received a Glomar response from the CIA, that is the Agency would “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of any records on Dr. Rome.
Klim further told me he appealed the Glomar response, and his appeal was turned down. While this means there is no CIA admission of any contacts with Dr. Rome or the Mayo Clinic, it is common sense to consider that when the CIA says it can “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of any records, rather than say it finds no records, or some such response, it means there are files but they are too sensitive to even admit their existence.
The April 2024 Stat article related the discovery of “two versions of a [July 12, 1955] long report by CIA personnel describing a visit to an institution referred to as ‘the Clinic’ in April 1955 to discuss matters related to ‘ARTICHOKE and other programs of interest to us.’ While heavily redacted, every unclassified detail [in this report] lined up with the Mayo Clinic in the mid-1950s….” (bracketed material added).
For for the Mayo Clinic, according to Klim’s article, its “director of communications for media relations declined to comment on whether Mayo collaborated with the CIA on their mind control research during the 1950s. A CIA spokesperson also declined to comment on whether or not any such collaboration took place….”
The July 12, 1955 CIA report described CIA communications with “a chief of psychiatry fascinated by the use of psychotropic mushrooms by Siberian tribes, and a former chief of anesthesiology who popularized the use of sodium pentothal in his field.” These identifiers strongly matched biographical details of two doctors’ careers.
These two doctors, I can say with very strong probability (such that I will treat their identities as near-proven fact), were the Mayo Clinic’s Chief of Psychiatry, Howard P. Rome (the mushroom enthusiast), and its former Chief of Anesthesiology, and still acting consultant in 1955, John S. Lundy, famed for his pioneer work with Sodium Pentothal.
Furthermore, a rather long interview with “probably the outstanding mycologist in the United States, if not the world, today,” was also discussed in the CIA report Klim had found. The interview took place three days after the interview with the two doctors. The identity of the mycologist was almost certainly Elvin C. Stakman, chief of the division of plant pathology and botany at the University of Minnesota. The interview with Stakman will be explored more in a future article.
CIA Recruits an Anesthesiologist at the University of Minnesota
After meeting with Rome and Lundy, the author of the CIA report, who repeatedly referred to himself as “the writer,” met the following day, April 9, with someone whose identity is, like the others, redacted in the document, except we know he was an anesthesiologist. In fact, he was likely the anesthesiologist from the University of Minnesota who was the subject of a January 3, 1978 article at The Minnesota Daily.
The Daily’s article, “U May Have Done 1950s CIA Truth Serum Study” (alternate link at CIA Reading Room), described “CIA efforts to engage a University anesthesiologist in research for the CIA project ARTICHOKE, which involved the use of narco-analysis, or ‘truth serum,’ on criminal suspects.” The article strongly implied that this doctor performed at least one experiment in “narco-analysis research” with the former director of the University of Minnesota police department, C.B. Hanscom.
Hanscom denied doing work for the CIA. According to what The Minnesota Daily said was a sixteen page transcript of the interview between the U of Minn anesthesiologist and a “CIA employee,” the anesthesiologist maintained “none of the anesthesiologist's immediate associates were involved in narco-analysis research." According to this anesthesiologist, "some of [his associates] doubt the real value of it." In a moment of seeming bitterness, the doctor stated his belief that the other people in his department believed "the only interests of concern to me are police-type interests.”
The Minnesota Daily story is important for two reasons. It appears to help identify the anesthesiologist with whom “the writer” had a meeting on April 9, as many matters discussed match up with the newspaper account. But the article also shows, independent from either Klim’s research or my own, how the CIA was visiting University of Minnesota doctors, seeking ARTICHOKE partners at a time when the Mayo Clinic and the University had a close organizational relationship, via a shared medical graduate program. Dr. Rome, for instance, was, according to his CV, also a professor at U of Minn. As we have seen earlier, so was Dr. Cameron.
Of some interest, a February 13, 1981 article at The Minnesota Daily quoted a patrolman at the University police department who saw a document pertaining to at least one ARTICHOKE experiment at the University that included the presence of Hanscom, an unidentified doctor and an attorney, but that it and other related documents had been shredded “two to three years” earlier.
The identity of the University anesthesiologist who cooperated with CIA’s ARTICHOKE remains unknown. The 1981 article also described other instances of CIA interest in and cooperation with University of Minnesota students and personnel. (See the article, “University campus still scene of CIA’s activities,” page 13.)
Rome’s Interest in Hallucinogens
On April 10, 1955, the “writer” met with a “SO consultant,” most probably someone working with the CIA’s SO or “Security Office.” On the 11th, the writer then met with Stakman, for the discussion on toxic mushrooms. As we shall see, “toxic mushrooms” was a topic of discussion as well in the conference with Rome and Lundy.
In the Stat article, Dr. Klim had pointed to internal evidence that the “Clinic” mentioned in the article was in fact the Mayo Clinic. He cited as evidence “the number of seats in the then-new Medical Sciences Building and the vast network of pneumatic tubes through which medical records were sent between hospitals [as] described in the [CIA] report.” He said there were other evidence markers as well.
One such marker I found had to do with the distance from the airport to the “Clinic” where the interviews took place. The CIA report stated the clinic was “75 miles southeast” from the airport, which is almost exactly what Apple’s map app showed to be the distance between the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and the Mayo Clinic. (I later learned that Dr. Klim had also figured this out.)
But the primary evidence is really the parts of the report that describe the two clinic doctors, who were interviewed over the course of two days, April 7 and 8, 1955. Rome was a self-styled expert on mushrooms, and his 1959 paper on “Mushrooms, Folklore and Experimental Psychoses” evinced a longtime interest in hallucinogens, familiarity with LSD and psilocybin, including making “clinical observations” on the same.
A literature search showed that in 1956 Dr. Rome had co-written the article, “Mescaline and LSD-25 in activation of temporal lobe epilepsy,” published in the April edition of the journal Neurology. A year earlier, in 1955, Rome co-wrote an article for a journal that published Mayo Clinic articles. I have not been able to obtain the article, “Reversibility of induced psychosis with chlorpromazine,” but it’s clear from the title that “induced psychosis,” which can only come from drugs, was of primary concern. Additionally, the Mayo psychiatrist in the CIA report showed at least a couple of times his interest in experimenting with chlorpromazine and mind-bending drugs such as LSD and Rauwolfia (see CIA report PDF pgs. 5 and 11). This seems to fit Rome’s interests very well.
Another example of identifying the Mayo Clinic as “the Clinic” in the CIA document was the brief description in the latter of the Clinic’s animal experimentation facilities. The Mayo Clinic had, in fact, been a leader in establishing such “animal colonies” for clinical research. It’s unlikely that any other “Clinic” at that time had such animal experimental research capacities.
Mayo Clinic, Operation Paperclip & Other Government Research
Having the CIA turn up at the prestigious Mayo Clinic was not likely a purely serendipitous decision. I’ve already shown that nearby University of Minnesota was an MKULTRA/ARTICHOKE contractor. But the Mayo Clinic had its own pattern of doing classified work for the government, including a history of doing top secret work for the U.S. military. According to a webpage of the Mayo Clinic Libraries, during World War II the work done at Mayo’s Aero Medical Unit [AMU] was “considered top secret and only individuals vetted by Mayo Clinic’s newly created Security Section were allowed access to the Unit.”
The Mayo’s AMU scientists were also sent to Germany after the war, where they worked with former Nazi scientists such as Hubertus Strughold and Theodor Benzinger. According to the Mayo webpage, “In September 1945, Dr. [Edward J.] Baldes received orders to go to Germany, which he visited between October 1945 and May 1946. Based at the Army Air Forces (AAF) Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, he met several German aeromedical experts and purchased scientific equipment for the continuation of their research.…. Back in Rochester, Dr. Baldes served as head of the Section of Biophysics and Biophysical Research from 1948 to 1958.”
Interestingly, Baldes also “served as special consultant to the USAF Aeromedical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio until 1954.” Wright-Patterson was the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Materiel Command (AMC), which, according to a June 2000 report by the Air Force Research Laboratory, was headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB.
The Air Force report described how AMC “was responsible for the management of the BW/CW [biological and chemical warfare] program during the 1950’s” (PDF, pg. 19). The biological and chemical warfare programs were “extremely active” at Wright-Patterson in that time period.
“In October 1950, AMC was assigned the mission of supervision of research and development in biological warfare; the command assigned this responsibility to the Aero-Medical Laboratory. In 1951, all research, development, and engineering activities were moved from AMC to the newly formed ARDC [Air Research and Development Command]. During the 50's, research was conducted in the Laboratories (including the Aero-Medical Laboratory) at ARDC's WADC” (PDF, pg. 27, parentheses in original). “WADC” was the acronym for the Wright Air Development Center, located at Wright-Patterson Air Base.
More than just research was done at Wright-Patterson. Declassified documents show that the air base there was a central transfer point for over 400 biological bombs sent overseas to a UK air base at Lakenheath, England, and Wheelus Air Force Base near Tripoli, Libya, part of the top secret Project Steelyard program. Steelyard positioned BW munitions filled with either wheat rust or rye rust for possible use against crops in the Soviet Union, mostly in the Soviet Russian and Ukrainian socialist republics.
Was Dr. Baldes from the Mayo Clinic involved in either chemical or biological warfare research or other aspects of those programs, such as munitions? I have no evidence he was, but his “special consultant” work for the Aero-Medical Lab at Wright-Patterson may be an intriguing target for further investigation.
CIA Visits the Mayo Clinic: “Intense experimentation and thought experiments”
In his July 12, 1955 report on his visit to the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, the CIA “writer” discussed with Drs. Rome and Lundy thirty different drugs or substances that interested the CIA in their Artichoke work.
These drugs or substances included LSD, Bulbocapnine, the stimulant Meratran, Serpesil (Rauwolfia), the analgesic Dolitrone, Mescaline, Xenon gas, Tertiary Amyl Alcohol, Serotonin, Dibenamine aka Dibenzylchlorethamine, Cocaine, Glutamic Acid, Alcohol, ACTH, Cortisone, the sedative Chloral Hydrate, Antihistamine drugs, toxic mushrooms, marijuana, barbiturates, morphine, the hallucinogen known as Harmine, and adrenochrome, among others.
The “writer” also discussed with the doctors the possible combinations of different drugs, and the need to be on the lookout for unusual new side effects associated with any novel drug.
Other topics reviewed during the two days of discussions included “brainwashing,” using “dietary deficiencies as a possible weapon” (CIA report, PDF pg. 14), induction of amnesias, use of stomach tubes to deliver substances to subjects, “electronarcosis,” lobotomies (the doctors were against this), psychological harassment, “the problem of the unwitting and even the violently unwilling subject” (PDF pg. 12), inhalants, convulsants (such as Ammonium Chloride and the barbiturate Dibural), nerve gases, planting “deep electrodes” in the brain, the polygraph, and experiments with hypnosis.
Regarding hypnosis, one of the two doctors, most likely Rome, “stated that it certainly deserved intense experimentation and thought experiments could be designed to establish how far an individual could be pushed under hypnosis” (PDF, pg. 12). As mentioned earlier, it did not seem from this discussion that Rome had been cognizant of the work done under either MKULTRA subprojects 5 and 25 at the University of Minnesota.
One other subject that was deeply discussed was “isolation.” From the CIA report it’s clear that the term was concerned mainly sensory deprivation. It’s worth quoting this material a bit more extensively.
Perhaps the most interesting discussion of the entire trip occurred during one of the conferences. [Redacted — most likely Dr. Rome - JK] without any previous reference, asked the writer if he were familiar with the work of Dr. [Donald O.] HEBB in Canada. The writer stated he was familiar with HEBB’s work. [Redacted] then asked did the writer note the significance of Dr. HEBB’s work from an intelligence point of view. The writer replied that the matter was known and we were examining it and studying it as best we could. The writer asked [redacted] if he had done any work along these lines and he replied he had not but had read all available literature along these lines and wanted to do some experimentation if he could make some arrangements. [Redacted] stated that Dr. HEBB’s work was quite well known and stated the effect on animals was also fairly well described in the literature. [Redacted] then stated that this field should definitely be exploited. He stated it was of extreme importance and that is might be a very important intelligence weapon. He urged that worked [sic] be done in this connection and the isolation technique be used in combination with chemicals such as LSD, mescaline, Rauwolfia, etc. The writer discussed the isolation problem in very general terms with [redacted] and particularly asked them to give consideration to ways and means to which the isolation technique could be brought to bear on willing or more important unwilling or even violently-objecting subjects. [Redacted] stated that the problem appeared to him of tremendous importance and he certainly intended to give this matter considerable thought. [Redacted] urged complete studies of experimentation and research in this field a number of times during the conversations in the several conferences the writer had with him. [CIA report, PDF pgs. 18-19]
There is some irony in the fact that, since the early 1950s, copies of Hebb’s research work on isolation and sensory deprivation — work funded by a secret project within Canada’s Defence Research Board — “were sent to all three branches of the U.S. military, as well as the CIA.” Of course, this was not mentioned to the doctors at the Mayo Clinic. Such secrets were highly compartmentalized. Nevertheless, one of the latter doctors — probably Rome — had already sensed its importance as an “intelligence weapon.”
What I personally find interesting is how, despite the fact the doctors told the CIA that they would not countenance doing experiments on their own patients, nor receive monetary remuneration for their work, they were avid enthusiasts for the ARTICHOKE project, offering suggestions, references, and professional support for the “Isolation” work. Notice how even while setting boundaries to protect their own patients from CIA intervention, the doctors involved had no cavils about interventions made using their knowledge upon “unwilling or even violently-objecting subjects.”
Rome and Lundy even suggested, in a strange turn of phrase, that when it came to the CIA’s agenda, the way they thought about these things “would have to be rearranged”:
All personnel interviewed at the [redacted] very emphatically stated to the writer that [redacted], a private [redacted] and that experimental work could not be attempted with their patients except where it could be shown that it definitely worked for the patients good. They made it very clear that their work was to help those that were ill and pointed out that their specialties were all aimed in that direction. They said, however, specifically that this did not exempt them from studying the effects of the new drugs, determining possible uses of new drugs, designing instruments or from working to help the U.S. Government in any way they could. They stated their thoughts would have to be rearranged to meet the challenge of the various ideas the writer had expressed to them and that certain mechanisms could be set up along these lines and certain individuals should be cleared. [PDF, pg. 29]
In the course of their discussions, Rome and Lundy made at least half-a-dozen recommendations for security clearances for scientists and doctors they knew, or whose work they knew well. The recommendations included the Dean of the College of Pharmacology at an unidentified university; a consultant in neurology, “recommended because of his knowledge of brain problems” (CIA document, pg. 30); and “a distinguished woman biophysicist and physicist... exceptionally brilliant and a specialist on the effects of ultrasonics, radar and radio on human beings” (Ibid.).
Much more could be said about the CIA’s ARTICHOKE meetings at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota in April 1955, but I believe enough has been explained here to provide adequate background, and I want to move on to Rome’s activities with the Warren Commission. I will return in a future article to the 1955 ARTICHOKE document and a fuller description of all that it entailed.
On a more personal note, I share Dr. Casimir Klim’s feelings when he read the particulars about CIA’s conference with the Mayo doctors. In his article for Stat, he wrote, “I found the matter-of-fact manner in which these physicians expounded on how medical science could be repurposed for coercion and domination jarring and nauseating to read.”
Part Two
Meeting of Warren Commission Members With Psychiatric Panel on July 9, 1964
Most of the following quoted material comes from a partial transcript of this meeting published by The New Republic (TNR) on September 27, 1975. While I have looked at the entire transcript of this meeting (see embed link at end of this article), there is not much that is relevant to this article — with one notable exception — that is not in the TNR edited transcript. The shorter edited transcript is more convenient for reference purposes for this article. When I have reason to reference the full transcript, I will indicate that.
TNR’s introduction to the transcript material, written most likely by journalist Tad Szalc, stated, “The three doctors had studied most of the biographical material available on Oswald—based on numerous earlier interviews with witnesses by the Commission, its staff, and the FBI but they cautioned the Commissioners that hard conclusions were impossible given the fact that Oswald could not be interviewed psychiatrically. The Commission appears to have used this material in a highly selective manner, incorporating some of the views of the doctors in the final report while rejecting others.” [TNR, PDF pg. 35]
In particular, Szalc said the Commission rejected claims that Oswald had a “killer instinct,” or that he had been moved to assassinate the president because he had been rejected by his wife the evening before.
Szalc continued: “Opening the discussion, staff members drew for the doctors Oswald's early history, his father's death and the feelings of his mother, Marguerite Oswald, that society treated poor widows harshly” (Ibid.).
The various psychiatrists drew heavily, if irresponsibly, upon psychodynamic theories for Oswald’s behavior. For instance, the transcript begins with Dr. Rothstein’s supposition that Oswald had transferred his feelings of anger toward his mother for not meeting his dependent needs to that of the government. Rothstein’s contributions are numerically less in the truncated version of the transcript available to us, but he seems to harp on this theme.
“It may be stretching things, but I think if rejection by a woman and mother is important, the possibility of this having some effect may be present,” Rothstein told the group later in the meeting (TNR, PDF pg. 36). It was a theme that Rome would pick up in a big way.
After the discussion about Oswald’s early years, according to TNR editorial notes, “the group discusses at some length Oswald's attitudes in school and outside, the blend of withdrawal and agressiveness [sic] in his personality” (TNR, PDF pg. 35).
Dale Cameron, the superintendent from St. Elizabeth’s found this early period in Oswald’s life decisive. “It sounded as though he [Oswald] was withdrawn, and that as he tried to develop some masculine identity, then this kind of hostile belligerent business would come out. Then he got squelched again,” Cameron said (Ibid.).
He went on a bit later in the same vein: “… It seems to me he [Oswald] has been a retiring kind of person in a sense, not alone because he wanted to be alone, but because he was so terribly rejected, and as he tries to come out he comes out in a hostile way, and then gets smacked down and comes out in a hostile way again, and then if this is true, and if indeed he did get rejected, in essence, by the Russians, and I don't know that, this would then become a trigger another hostile kind of outburst” (TNR, PDF pg. 36).
The idea that Oswald was a powder keg waiting to explode was bandied about quite a bit in this meeting. Soon after Cameron’s statement above, Wesley Liebeler, who was the WC Assistant Counsel, made what even he recognized was an untoward statement, providing direction to the psychiatrists about which kind of interpretation of Oswald’s behavior was appropriate.
Liebeler stated: “I don't want to put any thoughts in anybody's mind .. . but Oswald was discharged from a job on April 6, 1963 and on April 10, 1963 he apparently made his attempt on the life of General Walker.…” (Ibid.).
My guess is that Liebeler exactly wished to put such thoughts into the doctors’ minds. The following interchange shows how the different attendees at the conference fed off each other. Note, by the way, the intense intervention of Commission member John J. McCloy, who presumably was there to mainly listen to the psychiatrists’ contributions.
Dr. Cameron: In Oswald's case, a man who would defect and go [to the USSR] in these circumstances, shows that he is perfectly capable of acting on his beliefs, and that in retrospect would have been a big fat danger signal for this kind of boy . . .
Mr. Liebeler: So you would certainly watch defectors?Dr. Cameron: Yes, I certainly would.
Mr. McCloy: He was an activist throughout. In the first place, he signed up for the Marine Corps. He went over to the Marine Corps. He went off to Moscow. He went off to Mexico. He got excited about the Cuban business. He printed the pamphlets and distributed them on the corner of the street. He shot at Walker. He shot at the President . . . .
Dr. Cameron: If he had shot Walker, the President probably would have been saved. [TNR PDF pg. 36, bracket material added by author]
Edwin Walker and the Psychiatrists
The Warren Commission claimed that Oswald had taken a shot at Major General Edwin A. Walker on April 10, 1963. Marina Oswald reportedly confessed the same to the Secret Service, but there are good reasons to believe that the shooting was staged. In any case, the shooting of Oswald was a major piece of the case the government was constructing to create a mosaic that would show Oswald had been, supposedly, a violent individual, one capable of shooting a president.
Interestingly, Walker was arrested nearly a year before the JFK assassination, in October 1962, for inciting an insurrection the previous month during the racist mobilization to stop the integration of the University of Mississippi. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had him sent to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri for “psychiatric observation.” Of course, this is where WC consulting psychiatrist, and participant in the July 9 WC meeting, Dr. David A. Rothstein was a staff psychiatrist. Did Rothstein examine Walker? At this point, I don’t know, but it’s a plausible possibility. If he did not, he very well may have known other doctors who did.
According to psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, one of Walker’s attorneys, Robert Morris (who was also President of the University of Dallas) called him back in 1962, having gotten his name from William F. Buckley, Jr., son of a Texas oil millionaire, and himself a CIA agent in the early 1950s. In 1955, Buckley founded the arch-conservative magazine, National Review. Later he made a career as a right-wing talk show host.
Morris asked Szasz “to help his team to free Walker from psychiatric imprisonment.” Szasz referred the attorney to Dr. Robert L. Stubblefield, chief psychiatrist at the Southwest Medical Center in Dallas, who conducted Walker’s competency evaluation and found him mentally sane for purposes of his legal defense. The prosecution’s expert had been Dr. Manfred Guttmacher, “chief medical officer at Baltimore City’s Supreme Court.” Ultimately, the charges were dropped against Walker.
In one last pertinent coincidence, Walker’s two examining psychiatrists, Stubblefield and Guttmacher later conducted psychiatric examinations of Lee Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby. These psychiatrists found Ruby to be sane, though Ruby’s condition later exhibited symptoms of psychosis, a breakdown that occurred the night before Ruby was to be examined by Dr. Louis Joylon West, infamously known as a CIA-contract MKULTRA doctor.
I have digressed a bit here on the Walker and Ruby cases. At this point in the narrative, I will return to the outline of the July 9 WC executive session.
“This is not the kind of man any intelligence service would want to pick up.”
After McCloy and Cameron brought up the Walker shooting, Dr. Rothstein posited whether or not Oswald’s purported actions in killing the president were not due to some kind of suicidal impulse. “Every one of these people who threatens the President was for one thing they have made some suicidal attempt in the past,” Rothstein said, “and in at least a lot of them there was an identification of this with suicide... Oswald may have really, at least unconsciously, had a need or this was an event equal to suicide in a sense....” (TNR, PDF pg. 36).
McCloy exploded at this (or at least it seems like an explosion, as I read it). In this instance, it was Cameron, the psychiatrist, who moved to bring the discussion back to more realistic, if unfounded and highly speculative, psychological motives:
Mr. McCloy: I already talked about what seems to be his [Oswald’s] killing instinct. He also talked about killing a good bit in his papers ... when he talked about Russia being his own country, he considered it his own country and it was a war. He immediately said he would have to kill Americans, kill any American ....
Dr. Cameron: I would have a little trouble with the concept of a killer instinct. I think this was a violent hostile paranoid person, which is understandable in terms of his past history, and that in his hostility and violence he would kill, yes. But I wouldn't attribute this to any innate instinct in that sense of the word. I think it was more the product of his life experiences, plus his innate personality, whatever talents he was born with ....
Mr. Dulles: His disappointment in Russia too was due in part to the character of the state he found there. He didn't welcome that. He apparently rejected that. [TNR, PDF pg. 36, bracketed material added]
Dulles evidently had his own agenda here. Liebeler stated that Commission staff did not see Oswald as a Russian agent, and Dulles responded, “You can assume exactly what was said, he was not a tool. I think the evidence before the Commission pretty clearly brings that out. I think they [the Russian security services] looked him over, but rejected him ... This is not the kind of man any intelligence service would want to pick up” (Ibid.).
Given the recent evidence that Oswald was indeed involved in intelligence matters, and that, as Jefferson Morley and Margot Williams recently stated, “a small clique of covert operatives monitored Oswald’s politics and personal life for four years before JFK was gunned down in Dallas,” Dulles’ statement at the July 9, 1964 WC meeting seems more than just an ironic aside. It reads now as a blatant attempt to mislead.
At this point, Rome had had little to no participation in the meeting. But after Dulles’ intervention, he began to speak out more.
Dr. Rome: …He comes back from Russia, and now it is a plague on both their houses. Neither of them [the U.S. or the Soviet Union - JK] have been able to really provide this kind of a satisfaction. Then there is this business of trying to get to Cuba. Again, this frenetic kind of a search all around the periphery in an attempt to locate and establish himself.... [Ibid., bracketed material added]
Howard Rome almost sounds like psychologist Erik Erikson here. In reading the full transcript, Rome, besides echoing the positions that Warren Commission staff would make, had two primary contributions to the discussion. One was his repeated insistence that Oswald’s actions were a way of establishing a firm identity for himself. He also kept hammering away at the supposed psychological effects a presumed reading and spelling disorder had on Oswald’s identity formation, a theory Rome continued to propound even after the July 9 meeting.
Warren Commission staff would not accept the language disorder influence upon Oswald. In the end, there was a one sentence, desultory reference to that theory in Chapter VII (pg. 383) of the Warren Report.
Rome, like others in the room, seemed to have his own animus towards Oswald, and it didn’t always comply with the facts the WC staffers brought to him. At one point, Dr. Rome told the Commissioners to expect that a child with Oswald’s kind of reading and spelling disorder would experience a decline in school performance and behavior by 4th or 5th grade. Moreover, those difficulties, he felt, led to Oswald’s “marked dislocation” with his peers by “age 8 or 10” (Full transcript, PDF pg. 42).
But the facts were not as Rome surmised. Albert Jenner mildly remonstrated him.
Mr. Jenner: Doctor, we have to remain skeptics, as lawyers act as devil's advocates to ourselves.
Dr. Rome: Sure.
Mr. Jenner: One of the things that we are hoping we will obtain, we are already obtaining, is advice from you gentlemen as to what we should look for. Let's take the school record. The fact is that until he reached New York City, his school grades were good, and I have no reservation in saying they were good. They were good grades. They were better than the grades that his brother Robert was receiving….
The conduct grades he received from his teachers were all pretty good until he hit New York. Now, we are faced with that record. There it is. We can't change the record. This is the appraisal of many teachers in various grammar schools and high schools. [Full transcript, PDF pg. 43-44]
Did Dulles Out Oswald as an Intelligence Agent?
There was one very odd contribution by Allen Dulles to the discussion about Oswald, and it’s worth pointing out. This was not covered in the TNR edited transcript, so my references here are to the full transcript.
The group was discussing the various pseudonyms Oswald had adopted: Alek Hidell, A.J. Hidell, and O.H. Lee, etc.
Dr. Rome: Of all of the names under the sun to pick, why is it that he uses again his own kind of initials, instead of being Theofalus [probably “Theophilus” - JK] Jones, or something of the sort? [Full transcript, PDF pg. 107, bracketed material added]
It had been pointed out that the initials for O.H. Lee — OHL — were really Oswald’s own initials, LHO, spelled backwards. Rome had a theory for this:
Dr. Rome: I think, again, this need, even though he is attempting to hide himself, he has a need to prove himself, to establish himself. Again, I think we see this recurring theme and a need to establish an identity. [Ibid.]
Dr. Rothstein wondered out loud if this reversal was consistent with the learning disorder spelling reversals Dr. Rome had mentioned. It was Dulles who then spoke up, claiming that these kinds of reversals in pseudonyms were standard procedure for covert intelligence operatives! Oswald might have merely been using a “normal trick of the trade.”
Mr. Dulles: You often do this, take initials and names that are very similar to your own because of the initials. You often have initials on baggage and forget about it and go under one pseudonym, and you find that doesn't fit the initials on the bag you sometimes are in trouble., so that is quite a normal trick of the trade. But this doesn't quite fit any of these, although there is a mixture of his name in here in most of these. [Full transcript, PDF pg. 108]
Dulles contradicts himself at the close of his speech. Oswald’s pseudonyms don’t “quite fit” the pattern he mentioned, but actually, “there is a mixture of his name in here in most of these.” So the pseudonyms do fit the behavior of an intelligence agent?
Whether anyone else noticed what Dulles said or not, his contribution on this point landed like a lead balloon. The whole pseudonym issue was dropped immediately, and Liebeler moved the meeting on to discuss the “so-called Russian community” Oswald and his wife were hanging around with in Dallas and Fort Worth.
“To demonstrate that he really is a man”
Soon after this point in the meeting, Dr. Cameron proposed the idea of the significance of Lee Oswald’s separation from his wife. This separation supposedly “emasculated” Oswald. Howard Rome seemed to really like this idea. Once again, Liebeler set the tone:
Mr. Liebeler: ...Now after they got back [to Dallas in early Oct. 1963] Lee wouldn't let Marina smoke, wouldn't let her drink, wouldn't let her wear lipstick. He did not encourage her or help her to learn English, and in some people's views he positively opposed her learning the English language...
Dr. Rome: I would think that it was mostly again another aspect of her dependency relationship, to have her dependent upon him then as a mask for his dependence upon her, and still exercise his control of the situation.
Mr. Jenner: She was completely dependent on him, there is no question about it...
Dr. Rome: I think his need to appear in every sense the man in the house, to wear the pants In a literal and figurative sense more and more, and I think we are working up to and what we are really going to find out is what kind of a man he was…. [TNR, PDF pg. 36, bracketed material added]
After some back and forth, with Liebeler having quite a lot to say about the marital and sexual relationship of the Oswalds, Szalc described what came next: “The panel went over material showing that Oswald came to see Marina the evening before the assassination and asked her to come live with him in Dallas. Nothing was settled and Oswald went to bed at the Paines' house two hours before Marina did. The next morning, November 22, he got up before Marina did, left his wedding ring on a dresser along with $170, took the rifle from the garage, and had a friend drive him to Dallas” (Ibid.).
Dr. Rome, the MKULTRA/ARTICHOKE consultant, then jumped in. Oswald had “in a variety of ways has been made a cuckold,” Rome said (see the quote towards the beginning of this article). The theme was being worked out, either with conscious intent, or as kind of free-wheeling groupthink around the predetermined conclusion of Oswald as a dangerous individual. Oswald the impotent cuckold needed to feel like a man, so he became an assassin. And after all, didn’t he already try to be an assassin when he (supposedly) shot at General Walker?
Here is Rome’s entire intervention painting Oswald as an impotent cuckold:
Dr. Rome: Let me try this on you for size. Here is a man who in a variety of ways has been made a cuckold, and had his nose rubbed in his impotence, literally and figuratively.
He comes back. She is angry. He is rebuffed. All through this he does all of the kinds of somewhat ignominious things for him that he has not done previously in the way of playing with the children, offering to get the washing machine, now trying to fill the role of a dutiful husband and father.
I think it is extremely significant that with this situation now, and being confronted in a very probable way by his impotence, that he leaves his wedding ring. He gives as much money as he is able to give to her, and then he takes up the only evidence of masculinity that he has ever been able to demonstrate, his rifle, with him, and now he is going to demonstrate that he really is a man under these circumstances.
I think that we have today been able to build up to this point very definitely the kind of psychological background that would make then the subsequent behavior extremely consistent in a psychological sense. [Ibid.]
Rome, here, seemed to be exerting his professional authority. Of all the psychiatrists present, he was the most senior, and the most honored in his field.
Dr. Rothstein: I am not saying that he wasn't going to kill the President until after this argument, but I think this was a big factor in it. . .
If readers are picking up on a definite misogynistic trend in the psychiatrists’ emerging narrative, Dr. Cameron then made it fairly explicit, blaming both Oswald’s mother and his wife for driving Oswald to do the dastardly deed:
Dr. Cameron: I would look at this last episode [i.e., the night before the assassination] as simply a final fillip, if you will, in a sense this whole life with his mother, and I come back to her repeatedly, and the things we have talked about all day,4 and the fact that for him... to release his hostility in some way that would be noteworthy, and the assassination of a prominent person would satisfy this need. Now he I think must have thought about it if he did kill the President… So I think what Marina had a chance to do unconsciously that night was to veto his plan without ever knowing of its existence, but she didn't. She really stamped it down hard. But that one incident would never, never have been enough.
Dr. Rothstein: He might very well have done something like that or the same thing at another time in the future. [TNR, PDF pg. 36, bracketed material added]
Cameron’s claim that Marina Oswald could have stopped the JFK assassination if she had only not frustrated her husband is blatantly absurd. But as we shall see further on, this particular meme is still alive among establishment assassination commentators. It was also a theme the psychiatrists could not let go of.
At this point in the meeting, Dr. Cameron opined that Oswald was out to “get” any “prominent person in the public eye whose death would result in a real rhubarb” [TNR, PDF pg. 38] Rome summarized the situation, and Dulles replied approvingly, though I find Dulles’s choice of words to be strange (“that finishes” Oswald). There is a good deal of animus against Oswald in the room, not necessarily strange among a group of government officials whose president had been assassinated. But this seemed quite personal.
Dr. Rome: […] it is as though he [Oswald] is above these mundane, domestic kind of things, and in a sense he loses a battle but wins a war by this kind of an explosive act which, at the same time, recoups him not only in his own eyes but really makes him quite a man…
Mr. Dulles: Then that finishes him, of course. He is perfectly willing to be finished with it.
Dr Rome: With this identification again. At least you have by virtue of your violence identified yourself with an extremely prominent person. This makes you prominent. [Ibid.]
The entire room appears to be picking up on the theme being proposed, and it’s Dr. Cameron who returns to the concept of the dire role of Marina Oswald.
Dr. Cameron: […] I think if Marina had accepted him, if she had been a loving wife that night, he might have slept late then morning and he might not have got the president, but eventually it would have had to have been some way. It would have been a temporary reprieve ....
Dr. Rothstein: I think his discomfort might have been relieved to the point he wouldn't have taken action on it.
Dr. Cameron: He would have done it later to somebody else.
Dr. Rothstein: She [Marina] is what the psychiatrists would often call a castrating woman... Who is building up her own importance, her own feeling of importance by depreciating him .... [Ibid.]
At some point here, somebody in the room (probably Norman Redlich, as we shall see) protested the harsh assessment of Marina Oswald. Even so, the speculations at this point began to get really wild!
Dr. Cameron: […] You are troubled ... by the notion that we seem to be saying she was a pretty unsavory character, and that you know a lot of women who may have comparable behavior without attributing to them such unsavory motives... But at any rate she was capable of fitting into his pathology, and I think it is his pathology that we are concerned with here, and she happened to fit in with it....
Dr. Rothstein: I still would want to say I think to some extent the President at some level of his thinking was his wife and his mother,
Dr. Cameron: I think by choosing a prominent person, particularly one associated with government, he was perhaps unconsciously assassinating both his mother and the system.
Mr. Liebeler: And his wife also?
Dr. Cameron: Possibly.
Mr. Liebeler: And perhaps also the Soviet system? [Ibid.]
“What in your opinion should we do?”
Who knows were all the psychobabble would have led if Rankin’s executive assistant, Norman Redlich, had not jumped into the fray. Redlich, a member of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, was himself not unfamiliar with character assassination. The right-wing press had been claiming that he was a leftist associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the same pro-Castro organization that Oswald had purportedly been associated with. J. Edgar Hoover had the FBI investigate him. Warren Commission member Gerald Ford had privately moved for his dismissal from the Commission. It reportedly took the intervention of Earl Warren and J. Lee Rankin to allow him to keep his job.
While the editorial matter in the TNR transcript indicates that more than one WC staffer “indicated their opinion that the psychiatric analysis of Oswald's possible motives was inadequate and unconvincing” — I think W. David Slawson felt that way — the only opinion they published from the full transcript was Redlich’s. After Redlich’s criticism was aired, the psychiatrists moderated their stances somewhat, with Rome taking Redlich’s lead.
Mr. Redlich: … My objection to your analysis is that I think you are fitting this into a pretty tight mold based on one side of the story....
I am prepared to argue that you have in my opinion, not having observed Marina Oswald personally, visually, not having visually observed Lee Harvey Oswald, not having observed Oswald's mother visually, I just cannot understand how professionally you gentlemen are able to say that somehow there is a similarity between Marina Oswald and Margaret [sic] Oswald, that Marina is this kind of a person that you say she is....
Dr. Rome: Obviously these conjectures are highly speculative. There is no question that they are based on inference, incomplete information, conjecture.
Mr. Dulles: We have asked you gentlemen to make them, ...
Mr. Redlich: ... I think Mr. Dulles is quite right that we have asked for this, and that my comments are really directed on the use that we make of your speculations and conclusions based on the information that we have provided to you. What in your opinion should we do with the type of analysis that you have provided us today? ...
Dr. Rome: As far as I am concerned, this is highly conjectural. It is purely speculative. I see it as being of no use to anyone beyond a staff level to help perhaps clarify your approach to the record.
I should think it would be most unrealistic to use this in any way. I think you would be laughed right out by the public with this high spun fantasy kind of inferences based on second- and third-hand hearsay information.
I have thought that this was solely for the purpose of again establishing some testable hypothesis in which you could or could not fit the evidence that you have. That there will be great gaps and deficiencies, yes. I think this is so.
But to try to account for Lee Oswald's behavior by now retrospectively, after his death, trying to devise some sort of psychological history I think would be a specious exercise.... [Ibid.]
Rome was quick to revert to double-talk when confronted by WC staffers, except when it came to his Oswald dyslexia theory, about which, faced with push back, he merely clammed up.
In the end, the Warren Commission report never did provide a direct psychological motivation to Oswald’s alleged actions, though there was a good deal of discussion in the July meeting about whether they would do so, as one can see if one reads the full transcript.
The hypotheses surrounding the martial conflict between Lee and Marina and the events of the night of November 21 were never mentioned in the Warren Report, although the supposed fact of the marital conflict was discussed. What did survive the bull session between WC commissioners and staff and the government-linked psychiatrists (two of whom, we’ve seen, had definite CIA connections) was the idea that Oswald wanted to be a “great man” by means of assassinating the president.
Cameron lined up behind Rome, in saying that a public airing of the psychological issues would not be helpful. Rothstein was not so sure.
Dr. Cameron: […] Now, whether or not you make this public or should make it public I think is highly questionable. One, Mrs. Margaret [sic] Oswald is still in existence, and so is Marina, and there would be little purpose served I think in trying to damn her or Marina for this testimony, if my hypothesis of how a lot of this, particularly the mother, came about, I see little point in this.
I think you would probably say yes, he did it, and there was no, if this is true, international involvement, and he seems to have done it as a loner for reasons peculiar to himself, and just drop it there….
Dr. Rothstein: The only thing I would add, I think it would not be entirely unreasonable to say that you have consulted with psychiatrists as to whether this was possible. I don't know whether you would agree with that, but it seems to me that would be reasonable.
Dr. Cameron: I don't think it is necessary. I think the Commission will have to decide that question…. [TNR, PDF pg. 39]
The rest of the meeting appears to revolve around what psychiatric theories and/or consultative work should be made public in the report. Only Rothstein, and perhaps surprisingly, Dulles, seem to have thought that it might be worth mentioning that the WC had consulted with mental health experts.
Dr. Rome wondered how necessary any reference to the psychiatric testimony would be. Dulles’s reply serves here as some comic relief.
Dr. Rome: Don't you suspect the total mass of data that is going to be made public [in the report] is going to be self-evident?
Mr. Dulles: But nobody reads. Don't believe people read in this country. There will be a few professors that will read the record....
Mr. Jenner: And a few newspaper reporters who will read parts of it.
Mr. Dulles: The public will read very little... [Ibid., bracketed material added]
In the end, Rome’s opinion would win out. The psychiatric consultations were not mentioned in the report, but that didn’t mean that the WC didn’t selectively reference certain psychological themes when it discussed Oswald. As the TNR editorial summary put it:
The Report, however, made no reference to the Commission's consulting the panel of psychiatrists. On the other hand, many passage [sic] in the report reflected some aspects of the psychiatric analysis. Other aspects were rejected; the report said the Commission did not believe that Oswald's relations with his wife caused him to assassinate Kennedy. Listing Oswald's difficulty in establishing human relationships, his discontent with the world, his hatred of American society, his search for a place-in history, his commitment to Marxism and Communism, and his capacity to act without regard to the consequences, the Warren Commission offered this conclusion: "Out of these and many other factors which may have molded the character of Lee Harvey Oswald there emerged a man capable of assassinating President Kennedy.” [Ibid., italics in original]
The Psychiatrists’ Letters
This was not the end of the psychiatrists’ interaction with the Warren Commission. Each of the psychiatrists were allowed to read draft copies of the report, or at least of the chapter or chapters that directly concerned Oswald. Each of the psychiatrists then replied in writing. I have not found Cameron’s response, and have requested a copy from the National Archives.
Dr. Rothstein wrote a detailed editorial commentary for Liebeler, which was referenced in a memo from Liebeler to Willins, reproduced as part of Liebeler’s 1976 testimony for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (pp. 235-237). The memo was dated September 14, 1964.
Pursuant to Rothstein’s recommendations, a paragraph was added to Chapter VII that drew upon a psychological evaluation conducted on Oswald by Irving Sokolow, a Youth House psychologist. Oswald had been remanded to Youth House, a child evaluation facility in New York City, from April 16 to May 7, 1953. The charge was truancy. Lee Oswald was 13 years old. The evaluation painted a grim picture, at least the part Rothstein wanted put in the report (and it was put in the report, see WC report, pg. 381.)
The young teen Oswald’s Human Figure Drawings were said to be “empty, poor characterizations of persons approximately the same age as the subject. They reflect a considerable amount of impoverishment in the social and emotional areas.” The child was said to be “somewhat insecure… slightly withdrawn.” The mother animus wasn’t far from Rothstein’s mind. Oswald “exhibits some difficulty in relationship to the maternal figure suggesting more anxiety in this area than in any other,” Sokolow wrote, and Rothstein urged the words enter the official record.5
There were a few other matters, including a suggestion that criticism of the Oswalds’ marital relationship be toned down just a bit. But a number of Rothstein’s suggestions just came too late to change anything, as the state of the report’s galleys were somewhat fixed.
On September 8, 1964, Dr. Rome wrote a 12-page letter to Wesley Liebeler concerning Oswald. (Liebeler had apparently asked for his response to the report draft.) The letter mostly consisted of an analysis of the many misspellings in Oswald’s writings, and Rome’s belief that this was due to Oswald’s suffering from the reading and writing disorder, dyslexia. Rome provided two-and-a-half pages of examples of Oswald’s misspellings. He seemed compelled to convince WC staff about the relevancy of his theory.
“I think that this disability and its consequential effect upon him [Oswald], while a minor point, in the total array of evidence accumulated by the Commission is relevant since it amplifies the impressions from many sources about the nature of Oswald’s estrangement from people, his diffident truculence during school years and his unwarranted estimation of his literary capacities,” Rome wrote.
But in the tradition of tendentious psychiatric theorizing, Rome used the supposed fact of Oswald’s reading and spelling disorder to construct a much wider picture of psychopathology.
“For a bright person to be handicapped in the use of language is an especially galling experience. It seems to me that in Oswald's instance this frustration gave an added impetus to his need to prove to the world that he was an unrecognized ‘great man’, Rome told Liebeler (italics added for emphasis).
The rest of the letter is mainly an elaboration of this theme. Unlike the wild theorizing in the WC conference room back on July 9, Rome felt he could with confidence make a clinical diagnosis of dyslexia for Oswald.
Rome then turned to his final statement, a full-throated endorsement of the work of the Commission in constructing Oswald’s biography, including its conclusion that the supposed facts therein showed Oswald emotionally and psychologically capable of being the assassin. In this, Dr. Rome appears to be leveraging his august authority to in essence sign off on the Warren Commission’s work, a nice thing for any Warren Commission member to carry in his back pocket before any inquiring congressional committee someday.
Rome wrote:
It is my impression that the carefully documented reconstruction of his life, buttressed by the evidence gathered from many first hand witnesses fits the pattern of behavior which the Commission's Chapter VII summarizes. I feel that the inferences which have been drawn are justified. The conservative manner which characterizes their presentation does not in any way strain my credulity. I do not find any construction which warrants modification. In short, I feel that this is a most thorough and at the sane time a restrained analysis of a very tragic event.
Two days after Rome sent his letter, WC staffer Howard Willens wrote to Wesley Liebeler. He suggested Rome’s observations on Oswald’s “reading-spelling disability” be included in the final draft of the report. Willens suggested the following language also be inserted: “The psychiatrist who has suggested the existence of this disability also stated his opinion that the frustration which may have resulted from it gave an added impetus to his [Oswald's] need to prove to the world that he was an unrecognized 'great man.'"
The Warren Report only very briefly mentioned Oswald’s spelling difficulties, but did not tie it to any psychological motivations. The Report’s Chapter VII, “Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives,” waited until its “Conclusion” to voice Rome’s “great man” theme, though it did not tie it to either his life with Marina or any reading or spelling difficulties. Yet the “great man” meme would be one that resonated for decades.6
The psychiatrists’ theorizing about the motivational impact of an alleged rejection of Lee Oswald by his wife the night before the assassination may not have made it into the Warren Report, but the theory did not die. It was resurrected in a 1965 book written by Warren Commission member, and later U.S. president, Gerald Ford, and co-author John Stiles, Portrait of an Assassin. The issue came up as Ford and Stiles discussed an interview with Marina Oswald, as reproduced on pg. 314 of their book.
Much more recently, author Gerald Posner, who has written extensively on his belief that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of JFK, on November 21, 2022 published a blog post, “The Equivocal Assassin?” Posner asked: “Did a bitter fight with his wife cement Oswald's plan to murder JFK the next day?”
As one can see from a screenshot of the article directly below, Posner mentioned the WC panel of psychiatrists and the July 9, 1964 meeting. He appears to approve of Dr. Cameron’s opinion that Marina Oswald had at least a chance to stop the assassination by agreeing to move back in with Lee. The real question today is why would Posner resurrect this claim, which he first retailed in his 1993 book, Case Closed (see pgs. 221-222)? Did Posner know of the CIA connections of two of the three psychiatrists? He’s had over thirty years to look into that.
Interestingly, Posner failed to add in the sentence that followed “She really stamped it down hard.” Cameron had then immediately said, “But that one incident would never, never have been enough.” Posner chose to leave that out. In this, he acted not as a researcher-historian, but as a JFK assassination propagandist.
Conclusion
In Chapter VII of the Warren Report, and prior to its subsection titled “Conclusion,” the WC report authors had said, alluding to the fateful night before the assassination, “The Commission does not believe that the relations between Oswald and his wife caused him to assassinate the President. It is unlikely that the motivation was that simple. The feelings of hostility and aggression which seem to have played such an important, [sic] part in Oswald's life were part of his character long before he met his wife and such a favorable opportunity to strike at a figure as great as the President would probably never have come to him again” [pg. 423].
Chapter VII’s conclusion is worth quoting in full. Note how the WC painted Oswald as someone who was hostile, alienated, unable to have “meaningful relationships, full of hate, a dreamer who “sought for himself a place in history.” It was, I think, the CIA’s psychological construction. To steal Dulles’ expression, it “finished” Oswald for history’s sake.
Many factors were undoubtedly involved in Oswald's motivation for the assassination, and the Commission does not believe that it can ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives. It is apparent, however, that Oswald was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment. He does not appear to have been able to establish meaningful relationships with other people. He was perpetually discontented with the world around him. Long before the assassination he expressed his hatred for American society and acted in protest against it. Oswald's search for what he conceived to be the perfect society was doomed from the start. He sought for himself a place in history — a role as the "great man" who would be recognized as having been in advance of his times. His commitment to Marxism and communism appears to have been another important factor in his motivation. He also had demonstrated a capacity to act decisively and without regard to the consequences when such action would further his aims of the moment. Out of these and the many other factors which may have molded the character of Lee Harvey Oswald there emerged a man capable of assassinating President Kennedy.
On September 27, 1964, the same day the Warren Report was released to the public, The New York Times carried a rather long article on page 15 of the paper. The article headline read, “Oswald's Act Held Consistent With Personality,” and the byline was by Joseph A. Loftus. Loftus had worked for the NYT for twenty years. He later left the paper to join the Nixon Administration in 1969.
Loftus’s article contained “a shortened version of the ‘Background and Possible Motives’” chapter on Oswald from the WC report. The NYT short version of the WC Chapter VII included the paragraph containing the “great man” quote noted above.
Whether it is the lasting power of the “great man” characterization, or the idea that Marina Oswald’s rejection precipitated Lee Oswald’s action on November 22, the psychiatrists’ participation in the construction of the Warren Commission report has had long-lasting significance.
However, I don’t believe the theories they propounded constituted the ultimate consequences of their work. I believe the main thing was to convince internal staffers and others who would examine the work of the Commission that the latter had done its due diligence in consulting with psychiatric experts.
The Commission then stacked the expert panel with known CIA assets (Overholser, and later Cameron and Rome), and one credulous and willing junior doctor (Rothstein). The main concern was that these doctors would accept the “lone nut” theory that the Commission had already dedicated itself to validating. The doctors had to be dependable, that is, they could be trusted to keep their speculations within bounds. Only one, Dale Cameron, ever even alluded to the possibility that Oswald might be innocent. It was a thought that passed with evanescent rapidity. (See Full transcript, PDF pg. 63].)
The psychiatric panel that advised the Warren Commission was part of a stealth cover-up of the real facts of the assassination, and a key component in the construction of the fable around Oswald’s motivation for the killing. This portion of the cover-up was godfathered by Allen Dulles, and probably John J. McCloy. Taken together with other revelations about CIA lies, evidence linking Oswald to intelligence agencies, and the activities of other CIA-linked actors surrounding both Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby, the revelations about the intelligence origins of the primary psychiatric consultants to the Warren Commission demonstrates clear evidence of CIA intention to deceive the American public.
The evidence also shows how much the Warren Commission was performative, and its “investigation” a real-life instance of political theater.
As for the Mayo Clinic and the cooperation of key doctors and scientists with the CIA’s MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE programs, the only thing I can say in their defense is they weren’t alone in working with the CIA. That’s an important point to close with. The Mayo Clinic and University of Minnesota were only two institutions that contributed to the CIA’s work in these areas.
In 1977, testifying before both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a Senate Health subcommittee, then CIA Director Stansfield Turner revealed “that the C.I.A. had secretly supported human behavior control research at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges or universities as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies,” according to a New York Times article. This was probably an undercount.
One other major example of a university and medical hospital tie-up that worked closely with the CIA was Cornell University and its medical center, as this heavily redacted list of participating institutions shows.
Over fifty years ago, the scandals surrounding the CIA’s unethical experiments in interrogation and torture have not completely died down. The government spends a lot of money in enhancing the reputation of the CIA, particularly in the media. One battleground over the malign influence of the CIA concerns its likely role in the assassination of an American president, and/or in its cover-up. This article has been a contribution to getting to the bottom of that event, one that had and still has a definite impact on the true nature of the United States government, and the society it claims to lead.
There has been a great deal of work linking Lee Oswald to the CIA. The following is an all-too-brief, and non-comprehensive list (in chronological order): Jim Garrison Response, Video, July 15, 1967; Sid Blumenthal and R.D. Rosen, “Assassin or Agent? Tracing the Links Between Oswald and the Spooks,” The Boston Phoenix, May 27, 1975; Mark Lane, Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991; James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed : J.F.K., Cuba, and the Garrison Case, Sheridan Square Publishers, 1992; John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, Carroll & Graf, 1995; “The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend,” by Bill Simpich, May 20, 2020, Mary Farrell Foundation; “Assassination Day, featuring Oliver Stone and Aaron Good,” (Podcast) November 22, 2021; Nick Reynolds, “New Documents Shed Light on CIA's Connection to Lee Harvey Oswald,” Newsweek, December 6, 2022; Jefferson Morley and Margot Williams, “WORLD EXCLUSIVE: The CIA's Pre-Assassination File on Lee Harvey Oswald,” JFK Facts (Substack), April 3, 2025.
Related to the Oswald material is recent research linking the case of Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, to CIA-MKULTRA operative, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, as described in a recent three-part series by researcher Max Arvo, “Jack Ruby: A Review and Reassessment,” Kennedys and King, November-December 2024. Arvo references important work that preceded his own. See Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, William Heinemann Publishers, 2019;
More recently, Dr. Klim published with three co-authors an academic article that drew upon his research on the CIA-Mayo Clinic connection. See Casimir Klim, Bryan VanDreese, Terence Meyerhoefer, Scott Breitinger, “Innovation and inequity in psychedelic research at the Mayo Clinic," History of Psychiatry, 2025, Apr 28 (Online ahead of print version) . LINK
The abstract reads: “This paper provides an overview of psychedelic research at the Mayo Clinic in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on methods, objectives, findings, and ethical practices. We highlight instances where researchers prioritized scientific progress over the autonomy, safety, and equitable treatment of research subjects, and discuss this history in the context of ongoing challenges with informed consent and equity in contemporary psychedelic research.”
While I have given some explanation in this article as to what the CIA’s ARTICHOKE program was all about, readers may wish to pursue the topic on their own. Links to the following documents and articles are offered here for that purpose. As a start, there are documents released by the CIA years ago when Congressional committees and public outcry began the process of releasing material previously classified.
There was this Description of Newly Discovered Project Artichoke/Bluebird Materials, probably written to satisfy some internally-generated Agency or Congressional request. It was declassified in 2002. Then, there is an April 26, 1952 memorandum from the ARTICHOKE Project Director, Robert J. Williams, to H. Marshall Chadwell, who was Assistant Dircector, Scientific Intelligence at the CIA. The memo covers much of the same material as the ARTICHOKE conference document discussed in my article, though the latter goes into more detail about the drugs, the techniques, etc.
In addition, a July 14, 1952 CIA memo from the Assistant Director of Scientific Intelligence to Allen Dulles, who was at that time the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, shows that Dulles was well briefed on ARTICHOKE aims and activities.
Also worth perusing is a set of declassified files on the Bluebird and Artichoke programs collected by paperlessarchives.com.
I have previously written at some length about Artichoke, especially in my article, “CIA, MKULTRA and the Cover-up of U.S. Germ Warfare in the Korean War.” I also co-wrote an article with Hank Albarelli back in 2010 at Truthout that went into great detail on an actual ARTICHOKE “case,” that of “Lyle O. Kelly,” aka Dimitre Dimitrov. Interestingly, there is a bizarre link between Kelly/Dimitrov and both the Kennedy assassination and President Gerald Ford, as is explained in Truthout article. I republished this article at my old blog, Invictus, so it would have links to the relevant ARTICHOKE documents.
Finally, John Greenewald at the Black Vault website has posted links to the vast material on MKULTRA, Bluebird and ARTICHOKE, which was initially released on a series of CDs by the CIA. The collection includes a link for download of an even newer set of documents. You’ll want to bookmark this: CIA MKULTRA / Mind Control Collection. The 1955 Artichoke conference material discussed in this article initially resided in the files released on the CIA CDs, and is linked at the Black Vault website. It can be found as DOC_0000184434 on CD ROM #2, which calls up a number of files, each representing a page or so of the master document.
In the full transcript, there was a good deal of discussion early on about what a terrible mother Marguerite Oswald supposedly was. She’d abandoned her children, was “unloving.” She was said to have been violent towards her second husband, Edwin Eckdahl. (See Full transcript, PDF pg. 14.)
At one point, Dr. Cameron told the group, “[Oswald’s] mother had a great drive to be recognized by important persons. She wanted to be an important person herself, that she was grasping, self-centered, selfish, and used her children for her own benefit, I think there can be little doubt. Growing up in that kind of an environment, I would expect a person to have a good deal of this rub off. I would also expect them to develop a great drive for some kind of recognition and/or achievement....” (Full transcript, PDF pg. 53). The implication was that Oswald’s seeking notoriety for assassinating someone famous (Walker, Kennedy) somehow stemmed from his mother’s own personality. This was mother-bashing on a grand scale.
There was one other important psychiatric input into the mosaic that was Oswald’s supposed character, and that concerned the testimony of Youth House’s Chief Psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs. According to the WC report, “Contrary to reports that appeared after the assassination, [Hartog’s] psychiatric examination did not indicate that Lee Oswald was a potential assassin, potentially dangerous, that ‘his outlook on life had strongly paranoid overtones’ or that he should be institutionalized.”
Contrary to the documentary record, Dr. Hartogs, who testified before the Warren Commission on April 16, 1964, told his examiners, “If I can recall correctly, I recommended that this youngster should be committed to an institution.” Hartogs did all he could to condemn Oswald to the authorities, once he realized that Oswald was the child he had evaluated eleven years earlier. He told the FBI that the young Oswald had “extremely cold, steely eyes… there was nothing emotional, affective about him.” Oswald’s “suspiciousness towards adults” showed he had a “severe personality disorder.”
When Liebeler showed Hartogs a copy of his original psychiatric report, the report presented a very different picture of Oswald, one that recommended probation and not a “more harmful placement approach,” such as psychiatric commitment. Hartogs could not account for the difference between his report, which said nothing about dangerousness, and his memory. A somewhat blurred copy of Hartogs’ report is available here; and here is a textual, cleaned-up version of the report. Nothing of Hartogs’ contradictory testimony to Warren Commission examiners ever made it into the report.
Hartogs made quite a name for himself out of his connection with Oswald, including various newspaper accounts. In 1965, he published a book on Oswald and Ruby, The Two Assassins. The following year, assassination researcher Sylvia Meagher wrote a scathing review of Hartogs’ book. She titled it, “The Faked Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald: A Psychiatrist's Retroactive ‘Clairvoyance.’”
Meagher’s essay could also have stood as a condemnation of all the pseudo-psychoanalytic surmises about Oswald’s mother and Lee’s marriage with Marina. Of course, she didn’t know about Rome’s, Cameron’s and Rothstein’s contributions. The WC transcript of the meeting was then still classified. Nevertheless, she sarcastically wrote:
Now it is clear at last: Oswald’s repressed lust for his mother, Marguerite Oswald, sub- consciously motivated him to murder President Kennedy; Ruby, tormented by a similar secret incestuous impulse to kill his father, in the symbolic role of President, killed the assassin who had acted out his own subconscious desire to kill in order to expiate his inner guilt-feelings. It all harks back to Oedipus.
In a documentary for the PBS show, Frontline, titled “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald,” broadcast on November 20, 2003, the show quoted Ruth Paine as saying, “He lives in this fantasy about being a great man…. [Marina] was very distressed, said that he [Lee] was using an assumed name and he's done this before and he lives in this fantasy and he has this idea about being a great man. And she was very worried about him, worried about his mental state, as I understood it from her.” Paine is notorious for various relational associations with the CIA.
In 2013, the long-time historian of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Sheldon Stern, interviewed “journalist Priscilla Johnson McMillan, the only person to have interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife and worked for John F. Kennedy.” McMillan was the author of the 1977 book, Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy. McMillan had her own opaque connections with the CIA, having applied to join the organization in 1952, only to withdraw her application the following year.
McMillan told Stern, “Killing Kennedy didn’t come out of the blue. Oswald was mentally ill. He thought he was a great man and told Marina someday he’d be president or prime minister (of the U.S.)… He was certainly violent with his wife. I do think Oswald acted alone” [parentheses in original].
Oswald was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.