Presidents are like managers of a baseball club. They’re the boss in the dugout, the one who walks onto the field, the ones fans see call the shots. Who get the closeups on FOX during heightened World Series moments.
But managers aren’t front office. They’re not the executives who own the club. They have bosses, too.
So who is in the president’s front office? It should be the American people. But with the dominance of 19th century Robber Barons like the Rockefellers and oligarchical international banking families, the People were kicked to the bleachers, distracted by the burdensome demands of everyday life. Entertained by bread and circus.
In the Cold War, hysteria over communism loomed over the populace. Communism or death. Communism or Christ. Nothing else mattered.
So who ran the front office during JFK’s short tenure as manager? Whoever eliminated him in Dealey Plaza pulled off such a brazen act it can only have been accomplished with the assurance of protection from above. Anyone in the long motorcade — Connally, Yarborough, LBJ, even Jesse Curry and Bill Decker — were sitting ducks, should shots go awry, which they did (i.e. Connally, James Tague). They were the players on the field. Travel into nut country at your own risk. The odd sensation of stagecraft viewing the Zapruder film is for another article — the colorful wardrobes of certain figures placed along Elm, the mise-en-scene of the emotionless spectators — but if both Joseph Milteer and Ed Lansdale and their ilk ranging from Theodore Jackman or Cactus Jack Y. Cannon or E. Howard Hunt or Jean Souetre or Tosh Plumlee or John Roselli or Charles Harrison or Chauncey Holt or Charles Nicoletti or Jerrie Cobb — if all and more viewed the fireworks, then perhaps it was less a sophisticated ambush than a wild dash to see who would get the shot off first, akin to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, released in American theatres two weeks earlier.
Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien speculated last year one of the shooters in Dealey Plaza was a fellow named Jack Y. Cannon (sometimes spelled Canon), a suggestion largely derived from the work of their podcast collaborator Dick Russell. According to the Seagraves in Gold Warriors, El Paso native Colonel Jack Cannon “used war-gold to finance death squads in occupied Japan, to eliminate leftists and labor organizers.” More to the point, Cannon, a veteran of the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), ran the Cannon Agency, “[General] Willoughby’s dirtiest and wettest operation in Japan.” In other words, Cannon was protected by Willoughby.
Still more, Colonel Jack Cannon became the Klan’s Grand Dragon of Texas in 1966. This dovetails with research proffered by Jeffrey Caufield, Russell and others that radical right, Birchers and Klansmen fomented the assassination of the president. This was not pulled out of thin air, but was taken from Klansman Joseph Milteer himself, per informant Willie Somersett.
Albarelli and his co-writers wrote about Cannon extensively in Coup in Dallas. It should be noted Cannon was acquitted in a court martial on charges of threatening bodily harm to an enlisted man and shooting two cows.
General Willoughby, long of interest to Russell and Caufield, widely known from MacArthur’s staff as SCAP’s “lovable” and “little fascist,” was a prominent member of the anti-JFK secret society dubbed the “Shickshinny Knights,” the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
I have written about the Shickshinny Knights and their far-right agenda in a previous article, Shaking Down Shickshinny. This outfit, headquartered in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, took pains to convince itself and others to be a genuine chivalric order — the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It saw itself in continuity with the medieval order of the same name with a constitution approved by the Romanov Grand Duke Alexander of Russia in 1908. In other words, it was sympathetic to anti-Bolsheviks and white Russians who hated what had become Soviet Russia.
I suspect this organization is the pivotal bridge in the assassination of the President: it connects, on one side, the hard-right cabal as led by Willoughby and manifested in Dallas by General Walker through Harry Dean, Guy Gabaldon, Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard, Birchers, Jack Ruby, the Dallas PD and the Klan; and, on the other side, the militant anti-communist conmen in New Orleans who shaped the path of the patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald. This is irrefutable: the faux religious order that David Ferrie, Jack Martin, Guy Banister and their cronies infiltrated considered itself to be part of the Order of St. John. If the Willoughby wing represented the armed services aspect of the Shickshinny Knights, this quasi-religious element of the order represented the occultic, esoteric tendencies that coat the Kennedy assassination — as well as the Rosicrucian and Gnostic angles of the RFK and MLK hits.
Moreover, the “bishop” of the diocese of Scranton, the pastoral region of Shickshinny, Theodotus de Witow, consecrated Walter M. Propheta archbishop. The same Propheta, Ukrainian anti-Communist, who wrote a sanctimonious letter to Jim Garrison urging him forward in his investigation. An investigation into individuals — Ferrie, Martin, Banister — who were ordained in the very church Propheta oversaw.
de Witow opens the door to Rosicrucianism, Aleister Crowley, theosophy and hypnotism. Also, per Raymond Broshears, I submit hypnotist David Ferrie confessed his involvement in the Kennedy assassination privately to de Witow and de Witow’s wife, Gladys.
As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, MacArthur wanted no outside influence to his operation — CIA included. He had his own army, his own intelligence. Were members of his “Bataan Boys,” loyal staffers which included General Willoughby, the protection safeguarding those who pulled off the hit on the ground in Dealey Plaza in 1963?
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There are no lack of possible motives that have been put out to explain away the president’s assassination. What if it was less about Jack’s particular policies as president — civil rights, disarmament, Viet Nam, the oil depletion allowance, or any other arbitrary reason — than it was to thwart what the New Englander represented? The spectacular hit certainly sent a message: this carpetbagging Catholic, with a liberalism sympathy towards aggiornamento, was far too interested in recoiling things like dialogue with persona non grata entities as the Kremlin abroad or Black communities at home that was posing great danger to a certain way of American life.
This is best summarized by anti-segregationist rabble rouser Delphine Roberts, Banister’s secretary and mistress and fellow Catholic but who bore no love for her brethren JFK — and it should not go unnoticed that Kennedy’s tenure occurred at the same time as the Roman Catholic Church was opening its windows to the modern world with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, ramifications among traditional, conservative Catholics and progressive Catholics still felt today — as evidenced in her op-ed line from 1962: “It is our sacred duty to preserve the white race of Jesus.”
I have written elsewhere how Christian identity informed the assassination.
The assassins saw their action as a sacred duty. To preserve their vision of America, its spotless Christian bloodline. Better dead than Red. Fascism isn’t such a bad thing after all, is it?
The Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem’s newsletter, the Maltese Cross, whose editor-in-chief was General Willoughby, contains a catalog of associate editors at the time of the assassination who embody hard right ideology. Among them:
Paul M. Winter — Leader of the Philadelphia KKK, vehement anti-Catholic, and according to Dr. Philip Jenkins, “earned notoriety by forming a personal elite bodyguard and enforcement squad known as the Super-Secret Society, the ‘S.S.S’.”
Dr. Emilio Nunez Portuondo — On November 24, 1963, an astute Mexico City long-distance telephone operator heard a voice on an international call say, “The Castro plan is being carried out. Bobby is next. Soon the atomic bombs will begin to rain and they won’t know from where.” One of those telephone numbers was traced to Portuondo.
Prince Michael Sturdza — Romanian nobleman and member of Romanian militant revolutionary fascist movement and political party the Iron Guard.
Baron von Koerber — Onetime Hitler supporter who signed name to 1924 autobiography of Hitler, which was later determined to be written by Hitler himself.
Frank A. Capell — Far-right propagandist who took over as Order of St. John grand chancellor in the late 1970s.
Admiral Richard G. Black — Base Commander of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition (1939–1941), alias Admiral Byrd’s Third Antarctic Expedition. Byrd was cousin to D.H. Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository and co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol.
Brig. Gen. J. Harry LaBrum — Received honorary degree from diploma mill Philathea College of Ontario which also gave similar honor to Illinois Civil Air Patrol founder and fellow “clergyman” in same church as Ferrie and others, Gordon Da Costa.
The original Sovereign Order of St. John grand master himself, Charles L.T. Pichel, corresponded with Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, once close to FDR, who “became a confidant of Hitler before the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch,” according to Bradley W. Hart in Hitler’s American Friends.
It is key to understand the sheer number of military personnel from General MacArthur’s staff who were members of the order — and that Willoughby, however incompetent, was Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the US Army Forces in the Far East (FECOM). He ostensibly ran intelligence with the Order of St. John. Kevin Coogan, in The Spy Who Would Be Tsar, wrote:
“The Shickshinny Knights may have operated as a cover for sections of the U.S. military who were still committed to a vision of using far-right emigre networks for special warfare operations in spite of strong resistance from the CIA, and OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) in particular. Through the Knights, elements in the military maintained their own off-the-books version of the Volunteer Freedom Corps.”
Lee Oswald was recruited and managed by operatives within the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Like the order’s patron saint, John the Baptist, John Kennedy was martyred by decapitation, his blow to the head necessary bloodshed — in this case, to return America safely back to its white, Christian, isolated and segregated roots.
Were the Shickshinny Knights, then, the front office managers who ran ‘The Show’? I submit they themselves had significant backing and protection. It strikes me as not a little unusual that individuals involved in Asian affairs after World War II — Willoughby, Bonner Fellers, Lansdale, among other OSS vets — emerge in JFK assassination literature. The complicity of MacArthur and former president Herbert Hoover, specifically, to fight anti-communism with secret funds from Golden Lily loot is particularly intriguing when considering at the time of Willoughby running intelligence for the Order of St. John MacArthur and Hoover both lived in the Waldorf Astoria, which author Richard James DeSocio has written about to great lengths as a center for conniving and colluding — the JFK hit notwithstanding.
Given this, it is tantalizing to consider: Was Lee Oswald’s attempted Saturday night phone call from the Dallas police station to World War II veteran and lawyer John David Hurt of Raleigh, NC because of Hurt’s background, where according to the HSCA Hurt “served in the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in Europe and Japan 1942–1946.”
The report went on: “He stated that he was stationed in Japan on Honshu Island near a place called ‘Karosawa’ (phonetic). He said the only work of any significance or particular interest he did there was to stumble upon a bullion of silver which the Germans were using to trade with the Japanese.”
Like fellow CIC officer Jack Y. Cannon, both Hurt and Jack Y. Cannon would have reported, ultimately, to one Charles A. Willoughby, major general, U.S. Army.
If Hurt was a member of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusam, such enrollment remains to be determined. But not an impossibility.