(1)
Kerry Wendell Thornley, Warren
Commission (1964)
Oswald asked,
"What do you think about Communism?" "I replied I
didn't think too much of Communism" and he said, "Well,
I think the best religion is Communism." And I got the impression
at the time... he was playing the galleries... he said it very gently.
He didn't seem to be a glassy-eyed fanatic by any means... I did
know at the time he was learning the Russian language. I knew he
was subscribing to Pravda... All of this I took to be a sign of
his interest in the subject, and not as a sign of any active commitment
to the Communist ends... I didn't feel there was any rabid devotion...
His shoes were always unshined... He walked around with the bill
of his cap down over his eyes... so he wouldn't have to look at
anything around him... to blot out the military... It was well-known
in the outfit that... Oswald had Communist sympathies ... Master
Sergeant Spar, our section chief, jumped up on a fender one day
and said, "All right, everybody gather around," and Oswald
said in a very thick Russian accent, "Ah ha, collective farm
lecture," in a very delighted tone. This brought him laughs
at the time...
Every now
and then we had to give up our Saturday morning liberty to go march
in one of those parades ... (and) to look forward to a morning of
standing out in the hot sun and marching around, was irritable.
So, we were involved at the moment in a "hurry up and wait"
routine... waiting at the moment... sitting. Oswald and I happened
to be sitting next to each other on a log... he turned to me and
said something about the stupidity of the parade... and I said,
I believe my words were, "Well, come the revolution you will
change all that." At which time he looked at me like a betrayed
Caesar and screamed, screamed definitely, "Not you too, Thornley."
And I remember his voice cracked as he put his hands in his pockets,
pulled his hat down over his eyes and walked away... and sat down
someplace else alone... and I never said anything to him again and
he never said anything to me again. This happened with many people,
this reaction of Oswald's and therefore he had few friends... He
seemed to guard against developing real close friendships.
(2)
Kerry Wendell Thornley, Oswald (1965)
When news of Oswald
first began to appear, I wondered how any man could have changed
so thoroughly in a few short years. A national news magazine called
him a psychopath, a schizoid, a paranoid, and probable homosexual
- all in the same single column of print. Suddenly I was reading
that he was constantly fighting with his fellow Marines and that
in the service he displayed a conspicuous yen for physical violence.
I observed no such traits. That an appendix of the Warren Report
had to be devoted to speculation and rumors is in my mind argument
enough that a good deal of fabrication and exaggeration was involved
somewhere along the line. While Oswald had his psychological problems,
I doubt that he would have been found legally insane had he lived
to face a jury.
(3)
Jim
Garrison, On the Trail
of the Assassins (1988)
Thornley had told
me that he returned from his summer in California by way of Mexico
City. This happened to be very close to the time that the Warren
Commission said Oswald was in Mexico. By November 1963, according
to his own account, Thornley was living in a New Orleans apartment
he rented from John Spencer.
We located
Spencer, who turned out to be a friend of Clay Shaw's. As he described
it, sometimes Spencer visited Shaw, the director of the International
Trade Mart, and sometimes it was vice versa. Spencer told us, however,
that Shaw never came by while Thornley was living at his place.
Several
days after the assassination. Spencer told us, he came to his house
and found Thornley gone. In Spencer's mailbox was a note from Thornley
saying, "I must leave. I am going to the Washington, D.C. area,
probably Alexandria, Virginia. I will send you my address so that
you can forward my mail." Spencer said it was quite unexpected
because Thornley had at least a week left in the month before his
rent was due. He went to Thornley's apartment, number "C",
and found that paper had been left over the entire floor, torn up
into small pieces like confetti. Before being torn up, the paper
had been watered down so that the ink was blurred, making it unreadable.
Spencer said he had some conversations with Thornley about his book
The Idle Warriors and that Thornley had asked him to read
a copy of the manuscript,
which had been turned down by several publishers before
the assassination. Spencer never did get around to reading it. After
the assassination Thornley told Spencer that he was going to be
a rich man because
of the coincidence of Oswald having been the subject of
his book.
I later
sent Andrew Sciambra to the Washington area, where he traced Thornley's
path. Thornley had wound up at Arlington, a Washington
suburb, and had moved into Shirlington House, a first-class apartment
building where he worked as doorman. Thornley stayed at Shirlington
House for six months, until he testified before the Warren Commission.
Oddly enough, his salary was less than the rent of his Shirlington
House apartment.
In the
mid-1970s when I was in the private practice of law, Thornley sent
a lengthy, almost biographical, 50-page affidavit to me describing,
among other things, evidence he had encountered in New Orleans of
"Nazi activity" in connection with President Kennedy's
murder. It was apparent that even though I no longer was D.A. Thornley
wanted
to assure me that he had not been involved in Kennedy's assassination
in any way.
Although
it did not accord with reality, as I recalled it, the affidavit
had, in retrospect, one interesting feature. Purely gratuitously,
it mentioned how Thornley had left Washington following his Warren
Commission testimony and ultimately returned to California, where
he and John Rosselli happened to become friends. The affidavit was
mailed to me before Rosselli's name surfaced during the Senate's
1975 investigation
of the C.I.A.'s assassination practices. Rosselli, it turned out,
had been one of a number of mobsters with whom the Agency had developed
a relationship during its pre-Castro activities in Cuba.
(4)
Kerry
Wendell Thornley,
Confession
to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK (2000)
During most of
my life I have been inclined to reject conspiracy theories of history.
Notwithstanding my willingness to admit that conspiracies exist,
I felt that a grasp of political events depended upon an understanding
of the power of ideas. In my view, conspiracies were insignificant.
My tendency was to challenge the motives of conspiracy buffs when
I did not, as was more often the case, question their mental health.
Balancing
my occasional doubts was a fear of becoming paranoid. When Oswald
was accused of assassinating Kennedy, my first hunch was that he
was innocent and had been blamed in a misunderstanding that would
soon be cleared up. When the media continued to insist there was
ample evidence that Oswald, and Oswald alone, shot the President,
I quickly changed my mind.
Two years
later, when a Warren Report critic confronted me with the many discrepancies
between the conclusions of the Warren Commission and the testimony
and exhibits contained in the Twenty-six Volumes, I could no longer
hide from myself the probability that either Oswald was innocent
or he had not acted alone.
Yet even
then I did not want to think an elaborate conspiracy was involved.
Maybe Lyndon Johnson or some of his Texas friends had arranged to
kill Kennedy and perhaps it had not occurred to the Warren Commission
to probe that possibility. A more complicated theory would seem
paranoid.
Above all
else, I did not want to seem paranoid.
One year
elapsed between the time I began doubting the lone-assassin theory
and the beginning of tribulations in my own life suffered at the
hands of a man most journalists insinuated was a paranoid. First,
District Attorney Jim Garrison made a bizarre attempt to recruit
me as a witness for the prosecution in his probe of a New Orleans-based
conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy. When I expressed my unwillingness
to cooperate, he accused me of working for the C.I.A. and summoned
me to appear before the grand jury.
After asking
me what seemed like a lot of irrelevant questions, he charged me
with perjury for denying, truthfully, that I had met with Lee Harvey
Oswald in New Orleans during the months previous to the assassination.
I had not seen Oswald in person, nor had I communicated with him
in any other way, since June of 1959 - at the latest.
(5)
Kerry
Wendell Thornley,
Confession
to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK (2000)
Needless to say,
I was jubilant at the news of Kennedy's death -- something I made
no attempt to conceal from anyone, much to the annoyance of most
of the Bourbon House regulars. Besides that, I was extremely proud
of Oswald for getting himself accused -- although I suspected he
was innocent, since in the service he had displayed a talent for
getting blamed of things.
As for me,
I felt betrayed by most of my French Quarter friends, who were obviously
grief-stricken. Hadn't they laughed in the past at my anti-Kennedy
jokes? Where was their integrity? Here I had been thinking they
were potential converts to the Objectivism of Ayn Rand and, instead,
they were all turning out to be a bunch of whim-worshipers.
Then, Sunday
morning, I learned that Oswald had been murdered. I was horrified.
Irrational violence had won out over good sense once again. Why
would anyone want to kill a pathetic little guy like Lee? Now everyone
else was smug and I was in mourning.
Both the
Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been
to the restaurant by then to question me. A poll appeared in the
evening paper indicating that most Americans now thought the assassination
was the result of a conspiracy. As I moved about the French Quarter,
it seemed to me I was being tailed by middle-aged men in suits.
I decided
to go to the F.B.I. office and volunteer my services in luring out
the real assassins of John F. Kennedy. They could say Oswald had
confided in me and use me as a decoy to trap the people who had
silenced him. I spoke to an FBI agent in the Federal Building who
kept pretending he didn't understand what I was talking about. Among
his questions, and typical of most of them, was, "This Oswald
- was he a homo of any kind?"
In the days
that followed I quarreled with virtually every one of my friends
to a greater or lesser extent. Mildest among these disputes were
disagreements about questions of taste. Couldn't I have at least
been silent, instead of offering to buy drinks for everyone in the
Bourbon House? In the worst disagreements, tempers flared and fist
fights almost resulted.
(5) Robert Howard, Forum Debate on Kerry Thornley (18th September, 2005)
At the risk of being redundant, I would like to mention that I know that many of us are waiting for our copies of Joan Mellen's book to come out, I have pre-ordered my copy as well. In the meantime I have been going over some of the teasers for the book and exploring some of them. One of the things that I have discovered is an angle on Kerry Thornley that is attributed to the late Harold Weisberg's research, this may or may not be in Mellen's book; The story is during the Garrison investigation after Weisberg decided that Garrison was going in a direction that he didn't feel was the way to go, Weisberg followed a lead concerning Oswald and the picking up of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in New Orleans from Jones Printing Co. According to the story, Weisberg showed the owner over 100 photos of individuals other than Lee Harvey Oswald (apparently he had discovered that Oswald wasn't the person who picked them up.) When the owner picked the individual out of the photos, Weisberg contacted him and told him he needed to get an attorney as he was about to be indicted for perjury; at this point in a taped interview Kerry Thornley admitted committing perjury and admitted that he had been the one to pick up the FPCC leaflets. When Weisberg informed Garrison about this he declined to pursue it because it didn't have anything to do with his chief suspect Clay Shaw. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the story but it has appeared on one of the JFK Forum's other than this one. It should also be mentioned that the FBI was aware of this and declined to investigate it, ostensibly per Hoover himself.
