Desperately Seeking Truth

Researching history to find the truth about what REALLY happened is not unlike looking for a specific destination when all one has is its address, while traveling on a highway littered with flashing billboards, each offering diversions and false promises pointing the way to the same destination by a different route. Billboards, like most advertising, lie. I always have to remember my modus operandi--the true route to the destination is to follow the money.

I began my most research into Morris Douglas Jaffe after reading a blog by John Delane Williams, Why is Morris Jaffe Interesting? This phase of my research required me to 

• begin with assumptions Williams had made, compared with facts I uncovered about Jaffe's background. (The Fed Mart allegations)
• My next blog about this research revealed what I thought may have been a significant link between the Jaffe family in San Antonio and Lyndon Johnson's close friend and attorney from the Texas hill country, "Judge Moursund." (Old San Antonio)
• It was the next step in my research that led me to inquire into Jaffe's uranium exploration,  found in a blog post called "Other Uranium Explorers in Texas in the 1950's."

What I knew for sure at that point were the following details:

• Lyndon Johnson's San Antonio friend, Morris Douglas Jaffe, was involved for a time in uranium exploration;
• Another Morris D. Jaffe was a lawyer in Dallas.

My initial goal was to sort the two men out and determine which had a uranium company, what happened to it, and with whom he was connected or, perhaps, who was investing in his company. I also needed to know whether either of the two Morris Jaffes was, as  John Delane Williams alleged, the son-in-law of Sam Bloom, an advertising man who "was enlisted to handle public relations for Judge Joe Brown for the Jack Ruby trial." 

Williams also stated in the same post that 

"Mort Freedman was a brother-in-law to Sam Bloom and the owner operator of Morty Freedman Inc. at 2135 Lamar in Dallas. More importantly, he shared the telephone number with the Dallas Uranium and Oil Company on the third floor of the Dal-Tex Building."

Continuing with my metaphor, I knew what I wanted to know, but I had to follow money maps to reach my destination, while ignoring all the billboards (statements Williams made as truths), attempting to divert me from a successful completion of my journey. It took many twists and turns, and for that reason, I am pinpointing for readers the stops made along the way, intersections as it were with other money trails, that eventually led to the correct path to the discovery of the role uranium played in the plot to kill the Kennedy brothers.

1. In September I decided to look into the background of a Waco attorney named David Copeland, the man behind the mask of William Torbitt and the "Torbitt Document," as well as a major source of information secretly supplied to Penn Jones, Jr., an early researcher in the JFK assassination. Copeland's wife, Jayne Copeland -- daughter and partner of Mrs. Lillie Mae Blain Baker -- was a children's clothing maker who traveled within circles of the fashion and textile industry in Dallas, New Orleans and New York. This was the same industry engaged in by many of the backstage characters in the Kennedy assassination--people like Abraham Zapruder and Jeanne LeGon De Mohrenschildt. Did Copeland learn what he knew through his wife's contacts or from other sources?
2. The Torbitt Document took me back to research I had begun years before but never completed--a fascinating look at a trial of two Mexican assassins arrested by Alice District Attorney Sam Burris in the mistaken killing of the son of a lawyer from south Texas named Jake Floyd. 
3. Researching the background of Sam Burris was a step necessary in determining how close he may have been to a relative named Howard Burris, lurking inside the excellent research of Richard Bartholomew's treasure, Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used In the JFK Conspiracy. 
4. Within Bartholomew's manuscript was revealed a connection between Howard Burris and the notorious Edward G. Lansdale, an Air Force Major General at the time of his retirement on November 1, 1963, who headed Operation Mongoose during the Kennedy years.

Only recently did I discover that Jack Ruby was aware of the book written by J. Evetts Haley before his death of a fast-growing cancer in 1967. Ruby wrote a letter, addressed only to "John," which can be seen at page 104 of a book written by William P. Litynski and uploaded to Scribd:

While Ruby is in jail, he writes this letter:  [image of note] It reads:

"you must believe me that I know what is taking place, so please with all my heart, you must believe me, because I am counting on you to save this country a lot of blood-shed. As soon as you get out you must read Texan looks at Lyndon [A Texan Looks at Lyndon by J. Evetts Haley], and it may open your eyes to a lot of things. This man is a Nazi in the worst order."

Further on in this letter Ruby writes:

... isn't it strange that Oswald who hasn't worked a lick most of his life, should be fortunate enough to get a job at the Book Building two weeks before the president himself didn't know as to when he was to visit Dallas, now where would a jerk like Oswald get the information that the president was coming to Dallas? Only one person could have had that information, and that man was Johnson who knew weeks in advance as to what was going to happen, because he is the one who was going to arrange the trip for the president, this had been planned long before the president himself knew about, so you can figure that one out. The only one who gained by the shooting of the president was Johnson, and he was in a car in the rear and safe when the shooting took place. What would the Russians, Castro or anyone else have to gain by eliminating the president? If Johnson was so heartbroken over Kennedy, why didn't he do something for Robert Kennedy? All he did was snub him.

This letter and Ruby's remarks to the press, suggest that Ruby became only later convinced that Johnson was a power behind the scenes. During his Warren testimony he shows no inkling of this conviction.

Upon investigation, we learn that the above letter was printed in an issue of Ramparts magazine with the following lead-in:

The letter which follows is one of two unsigned letters handwritten in pencil on slips from a memo pad confiscated by one of Ruby's guards and subsequently smuggled from the jail. They were sold at auction in the Astor Gallery in New York on January 31 1966 by Charles Hamilton, a reputable autograph dealer who vouched for their authenticity. The purchaser of this one was Texas editor Penn Jones Jr., author of the book Forgive My Grief. He paid $950. Ruby's younger brother Sam immediately contacted Jones and confirmed that Ruby had admitted writing the letter.

With Jones' permission we are publishing most of the letter (33 pages in its original handwritten form) This is its exclusive publication and it is presented as Ruby wrote it without correcting his errors in spelling, grammar, or punctuation, without attempting to clarify its ambiguities, contradictions, and evident factual errors. It will be remembered that Ruby never went beyond the eighth grade in school.---by David Welsh

The letter can be read as it appeared in Ramparts by looking at the file on Jack Ruby at the Mary Ferrell website. The complete file is 204 pages long. I will be glad to email a pdf of the file to anyone requesting same.

Jaffes in Old San Antonio

Wolfe Jaffe

 John Delane Williams' statement, citing Madeleine Brown, that Sam R. Bloom was the father-in-law of Morris D. Jaffe of San Antonio, was erroneous. The proof is in a study of the Jaffe genealogy.

Jaffe's grandfather was a Russian Jew named Wolfe Jaffe who arrived in Galveston from Hamburg in 1883 and initially settled into a Mexican-Catholic neighborhood in downtown San Antonio one  block west of the river. He sold dry goods, and his store was listed in San Antonio's directory at 613 W. Commerce Street. In 1915 Wolfe's plan to construct an apartment building in San Antonio at 423 Oakland Street was announced with fanfare. A large fourplex on what was then called Oakland Street (now within the right of way of IH-35) near the intersection with McCullough Avenue would be built for himself and three tenants.

Only a few doors away from these apartments lived the wealthy Irish-born  attorney, Henry Patrick Drought, with a family of four sons and five servants. Mrs. Drought took pride in the heritage of her family, the Tunstalls, who claimed their first Tunstall forebears arrived in Virginia shortly after the death of Charles I. The old half-century old Tunstall homestead at 418 Oakland was sold in  1907 to be demolished and graves in its adjoining family burial ground moved to the city cemetery. When Mrs. Drought's mother died in 1911, the obituary reflected about her life that:

Mrs. Tunstall was born in Lexington, Ky., and was the daughter of Rev. Nathan Hall, pastor of the Presbyterian church there. She remembered with great distinctness the great men of that day, knowing Andrew Jackson, who was a friend of her father's and who attended his church in Lexington when he made his periodical visits to Kentucky looking after his democratic fences in the whig stronghold of Henry Clay. She early married Warrick Tunstall, a distinguished lawyer of St. Louis, one of the founders of the St. Louis Law society and library, who died some years ago. Mrs. Tunstall taught probably the first Presbyterian Sunday school in San Antonio, having among her pupils then many who have since become the leading men and women of San Antonio. She took a great interest in politics and, in fact, in all current issues. She was extremely charitable and her heart and hand were always open to the afflicted or needy. In the early days in San Antonio her house was a center of gayety where hospitality was generously dispensed.

Despite her mother's pride in her Presbyterianism, Mrs. Drought converted to Catholicism upon her marriage to the Irishman, and she took her role as a socialite very seriously, as revealed by her own obituary in 1943:

Apparently the rent from the other units was profitable, and by 1917 Wolfe Jaffe began construction of another apartment complex at 223 4th Street for $35,000, a tidy sum in those days. He sold it in 1920, only a year before his death. His widow, however, continued managing other rental properties until her own death in 1949.

Wolfe and his Polish wife, Anna Jaffe, had two sons, Louis and Morris, and four daughters. When their son Morris died in 1958, his funeral was held in St. Mary's Catholic Church. He had married  a Catholic woman named Irene, and their son, Morris D. Jaffe, was not born until 1922, several months after Wolfe Jaffe's death. He attended St. Mary's, a Catholic university in San Antonio, at about the same time as Mrs. Roger Zeller's brother, Edwin F. Dietzel, Jr., and entered the Army air corps at about the same time as well. A notice in the local paper in 1918 indicates Morris and Irene lived at 525 E. Elmira, one street west of Oakland, that year and that he ran a loan company that helped finance his father's real estate business, further confirmed by WWI draft registration papers.

1918 notice in San Antonio newspaper

The real estate market in San Antonio had begun to take off, and the Jaffe family benefited by being involved in both the construction and loan industries. Northerners had discovered the climate in the south to be favorable and were relocating to the warmer state. One of those transplanted northerners was Clara Augusta "Gussie" Ayres, born in Ohio shortly after the end of the civil war.

Miss Ayres married James Mills Young, son of a medical doctor, Dr. Charles Glidden Young, in San Antonio in 1890, the same year his brother, Vinkler Howard Young, had died in Palestine, Texas. Dr. Young, originally from New Hampshire, had come south prior to the war that erupted between the states to build short line railroads connecting cities in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

One family researcher has shown that James was born in 1864 in Chappell Hill, just outside of Brenham, Texas, shortly after his father (who had married Henrietta Maria Louisa Chamberlain in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1842) finished his railroad work in Louisiana and moved on to eastern Texas.

In 1910 James M. and Gussie Ayres Young lived in San Antonio (within the present bounds of Fort Sam Houston) with their three daughters and Gussie's father, Nathan Tandy Ayres. More will be said about these families later. Suffice to say that it was this area on the outskirts of the military reservation where the Jaffe land development projects were focused.


Morris D. Jaffe
When Morris married Jeanette Elaine Herrmann, a former student at the Catholic Incarnate Word college, in April 1947, he was described as having been "a captain in the air corps." He had trained at Blackland Field in Waco and was assigned to duty posts in Utah, El Paso and Kansas. His best man was Paul Herder, son of trucking line owner, Charlie J. Herder, from Weimar, Texas, located in San Antonio at 1311 S. Flores.

His new wife's family were established in San Antonio, and their names appeared often in trivial society blips such as this one in 1932:

Mrs. Albert Hermann entertained with a party Sunday afternoon in her home in West Mulberry Avenue, complimenting her small daughter, Jeanette Elaine, on her fifth birthday anniversary.

On the occasion of the fifth birthday of Jeanette's brother, Don Albert Herrmann II two years later, the guests at his birthday party included young Ann and Travis McCrory "Mac" Moursund (frequently spelled Moursand), son of Travis and Marion Moursund, who lived on E. Mistletoe a block or two from the Herrmanns. Ann McCrory Moursund would be crowned queen of the Victory Black and White ball in 1945, long after her parents' divorce, and in 1944 Mac began his studies in New York at West Point.

Their father, Travis B. Moursund, was the son of Anton N. Moursund, an attorney who practiced for a time in Mason County, not far from Blanco and Johnson City, Texas, where his brother Albert Wadel Moursund practiced law. Their father was known as "Judge Moursund," an attorney from Norway who had settled in the Texas Hill Country near Lyndon Johnson's birthplace. Travis entertained a brief fling with politics--elected in 1926 as a state representative from San Antonio--where he served only one term. He lost his primary bid for the Texas state senate race in 1928 and was thereafter content to spend his spare time acting in local "little theater" productions and serving as local bar association president. In August 1932 he married Norma Basse of San Antonio in Nueva Laredo, Mexico. The Moursund children's mother was the former Marion McCrory, daughter of criminal judge W.W. McCrory, who later married Charles Murphy, city license and dues collector, who then ran for tax commissioner.