Sir Stewart Menzies and Gladio

Belgian Enquiry into Gladio 



The Belgian parliamentary commission has ended its investigation into the "Stay Behind," or Gladio, network. 

Sir Stewart Menzies--"C"

Its conclusions show that the Belgian network was jointly organised by the STC/MOB (a branch of the civilian security service) and the SDRA 8 (of the military security service). In addition to functioning as a resistance network in the event of a Soviet attack on western Europe, the organisation also had contingency plans for evacuation of VIPs, the removal of security service secret documents and maintaining contact with government ministers.

The first "Stay Behind" network, codenamed "Sussex II," was set up in December 1944 with the approval of Premier Spaak, when Sir Stewart Menzies (Chief of MI6) visited Brussels. 

In 1948 the Brussels Pact [consisting of five nations] created the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU) which by 1951 had become the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), based in Paris. A letter, written by Belgian Premier Van Houtte in March 1953, discusses coordination and technical arrangements between the CPC and SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), clearly linking the CPC with NATO.

During 1957 the CPC created two sub-committees, one of which went on to become the Allied Coordination Committee (ACC) and was responsible for coordinating the "Stay Behind" networks in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States. Its peacetime duties included elaborating the directives for the network, developing its clandestine capability and organising bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime it was to plan stay behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE; organisers were to activate clandestine bases and organise operations from there. Organisers would receive diplomatic immunity for their actions.

Between 1980 and 1986 the ACC arranged three-yearly international exercises to test its radio communications network and the collation of information. These exercises were codenamed 'Oregon.' In addition there were annual exercises to test the professionalism and performance of the network:

• 1985 WODAN (Belgium/Holland); 
• 1985 THUNDERBOLT (Belgium/US); 
• 1987 SEABIRD I (Belgium/US); 
• 1988 SEABIRD II (Belgium/Holland); 
• 1989 SEABIRD III (Belgium/Italy); 
• 1990 MARGARITA (Belgium/Britain).

 The last ACC meeting took place on the 23-24 October 1990, and members discussed the re-orientation of the ACC. The Belgian security service suggested a policy that would allow the network to operate more broadly in "crisis" situations. Apparently the "stay behind" network had been activated during the Zaire crisis in 1980, but failed to intervene because of operational problems.

Contact between the ACC and SHAPE (NATO) was carried out by the Clandestine Planning Committee. When, in 1968, the Chair of the CPC moved to Brussels it became a part of the Belgian military security service (SGR) known as section SDRA II and served as the international secretariat of the CPC.

Daniele Ganser

During the Belgian parliamentary commission enquiry the head of the SGR, General [Raymond] Van Calster gave evidence that was misleading. When questioned about the structure of the SGR he omitted to mention SDRA 11. Colonel Detrembleur, head of SDRA 11, refused to answer the commissions enquiries on his department, asserting that he was bound by NATO confidentiality. He claimed that the commission would need to obtain SHAPE authority for him to answer any questions, and he doubted if this would be forthcoming as it had been refused to other countries in the past. The commission dropped their investigations into the NATO connection.

Although the security service witnesses confirmed the existence of a functioning NATO security system against subversion, a NATO Security Committee and its National Security Authorities, much of this information had been published by Stef Janssens and Jan Willems in their book Gladio. According to their investigations NATO members must install a National Security Authority. 

Statewatch bulletin, vol 2 no 1 

© Statewatch ISSN 1756-851X. 

Personal usage as private individuals/"fair dealing" is allowed.

Jesus H. Jones Behind the Scenes

"The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue."  --Edward R. Murrow

Musings about Media and Politics

During some of the scandals which erupted a few years ago I spent some time musing about how little has changed since the days of Plato's Republic in Greece when the Sophists helped to destroy their democratic government. I compared the Greek Sophists to the likes of Scooter Libby and explored the rise of political strategists such as Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff, tracing the roots back to the development of propaganda techniques during World War II by members of the newspaper, magazine, radio and television media and their adjunct advertising staffs.

Further musings along this line have taken me back into political management of the Democrats s as well, decades earlier. When businessmen and bankers are put in control of our government, they tend to see the national interest from their own slanted perspective--believing "what's good for General Motors is good for America," et cetera. As James Carville used to remind Bill Clinton ad nauseum, "It's the economy, stupid," and those in charge tend to have the most impact on the economy when working through the corporations over which they, or those who are backing them, have the most control.

In the late 20's and early 30's, not only was radio one of the biggest investment opportunities of that day, but its technology promised an ability to influence a wide-ranging audience of voters, as well as buyers of consumer goods. Retailers of goods and services were beginning to understand that radio could have a broader impact than newspapers and magazines. Politicians, and those who financed them, were eager to get aboard this new technology. Demographics, like democracy, is all about numbers.

President Roosevelt, a savvy politician, make great use of the new phenomenon in his "Fireside Chats."

Elliott's network would have made a third one, competing with CBS and NBC.

Lyndon Johnson's opportunity to rise in radio came simultaneously with Elliott Roosevelt's decline in that field, which may or may not be a mere coincidence, each resulting from the influence of Jesse Jones' network of Texans. In Jones' book, Fifty Billion Dollars, published by Macmillan in 1951, he disingenuously described the maneuvers of the Texas state Democratic convention of 1944:

the Regulars captured the convention from the pro-Roosevelt delegates, who then bolted to hold their own convention. Soon after these meetings certain troublemakers in Washington tried to make it appear to the President and others close to him that I had encouraged the action taken by the Regulars. This was due to the fact that George A. Butler, the husband of one of my several nieces, took a prominent part in the Regulars movement. In discussing this with the President, I told him that I had a good many in-laws, including several men who had married my nieces, and that I did not control them in their politics any more than he controlled his own family. I reminded him that his son Elliott, over my protest, had persisted in his purpose to second my nomination for the Vice Presidency at the 1940 Chicago Convention, after the President had chosen Henry Wallace, and of Elliott telling me that his father did not know what he was doing in wanting Wallace. Subsequent developments proved that Elliott was right about Wallace.

Being a member of the President's Cabinet, I was, of course, embarrassed by Mr. Butler's activities in the Regulars movement, but there was nothing I could do about it. [page 274]

Background of the "Texas Regulars" Movement

Spearheading the publicity for the "Regulars" was the eminent E.E. Townes, who had been closely connected to Jesse's financial network since at least 1917, if not much earlier, through Houston oil men made wealthy after the Spindletop boom in 1901.

Click to enlarge

Included among these businessmen were the founders of Humble Oil, which had been chartered in 1917 by none other than Houston attorney Edgar E. Townes on behalf of William S. Farish, Ross and Frank Sterling, Harry C. Wiess, Robert L. Blaffer, and W.W. Fondren. Jesse Jones, who was never an oil man, was strangely included in the original list of incorporators (possibly as a mere trustee who represented the financial interest of others who wished to remain unnamed, most likely Col. E. M. House, who had previously introduced Jones to President Woodrow Wilson).[1]

A few months after Humble Oil's corporate papers were filed, President Wilson appointed Jesse to head the American Red Cross, then active in World War I as a sort of "unofficial intelligence agency," before any official civilian intelligence service existed. Jones sold his stake in Humble Oil in 1918, after first introducing W.S. Farish to his "personal friend," Harvey Gibson, president of Liberty National Bank in New York City, which loaned Humble a much needed $250,000.[2]

Jones revealing model of San Jacinto Monument

E.E. Townes took Jones' place in 1918 on the board of directors of Humble Oil and thereafter devoted full time to the corporation's business.[4] Townes' brother, John C. Townes, Jr., was general counsel for the company for a ten-year period before going into partnership with E.E. Townes and his son.[5] For a number of years their law firm was located in the same building--Houston's San Jacinto Building--as Herman and George Brown's "Brown Foundation," not surprisingly since, according to Jesse Jones' own newspaper [Ralph Bivins, Houston Chronicle, Section Business, Page 6, 08/17/2003], principals of Brown and Root bought the building in 1940 from principals of Humble Oil:

In 1940, an investment group led by George Brown of Brown and Root bought the property for $1.35 million. The seller was a holding company led by R.L. Blaffer, former chairman of the old Humble Oil and Refining Co. In 1950, a redevelopment of the hotel became major news in Houston. The interior and exterior of the hotel were stripped away, architect Kenneth Franzheim [a New York and Houston architect who was awarded contracts from Jesse Jones' RFC subsidiary Defense Homes Corporation] redesigned it, and the hotel was transformed into an office building.

The Townes brothers also were assisted by attorney Frank Andrews, senior partner of Andrews, Kurth, the Houston firm which represented Standard Oil of New Jersey, which had a hidden 50% interest in "the Humble." Andrews, incidentally, was another very close friend of Edward M. House (the "Colonel," as he was called).[6] In fact, Andrews and House were partners in an unsuccessful venture in Spindletop with investors from Boston.[7]

The year FDR was first elected, 1932, Elliott was sales manager of the Southwest Broadcasting company, based within the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, which handled the exclusive advertising rights of some of Texas' biggest corporations--Humble Oil and Duncan Coffee in Houston and Magnolia Petroleum of Dallas.

Those corporations' executives all had strong ties to the government's biggest banker of that day, Jesse Holman Jones, sometimes called "Mr. Houston." Jones not only headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but he also owned the Lamar Hotel where the "Suite 8-F Crowd" would meet in Herman Brown's 8th floor suite. Originally appointed to the RFC by Herbert Hoover, Jones would remain in his important post throughout FDR's terms of office until frustration with the New Deal forced him out. Jones' arrogance jokingly earned him the nickname, Jesus H. Jones, among some of his detractors.

In January 1938, Elliott became president of Hearst Radio, Inc. after Southwest Broadcasting sold three of the companies it owned to Hearst. One of those stations--Station KUT (1300 kilocycles)--had been created in Austin, Texas in 1922 by the University of Texas which sold it in 1927 to Jesse Jones, under the corporate umbrella through which he owned Houston Station KTRH. Sold to the Hearst empire in 1932, the call letters were changed to KNOW while the station employed then-student Walter Cronkite. Intriguingly, KNOW would later broadcast from the Norwood Building, now owned by an LBJ subsidiary controlled by Lyndon's daughter, Luci JohnsonTurpin.

Elliott Fades Out

The national network Elliott formed possibly with an eye toward helping FDR with the upcoming 1944 election had been financed by a group of men from Harry Truman's stronghold in Missouri, including Lester E. Cox, who established KGBX radio in Springfield, Mo. in 1931. Like the Fort Worth clique which favored the vice presidency of John Nance Garner, these Missouri Democrats likely hoped to influence Elliott's father's choice of a running mate by investing in the son's career. As Jesse Jones revealed also in his book, however, FDR welcomed the financial assistance but felt no obligation to those who showered Elliott with money. Cox sold KGBX to a newspaper company in 1944, just before FDR finally dumped Vice President Henry E. Wallace, replacing what the Regulars called the "Communist" candidate with Missouri U.S. Senator Harry Truman.

By 1944, however, Elliott Roosevelt, in addition to losing interest in the radio network bought in the name of his second wife, Ruth Googins, but he had also dumped Ruth, having left curmudgeonly Jesse Jones to clean up the radio mess abandoned by him shortly after Pearl Harbor. In a section of Jones' book, entitled "Bailing out Elliott Roosevelt," Jesse relates in great detail how he fixed the situation after receiving a call from FDR while Sid Richard and Charlie Roeser were in his office railing about their tanked investment in Elliott's radio network:

They told me that Elliott's radio company had lost its entire capital of $500,000, and that to buy his stock in the company Elliott had personally borrowed $200,000 from John A. Hartford, president of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, $50,000 from David G. Baird, an insurance official of New York, and $25,000 from Judge Charles Harwood of New York, who subsequently, in the early part of 1941, had been appointed Governor of the Virgin Islands by the President. As collateral to these loans, Mr. Hartford had received $200,000 par value of Elliott's radio stock and Mr. Baird, I think, $50,000 of the same....The [financial] statement showed the company to be insolvent. Operating losses had exhausted all of its capital stock.... These debts did not include what Elliott personally owed for the money he had borrowed to put into the stock of the company. Messrs Roeser and Richardson advised me in writing that they regarded their stock in the company as then of no value....

At the time Mr. Hartford loaned the money his company was being sued by the Federal Trade Commission under the antimonopoly laws. This was of course known to the President but not to me. [pp. 294-295]

After FDR was elected to his third term, someone spilled the beans on the mess Elliott had made and an investigation ensued. Columnist Westbrook Pegler described part of that public airing as follows:

Hartford was asked why, when he went to see Jesse Jones, then secretary of commerce and chairman of the Reconstruction Finance corporation, at Jones' suggestion, he expected that he was going to get back his $200,000, with interest.

"I thought the President would pay his son's debts, just as any father would," Hartford answered.

At the time of the settlement, Sid Richardson and Charles Roeser, Ft. Worth oil men and friends of Elliott, who had been dined several times at the White House, wrote their opinion that the stock of Elliott's Texas state network, which Hartford had taken as collateral, was worthless. Richardson and Roeser were large stockholders and friends of Elliott and his wife at that time, a Ft. Worth girl. Jones was appearing in the deal as agent for clients, the President and Elliott. All concerned in the representations by which Hartford was led to believe that his collateral was worthless and that he was well rid of it at two cents on the dollar, had an interest in the company or, in the President's case, a paternal interest in his son's fortunes.

There were reasons at that very time, however, had Hartford taken the pains to inform himself thoroughly, instead of relying on his faith in the President and Jones, which might have persuaded him to hold his stock for a rise. The company's affairs were improving. 

"Jones," he said, "assured me that Elliott was broke and insolvent and the stock was worthless and, being a member of the cabinet and head of the largest bank in the world (the RFC), that was all the assurance I wanted."

He added that Jones told him Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, too, was broke. The stock is now worth more than $100 a share. Hartford's 2,000 shares, bought back for $4,000 of Jones' money, by President Roosevelt's suggestion, now are worth more than $200,000 at that rate.

Apparently Jesse, whose own Station KTRH was part of Elliott's network, had no idea what the network was worth.


Elliott's marriage to rising movie starlet, Faye Emerson in December gave evidence of his new focus on creating a transcontinental airline company, if one can rely on the fact that witnesses at the wedding were Jack Frye, president of Transcontinental and Western Air, Inc. (TWA), and Johnny Meyer, a close friend of TWA's Howard Hughes from Texas (nephew and one-time son-in-law of two of W.S. Farish's in-laws). Meyer had allegedly introduced Elliott and Faye only a few months earlier. News stories of their wedding revealed that "Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet, was her [Faye Emerson's] great-uncle," which, if true, made her a relative of Ruth Forbes Paine Young--daughter of William Hathaway and Edith Emerson Forbes--mother-in-law of future Oswald "friend" Ruth Hyde Paine.

Newlyweds Elliott and Faye (center) with M/M Jack Frye, Janet Thomas, Johnny Meyer, and Mrs. Joseph B Livengood, Faye's friend. Press Photo 1944

British Intelligence Planned Dump Wallace Campaign?

Instrumental in the campaign to dump Wallace was British Intelligence, which then had a very active role in spying on Vice President Henry Wallace--according to Jennet Conant, author of a most fascinating book The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington--with unwitting help from Lyndon Johnson's financial angel, Charles Marsh, a friend of Roald Dahl, the undercover spy:

It was a dirty convention and made for a lot of hard feelings all around. Roosevelt tried to be conciliatory and asked Wallace to remain part of his administration, telling him he could have his pick of jobs with the exception of secretary of state. That job was reserved for his dear friend Cordell Hull, his secretary of state for the past ten years, who was in his last stint of public service. Roosevelt hastened to assure Wallace that he wanted him to take an active role in postwar planning and to sit on "some international conferences." Wallace felt that as one of the strongest leaders in the Democratic Party, he should by rights have the State Department, the most important cabinet post. Out of deference to the president's wishes, however, he settled for secretary of commerce, the seat currently occupied by his bitter adversary Jesse Jones. The president had already indicated that after the election one of the first people he wanted to boot from his administration was the arrogant "Jesus H. Jones." The ambitious commerce secretary had been a thorn in Roosevelt's side as well, and it suited him to allow Wallace to replace him, thereby exacting a measure of revenge on both their behalfs. [pp. 267-268]

An intriguing detail about Henry Wallace's replacement on the Democratic ticket in 1944 harks back to the radio men from Missouri who financed Elliott's first move into national broadcasting. Lester E. Cox would move up the regional political ladder within Truman's political sphere. As the news article to the right attests, Cox was close to Sen. Prescott Bush's younger brother, James S. Bush, Prescott's best man at his 1921 wedding to Dorothy Walker of St. Louis.[8]

Both Cox and Bush were Democrats who were appointed in 1951 by Missouri's Democrat governor to the governing board of the University of Missouri as well as to its executive committee, which controlled the university's School of Mines and Metallurgy and its radio station. Bush would leave the governing board in 1957. In the meantime his nephew, George Herbert Walker Bush, Prescott's son, would have moved first to the West Texas oil fields and then to Houston, where he began hobnobbing with the same social set which had made up the Texas Regulars in 1944, and he would help them build the Republican Party in Texas, while always having nice things to say about his uncle's friend Harry Truman.

James Bush's Skull and Bones class, 1922

Like Prescott, Poppy and Dubya Bush, James, whom Kitty Kelley in The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty called "the black sheep of the Bush family," was a member of the Yale secret society, Skull and Bones. Kelley also stated he was an alcoholic who, when drunk, beat his wife Janet. That fact never made it into the headlines, however.

---

[1] Bascom N. Timmons, Jesse H. Jones, The Man and the Statesman (New York:  Henry Holt, 1956), p. 96.

[2] Henrietta M. Larson and Kenneth W. Porter, History of Humble Oil (New York:  Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 72.

[4] Ibid., pp. 28, 55, 58.

[5] Committee on History and Tradition of the State Bar of Texas, Centennial History of the Texas Bar:  1882-1982, p. 94.  According to this account, Townes was a member of the Masonic Blue Lodge, Arabia Temple Shrine, and, after the death of his first wife, was married to Mrs. Browne Rice, Jr.

[6] Rupert Noval Richardson, Colonel Edward M. House: The Texas Years, 1858-1912 (Hardin-Simmons University Press, 1964), p. 201. 

[7] Ibid., p. 201.

[8] In 1948 James Bush made it into Walter Winchell's column with a one-sentence question: "Could James S. Bush (of St. Louis) be 'Mr. Next' for the lovely widder of Wm. Rhinelander Stewart?" The answer turned out to be yes. Bush married the beautiful Janet Newbold Ryan Stewart, whose son, Allan Ryan, Jr., was later in the same 1953 Yale/Skull and Bones class with Poppy Bush's brother, Jonathan J. Bush. James Bush had been a Lt. Colonel, U.S. Army Air Force in WWI. After working as an investment banker at Hayden, Miller in Dayton, Ohio, Bush moved to St. Louis to work for G.H. Walker and Co. (the investment bank set up by Prescott's father-in-law decades earlier), where his 503 Locust office was next to the Boatmen's Bank building. They lived at 36 Westmoreland Place in the city in 1939. Walker relative James H. Wear, Jr., also a banker, lived at 40 Westmoreland. Wear (Yale's class of 1934) was the son of Yale Alumni's one-time president of the St. Louis chapter, whose sister Loulie married George Herbert Walker. The Wears and Walkers all lived within walking distance of each other in the Central West End near Forest Park. By 1910 G.H. "Bert" Walker had bought a three-story Italian Renaissance home at 12 Hortense Place where the couple reared two daughters and four sons, with assistance from six live-in servants. George’s father, David Walker, lived nearby at 53 Vandeventer Place, and an elder brother, David Walker Jr. (a clerk in the Eli-Walker dry goods business), also lived at that address.

Elliott Roosevelt's Radio Network

Creating "Cowtown"

Joseph B. Googins, manager of the Swift meat packing company, moved to Fort Worth from Chicago shortly after Fort Worth city fathers enticed Swift, in June 1901, to build a rail head plant in the Texas city. Although Amon Carter is sometimes given credit for securing the move which created numerous jobs in the Fort Worth stockyards, newspaper articles in 1901 credited Winfield Scott and L.V. Niles with the making the trip to Chicago proposing the move.

This construction promised to save the Chicago packers money to drive live cattle to Chicago for slaughter. Googins then became a wealthy Fort Worth businessman, one of the seven original directors of the Fort Worth Belt Railroad of the first board in 1903. Other

Swift and Armour owned the land jointly where plants were built.

directors included George B. Robbins, who was also director of the Armour Co., and  O.W. Matthews, manager and secretary of the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company.

Amon Carter was one of the six incorporators of the Star-Telegram in 1909, along with its president and editor, Louis J. Wortham (no obvious relation of Suite 8-F member Gus Wortham). L.J. Wortham had been close to Paul Waples who formed the Texas World's Fair Commission for the St. Louis exposition in 1904 before launching, with Amon G. Carter and others, the afternoon Star, which later merged with The Telegram.

Googins served as a vice president for a time of Stock Yards National Bank at 115 E. Exchange and helped develop the city of North Fort Worth Townsite area now known as the Stockyards neighborhood. It should not be overlooked that Googins had migrated to Texas from Chicago, where he undoubtedly had connections to agencies handling the advertising of meat products, a business detail that would factor into Ruth's later involvement in radio ownership.

Corner of N. Commerce and Exchange in north Fort Worth.  

In the photo at right, the Stockyards offices and the Exchange Club building are in the center, across the street from the Stockyards Bank of which Googins had been an officer before his death in 1922. Eleven years later his daughter, Ruth, met one of the sons of then recently-inaugurated President Franklin Roosevelt, Elliott, who just happened to be in the city on his way to Arizona, as shown in the wedding announcement below:

Elliott Roosevelt to wed Fort Worth girl,
1933

Political Wedding?

In 1939 Ruth purchased a radio station--one made famous in an earlier day by local "Elmer Gantry" type preacher named J. Frank Norris. Radio was the Facebook and Google of those days--giving advertisers a platform from which to spread the capitalistic bilge to influence the public to buy whatever they were selling at the time. Those who financed President Franklin Roosevelt in the early 1930's hoped they were buying political power, and they spread their money around to his children in the hope of advancing their own cause, namely deeper pockets for themselves.

Anti-Roosevelt author Emanuel M. Josephson in 1948, looking back on that capital investment in radio, wrote  in The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A History of the Roosevelt-Delano Dynasty, America's Royal Family:

In 1938, with the support of Charles F. Roeser and Sid W. Richardson, Texas oil operators, who invested $500,000, Elliott set up a chain of 23 radio stations in Texas. This provided him, according to the Washington Times-Herald of August 29, 1945, with an income of $76,000 a year, more than his father earned as President of the United States. The enterprise is reported to have lost $100,000 in the first three months. The Transcontinental Broadcasting Company was liquidated in 1941.

Breaking into Radio

The formal announcement about Elliott's new radio network was made in Chicago on Halloween 1939, after Elliott and six investors, mostly from the Missouri area, incorporated in Delaware, hoping to compete with CBS, NBC and the Mutual Network. Elliott's stock ownership was represented on the board by John T. Adams, general manager of the Texas state network, was named chairman of the board of the Transcontinental Broadcasting System.

Elliott had flown to New York at the end of November to reveal that the headquarters of the network would be in the General Electric building at 570
Lexington avenue—51st and Lexington —in New York City and would take up three floors of the building. William A. Porter, a Washington attorney, was given the job of vice president, and H.J. Brennan was the treasurer. Porter had handled Elliott's role in the Federal Communications Commission's monopoly investigation of the radio industry when the President's son, as head of the Texas State Network, testified in February 1939.

About Elliott, the November press announcement stated:

Fresh out of Princeton, young Elliott got his first job with the advertising firm of Albert Frank- Guenther Law, Inc. He lasted two years before talk, occasioned by the surpassing eagerness of companies to become his clients, forced him to move on. He tried the aviation business, but the clamor attending several deals made life unbearable. The future seemed no brighter when he went to work for William Randolph Hearst, as vice president of Hearst Radio, Inc., in charge of four stations in Texas and Oklahoma, and president of Hearst- owned KFJZ in Fort Worth.... 

In June, 1937, Elliott's wife, the former Ruth Googins of Fort Worth, contracted in her own name to buy KFJZ. Price of the  100-watt station was $57,000. Three months later, Elliott bought another 100-watter, KABC, in San Antonio, under his own name for $55,000. Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt put their two stations together in the Frontier Broadcasting System, made a go of it. And last: year KFJZ and KABC became the outlets of the Texas state network, Elliott Roosevelt president. Today, TSN has 23 member stations, a base advertising rate of $1,218.37 per hour, and calls itself the fourth largest network in the world.

Since he's been in the radio business, Elliott has made news out of all proportion to the importance of his little station. As a regular commentator on his own network, he got in solid with Texans by becoming one of the state's biggest boosters—second only to Amon Carter. He set himself "right'' politically by becoming a pal of John Nance Garner, which nicely counterbalances his presidential relationship. And he's become a national figure since Emerson Radio began sponsoring his comments on a coast- to- coast hookup on Mutual Broadcasting System. 

The inference could be made that Elliott's real boss, however, was his father, who was already looking ahead to the technological changes taking shape that were to change the face of political campaigning. Elliott was given the task of putting in place an infrastructure from which to launch FDR's final run for the Presidency in 1940:

Blackett-Sample-Hummert

Selling Soap and Politics?

Blackett-Sample-Hummert (B-S-H), founded in 1923 in Chicago, where Ruth Googins was born, wrote ads for Procter and Gamble, producing daytime radio dramas promoting the company's soap products--thus inspiring the term "soap operas”." According to Time Magazine, "in 1938 B-S-H had placed orders for $9,000,000 worth of air time. This was about one-eighth of all money paid for radio network time and over $3,700,000 more than B-S-H's nearest competitor spent."

Possibly the purchase of the network had been inspired as a result of a column written by Drew Pearson and his then-partner, Robert S. Allen, in 1936, which called B-S-H a "group of high-pressure ad men ... hatching ideas to unsell Roosevelt to the country and sell Landon in his place. Their aim is to get away from the barnstorming campaign speech, the baby-kissing, the torch-light processions, and make the housewife and the workingman anti-Roosevelt conscious." Pearson credited Hill Blackett, the senior member of the firm with developing "a new type of campaign ... at republican national headquarters in Chicago." He then went on to illustrate how the campaign would work:

First move in this campaign is a set of blackboards to be placed in grocery stores, on which will be chalked up three headings: PRICE—TAXES—TOTAL.

Thus the butcher, explaining the high price of meat to the housewife, merely points to the blackboard and shows how much of the total price she pays is allegedly made up of taxes. There is no indication anywhere about the blackboard that it is supplied by the republican national committee, and that is the beauty of the scheme. It automatically drives home the idea that Roosevelt is responsible for high taxes, without being labeled propaganda. This is the general type of campaigning the new idea-men are proposing. It is reported to have democratic strategists somewhat worried.

Note.—One brain child of the idea-man pictures a large Brazilian steer, supposed to represent the Importation of meat under Hull's reciprocity treaty. Fact is, however, that fresh meat from any South American country is flatly embargoed by an act of congress, over which Hull has no control. Canned meat comes not from Brazil, but from Argentina and Uruguay.

Hill Blackett had grown up in Iowa, then managed an advertising company in Oakland before moving to Winnetka, Illinois. He was head of public relations for the Republican National Committee in 1936, and his firm was located in downtown Chicago at 221 N. LaSalle.

Roots of Suite 8-F Members

Membership List?

Lamar Hotel, part of Jesse Jones' empire

My understanding of the men and Mrs. William P. (Oveta Culp) Hobby--who, to my knowledge, was the only woman considered part of the "crowd"--was that they were simply visiting Herman Brown's suite unofficially. There was no "membership list" because there were no "official" members. I think they just jokingly referred to themselves in this way because they had heard references to Eastern financiers as members of various "crowds".

It would be more akin to a financial syndicate or even an unofficial lodge where men get together to talk about business (in Texas they say "bidness") opportunities--to share knowledge with "trusted" colleagues. Politics was viewed merely as another means of making their business dreams a reality. 

However, most of them grew up in Texas only a decade or two removed from the post-war reconstruction era, an age which taught them to distrust "Yankees" who would use every political contrivance to despoil their land and take advantages of the resources located within Texas. They were committed to restoring what they saw as the glory of the Texas Empire. In that sense they would have been "right wing," as I understand the term. To me the term conservative means maintaining the economic status quo, while right-wing means going backward to a previous status.

The people who were hobnobbing in Herman's rooms had never had much status to speak of. Their only claim to fame was the fact that one or more of their ancestors had arrived in Texas somewhere around the initial days of the Republic in 1836, and they had either heard stories about that or had invented some significance from that fact. Like all groups favoring control by oligarchy, they wanted to set themselves apart from others into some sort of special elite, and they wanted to wrest political control out of the hands of those whom they felt were inclined to keep them down. I doubt they had any understanding of history, though it is important, I believe, for us who are looking back, to understand what actually happened.

Texas History 


Texas was born in the days of Andrew Jackson, a man from Virginia who moved to Tennessee (then called the western frontier) and found himself strapped economically by  the Second Bank of the United States, the stock ownership of which was within the control of the second or third generation of family inheritance. Jackson had fallen in with others who had been called "anti-federalists" during the post-revolutionary era, a philosophy  espoused by Aaron Burr. Burr's attempt to promote the building of a separate "empire" within lands to the south and west of Tennessee was rewarded with his unsuccessful prosecution for treason in 1807, only a few years before the War of 1812 resulted in an American blockade against trade with Great Britain, our enemy. 

General Jackson won the battle in New Orleans during the War of 1812, and then returned to Tennessee, mentoring young Sam Houston, who went to Texas, then part of Spanish Mexico, and won the Battle of San Jacinto, the culmination of Texas' war of independence. Most of those who met in Herman's suite claimed some connection to "Texians" of that day and celebrated San Jacinto Day (April 21)--then a Texas state holiday--as Americans do the 4th of July.

As the civil war approached, however, Sam Houston--first as President of the independent nation of Texas, and later as governor of the annexed State of Texas--opposed secession. As a result, rabid secessionists forced him out of office. The "Order of the Knights of San Jacinto," created originally as a secret Masonic-type society following the principles of Sam Houston, began to resemble the views of those who advocated the Southern Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan which rose to prominence again during the prohibition era. 



Remember San Jacinto

End of Battle of San Jacinto

Lyndon Johnson claimed a relationship to the Texian heroes through his Bunton ancestors. Robert Dallek well documents the Bunton history in his book, Lone Star Rising (page 16 et seq.). Lyndon's maternal greatgrandfather, George Washington Baines, also gave him a right of entry into this secret society. Baines, a Baptist preacher and professor at one time in Independence, Texas, the early capital of the Republic formed in 1836, nevertheless had no roots in Texas until 1848, when he helped to organize a Baptist congregation in Marshall, Texas while he lived in Louisiana. It was in Louisiana that LBJ's mother's father, Joseph W. Baines, had been born in 1846, before the Baines family's move to Texas after annexation in 1845. In Independence, near Brenham, however, George Baines eventually became a friend of the man who had been President of the Republic of Texas.

Rebekah's father, Joseph, studied law under James Webb Throckmorton, whose father had been "a Whig of the Tennessee school," one of Sam Houston's most loyal political supporters as secession loomed:

Sam Houston

In the 1857 gubernatorial election he supported Sam Houston and unionist sentiment ... and became a political advisor to the governor and Houston's ally in attempting to restrain the forces within Texas who favored secession. Throckmorton's attempt to organize a state Union party attracted few supporters, and he watched helplessly as the events between 1859 and 1860 precipitated the crisis of 1861. He refused to concede, however, and was one of only seven delegates to the 1861 Secession Convention who voted against Texas withdrawal from the union.

Throckmorton was removed from office as governor in 1867 and prevented from holding office until after the passage of the General Amnesty Act of 1872. In 1874 he was elected to Congress and reelected in 1876 as an advocate of education and federal support of railroad expansion, reflecting interest of a client, the Texas and Pacific Railway Company, involved in unsuccessful litigation against the Southern Pacific Railroad, which led to a joint venture with Jay Gould of the Missouri Pacific.

Burleson baptizing Sam

G.W. Baines, while living in Independence, Texas, had not only met Sam Houston but had convinced him to be baptized, although it was Rufus C. Burleson, who succeeded Baines as pastor of Baines' church, who performed the rite. While in Independence, Baines encouraged women students at the Baptist female college (later called University of Mary Hardin-Baylor), where he was a trustee of  which moved from Independence to Belton, a town 60 miles north of Austin. The land in Belton was donated by Rufus Young King, a real estate developer, who was the maternal grandfather of George and Herman Brown, organizers of Brown and Root. Rufus King's parents were pioneers to Texas who had set out from North Carolina before 1828, the year Rufus was born in Alabama, which was then part of the Mississippi Territory. The Brown boys were born in Belton and grew up in Temple, a few miles away--both in Bell County --where future governors, "Pa" and "Ma" Ferguson were married and politically active. Much of the Browns' social and political network had originated in that same county, including Oveta Culp.

Stomping Grounds in Bell County

Baines' Salado home now a B and B

The 1880 census reflects that King (occupation merchant/drummer) was then living in Belton, Texas with his second wife and her parents, along with 22-year-old daughter Lucy King, who would become the mother of George and Herman Brown. In the same town was Annie Baines Rosebrough and her attorney husband William, the youngest child of G.W. Baines, with whom G.W. Baines resided. In 1867, the same year his son Joseph went to McKinney to study law under Throckmorton, G.W. Baines had moved to the town of Salado--in the same county as Belton, Temple and Killeen--from which he traveled as an agent for the Education Commission of the Baptist State Convention until 1881. He died of malaria in 1882.

Joseph Wilson Baines

LBJ's mother, Rebekah Baines, was a mere infant when her grandfather died. Her father, while Throckmorton's student in Collin County, Texas had married a local girl whose parents were wealthy farmers from Kentucky. Joseph taught school, studied law and then set up a newspaper while he lived there. He used his newspaper to support the election of John Ireland as governor in 1882 and 1884. Ireland served as governor until 1886, and in 1883 appointed Joseph W. Baines as his Secretary of State, which require Joseph to move his family to Austin only a year after his father's death; young Rebekah resided at 303 E. 14th Street, just east of where the State Capitol Building would be constructed. 

Governor Ireland, who had served in both the House and Senate of the Texas Legislature, where he opposed granting lands and subsidies to railroads, in particular to the International-Great Northern Railroad consolidated by the Gould network, which consumed Throckmorton's client, the T and P. Gov. Ireland helped establish the University of Texas and during his term of office the construction of the Texas Capitol building began with pink Texas granite from Marble Falls.

After Ireland left office, the Baines family moved further west to Blanco, 100 miles west of where the granite for the Capitol had been cut. After financial setbacks in Blanco, Baines settled in nearby Fredericksburg, where he and his wife reared two daughters (Josefa and Rebekah) and son Huffman, named for Mrs. Baines' father. Joseph died there in 1906, shortly after Rebekah had spent four years studying literature at various colleges, including Baylor Female College in Belton. She taught elocution in Fredericksburg before her marriage in 1907 to Samuel Ealy Johnson, Jr., and then worked as a stringer for newspapers in San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin. When Sam died in 1937, Rebekah Baines Johnson moved to Austin, where she died in 1958, having witnessed her son Lyndon's rise to the U.S. Senate.

Map of Bell County, Texas

Intriguing, however, is that LBJ's ancestors and those of the Browns were running in the same circles at the same time and could very well have had contacts with each other long before Lyndon ran for Congress.

Colossal Failure to Research Ekdahl

Who Was Edwin Albert Ekdahl, Stepfather of Lee Harvey Oswald?

The only father figure Lee Oswald ever had was the man pictured below, who appeared on the scene in New Orleans in either late 1942 or the first half of 1943, and disappeared from the Oswalds' life in mid-1948. Yet, Ekdahl has been almost totally ignored as a target of research before now.

Ekdahl's Overlooked Fort Worth Connections

The facts of his marriage to Marguerite Oswald were set out in a divorce petition filed by Edwin A. Ekdahl, signed personally by Fred Korth, whose office was at 812 Neil P. Anderson Building, situated at 411 West Seventh Street in Fort Worth.* Exploring that building's location really gives one a sense of who Ekdahl was during the years Lee Oswald lived in the same house with him. The best way to sense that connection is through Jack White's historic photos.

Ekdahl's office, left; Korth's office, right

Ekdahl's office was nearby in the Texas Electric Service Company (TESCO) Building at 408 West Seventh--the same building which had housed FDR's Works Progress Administration during the depression years leading up to World War II. TESCO used the advertising agency, Witherspoon and Associates, where photographer Jack White was a vice president. White, intriguingly, served as a consultant to the HSCA concerning photo analysis and enhancement and has been an unabashed defender of the work of John Armstrong, author of the book Harvey and Lee, inspired by White's prior photographic work on Oswald. According to Dave Perry, White and Armstrong had in fact worked together "scrutinizing" Marguerite's files. White, at least, should have known, if he did not in fact know, that Oswald's stepfather, Edwin Ekdahl, had worked for one of Witherspoon's most important clients, the Texas Electric Service Company, located across the street for Fred Korth's office when Korth represented Ekdahl in his divorce from Marguerite.


The Fort Worth Club was in the building a block away at 306 W. 7th, where oilmen Charlie Roeser and Sid Richardson had offices, next to the Worth Hotel, on whose stationery Marguerite wrote letters. At one time the website for the Fort Worth Club contained the following boast:

“The Fort Worth Club has historically been the place where the city's most prestigious visitors have chosen to hang their hats while in Fort Worth. Chairmen, Presidents and others from the corporate, political, social, and entertainment world have enjoyed the Club's warmth and hospitality. Stars of the stage and screen have always made themselves at home in The Fort Worth Club. The legendary Sid Richardson lived at the Club and one of Texas’ heroes, Will Rogers, made The Fort Worth Club his second home. Amon Carter, publisher of the city's most powerful newspaper, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, maintained a suite at The Fort Worth Club and was Club president for over 35 years. Mr. Carter and his comrades reportedly ran the town from The Fort Worth Club. It was and is the place where key decisions regarding Fort Worth are made. Meetings at the Club brought General Dynamics, now Lockheed, the city's largest employer, and Casa Manana, Fort Worth's greatest entertainment attraction of the era. Other landmark associations consummated at the Club include the General Motors plant in Arlington, the Bell Helicopter Textron plant in the Mid-Cities, and the Swift and Armour packaging houses.” [Quoted from Fort Worth Club website.]

Today's website merely touts:

In 1926, The Fort Worth Club erected a grand, 12-story high-rise at Throckmorton and Seventh streets, featuring apartment suites for prominent members. Club President Amon G. Carter hosted many prestigious guests at the new building in his personal quarters, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bob Hope, Gene Autrey, war hero J.D. Doolittle, lords and ladies of London, sports figures and more. The new Fort Worth Club became the social epicenter of Fort Worth.

Amon Carter's office at 400 West 7th, in the Fort Worth Star Telegram Building, was just next door to Ekdahl's at No. 408 W. 7th:

Amon Carter partnered with Jesse Jones of Houston

When Edwin Met Margo

Edwin, Marguerite and the '38 Buick

We are told Marguerite met Ekdahl in New Orleans while her boys were all staying at the since-demolished Bethlehem Lutheran Orphanage, east of New Orleans (5413 North Peters Street) prior to her termination from the hosiery shop she managed briefly. Both Marguerite and John Pic recalled that she was then working at Pittsburgh Plate Glass company on Canal Street when the couple met, but it is not clear from their testimony where she was living at the time.

Dr. Cuthbert J. Brown's records reflected that in August and September 1942 Marguerite resided at 227 Atlantic Avenue in Algiers, La. By the time she paid her next visit to this doctor in July 1943, however, an address change to 2136 Broadway was noted on her patient card. A two-story building divided into apartments on the west side of New Orleans near Audubon Street and Tulane University, this house was in a totally different neighborhood from anywhere she had ever lived, and none of the neighbors, owners or tenants questioned 20 years later--either at the Broadway or the Algiers locations--recalled ever having heard of her.

Notwithstanding the FBI's inability to confirm the last two addresses, the Warren Commission felt the evidence (Exhibit 1963 and Exhibit 2213) did support Marguerite's having lived on Broadway during 1942 or 1943. The evidence included Marguerite's W-4 form filled out on July 9, 1943, when she was employed as manager of a hosiery store owned by "Lady Orris Hosiery Co. of New York," operated by Edward Aizer, listing her address as 2136 Broadway. Aizer also told the agent she was then dating a "well-to-do gentleman" with a heart condition, obviously Edwin Ekdahl. However, John Pic was definite in his testimony that she met Ekdahl while she worked at Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, so it seems safe to assume that job preceded her managerial position at the hosiery shop.

Aizer's recollection was that he terminated her employment after only about two months because of her lack of competence with figures. John Pic, who supplied one of the most accurate chronologies of the Oswald/Pic family homes and schools and was clearly not one to be taken in by Marguerite's habit of dissembling,  stated, with regard to his mother's being fired from this job:

"Whenever she changed jobs she always gave me a rationalized answer....I remember once, it may have been the Lerner shop or it may have been this hosiery shop which you are referring to, that she told me that they let her go because she didn't use an underarm deoderant [sic]. That was the reason she gave me, sir. She said she couldn't do nothing about it. She uses it but if it don't work what can she do about it. Other times whenever she changed jobs it was always because the next job was better. "

Following the failure of an attempt at running her own home business, "Oswald's Notion Shop," selling sewing notions and some candy, in the front room of their home for less than a year, Marguerite took what may have been her first job since her marriage to Robert E. Lee Oswald in 1933. Prior to the birth of her first son, John Edward Pic, she had, since before her 17th birthday, a receptionist at the large New Orleans law firm which represented the Standard Fruit Company as one of its clients.

Three children and two husbands later, following the Christmas holidays of 1941-42, Marguerite placed only the two older boys --Lee was still too young at age two for placement--into Bethlehem Lutheran Orphanage a few miles east of this neighborhood, and she then secured work outside the home. John Pic remembered the time as being soon after WWII started. Perhaps Marguerite had heard that nearby Algiers Naval Base was gearing up for war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Marguerite's biographer of sorts, Jean Stafford,  A Mother In History: Marguerite Oswald, The Mother of the Man Who Killed President Kennedy, quoted Lee's mother as saying:

"I used to work in Algiers, Louisiana, during the war and that is across the river from New Orleans. I was a switchboard operator. My duty was six o'clock in the morning until three, or six-thirty, I forget which. So, I rented a room in Algiers, Louisiana, and my sister was taking care of Lee permanently at this particular time. He was about two years old. Every evening I left Algiers and took the ferry and came over and took care of my baby, and would have to leave early enough to get home before dark--after all, I was a woman alone--to be across the river so I could go to work for six-thirty. And the Naval Base personnel used to come with a jeep to pick me up because there was no other way to get to the Naval Base." [p. 60]

We know from information provided by Marguerite's sister, Lillian Claverie Murret, that her home at the time was some five miles northwest of the neighborhood where Marguerite had lived with her husband, Robert E. Lee Oswald, so that made it quite a distance farther and across the river from Algiers. It is unlikely Marguerite traveled to the Murrets every evening to see Lee; most likely she was recalling the short period at Pauline Street when she had live-in caretakers for Lee.

Her room at 227 Atlantic Avenue, apparently shared with another woman, was 1.3 miles from the headquarters building of the naval training station at Algiers--2300 General Meyer Avenue.

Marguerite's employment in 1942-43 time frame.

The best illustration from Marguerite's own mouth of what Pic would describe in 1964 as her habit of giving a "rationalized answer" to her job changes appears just following the portion of the above-quoted statement  from Stafford's book. The continuation of Marguerite's rambling monologue was as follows:

"I was on this side of New Orleans [in Algiers?] and this young lady that also roomed where I was rooming had a car and she was coming to New Orleans and she told me that if I would stay over she would take me home. Well, my two nephews [Murret sons] had had a tonsillitis operation and I went to the hospital and stayed a little while with them and then I met this young lady and she had a date and they decided that we should go into one of the nightclubs in the Vieux Carre and have a little recreation. Well, now I love to dance and go out to dinner and places like that, and so I said I would.

"And before I knew it, it was two o'clock in the morning. What could I do? I'm with them, they have the car, so I have to wait. So when I did get home I called the other young lady who worked the evening shift for the switchboard and told her I wasn't feeling well and would she take the morning and I would take the evening. She said she would. However, it didn't please her too much. So that afternoon I was called to the Colonel's office and he asked me what happened and I told him I wasn't feeling well, and that I had been up until late and had been to the hospital--that part of course was true--so it was perfectly natural that I call the other young lady and ask her to change with me.

"However, I did dance, you see, with a few of the boys, and they happened to be men from the base, but how was I to know that? And he told me that I was not telling the truth and that I had been seen in a nightclub and I was dancing until two o'clock in the morning when I should have been home in bed resting to be there for the six o'clock shift. And he fired me, right then and there." [pp. 60-61]

Assuming Marguerite was telling the truth, as she remembered it, why would a "colonel" be stationed at a naval base? Was it also possible Edwin Ekdahl, having served in the Navy's engineer corps during WWII, could have been assigned in Algiers during the same time? Or perhaps he was working there in some other capacity?

1940's era map of Algiers Naval Station

Stafford made no reference to Edwin Ekdahl at this particular point in the book, but it is somewhat intriguing that he did appear on the scene at this point in time, or perhaps a few months later. John Pic pins their meeting to his own appendectomy, but neither Armstrong nor the Warren Commission apparently ever felt called upon to look into details of his doctor and Pic's mother's address at that time:

Mr. JENNER - Well, I think probably a good new start off point is Mr. Ekdahl. Tell us your recollection of him, what led up, your present recollection of the circumstances which brought him into your lives and when you first were aware of his existence and what your circumstance was at that time, what your mother's was?
Mr. PIC - Okay.
Mr. JENNER - Give times as best you can.
Mr. PIC - If you can date for me when I had my appendix out I can practically date for you Mr. Ekdahl's.
Mr. JENNER - I am afraid I can't. Were you at Bethlehem Orphanage?
Mr. PIC - Yes; I was at Bethlehem so it would be either 1943 or 1944, and I am sure she was at Pittsburgh at that time.
Mr. JENNER - Pittsburgh Plate?
Mr. PIC - Right. And it was right after I had my appendix out that he appeared on the scene. And she visited us more often when she was going with him.
Mr. JENNER - And she brought him with her, did she?
Mr. PIC - Yes; he had the car.

This detail furnished by Pic, therefore, requires that we go back to Marguerite's address and job history and to the schools John Pic attended. Albert Jenner, the Warren Commission staff attorney who questioned him, never quite grasped the fact that Pic attended George Washington Elementary located at 3810 St. Claude Street (not "St. Cloud," as transcribed in the W.C. Report), which is now Douglas High School, situated near Alvar and Bartholomew Streets, just as Pic remembered it.**

Before Ekdahl--Robert E. Lee Oswald Death, July 1939

After the death of her second husband in the late summer of 1939, Marguerite, age 32, inherited the 2109 Alvar Street residence encumbered by a mortgage. Lee was born October 18 that same year, and to save money (according to John Pic), she put the older boys in the Catholic Infant Jesus College home in Algiers, La.--across the river--until the following summer of 1940. At that time, she brought them back to live with her and baby Lee, and they attended school at George Washington Elementary for a year and a half before having to be placed into another orphanage. Being a Lutheran, it is not known what possessed her to consider the Catholic home for the boys, but the fact it was located in the same area as the naval base where she later got a job is intriguing. Vincent Bugliosi sides with Albert Jenner rather than Pic here, in saying Pic returned for a time to his first school, William Frantz, before transferring to George Washington.

Endnote 516 (page 361) from Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History CD tells us: "Mrs. Fred Huff, the owner of the [1242] Congress Street property, said she had rental records for Marguerite dating from November 10, 1940, but she said Marguerite could have moved into Huff ’s house earlier since her records prior to that date had been destroyed (FBI interview of Mrs. Fred C. Huff on December 9, 1963). The FBI said that records of the New Orleans Retail Credit Bureau reflect Marguerite had moved into the Congress Street house on September 28, 1940 (CE 2201, 25 H 80)."

Marguerite had decided it would be more economical to rent out the Alvar Steet house to the doctor who had delivered Lee in October 1939 while renting smaller accommodations, thus moving several time until her purchase on March 9, 1941 of an "upper lower class" house, as Pic characterized it, at 1010 Bartholomew a few blocks away. Not remembering the address of the intervening residences, all Pic would say was that one was "a green house."

The Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. where she worked was then located at 1500 Poydras at LaSalle (now part of the present location of the Superdome or "Sugar Bowl" arena). She sold the Bartholomew Street house on January 16, 1942, but kept the house on Alvar rented to Dr. Mancuso. Marguerite remembers in a monologue, delivered during Rankin's questioning, this period of time before Lee turned three years old:

War had broken out and the Negroes in New Orleans were going into factories and so on and so forth so there is many a job I had to leave in order to stay home and mind Lee until I could get help.  Then my sister helped with Lee. There is one particular instance, I let a couple [the Roaches] have my home, plus $15 a month in order to care for Lee while I worked [at the Algiers Naval Base?], and this couple after about 2 month's time had neglected Lee and so I had to put them out of the house and there again I had to quit a job [or was she fired?] and take care of Lee until I could make arrangements and my sister could help me with it.  So when Lee was 3 years old I was having it very difficult with Lee, because of the different people to take care of Lee, and the different jobs that I had to give up. However, I was never in want of work. It was during the war and I was always able to get work, but I realized if I continued to quit jobs because I couldn't hold the jobs that some day I wouldn't have enough jobs in New Orleans for me to hold one....So, then at age 3 Lee was placed in the home. I waited patiently for age 3 because I wanted naturally for the brothers to be together. It was hard on Lee also because Lee was at a different place and his brothers were at a different place. So at age 3 I placed Lee in a Lutheran home. Of course, you have to be under strict investigation financially and otherwise to do this because this is a church placement, sir.

Then, I became manager of Princess hosiery shop on Canal Street. I opened that shop and I was left by myself and in 6 days' time I hired four girls. There was the first shop this man has had. He now has, I think, 54 stores and he always remembers me as on the road of starting him to success, because this young man didn't have much money at the time. And this is where I met Mr. Ekdahl and there is why I didn't want to marry right away because the children were being taken care of and I was manager of the hosiery shop. [Mr. Aizer revealed she was dating Ekdahl while working at the hosiery job.]

After leaving them in Bethlehem, Margaret had first rented an apartment at 831 Pauline Street in the same general neighborhood as the Alvar and Bartholomew houses, and soon thereafter to 111 Sherwood Forest Drive, four or five miles northwest from that old neighborhood and quite close to her sister's home in New Orleans. Mrs. Murret often helped Marguerite care for young Lee, according to Russell Holmes' file Chronology compiled during the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation in 1976.

More Armstrong Inaccuracies and Omissions

John Armstrong, in his book, Harvey and Lee (page 18), writes inaccurately that while living on Pauline Street Marguerite "began working for Bert's Shoe Store at 827 Canal Street in New Orleans, her first job of record." He says at page 20,

"After leaving Princess Hosiery Mrs. Oswald's friend, Mrs. Oris Duane, became the store manager and remained in that position for the next 20 years. There is no record of where Marguerite Oswald lived or where she was employed after leaving Princess Hosiery (August 1943 thru April 1944). In fact, the only record of her employment from 1939 (death of her husband) thru 1944 (5 years) was a brief period at Bert's Shoe Store, a brief period at the Naval Base in Algiers, and a few weeks at the two hosiery stores."

The only document substantiating her job at Bert's Shoes appears in Lee Oswald's 201 File in a document created by the Secret Service. The day after JFK's assassination and Lee Oswald's arrest, the Secret Service reviewed Lee's application to work at Reily Coffee Company and, noting the names of some of Lee's Oswald relatives there, began calling them. His father had three brothers, and it was in a call to Mrs. Hazel Oswald that Marguerite's job at Bert's Shoe store was reported.

Hazel was the second wife of one of Robert Lee Oswald's three brothers, William Stout Oswald. She reportedly had received a call from Lee Harvey Oswald in May 1963, inquiring about his father, who had died before he was born; she told him his three uncles were all then deceased as well. Hazel also remembered receiving a call from Marguerite some years prior to 1963--shortly after Marguerite and Lee returned from New York--stating that she was then employed at Bert's Shoes, and Lee was then 14 years old.

Under the year 1942 Armstrong relates this information, which he failed to follow up on completely:

In the summer of 1942 Marguerite rented a room at 227 Atlantic Avenue in
Algiers (across the river from New Orleans), in order to be close to her job at the Naval base, while Lee remained with Lillian Murret. On August 17 Dr. Cuthbert Brown treated Lee Oswald for impetigo, a disease of the skin. Oswald's address was listed as 227 Atlantic Avenue, the same address listed on Dr. Brown's records when he treated Marguerite on September 10, 1942.
In the fall of 1942 Marguerite lost her job at the Naval base and returned to New
Orleans. John and Robert remained at the Orphanage and were invited to their friend's home for Christmas. On December 26th, after Lee had lived at the Murret's home for 7 months, Marguerite placed 3-year-old Lee in the Evangelical Lutheran Bethleham Orphan Asylum with John and Robert. Thirty-five-year-old Marguerite then went to work for Pittsburgh Plate Glass and soon met her future husband, Edwin Ekdahl. Edwin Ekdahl was a 55-year-old engineer, originally from Boston, who was working for Ebasco Services of New York City.(34) Ekdahl had separated from his wife (Rasmine Ekdahl) a year earlier and was working in New Orleans. The couple had one child, Dewey Ekdahl, who lived with his mother in Boston.

We learn that Ebasco, a subsidiary of the Electric Bond & Share Co., was engaged in extremely sensitive matters at that very time from newspapers such as the following:

Nov. 1942

Big Power Plant Of Reds Designed

NEW YORK, Nov. 19 (AP) — Ebasco Services, Inc., a subsidiary of the Electric Bond & Share Co., big utilities system, is designing a $10,000,000 electric generating plan to be erected in Russia as a part of the United States lease- lend [sic] program, it was learned today. It was understood the U.S. treasury  procurement division arranged with Ebasco Services for the blueprints for the big power unit, to be built "eastward" from the present industrial areas. The plant will have 100,000 kilowatts capacity from four turbine generators. Total cost was estimated at $100 a kilowatt.

We have to wonder whether there was a connection between Ebasco Services and Texas Electric Service Co. (Tesco) in Fort Worth. Why was this question ignored by Armstrong? Was it because his friend, Jack White, worked for Tesco's ad agency?

Arrival in Texas from New Orleans

The FBI documented, by consulting Ivy Kern, formerly of 237 Atlantic, who stated positively she knew nobody named Marguerite Oswald, and that Mrs. Oswald had never lived at 227 Atlantic in 1941 or 1942. The Koeppel/Meyer family who did live at that address, confirmed that fact.

Schultz home in Dallas with sandbox in back

Lee left the Lutheran home in January and the two older boys were removed by Marguerite in June 1944  to in Dallas at 4801 Victor--an "upper middle class" neighborhood, as John Pic recalled--with sturdy brick homes sheltered by large shade trees. Lee led a happy existence there, often playing in a neighbor's back yard sandbox, according to an FBI interview of Roydon Schultz of 4726 Victor, who had a son a few years older than Lee [Commission Exhibit 1874].

According to Pic's memory in his Warren Commission testimony, when the older boys first moved to Dallas, Ekdahl was living somewhere in Fort Worth until the marriage on May 7, 1945, when he joined the family in Dallas at the House on Victor (part of Lot 7, in Block "A" of Ozone Addition to the City of Dallas). But his presence there could have only lasted for six weeks, since John Armstrong's records stored at the Poage Library include a copy of a deed (see page 19 of document), whereby Marguerite, joined by her new husband, conveyed the Victor residence to Ross Angelo on June 30, 1945.

Thereafter, the Ekdahls' address of Grandbury Road, Route 45, Benbrook, Texas, also reflected in Armstrong's records, was never researched for his book. Neither is the fact that Marguerite often wrote letters on stationery of the Worth Hotel, such as one addressed to  on April 13, 1946 (page 10) to the head of the Chamberlain-Hunt Academy where the older boys boarded. The address on one such envelope was Route 5 in Benbrook (page 40), which is mentioned in testimony of Otis Carlton, who says he actually purchased 100 San Saba from Mrs. Oswald. Contradicting that "evidence," is Mrs. W.H. Bell's statement (page 44) that she lived at 100 San Saba, and that the Oswalds lived in 1948 at 101 San Saba. Tax records seem to confirm that Carlton actually bought a portion of the Bell property, changing the addresses to 100 and 102, with 101 being across the street from both. If the San Saba Avenue property was at Route 5, then where was Route 45?

Old Granbury Road, Benbrook, Texas

When Christmas vacation came in December 1945, the boys rode the bus from Mississippi to Shreveport, La., near the Louisiana-Texas border. Pic remembered that Ekdahl was an hour or two late picking them up there, but they eventually arrived in Benbrook, at a new residence to which the family had moved since the boys had departed almost four months earlier. Pic describes this house as being

"about 15 miles below Fort Worth in Benbrook, it was way out. It wasn't the same Benbrook house. It was further. This was a brick house....It was rather isolated on one of the main highways. In fact, I just drove that way recently, and I couldn't find the place. When I went up to Fort Worth in 1962 I was looking for the house and I couldn't find it."

When the FBI interviewed A. R. Cartwright, he told them about an Oswald residence in Benbrook next door to the site for where the Water Department office had been located by 1964. He was apparently referring to the 101 San Saba Avenue house, since records indicate the address of the old City Hall to have been at the adjacent address of 101 Del Rio Avenue.

But what about the other Benbrook house Pic spoke of, and why did Albert Jenner skip over it so blithely during his questioning of Pic? To Jenner's query of whether that house could have been on Grandbury Road, Box 567. Pic's response was: "This was a brick house, with quite a bit of ground. I think way back they told us that one of the Roosevelt sons had a house out there, that is how I remember." There was, amazingly, no followup question:

Who Built the Benbrook Dam?

The intervening event which prevented John Pic from finding the house he remembered occurred in 1952 when Mrs. Amon G. Carter flipped a switch that closed the floodgates of the newly completed Benbrook Dam which had been under construction during John Pic's summer visit in 1945. The completion of the dam would result in the inundation of most of the Dutch Branch Ranch where Elliott and Ruth Googins Roosevelt lived between 1935 and 1944. Mos likely the first Benbrook residence where the Oswalds lived with Edwin Ekdahl was inundated along with it. Why did Jack White and his "protege," John Armstrong not look into this address? Why was there no investigation into Oswald's first grade class at Benbrook Common School?

Would an investigation of that address have demanded a more thorough look into the life of Edwin Ekdahl and his employer? Would it have revealed the background of President Roosevelt's daughter-in-law, her father, and his own elite associates in Fort Worth?

Elliott Roosevelt clearly enjoyed his connection to the man in the White House and played political games to get what he wanted, including electricity for their Dutch Branch ranch house in Benbrook in 1937:

Bringing electricity to outer regions of Benbrook, Texas

[Source of above excerpt: These Amazing Roosevelts: A Book About Franklin D. Roosevelt And His Adventurous Family,originally published by its author, the Methodist evangelist and FDR insider, Rev. William Le Roy Stidger, while FDR was still president.]

One of the "utilities" frightened by Elliott's power play, no pun intended, was Edwin Ekdahl's own employer at the time, Texas Electric Service Co. The address where young Lee Oswald lived that year, and tossed around by Jenner, was the same road described in the history of Benbrook at its website, which relates that:

Roosevelt's Dutch Branch Ranch covered approximately 1,300 acres in the Benbrook area with the ranch house located off of Old Granbury Road (West Cleburne Road) on the east of what is now Benbrook Lake. The ranch was purchased in 1935 by Elliott's wife, Ruth Goggins Roosevelt, and served as Elliot's home while he was president of the Texas State (radio) Network. President Franklin Roosevelt visited his son at the ranch on four occasions from 1936 to 1944. The Roosevelts sold the ranch in 1944 and Fort Worth oilman Sid W. Richardson later purchased it in 1946. Much of the ranch was condemned by the U.S. Government for construction of Benbrook Lake in 1947.

An October 1942 visit of FDR to the ranch is depicted in the following video:

 

The above scenes occurred three years prior to the Ekdahls' move to Benbrook. News reports in 1942 had been full of  talk of bomb-making plants for the war, as well as talk about the President's visit to Benbrook:

Maj. Gen. Richard Donovan, commanding officer of the Eighth Service Command of the service of supply, with headquarters at Fort Sam Houston San Antonio, Texas, rode through the [Consolidated Vultee Aircraft] plant with the President. So did Mrs. Roosevelt, Elliott's wife, Ruth, and two of her three children. Ruth Chandler, 8, and Elliott, Jr., 6. The chief executive, who had come up by train from San Antonio, where he inspected air corps and infantry bases Sunday, arrived at nearby Benbrook, Texas, at 9:30 (Central War Time) Monday morning. A few minutes later he drove up to Elliott's Dutch Branch ranch. Members of the family greeted him at the Hilltop ranch house. Mrs. Roosevelt had flown in Sunday night on her way to the West Coast, which the President had left three days before. Perching his youngest grandchild, 8-months-old David, on his lap, the President gathered Elliott, Jr., and Ruth Chandler around him and posed for family pictures on the front lawn. Then, with Ruth, the three grandchildren, and Mrs. Roosevelt he made a trip around the ranch in a red convertible coupe. He went down to the stables to have a look at the horses, and rode down the roads and across the fields. [Source: Paris, TX News, Oct. 1, 1942]

The Roosevelts, we are told, had already sold their ranch a year before the Ekdahls arrived, though it was in exactly the same area, "about 15 miles outside Fort Worth,"according to a 1985 article in which the Roosevelt children remembered living there. With WWII heating up, however, Elliott had felt called to quit the job of managing his wife's radio station and the ranch she had purchased with an inheritance from her long-deceased father, Joseph B. Googins, to return to the Army Air Corps. The title to the ranch was transferred from Ruth Googins Roosevelt in 1944, and then acquired in 1946 by Sid Richardson, the owner at the time the federal government condemned it for Benbrook Lake. History demands that someone in Tarrant County with access to deed records find out who that intervening owner was.

Construction of the dam did not begin until 1947--two years after John Pic and Robert Oswald were there for Christmas vacation, and the lake itself would not appear until the rains came following Mrs. Amon Carter's closing of the floodgates in 1952. No wonder Pic could not find the place in 1962! The entire area had completely changed.

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 *The petition was date-stamped on March 23, 1948, and the judgment was dated June 24, 1948. Marguerite had an attorney who, in spite of her claims of infidelity and adultery on the part of her husband, failed to file a petition on her behalf but a mere general denial. Without a counterclaim, the court would have been unable to award the divorce to her, even after a jury trial in which her sons allegedly testified. Or perhaps the missing allegations were part of the conditions of the settlement awarding her $1,500 as her share of the community property accumulated during three years of marriage. The failure to mention any real estate divided by the court, however, does indicate that the Benbrook home where the family lived in 1945 was merely rented. At any rate, the attorneys she hired were McLean & McLean with offices on the 9th Floor of the Burk Burnett Building, and John E. McLean filed only a general denial with one special denial to Ekdahl's charges, and a request for attorney's fees. Another interesting note is that his brother and partner was W.P. "Wild Bill" McLean, Jr., who acted as a special prosecutor of J. Frank Norris, alleged murderer of D.E. Chipps.

**In 1997 the Orleans Parish School Board voted unanimously to change the name of a newer George Washington Elementary school, at 1116 Pauline (constructed directly across the street from the school Pic attended by that name), to Dr. Charles Richard Drew Elementary to comply with a policy prohibiting school names honoring ''former slave owners or others who did not respect equal opportunity for all."