Dick Russell - On the Trail of the JFK Assassins: A Groundbreaking Look at America’s Most Infamous Conspiracy

The Village Voice, September 1, 1975

S AN DIEGOThere is no longer any doubt in my mind that the world has gone mad, and I with it. The story you are about to read is not fantasy, it is lunacy. And it is absolutely true. How to begin? Perhaps with the telegram.

This telegram was dispatched at approximately 1 AM, Thursday, June 19, to Gerald Ford, White House:

I have documents indicating that U.S. intelligence agencies had a laboratory producing robot murderers (Manchurian Candidates) and that at least one of them took part in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The programmer of this robot murderer is presently at large. I will provide the information to you at your convenience.

The sender was Richard H. Popkin, author of The Second Oswald and professor of philosophy. A reputable, scholarly gentleman who lectures at Oxford and the Sorbonne, edits the Journal of the History of Philosophy , co-directs the International Archives of the History of Ideas, and once translated Pierre Bayles seventeenth-century dictionary.

Unfortunately, this will not be the full tale of how the absentminded professor found unopened a five-year-old letter from an Oriental hypnotist, flew off to meet with him, and ultimately barricaded himself in a hotel room with a thousand pages of the hypnotists explosive research. Popkin is currently at work building his case and will then attempt to negotiate a deal with a variety of interested mediafrom television networks to major publishing housesfor the greatest sum possible. Therefore, I was permitted to see the documents only on the condition that I would sign a pledge not to reveal their contents.

At this point, I can tell you that Ive spent the better part of the past six weeks investigating the veracity of Popkins evidence. I did this for Popkin himself. He needed someone to verify certain leads in the Midwest, and he paid the expenses of a young Los Angeles investigator and myself to check the leads out. I personally have met the mysterious hypnotist and have done enough legwork to be convincedwith certain reservationsof the story the documents tell. The attorney generals office is not convinced, the Church Committee might yet be.

But all that must wait. This chronicle is necessarily but a footnote to the history of The Popkin Papers. If sometimes the tone seems disrespectful or even totally disconnected from such incredible subject matter, it cant be helped.

The account that follows is a journal of five days spent in the Richard Popkin household overlooking San Diego bay. Five days of bizarre telegrams, bugged telephones, and strange conversations with Jim Garrison, Dick Gregory, and Bernard Fensterwald. Five remarkable days in which the author of The History of Skepticism first concluded he had found the solution to one of the darkest puzzles of recent times.

SATURDAY. Stepping out of the San Diego airport, I am confronted by a fervent, bearded young man thrusting a leaflet in my face: WHO SHOT KENNEDY? by Moses David. It is copyrighted by the Children of God, and a tiny circle in the upper right-hand corner says: donation suggested. I give the fellow a nickel and hail a cab.

Yesterday morning, the tip-off that something huge is happening in California had come from an acquaintance at the Assassination Information Bureau in Cambridge. He didnt know exactly what Professor Popkin had unearthed, but along the grapevine that monitors the assassination business, the rumors had never been so electric.

After about an hour of busy signals, I had managed to reach the professor by phone. Im in a slight state of hysteria, he began, and proceeded to tell of two JFK assassination plots in 1963the first foiled by a double agent, the second including a killer programmed somewhere in the Midwest. He said hed give the story only to those whove been on our side, that the National Tattler had already mentioned six figures and could Village Voice come close to such an offer? If not, I was still welcome to come observe history-in-the-making. They even had a spare bed.

So I had headed West. After all, what was beyond possibility anymore? The CIA had hired mob hit-men to try to bump off Fidel Castro. The army had been turning on, tuning in, and dropping out ten years before Timothy Leary. The navy supposedly had run an assassin training school. If Nelson Rockefeller and the Nightly News were willing to reveal this much, what other horrors might be twisting slowly, slowly in the conspiratorial wind of Watergate?

For some time, a growing segment of the country had been turning back the clock to November 22, 1963. Finding out who really killed JFK, RFK, and MLK had become far more than the pastime of a few lone nuts asserting the innocence of a few other lone nuts. Indeed, a considerable chorus had begun wondering if America was run by lone nuts.

Was it merely a bunch of people getting off on their own paranoia? A lot of hucksters and false prophets gleefully boarding another media bandwagon? Partly, maybe. Still, a gut feeling persisted that somewhere in the muck of the last 12 years, a truth did wait to be discovered. And if Richard Popkin had found it....

Thus do I find myself riding past the Pacific Ocean on a cool summer evening, reading a nickel message from the Children of God: Save yourselves from this untoward generation of vipers who would destroy the Earth!

The Popkins ranch-style home sits on a hillside in the plush suburban environs of La Jolla. The Del Charro, where J. Edgar Hoover used to huddle with cronies, is now a vacant lot a few hundred yards down from their picture-window. Dr. Popkin (henceforth to be called the professor) is sitting with a few guests at a dining room table cluttered with manila folders, disheveled typescript, and a collection of mailgrams.