Jolly West Part III
For the most important and interesting revelations about Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West’s suspected involvement in the cover up of the assassination of President Kennedy, I refer again to Tom O’Neill’s MK Ultra opus CHAOS: CHARLES MANSON, THE CIA, AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES (Little Brown 2019). As with the last post, Jolly West Part II, I’ve done some further research and have recounted the facts from the perspective and context developed in our entire series (beginning with The Deep State and Scientology).
When you timeline the facts, often otherwise obscured truths emerge. That is why propagandists pay so much attention to confusing the critical factor of time. Accurate time sequence is the way we are going to approach the matter of some rather odd meddling that surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some new revelations emerge.
In February 1959 Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist and lawyer, invited his friend and colleague Jolly West to participate in a New Orleans seminar for Smith’s Law-Science Academy. The group was formed to test how far the boundaries of law could be stretched in freeing cold-blooded criminals into society. A ‘logical’ extension of the Military Industrial Mind Control complex aim of “infiltration of law.”
West dominated Smith’s agenda, making four of the eleven presentations given there. It was not surprising since both Smith and West share deep ties. They had extensive mutual MK Ultra and military psychiatric connections. For example, West associate and fellow MK Ultra contractor Dr. Stewart Wolf also attended the 1959 New Orleans conclave and had worked with Smith on legal cases. Wolf, like West, was mentored by confirmed MK Ultra experimenter and funder and personal friend of Alan Dulles at Cornell University medical center, Dr Harold Wolff. I obtained a stack of documents from the West personal archives that show Stewart Wolf working feverishly to establish West’s MK Ultra lab at University of Oklahoma at West’s behest in 1955. Even though Wolf was West’s titular superior (head of the school of medicine), and West was still in the throes of the Jimmy Shaver situation (see Jolly West Part II) and not yet working full time at the University, Wolf was head hunting for West’s MK Ultra doctor line-up, running each move by and taking direction from West.
Winston Smith, like West, was a proponent of plying uncooperative defendants with drugs and hypnosis to forcibly extract the “truth” out of them. The West, Wolf, Smith connections (and other military mind control complex ties) are thoroughly documented in an admirable piece of investigative journalism by Max Arvo in his three-part Jack Ruby series at Jack Ruby: A Review and Reassessment. For those wanting documentation beyond what we provide in this article, Arvo’s series is a virtual legal brief with a plethora of exhibits on much of the same ground we cover here.
On October 3,1963 Louis Jolyon West made the following pronunciamento to a meeting of the Mental Health Association of Oregon:
“Now we are at the dawning of a new era in the field of psychiatry because we are learning for the first time how to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.”
The Oregon Journal reported that “Dr. West listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis and sleep deprivation as some of the things that psychiatrists were using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people…The most important contribution of [LSD] so far is in producing model mental illnesses, he believes.” (Oregon Journal October 3, 1963) West was publicly claiming to have made good on his 1953 promise to MK Ultra boss Sidney Gottlieb to create the means “for inducing in [subjects] specific mental disorders.” (see Jolly West Part I and Part II)
Fifty days later, on November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The farcical narrative the media was fed and dutifully and incessantly drilled into the public psyche included the ‘fact’ that the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a ‘lone nut.’ A person who up to that fatal day had never apparently been evaluated as insane was dubbed stark-staring mad and yet capable of pulling off a military grade, triangulated ambush on the President of the United States – all on his lonesome. The gaslighting had only just begun. (For a short primer on the absurdity of our mainstream conditioning on the incident see Oliver Stone’s JFK; or go further with Stone’s follow-up documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass; and/or take a deeper, documented dive at Kennedy and King, where Arvo’s series is posted.)
The November 22/23 1963 several-hour initial Lee Harvey Oswald interrogation – sans lawyer for the accused – resulted in nothing but denials from Oswald and the remarkably resolute sounding declaration that he’d been designated and set up as the “patsy” for the biggest crime of the 20th Century. Despite being the most important interrogation in American history, no recording of the interrogation ever saw the light of day. Some have ventured that Oswald was a botched product of MK Ultra Mind Control – programmed to believe he had committed the crime. A failure because instead of dutifully copping to the crime, he retained enough bearings to realize he hadn’t had done it. We are not going there because the best potential evidence of Oswald’s real provenance would soon disappear, forever.
On November 24, less than 48 hours after his arrest, the most important prisoner in the history of the United States of America, Oswald, was shot down on live television by one Jack Rubenstein, better known as Jack Ruby, a mob and intelligence community connected strip club owner in Dallas. Seemingly a desperate act following 36 hours of futile attempts to make Oswald incriminate himself. As much as the world craved answers out of Lee Harvey Oswald, it shifted its attention toward Ruby in hopes of getting closer to the truth.
Within 3 days, after many machinations involving Ruby’s brother being led around by mob and media connected intelligence types, San Francisco’s Melvin Belli was announced as counsel for Ruby. In keeping with the sea of contradictions the JFK assassination case served up, Belli was not even a criminal lawyer. Instead, he was a high-profile, ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer, evidenced by his sobriquet “the king of torts.”
It just so happens that Melvin Belli was good friends with a local Dallas lawyer named Joe Tonahill, who was immediately brought on as local counsel. It also just so happened that Belli and Tonahill were close friends and associates of Jolly West colleague Hubert Winston Smith of Law-Science Academy fame and also a professor at University of Texas.
Two more peculiar events occurred before the first day of December 1963 even arrived.
First, two days after the Belli dog and pony show (announcing to the media the Texas arrival of the king of torts), Jolly West held one of his own. He announced to United Press International that a panel of ten “nationally known psychiatrists” had agreed to serve as “friends of the court” to “examine Ruby on an impartial basis.” West claimed he was put up to the caper by one Charles W. Webster, professor of criminal law at Southern Methodist University (See, West Announces Panel). One little problem, Webster said just the reverse. It was the self-promoting West who first came to Webster to be a local authority tag to help West wheedle his way into visit Mr. Ruby (see Webster discredits West). West went to his grave thirty-six years later never disclosing who actually put him up to pursuing Ruby. By the end of this article, I reckon you’ll be able to make a relatively educated guess on who that was. Likewise, the ten alleged nationally known experts were never identified. Yet, before the Grand Jury had even decided on the prima facie case against Ruby, West infiltrated the court and asked presiding judge Joe Brown to set West loose on Ruby. Brown rejected the move.
The second strange event occurred concurrently to West’s hijinks. His drug-hypnosis proponent friend Hubert Winston Smith was instantly tapped by his friends Belli and Tonahill to create an “insanity defense” for Ruby. By the time Smith was flat-out establishing the theory and assembling the team of psychiatrists who would dutifully testify to its veracity, the only psychiatrist to have examined Ruby, Dr. John T. Holbrook, found on 25 November that Ruby was “clinically and legally sane.” Holbrook would conduct subsequent examinations on Dec 4 1963 and January 27-29 1964 making essentially the same finding.
In fact, so apparently lucid was Mr. Ruby that by the time of trial, Smith’s own panel of three hand selected and coached psychiatrists had to agree that Ruby at that time was clearly ‘sane.’ So, reminiscent of the strange West affair involving Jimmy Shaver in 1954 (see, Jolly West Part II) the defense became that Ruby was “temporarily insane” at the time of the killing of Oswald, but apparently had regained his senses once the terrible deed was done. The jury thoroughly rejected the psych double-talk and by March 14,1964 Jack Ruby was sentenced to die by the electric chair.
If you study the case in any depth, you will soon realize there is next to no probability that Ruby could have pulled off the execution alone. A known mobster walking deep into a police station to stick a gun in the belly of the most guarded prisoner and valued potential witness in the history of the United States of America? The official motive repeated ad nauseum by the media was patently absurd on its face: “Ruby was so emotionally upset by Kennedy’s assassination he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to go through a trial.” Right, from a venereal disease wracked underworld figure with CIA and mob connections, both of which wanted Kennedy dead.
Predictably, Ruby fired Belli. He then formally hired the psychiatrist/lawyer who bungled his insanity defense; due no doubt to the facileness with which Smith threw his own hand-picked and recruited psychiatrists under the bus, sharply criticizing the performance of all of them. Smith blatantly lied to the court, claiming he had not seen the reports of the trial psychiatrists he had himself assembled and coached. In perhaps a Freudian slip, reminiscent of West’s diabolical work on “behalf of” Jimmy Shaver (see Jolly West part II), Smith vowed to use hypnosis and drugs to “get the truth out of Ruby.” Had this come from the mouth of the prosecutor that is one thing, but Winston was the supposed defense lawyer.
So, let us say that you promised the sure-fire insanity defense, it backfired, and now whatever conglomerate (organized crime, CIA, or combination of both) is dependent upon Ruby’s silence and/or discrediting is demanding results, or else. In order to manufacture insanity, who you gonna call?
Operation Mind Control Fixer
Smith’s first action was to recruit his friend and colleague Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West onto team Ruby. Smith moved the court for permission to urgently have Ruby’s mental state examined anew. According to West’s later report on the examination, he discussed with Smith in advance using “Hypnosis and intravenous sodium pentothal were included among possible techniques to provide further information concerning Mr. Ruby’s state of mind at the time he shot Lee Harvey Oswald on 24 November 1963.” It seems, Jack Ruby was in for the Jimmy Shaver treatment – see Jolly West Part II. By late April Smith had obtained court clearance for West to visit and “examine” Ruby.
Before we proceed, let’s review the Jack Ruby psychiatric scorecard up to the day West entered the scene. Five psychiatrists, four of them for the defense, had found Ruby to be compos mentis in seven different reports to the court. None, zero, nada, zilch had found Ruby to be non compos mentis. (Chaos, chapter 11 and endnotes, Tom O’Neill, and Jack Ruby: A Review and Reassessment)
Only on the day Jolly West – master hypnotist, LSD experimenter, and self-proclaimed insanity-producing wonder – met Jack Ruby did all of that change, forever. As was the hambone’s wont, West immediately announced to as many media members as he and Smith could muster that Jack Ruby was at that moment “obviously psychotic”, suffering from “auditory and visual hallucinations.” West found further “corroboration” for his insanity finding: Ruby did not trust West and did not want to be admitted into a mental hospital saying he felt safer in jail. In other words, that he wouldn’t submit to institutionalization under the grand master of MK Ultra Mind Control was proof the man was insane. (see West’s 29 April 1964 report)
West told the media that if Ruby was not at once committed to a hospital he would become “hopelessly insane.” Get it? Incurable. Yet, the very next day, West said Ruby seemed to have regained his wits. An apparent less-than-24-hour psychotic break. Max Arvos made a well-reasoned case that Ruby might have been plied with LSD to create “insanity”, just as West promised he could do less than two months earlier. Arvos noted that Ruby’s breaks with reality – according to West’s knee jerk admission – seemed to last about the average amount of time of an LSD trip (8-24 hours), not the expected weeks to months that a normative psychotic break would last. Indeed, it seems Ruby went in and out of psychosis at the flip of a switch until the day he died. And the only common denominator in Ruby’s orbit during that entire time was Dr. Lois Jolyon “Jolly” West. All of the other more than half dozen psychiatrists involved in the case came and left; only West remained, in spite of Ruby’s consistently expressed horror at his presence. In spite of the one-time slip up immediately stating Ruby snapped out of it the next day, West would spend the rest of Ruby’s life – and beyond – stalking him and continuously asserting the man’s permanent departure from reality.
In either event, the judge was not impressed by West’s April 29, 1964 report and Smith’s attempt to have Ruby committed to a mental hospital where West could have his way with Ruby full time. Ruby remained jailed pending his appeal.
Warren Commission Cover-up
Over the next two months Ruby’s sister Eva Grant negotiated on Ruby’s behalf to have him testify before the Warren Commission, formed to be the final-word investigative body on the JFK assassination. The Commission was infamously corrupt, being effectively controlled by member Allen Dulles, the bitter JFK-fired former head of CIA who created MK Ultra and its predecessors Operations Artichoke and Bluebird. As such it was the wolf guarding the hen house, suspect number one left in charge of the crime enquiry. Grant’s and Ruby’s actions were vigorously opposed by Smith and the rest of the legal team. In fact, just as a deal was finally struck with the commission, less than a week before Ruby’s appearance, Smith suddenly resigned as counsel, claiming financial hardship. (In fact, Smith had been fired by University of Texas; but soon after he was magically swept off his feet and ushered to University Oklahoma for a position his partner in crime Jolly West had arranged).
The full transcript of the Warren Commission’s examination of Ruby reads like lawyers interrogating a person fully in the throes of an amphetamine-laced LSD*(see endnote) trip (see Ruby’s Warren Commission testimony). For several minutes at a time Ruby would appear lucid, reciting details with incredible precision. The moment Ruby was asked questions that got him off what sounded like an automatic, amphetamine-driven narrative, Ruby would flip into delusory rantings about a real time extermination against Jews that was going on across the United States. Warren himself seemed flummoxed, several times reassuring Ruby that he was perfectly sane; only to have Ruby then take off on another flite of rambling fantasy. The one constancy with Ruby during the testimony was his repeated request to be taken to Washington under special protection so that he could in safety tell the entire story of how he came to gun down Oswald. The request was repeatedly denied as if that were some psychotic rambling despite Warren stating on the record, “you are speaking very, very rationally, and I am really surprised that you can remember as much as you have remembered up to the present time”, and “There are many witnesses whose memory has not been as good as yours. I tell you that, honestly.”
Significantly, Warren and the other Commission members were so disinterested in investigating or even asking rational follow ups they entirely ignored this whopping admission by Ruby:
Ruby: “Mr. Belli and I decided–oh yes, when I went to say that I wanted to get on the stand and tell the truth of what happened that morning, he said, ‘Jack, when they get you on the stand, you are actually speaking of a premeditated crime that you involved yourself in.’”
That statement by Ruby utterly discredits the central official line we have been force fed and choked on for 61 years since. That is the lie that Ruby committed a crime of passion with no sign or evidence of pre-meditation. The prosecution did not even plead a premeditated murder. Yet, Ruby admitted to Warren’s face that his own lawyer knew and Ruby did not correct him that the killing of Oswald was his own words, “pre-meditated”, in other words planned in advance, with malice aforethought.
CIA Shrinks Stalk the Warren Commission
Despite CIA connected operatives’ failure to have Ruby pronounced insane by the Dallas court, they doubled down in riding shotgun for the agency with the Warren Commission.
First, Jolly West, sent a letter dated June 23, 1964 directly to the head of the Commission, Chief Justice Warren about the time the Commission’s evidence intake was in its wrap-up stage. West offered his unsolicited opinion on Ruby’s motivation for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. He touted his exclusive expertise having personally examined Ruby, not mentioning that the Dallas judge and juries considering Ruby’s competence to participate in his own defense utterly rejected West. West proffered that the man he diagnosed two months earlier as “positively insane” had an actual reason for killing Oswald. West wrote that the motive was “wanting to prove that the Jews – through himself – loved their President and were not cowards.” Notwithstanding the ham-fisted anti-semitic nature of the evaluation (implying Jews are cowards and unloyal to America), West also failed to mention that according to his own six-page detailed report of examination of Ruby, not once did Ruby utter or even hint of any such motivation. It was purely an invention out of the dark mind of the Black Sorcerer’s apprentice. (Chaos, Chapter 11 and endnotes)
Second, West’s original CIA MK Ultra mentor Donald W. Hastings (see Hastings I, and Jolly West Pt II) was corresponding with Warren Commission de facto chief investigator, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, through 1964 and 1965. While the content is not known, toward the end of their pen pal relationship, Hasting published what he had apparently been feverishly working on in 1964 and 1965: a four-part series titled “The Psychiatry of Presidential Assassination.” In it, Hastings obviously with zero examination and zero first hand-evidence offered up with certainty the state of mind of Lee Harvey Oswald:
“…[T]here is not, in my opinion, any reasonable doubt that the assassin had paranoid schizophrenia.” A ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard criminal conviction without the need for any messy trial, let alone psychiatric examination.
On the other hand, in the very same paper, Hastings offers another absolutely contradictory ‘out’ for the Commission, presuming Oswald was found to have acted ‘rationally’: “It is possible that Oswald still clung to the hope that by silence and denial he might be freed and be allowed to go to Russia, this time as a person of importance who would receive a hero’s welcome.”
(The Psychiatry of Presidential Assassination, Part IV, Donald W. Hastings M.D., July 1965 pp 295)
Was it coincidence that two long-related CIA MK Ultra contractors – while under CIA contract – were working on and around the Warren Commission without identifying themselves as affiliated with the agency whose head (Dulles was known to have effectively run the CIA for many years after his JFK firing) should rightly have been suspect number one? (re Dulles continuing de facto leadership role, see e.g. The Devil’s Chessboard, Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, HarperCollins 2015) Was it coincidence that one-time MK Ultra mentor (Hastings) and his MK Ultra novitiate (West), both then-current MK Ultra contractors both created out of whole cloth “insanity” verdicts on both central players in the JFK assassination? Recently discovered documents cement the Hastings/West connection going back to 1948 (Hastings/West I), and show West in 1951 reporting to Hastings on their mutual MK Ultra associates at Cornell, including Allen Dulles’ personal friend Dr. Harold Wolff, and West’s 1950s/1960’s titular boss at University of Oklahoma, Dr. Stewart Wolf (Hastings/West II).
West Stalks Ruby to the Grave and beyond
Despite West’s best efforts, no judge nor jury would ever come to believe West’s assertion that Ruby belonged in an institution under West’s ‘care.’ While Ruby’s appeal was pending in 1966 the Texas Criminal Court of Appeal ordered the trial court to hold a jury trial on the sole issue of Ruby’s sanity. It seems there was some controversy on whom Ruby actually wished to serve as his counsel; the Court wanted to know whether Ruby was capable of directing his own defense before proceeding. While the lawyers came and went, Joe Tonahill (friend and confidante of Hubert Winston Smith) was still standing at the June 13, 1966 sanity trial, with a number of other lawyers also purportedly speaking on behalf of Ruby. While the hearing was held for purposes of ensuring Ruby’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel of his choice, the lawyers claimed the trial was a violation of Ruby’s constitutional rights. They attempted to keep Ruby out of the court room and while he was out of the court room argued that Ruby be censored from speaking. They refused to participate in protest while making a slew of continuing objections. The morning session of the transcript through page 29 reads as if the lawyers themselves had their own sanity issues. (June 13, 1966 Ruby sanity trial transcript)
In the afternoon session, several witnesses testified to months and months of apparent lucid, sane conduct on the part of Ruby in prison (pages 30-67 of transcript). Finally, over the objections of his own lawyers, Ruby himself demanded to address the jury to avoid being placed under the control of the likes of West. He gave a short statement attesting to his own sanity (page 68 transcript). He stated “I never did try to make anyone believe that I was of unsound mind. I don’t know where that originated from or who conspired to do that without my full mental capacity and agreeing with this…”
After listening to the witnesses and Ruby himself, the jury ruled that Ruby was in fact sane.
But that did not stop West. Notwithstanding Ruby’s distaste for West, he periodically weaseled his way into Ruby’s cell to pronounce him non compos mentis. Handy work against a patient who despises you and won’t speak to you. There is no evidence any other psychiatrist had a say about the psychiatric drugs Ruby would regularly consume throughout his nearly 3-year stint in prison. But, there is ample evidence he did consume such concoctions (his sister referring to them as ‘tranquilizers’). And, it is a fact that West was the only psychiatrist who remained connected to the case during that that entire period (none others lasting more than a few months). West’s pursuit of Ruby was dogged. According to his own testimony, West examined Ruby on six separate occasions over two years.
Ruby died on January 7, 1967. He had lost a short battle with cancer. The strain of cancer spread so quickly some researchers suspected it could have come out of the laboratory of West’s boss, Poisoner in Chief Sidney Gottlieb (reference to Gottlieb’s pursuit of such agents is documented in Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer 2019 Henry Holt).
West continued to pursue Ruby even after his death. He testified at the probate trial of Ruby’s Estate on March 27, 1967 (transcript of proceedings). As ever West asserted that Ruby was insane at the time he executed a jailhouse Last Will in 1966. Even though the date to which West assigned Ruby’s insanity occurred a year after West had last ‘examined’ him, he testified with arrogant certainty of his findings. The court rendered a judgment that never adjudicated the issue of Ruby’s 1966 sanity. But, West had done his duty beyond the bitter end.
Mission accomplished, I suppose. The insane label seemed to stick forever in spite of repeated failures to get a court to agree; perhaps just in case some hidden Ruby real confession ever surfaced.
Epilogue
Max Arvos discovered the appropriate bookend to accompany this story’s beginning which was West’s overt claim of his ability to create insanity with LSD with relative ease: “During a June 1967 discussion between defense lawyer Phil Burleson and prosecution lawyer Bill Alexander, Alexander stated that: when West first testified on Jack Ruby’s mental condition, in 1964, (according to Alexander) he said that Jack needed treatment for what Alexander thinks is just “death row psychosis” and fairly normal, and suggested that he be treated with LSD (then in an experimental stage).” – ‘Notes on Burleson-Alexander Panel Discussion’, Radio-Television News Directors Association, WKY Studios, Oklahoma City, June 3, 1967. Notes by Elizabeth Price. Document in West’s UCLA papers, Box 164, Folder 3, p.1.
*fn The significance of LSD mixed with amphetamines will come into sharp focus on a later installment of this series: Jolly West and Charles Manson
Moving On Up a Little Higher 