Blog

By Philip W. Boesch Jr.
Re-printed with permission – WestsideToday

For the first 89 years of this country’s existence, no woman was ever executed for any crime. Then along came Mary Surratt.

Mary Surratt and Thomas Jones never knew one another, but they both knew the actor John Wilkes Booth. In downtown Washington, Mary ran a modest boarding house where Booth hung out with Mary’s son John and other theater cronies. Thomas Jones lived a day’s ride away. The last anyone heard from Jones, he had a cheap booth on the midway at the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair, where he hawked his seedy book about how he helped Booth hide out in the woods after the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

Twenty-seven years after the assassination, Thomas crawled out from under a rock to try to cash in on his brush with infamy. Folks at the World’s Fair didn’t take kindly to Tom’s work. A newspaper column outlined briefly how angry veterans of the Army of the Republic trashed all the books. It seems Thomas didn’t die from his beating, but after openly selling his tale as an accessory to the most infamous murder in U.S. history, Thomas Jones did disappear. Laying low suited him best.

At Mary Surratt’s boarding house, they didn’t like Lincoln much and they spoke their minds freely, as they were permitted to do in these United States. Booth’s buddies drank a lot, and made noise about kidnapping the President; and then a few of them changed course and set out instead to kill him, the Vice President and the Secretary of State. Everyone testified later that Mary had nothing bad to say about the President. Minding her own business, she cleaned house and always had a pot of stew on for her son’s friends. The only witness who could recallnMary saying anything was certain she had nothing to do with Booth’s plot.

As it unfolded, the killer assigned to Vice President Andrew Johnson got cold feet and ran; Secretary of State Seward and his family were slashed viciously in a bloody knife attack that left two dead and Seward barely alive. At about the same time, at Ford’s Theater, hundreds heard a gunshot and then saw John Wilkes Booth leap from the second floor box to the stage below. Outside, Ed Spangler held Booth’s horse like he’d been told.

As alarm spread rapidly with the news, Booth galloped south into the night and across the bridge into Maryland. Hours later and far from the city, Booth woke up Dr. Mudd, a country doctor friendly to Southern boys, to set the leg bone Booth broke in his jump to the stage. When the good doctor threw Booth out the next morning, suspecting who he was, the assassin stumbled in the woods upon a local named Thomas Jones. It was Thomas who hid Booth away for the next week, bringing him his daily bread with news of the manhunt.

Then, when the coast was clear, Thomas rowed the killer across the river to Virginia, so he could continue his escape to the south. But the cavalry wasn’t far behind. They got wind of Booth, cornered him in a barn, burned it down and shot him dead for the reward. Before the frenzied hunt for accomplices, aiders and abettors, Booth’s friends scattered. Thomas Jones stayed quiet; John Surratt fled to Europe; his mother Mary stayed at home. To “aid” is to give any kind of support or information. To “abet” is to encourage. Any assistance makes you an accessory. You can be on the wrong side of the law if you know anything and keep it quiet. The U.S. Criminal Code calls it “guilty knowledge.” Aiders and abettors and accessories floated around Lincoln’s murder as they do around most big crimes, because we know how difficult it is to move through modern times completely alone.

Eight of Booth’s associates were tried and found guilty of conspiracy, including Ed Spangler and Dr. Mudd. Four of the eight were hanged, including Mary Surratt. Denying the court’s recommendation of leniency for Mary, President Johnson said simply “she kept the nest that hatched the egg.” President Kennedy was murdered in 1963. They are out there still: accomplices, aiders, abettors and accessories of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, witnesses with guilty knowledge… many identified by researchers and many not.

So we wait for the next Thomas Jones. He’s been hiding under his rock long enough. He can surface without fear of prosecution now. There are no prosecutors with a budget or appetite to take on the Kennedy murder, not in Texas, not anywhere. With any credentials at all behind his story, the modern day Thomas Jones can get an agent or manager or publisher or lawyer, or all of the above, to push a book deal, a TV interview, an infomercial with a DVD. He can appear safely on the web instead of in a booth where the vets can jump him. He can get it out on Amazon, drive traffic to his own
site, and sell, sell, sell. And with each copy sold, he can expose, a bit more, the ones who kept the nest for Oswald and Ruby.

Mary’s son John ran away to Europe, to leave his mother facing the gallows alone. When they brought John back a few years later to stand trial in a civil court, a hung jury was unable to decide what he knew and when he knew it. They let him go, and so John lived. There was something about Mary. She kept the nest that hatched the egg, and for it, she became the first woman in American history to be executed.

The Boesch Law Group handles business, entertainment and personal litigation matters throughout Southern California. Among its high profile litigation, Mr. Boesch was lead trial counsel for Anna Nicole Smith in obtaining her federal court judgments, including the #1 Judgment in the Nation according to US Law Week. He successfully represented the Wall Street Journal against all major oil companies in the leading federal case on public access to court files; and is the author of three editions of the California Judges’ Association’s Media Guide on Cameras in the Courtroom

By Philip W. Boesch Jr.
Re-printed with permission
Westside Today • August 2007 www.WestsideToday.com

His friends called him Kirk but I always called him Professor Kirkpatrick. He sat whitehaired dignified in his wheelchair, patient to his admiring students, popular, even kind. So I felt grateful to take 3 of his classes, plus a seminar, plus an independent study. He became my advisor. He recommended me, and we had our private moments when he changed his gray suit for a cardigan. I had access to him, maybe not as much as some, but all I needed. I was sure he taught by the truth.

If only then I knew the questions to ask. Lyman Kirkpatrick, before coming to Brown University in the mid-1960’s as Professor of Political Science, had no academic career to speak of. Since the early 50’s, his legs paralyzed from polio, the man worked as the Inspector General of the CIA, a direct report to Director Allen Dulles. Being around as long as Kirk had been, the IG knew secrets from all around the Agency. His was the job of a ghost, inspecting and auditing covert operations that weren’t supposed to exist, long before and after the murder of President Kennedy.

The world learned a lot more about Professor Kirkpatrick in 1998, long after Kirk died, when the CIA finally released his secret critique of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation not only blamed CIA planners for misleading the President, but before the CIA sealed his report for a lifetime, they attached to it the “Rebuttal” by Richard Bissell from ‘Plans.’ Bissell repeated the Agency’s angry view that everything was Kennedy’s fault, because 1500 CIA-trained Cubans were cut down and captured by Castro’s army when Kennedy pulled the plug on air support. He let good men die, Bissell said, so he could pretend he was never involved, when everyone already knew the US was behind the attack. It had to be in the Rebuttal, because Kirk wouldn’t do the CIA whitewash. He and his 3 investigators asked enough upsetting questions, that they didn’t know what to do with Kirk anymore. He wrote himself right out of a job with his IG reports, and then he left to teach, and then the CIA buried the reports he left behind…at least for the next 33 years.

To date, only two court cases have come out of the assassination. New Orleans Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw became Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” and Mark Lane defended the defamation lawsuit brought by E. Howard Hunt, a story retold in the best-seller Plausible Denial. In both cases, jurors said they believed Oswald did not act alone, that a number of people conspired to murder the President. The House Select Committee on Assassinations later reported the same thing.

We just didn’t know back then. We didn’t know that the same agents in the Cuban operation, who managed Lee Harvey Oswald, also shared assassination training and intense hatred for JFK. We didn’t have Joan Mellon’s Farewell to Justice, the 2005 account of how the CIA torpedoed Garrison’s case. We didn’t have David Talbot’s Brothers, the 2007 story of Bobby Kennedy’s private thoughts on the murder. Most of us didn’t have the foresight of a Mark Lane to see through the Warren Commission to the outrage of cover-up. For years, we didn’t even have the buried Zapruder film, which shows in slow motion before our very own eyes how the President was shot first from behind and then an instantlater from the grassy knoll in the front.

We questioned authority in the late ‘60’s, but the skills and tools of cross-examination were yet to come. So what to do now? The answer is that it’s time to pursue freedom of information to the ends of this earth. Follow Freedom of Information Act suits against bureaucrats who still withhold evidence. Support nonprofits and independent researchers. You can and should write your Congressman, but our government agencies won’t do anything. Read again how Mark Lane proved the truth of the story that placed the CIA’s Cuban operation, and Hunt, in the middle of the conspiracy to murder the President. Cross-reference the good works by Mellon and Talbot and others, and keep unpeeling the onion. Line up the lawyers who represented the characters in this bad play. This is the lesson of Blood, Money & Power, the book by a partner in Ed Clark’s Texas lawfirm. For years Clark served as LBJ’s personal lawyer and fixer, from the corrupt build-up of wealth, through to the end of his Presidency. It’s not news that Clark’s law partner puts Clark in the middle of the assassination web, but that he does it with information kept confidential for years by attorney-client privilege. According to Talbot, known CIA assassin David Morales told his lawyer he was in Dallas on November 22. Go after every lawyer file and note and recollection, and never take no or ‘privilege’ for an answer.

When the President was murdered, Kirk still ran the Office of the Inspector General of the CIA. He and his investigators knew more than anyone about the connections of the CIA’s Cubans. They wrote the inside book on it; they were competent, and dedicated. If I could have back just one seminar night with the professor, I’d be ready with the questions this time. What can still be done to chart the days for all the suspect CIA assets and agents? Where were they and what were they doing that week when Kennedy was shot? What about the killings of all these witnesses? Oswald contacts Guy Banister and David Ferrie, murdered before testifying, Johnny Roselli, implicated and murdered before testifying, witness after witness, victim after victim, knowing a little or a lot and dying for it…And how is it possible that police can question Oswald for 2 days before he’s killed, with no record of what he said?

Then, on a night in his office, one on one, when he’d be wearing his cardigan, I’d ask Kirk for the Inspector General’s survey of the assassination. I’d ask him for the truth. I still want to believe that he would have told me, and that we would have lived to tell the world. If only then I knew the questions to ask.

The Boesch Law Group handles business and personal litigation matters throughout Southern California. Among its high profile litigation, Mr. Boesch was lead trial counsel for Anna Nicole Smith in obtaining her federal court judgments, including the #1 Judgment in the Nation according to US Law Week. He successfully represented the Wall Street Journal against all major oil companies in the leading federal case on public access to court files; and is the author of 3 editions of the California Judges’ Association’s handbook on cameras in the courtroom.

By Philip W. Boesch Jr.
Re-printed with permision – westsidetoday.com

The LA Times reminded us this week that the fate of Roe v. Wade likely depends on this Presidential Election. The next President, they say, will appoint the swing votes on the Supreme Court for or against the right to abortion. Democrats and “liberal” groups frame the debate in favor of a woman’s right to choose…pro-choice. “Conservatives” and the Republican platform promote the right to life…pro-life. Justice Scalia himself has taken to the airwaves to remind voters that the Founding Fathers did not write into the Constitution a right to abortion.

But the news soundbites and the one-liner debates miss the real point of what is at stake here. Who after all doesn’t like life? Or for that matter the idea of choice? By casting the issue in such limited terms, the debaters on both sides neglect what Roe v Wade really was all about. What Just Scalia doesn’t emphasize, what the simple debate ignores, is that Roe V Wade affirms a Constitutional right to privacy. Admitting that “the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right to privacy, the Supreme Court nonetheless found by a plurality, barely, that “personal, marital, familial and sexual privacy [are] said to be protected by the Bill of Rights or its penumbras”. They wrote “said to be protected,” because they knew of course that the right to privacy does not appear anywhere in the Bill of Rights. Finding something in a penumbra is like touching a spirit. What mortal men get to do that? And who knows what a “penumbra” is anyway?

When anti-abortion advocates demand strict construction of the Constitution and rant against judges who create law, the trouble is that this now fundamental right to privacy was created precisely in the manner they oppose. Our privacy rights came into the Constitutional world in judicial opinions striking down laws against contraception and interracial marriage, by judges who stretched to rule against police invasion of the bedroom. Fragile and vulnerable from its beginning, the right to privacy grew stronger with fits and starts and building precedents until its coming out, its bar mizyah, in Roe v Wade. Judges who found this right in the “penumbras” were finding and making a rule of law that Congress and the Founding Fathers did not make.

What a good thing they did. Who now doesn’t believe in privacy? Conservatives want their freedom from government intrusion same as liberals and libertarians. Motherhood, apple pie and privacy are nonpartisan All-American. Cutting back on privacy – or taking away its legitimacy as a Constitutional right because it was “created” by judges and not by our Founding Fathers – is truly a slippery slope. Does anybody really want less privacy protection.

Children are taught early about the importance of their privacy and respecting the personal space of others. We accept as a given now, through decades of change seeping into our consciousness and our Constitutional interpretations, that privacy is an honored Constitutional right…maybe our most important right, up there high on the list with free speech and freedom of religion.

Until Roe v Wade is overturned.

The Boesch Law Group handles business and personal litigation matters throughout Southern California. Among its high profile litigation, Mr. Boesch was lead trial counsel for Anna Nicole Smith in obtaining her federal court judgments, including the #1 Judgment in the Nation according to US Law Week. He successfully represented the Wall Street Journal against all major oil companies in the leading federal case on public access to court files; and is the author of 3 editions of the California Judges’ Association’s handbook on cameras in the courtroom.