{"id":122310,"date":"2018-11-19T12:01:32","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T12:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=122310"},"modified":"2018-11-18T17:30:49","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T17:30:49","slug":"phil-ochs-and-the-crucifixion-of-president-john-f-kennedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/11\/phil-ochs-and-the-crucifixion-of-president-john-f-kennedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Phil Ochs and the Crucifixion of President John F. Kennedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c<\/em>They say they can’t believe it, it’s a sacrilegious shame
\nNow, who would want to hurt such a hero of the game?
\nBut you know I predicted it; I knew he had to fall
\nHow did it happen? I hope his suffering was small.
\nTell me every detail, I’ve got to know it all,
\nAnd do you have a picture of the pain?\u201d <\/em>
\n\u2013 Phil Ochs, The Crucifixion <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cYou are aware of only one unrest;<\/em>
\nOh, never learn to know the other!<\/em>
\nTwo souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,<\/em>
\nAnd one is striving to forsake its brother.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Goethe, Faust<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

17 Nov 2018 – <\/em>President John Kennedy was assassinated by the U.S. national-security state, led by the C.I.A., on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.\u00a0 That is a fact beyond dispute, except for those who wish to engage in pseudo-debates to deny the obvious.\u00a0 I prefer not to, since there is nothing to debate.<\/p>\n

But there is everything to mourn, even after fifty-five years, first of course for the man himself, then for those who have suffered and died for bearing witness to the truth about his assassination, and finally for the consequences of his murder, because it cut savagely into any pretense of American innocence and set the stage for the nihilistic tragedies that have followed, including the murders of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the ongoing \u201cwar on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, JFK\u2019s killers have tightened their chokehold on the country and on the throats of those wishing to tell the truth.\u00a0 Their penetration of the corporate mass media is wide and deep, and the narratives they spin can make an innocent soul\u2019s head spin.\u00a0 Everything is twisted to serve their interests.\u00a0 With a click of a finger, truth and falsehood rotate like spokes on a rapidly turning wheel \u2013 spooks turning spokes in a game of hide and seek meant to confuse and derange the public. Constant befuddlement is the name of this racket.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a melancholy task to contemplate the parts played, consciously or unconsciously, by various actors in this deadly game, not least because one\u2019s own naivet\u00e9 prompts one sometimes to question or abandon those one once admired and to dive deeply into the twisted minds and hearts of fellow humans.\u00a0 What follows concerns one such man\u2019s strange story as told by another man, whose story is perhaps stranger, and what their relationships with U.S. intelligence, if any, might suggest about our situation today.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Oh I am just a student, Sir, and only want to learn<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But it\u2019s hard to read through the risin\u2019 smoke of the books that you like to burn<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I\u2019d like to make a promise and I\u2019d like to make a vow<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That when I got something to say, Sir, I\u2019m gonna say it now <\/em><\/p>\n

Those are the words of the folk singer, Phil Ochs, from his 1966 song \u201cI\u2019m Going To Say It Now.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Ochs wrote and performed passionate protest songs during the 1960s that inspired many to speak and act in opposition to the Vietnam War and many other injustices.\u00a0 He was a fiery, sardonic activist whose music, such as \u201cI Ain\u2019t Marching Any More,\u201d<\/a> induced many to refuse military induction and to burn their draft cards.\u00a0 He, not Bob Dylan, was the committed voice of the 1960s radical anti-war folk music world, singing at events and rallies across the country, culminating at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago when the Chicago police rioted and savagely beat anti-war protesters, and Yippies and Hippies and protesters gathered in Lincoln Park to listen to Ochs sing defiant songs to keep up their spirits. But Ochs\u2019s own spirit was broken that terrible year of so many deaths, which started his long descent into alcoholism and mental chaos that ended with his suicide in 1976.<\/p>\n

I was one of those who was inspired by his music. I still am.\u00a0 Soulful and satiric, biting and beautiful, stirring and inspiriting, it has a power few can equal. \u00a0But I have come to a point where I feel compelled to broach a mysterious story involving Ochs, something that when I first heard it in passing shocked me terribly. No, I thought, that can\u2019t be true; it\u2019s impossible.<\/p>\n

But the more I have researched it, the truer it seems \u2013 with emphasis on the word \u201cseems\u201d \u2013 for there is only one source for the story, a source I don\u2019t doubt but can\u2019t confirm.<\/p>\n

But either way, I have come to see the story as emblematic of the treachery and confusion sown by the CIA, its Operation Mockingbird, and its so-called Mighty Wurlitzer that have played so many for fools through its control of the corporate mass media and the production of narratives that run like little movies too perfect to be true, but too true to be false \u2013 even when they are.\u00a0 Screens within screens within screens.\u00a0 Efforts to fuck up as many people as possible in operation chaos, to derange and cleave them into split personalities within and without, and to mystify as many minds as possible.<\/p>\n

I think Phil Ochs was one so mystified. I am wondering if in life and death he was used and abused by radically evil forces, whomever they may be.<\/p>\n

According to Phil\u2019s best friend from college at Ohio State, the man who taught him to play guitar, his singing partner, best man at his wedding, constant pal in their days in Greenwich Village, and life-long friend, Jim Glover, Ochs was in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, standing outside the Dal-Tex building in Dealey Plaza when JFK was driven by to be killed. Glover says Phil told him he went there as a \u201cnational security observer.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had read about this on some off-beat websites, but never in biographies of Ochs, or in the latest documentary about him, There But for Fortune<\/em>.<\/a>\u00a0 <\/em>There seems to be an \u201cofficial\u201d ban on mentioning Glover\u2019s claim, even though Glover appears in the books and the documentary, has been interviewed by the authors and filmmaker, and is considered by them, as Phil\u2019s old and close friend, to be a reliable source.<\/p>\n

Jim Glover, who was one half of the well-known folk duo, Jim and Jean, back in the 1960s, and is now an anti-war activist in Florida, says that he has told Ochs\u2019s siblings and biographers all the details, has also reported it recently and as far back as the early 1990s to the FBI, and has put these claims out on some internet sites and openly spoken about it. These disclosures have resulted in silence from Ochs\u2019s family and biographers.\u00a0 There have been no efforts to refute it, and so it circulates far outside the mainstream.\u00a0 Since Glover speaks of it openly and in great detail, and since it is a shocking claim with serious implications, one would think it worthy of response.\u00a0 But it is only greeted with silence.\u00a0 It seems perhaps like another example of what Thomas Merton called \u201cthe unspeakable\u201d \u2013 \u201cthe void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I contacted Glover and asked him about it.\u00a0 He told me that Phil had told him months before the assassination that he was \u201cworking for National Security, something like the C.I.A.\u201d\u00a0 Then, he later told him he had gone to Dallas with one of the Gambino boys as \u201ca national security observer\u201d and had been standing in Dealey Plaza outside the Dal-Tex building where he was filmed when JFK was shot. \u00a0Jim Glover has sent me photos that he discovered decades later that he says are photos of Phil in Dealey Plaza at the exact spot he mentioned and also in the movie theatre where Oswald was arrested.\u00a0 He thinks they are very conclusive, especially because of the Dealey Plaza location, despite their blurriness.\u00a0 While I think they are not dispositive, they do look like Ochs in a fuzzy sort of way.<\/p>\n

The first two photos are outside the Dal-Tex building, after and before the assassination.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The third is inside the movie theatre where Oswald was captured and taken out the front door, while the second Oswald was led out the back door.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And the last is a photo of Ochs at Ohio State in 1961 for comparison purposes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Whatever you think of the photos, they are one piece of a larger mystery, a tale stranger than fiction.\u00a0 They may or may not show Ochs, as Jim Glover is certain they do, but if Ochs\u2019s biographers trust him on other matters, why would they doubt him when he says Ochs told him he was in Dallas that day? \u00a0He says they are afraid to entertain the possibility.<\/p>\n

So we might ask the question: If Phil Ochs was in Dallas that day, what was he doing there?<\/p>\n

Let me reiterate: The murder of President Kennedy is not a mystery, and I am not exploring it.\u00a0 We know he was killed in a coup carried out by the national security state led by the CIA.\u00a0 If you want to know why, and if you want to know why this Thanksgiving, November 22, we should give thanks for John Kennedy\u2019s life and witness, read JFK and the Unspeakable<\/em><\/a> by James Douglass.\u00a0 It\u2019s the only book you need to read on the assassination.<\/p>\n

Phil Ochs is the mystery in Glover\u2019s telling, and I am wondering about him (and Glover), what he thought he was doing getting tangled up with shadowy intelligence operatives, how that awakening knowledge subsequently affected him, how he responded, and what place guilt and fear played in his post-1963 life and death.\u00a0 I am proceeding as if Ochs went to Dallas at the na\u00efve age of 22 not to harm Kennedy, but as Glover said he said, to investigate the threats against Kennedy that he had heard of in NYC through V. T. Lee of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and others. (This is the same V.T. Lee who received a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald, who was proposing a FPCC chapter for New Orleans in May 1963, where he was performing his theatrical stunts.\u00a0 Lee warned Oswald not to provoke \u201cunnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters\u201d in a place so hostile to Castro.\u00a0 But Oswald, of course, did the opposite to establish his fake support for Castro.)<\/p>\n

Glover says he also knew of the plots against Kennedy that were widely circulating in leftist circles, and afterwards felt Phil and he were being set up to be implicated in the assassination in case the official cover story fell apart since he and Glover were sympathetic to Castro and Cuba. He says their phones were tapped and they were being surveilled. \u00a0At this time Glover and his partner Jean were persuaded, against Ochs\u2019s advice, to go on a Hollywood Hootenanny Tour of southern college campuses, a surreal trip that made stops in Dallas and Houston and seemed clearly connected to the Kennedy assassination as strange people got off and on the multi-bus caravan, talking about Kennedy being killed.\u00a0 Glover says these included George and Barbara Bush and J. Edgar Hoover, who were picked up by the bus at the Houston airport late in the day of November 22.<\/p>\n

You would have to have a fantastic imagination to make this stuff up.\u00a0 Why would he? \u00a0\u00a0Yet his tale is truly bizarre, revealing the intricate nature of the government conspiracy to kill Kennedy and to create multiple tales of plausible deniability when others failed.<\/p>\n

He told me that he doesn\u2019t know who told Phil to go to Dallas, but he is unequivocal that he did.\u00a0 He said:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have all the answers.\u00a0 All I know is what Phil told me to keep us <\/em>
\nboth as safe as possible.\u00a0 He told me I\u2019ll never lie to you but there are <\/em>
\nthings I can\u2019t tell you.\u00a0 Knowing I had a big mouth if he told me things <\/em><\/p>\n

you [me] are asking, I might not be alive.\u00a0 His purpose as I see it was to observe, and being set up if Oswald lived, he could have been used as, \u2018See a Castro sympathizer knew and was involved.\u2019\u00a0 And that would apply to me also [learning what he did on the Hootenanny Tour] and they would stop at nothing to have us both silenced permanently if Oswald or Kennedy lived because we knew too much.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once, he said, as an example of his big mouth, he was performing at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village and told the audience that Phil had been in Dallas as a national security observer.\u00a0 He thinks Ochs\u2019s manager, Al Grossman, and Bob Dylan heard it, \u201cbecause Phil came over and said, \u2018Are you trying to get me killed?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Phil, he said, was a super patriot and would never have done anything to harm Kennedy, but was tricked into going to Dallas under the assumption that he was working with those trying to prevent the assassination by investigating the plot or trying to infiltrate it and perhaps stop it. But when Ochs returned to NYC later that day, \u00a0according to Glover, he was devastated by Kennedy\u2019s assassination and at the realization that he had been used and was now compromised.\u00a0 That is why he cried so terribly that night and wanted to die.\u00a0 His youthful innocence had died.<\/p>\n

Phil Ochs was a man of two minds and inclinations, not unusual for a coterie of musicians of that era who knew and associated with it each other, had military\/intelligence family backgrounds, and were never drafted like so many young men not in college. Like so many of these musical icons \u2013 Jim Morrison, David Crosby, Frank Zappa, \u201cPapa\u201d John Philips, Stephen Stills, et al (as Dave McGowan chronicles in his book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, <\/em>where he questions their public personae and the strange ways they gathered from far distances at one time into Los Angeles\u2019s Laurel Canyon, at the heart which was a covert military film facility, Lookout Mountain Laboratory)\u00a0 \u2013 Ochs had a military background.\u00a0 He was a conservative rebel who suddenly transformed from a conservative to a radical at Ohio State in his last year, according to Glover. He attended Staunton Military Academy with Barry Goldwater\u2019s son and John Dean of Watergate fame and was a sergeant in the ROTC at Ohio State where at the least he was aware of military intelligence spying on radical students; he idolized John Wayne, James Dean, Marlon Brando and the American western film mythology of the cowboy and soldier; he loved John Kennedy; he sang powerful anti-war songs and would jokingly say to his audience that now that they had listened to his anti-government songs he was turning them in to the government; he was a drama king who loved heroes and wanted to be one; he was a left-winger who mocked liberals; he was a folk singer who loved Elvis.\u00a0 In short, he was a man of many contradictions, of highs and lows, hope and despair, driven to stop war and injustice and to become a star in the superficial entertainment culture, etc.\u00a0 As he fell apart in his last years, it became easy to categorize him with the facile term \u201cmanic-depressive\u201d or \u201cbipolar.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that misses the heart of the matter, as if a term explains its reality, as if his paranoia had no basis outside his mind, as if he was just nuts to think the CIA was out to get him, as he did regularly and especially after he was attacked and choked while walking alone on a beach in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, when his vocal cords were ruptured and his voice permanently damaged.<\/p>\n

My guess is that he was driven by guilt and fear and that his suicide at age 35 was connected to being in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated.\u00a0 I think he died that day too, and that the next 13 years of his life were courageous attempts to quell his guilt for being gulled into going to Dallas and fear that he might be killed for doing so by singing out his rebellious songs in the face of his ghosts. He was a haunted man, and produced haunting songs in response to exorcise his demons, including the songs The Crucifixion<\/em><\/a> and That Was the President<\/em><\/a>, both about John Kennedy.<\/p>\n

In his last years he said he was John Train (sometimes John Butler Train), not Phil Ochs, and that John Train had killed Phil Ochs in the Chelsea Hotel on the summer solstice in 1975, the solstice being a significant turning point.\u00a0 His biographers give various explanations for his adoption of this pseudonym, all of which, I believe, miss the mark.\u00a0 To say he took the name from his heroes John Wayne, John Ford, John Kennedy, and William Butler Yeats, avoids the key word: Train. It\u2019s as if the word is unimportant or unspeakable, or the name John Train is a common name that \u201ccrazy\u201d Phil just made up.<\/p>\n

As he was unravelling in fear and trembling, I believe he was referring to a real John Train, a CIA operative, when he metaphorically said \u201con the first day of summer 1975, Phil Ochs was murdered in the Chelsea Hotel by John Train\u2026.For the good of societies, public and secret, he needed to be gotten rid of.\u201d Train assassinates Ochs.\u00a0 Then the following spring Ochs assassinates Ochs by hanging himself.<\/p>\n

Could it just be a coincidence that there is a real John Train who from the early 1950s onward was connected to the CIA and the covert state in various activities as an asset or an agent?\u00a0 This John Train, who was one of the founders and funders of The Paris Review<\/em>, its first managing editor, who together with the CIA\u2019s Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton started the magazine for the CIA under its propaganda front, The Congress for Cultural Freedom.\u00a0 This John Train, who ran cover corporations for the CIA and was connected to George Herbert Walker Bush through the CIA\u2019s Thomas Devine, who was involved in setting up Bush\u2019s company Zapata Offshore.\u00a0 This John Train, who was deeply involved with the CIA\u2019s activities in the early 1980s backing the CIA-supported mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan.\u00a0 This John Train who\u2026. [i]<\/a><\/p>\n

It is farfetched in the extreme to think that Phil Ochs just plucked the name John Train out of thin air. But the fact that this is asserted by his biographers makes sense when we realize that Jim Glover\u2019s claims are ignored by Ochs\u2019s family, his biographers, and the makers of the documentary about him.\u00a0 That there is a real CIA-affiliated John Train and that Glover insists Phil told him he was in Dallas on November 22, 1963 seem clearly connected.\u00a0 But these facts are unspeakable.\u00a0 I think they need to be explored.<\/p>\n

Like Jim Glover, I don\u2019t have all the answers about Phil Ochs.\u00a0 My guess and my hope is that Phil was used and was not complicit, that he naively thought by going to Dallas he was working with the good guys to protect the president from the killers, and when he witnessed the brutal murder, he felt compromised, and felt so overwhelmed with guilt and fear that life eventually became too unbearable for him.\u00a0 Clearly this is Glover\u2019s story.\u00a0 I think it is incumbent on those who don\u2019t believe it to explain why Glover would fabricate such an intricate tale that glorifies his friend as a true patriot, \u00a0whom he claims was used by intelligence operatives and who therefore suffered for the rest of his life for trying to protect President Kennedy.<\/p>\n

Whatever the truth in this age of \u201cnot knowing,\u201d I think his story is a parable for our times.\u00a0 Whenever you think you\u2019re getting the straight scoop, think again, and then again.\u00a0 The CIA\u2019s Operation Mockingbird is still singing its siren song to convince us that the crucifixion was a one-time event, when Phil knew otherwise, right from the start and right to the end. I think he tried to warn us and wouldn\u2019t be silenced, even in death.<\/p>\n

Watch on YouTube: When I\u2019m Gone<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

NOTE:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 See Joel Whitney\u2019s Finks, <\/em>Russ Baker\u2019s Family of Secrets, <\/em>David McGowan\u2019s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon<\/em>, and Bill Kelly\u2019s http:\/\/jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com\/2013\/05\/phil-ochs-at-dealey-plaza.html<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whatever the truth in this age of \u201cnot knowing,\u201d I think his story is a parable for our times. Whenever you think you\u2019re getting the straight scoop, think again, and then again. The CIA\u2019s Operation Mockingbird is still singing its siren song to convince us that the crucifixion was a one-time event, when Phil knew otherwise, right from the start and right to the end. I think he tried to warn us and wouldn\u2019t be silenced, even in death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}