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1 x Contents Acknowledgments Editor s Introduction Part One 1 Part Two 13 Part Three 93 Afterword 139 Appendix A: Executive Session, House Select Committee on Assassinations, April 1, Appendix B: Letters and Other Documents 215 ix xi About the Translator 259 About the Editor 261 Notes 263 Index 351 A photo section appears after page 78.

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3 x Acknowledgments The editor would like to express his gratitude to Arendo Joustra and the board of the Willem Oltmans Foundation for making the original text of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars available and to the Dutch Foundation for Literature for their generous support in producing this English translation. In addition thanks are owed to Dartmouth College Library for the photo of Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, the Times-Picayune/NOLA Media Group for the photo of Clay Shaw, the US National Library of Medicine for the photo of Dr. John K. Lattimer, and the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law for the photo of Dr. Cyril H. Wecht. ix

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5 x Editor s Introduction For me, this reporting on the Dallas assassination ended with George de Mohrenschildt s death. Willem L. Oltmans, Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars When he penned this sentence in the final days of April 1977 Willem Leonard Oltmans felt he was closing the door on a decade of investigative reporting. Dallas petroleum geologist George de Mohrenschildt, who had been the lynchpin of his investigation concerning a possible conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, had died just a few weeks earlier. 1 His apparent suicide had set off a firestorm in the American media and, arguably, saved the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) from oblivion just as its congressional funding was due to expire. Oltmans had met with the HSCA three times since the beginning of the year and, so he believed, told them everything he knew. It was time for the authorized investigation, with its necessary resources and... desired experts, not one lone reporter, to come up with new revelations about as Oltmans often referred to it the Dallas affair. Four decades have passed since the death of George de Mohrenschildt. He is remembered today, if at all, for three things: his brief friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy; the provocative statements he made during the final months of his life when he was in declining mental health; and his violent death in Palm Beach at the end of March In my introduction to the first edited and annotated edition of de Mohrenschildt s unpublished manuscript, Lee Harvey Oswald as I xi

6 Knew Him, I argued that the historical George de Mohrenschildt had all but vanished from view, with Kennedy assassination researchers having transformed him into a tabula rasa onto which almost any kind of interpretation of his life, however inaccurate or imaginary, could be superimposed. 2 Though he did not know it at the time Een reportage over de Kennedymoordenaars went to the printers in June 1977, Willem Oltmans was destined to be remembered, certainly in the English-speaking world, for three things as well: the brief time he and the mentally ill de Mohrenschildt spent together in February and early March of 1977, the media feeding frenzy that raged around him in the aftermath of de Mohrenschildt s passing, and his executive session testimony given to the HSCA on April 1, In Kennedy assassination research Oltmans has fared, if anything, even worse than de Mohrenschildt. George s behavior in the final weeks of his life has been excused on grounds as varied as nefarious plots to silence him to mental illness but, regardless of the cause one assigns to his actions, it allows him to be cast in the role of victim. Willem s behavior during the same time period, in contrast, has been widely interpreted as conniving, manipulative, and self-serving, allowing him to be cast in the role of victimizer. 4 Their preceding ten years of friendship within these narratives is conveniently ignored. While producing the first critical edition of Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him was an important task, it was equally important, I argued, to begin recovering the historical George de Mohrenschildt. In this introduction to the first English translation of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars I hope, in addition to explaining how and why this book came to be, as well as what it is and is not, to begin recovering the historical Willem Oltmans. For decades assassination researchers have relied on the same handful of sources in their effort to understand Oltmans, most dating to the late 1970s, written in English and published in the United States. The end result cannot help being anything but a caricature of the real Willem Oltmans and the complete body of work he undertook investigating the Kennedy assassination. Now, for the first time, a text by Oltmans himself, composed in his native language, may help begin the process of setting the record straight. In addition to making the book available to English-speaking readers the text will be annotated throughout, drawing on a variety of sources including Oltmans s personal notebooks, now being published as the Memoires. This does not mean the content of the Memoires ought to be considered true in a way the content of the book is not, but these volumes do serve a useful purpose in detecting simple mistakes arising from the extreme haste with xii editor s introduction

7 which the Dutch edition was written (dates, locations, individuals present during particular conversations, and what they said) as well as providing a wealth of additional detail and information that both enriches the book and expands upon its contents. 5 Oltmans before de Mohrenschildt And so it is with our own past. It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. Marcel Proust, Swann s Way Why do I write a diary? Because I vehemently disagree [with Proust].... My diary, kept meticulously soon even over a half a century will indeed be a reflection of the past, and will portray it extremely well in the broadest sense (including my dreams and love affairs). William L. Oltmans, Memoires, September 10, 1972 The best biography of George de Mohrenschildt, Nancy Wertz Weiford s The Faux Baron: George de Mohrenschildt, runs nearly 800 densely packed pages. There is good reason for this kind of detail, namely that George de Mohrenschildt s oversized and cinematic life was far too rich, too complex, and too fascinating to ever be reduced to his association with Lee Harvey Oswald in late 1962 and early 1963, his Warren Commission testimony in 1964, or his various unpublished book manuscripts. Anyone attempting to write a biography of Willem Oltmans would face even greater challenges. In addition to living decades longer than de Mohrenschildt, Oltmans traveled more, experienced more, met and knew more and more important people, and left behind a far-ranging legacy of published articles and books. 6 His personal journal kept from the age of nine, the Memoires, currently comprises more than thirty published volumes and will likely number seventy-six when the task of releasing them is completed. 7 These journal entries are brimming with pointed observations on twentieth-century world politics, the Cold War, the inner workings of the world of professional journalism, psychology, anthropology, film, literature, friendship, sex, and much more. Oltmans was, simply put, a true cosmopolitan, though certainly not one without character flaws. What follows in the rest of this section is, then, no more than the barest of outlines of the life of Willem Oltmans, only the background information necessary to understand his life at the moment in 1964 when he encounters Marguerite Oswald in JFK airport in the opening scene of Part One. editor s introduction xiii

8 Born in 1925, the middle of three brothers, Oltmans s family resided in Bosch en Duin, a small wealthy village in the municipality Zeist in the Dutch province of Utrecht. As a teenager during the German occupation he experienced the Hunger Winter (Hongerwinter) and claimed to have been a member of the Dutch Resistance, helping to blow up a train. 8 After the war he studied at the newly created Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands and Yale University in the United States, without formally graduating from either. Although he originally aspired to a career with the diplomatic corps of the foreign service he found employment within the press offices of the Netherlands. I entered journalism in 1953 as foreign editor of the daily, Algemeen Handelsblad in Amsterdam. After two years in the Amsterdam bureau of the United Press I worked in June 1956 as correspondent for De Telegraaf in Rome, Italy, when President Sukarno of Indonesia arrived on a state-visit. 9 Sukarno, the first president of the former Dutch colony, was hated by conservatives in the Netherlands. 10 De Telegraaf forbade him from interviewing Sukarno, but Oltmans was undeterred. I interviewed him and left later that year for Jakarta on assignment for the Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant and other papers. 11 Dutch journalism of the time might be characterized as quiet and deferential while Oltmans, in stark contrast, boldly inserted himself into the very stories he covered and advocated for particular policies in a remarkably contemporary way. The interview and subsequent friendship with Sukarno spelt the end of Oltmans s career with De Telegraaf and earned him the paper s enduring enmity while at the same time making very influential enemies within the government of the Netherlands. His association with Sukarno and advocacy on the behalf of Indonesia was especially despised by Joseph Luns, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs. 12 Oltmans to a large extent was professionally blacklisted in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States in He earned a living during the 1960s and 1970s through freelance reporting and lecturing. 14 After covering Indonesia for one year, ( ) I became [on] June 10, 1958, permanent correspondent at United Nations headquarters in New York till the 70s. I lectured from coast to coast on foreign affairs for W. Colston Leigh lecture bureau in New-York. 15 A business card of Oltmans s circa the early 1960s listed his occupation as Foreign Correspondent Lecturer and included the Fifth Avenue address of W. Colston Leigh, Inc., on the bottom. xiv editor s introduction

9 Oltmans and de Mohrenschildt We should ask for a large amount of money to make the tapes available (for instance, $10,000) and in any case do not agree on anything without our agreement... remember you get your share of [the] money if we agree on release. George de Mohrenschildt, Letter to Willem Oltmans, June 3, 1972 A Tale of Two Books It is important to note what Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars is, and what it isn t. The book is not, as some are sure to read it, a shameless attempt by Oltmans to cash in on the death of George de Mohrenschildt. It would be more accurately described as a book written to replace another book, one that was a collaborative effort between de Mohrenschildt and Oltmans. Although he spoke several languages and possessed a number of university degrees, de Mohrenschildt was a frustrated writer. Prior to meeting Oltmans he had authored three books, Adventures of a Young Man in Mexico, A Son of the Revolution, and Trois et le Mule (Three and a Mule). Written in plodding and grammatically awkward English, words and names frequently spelled phonetically, none of these works had been accepted for publication when de Mohrenschildt met Oltmans in George had especially high expectations for Trois et le Mule, a travelogue based on the day-by-day adventures of the nearly year-long walking trip he and his wife, Jeanne, had made through Central America during 1960 and Someday, he would tell the Warren Commission in 1964, when I have more time, I will make it a bit more colorful. 18 Oltmans s journal mentions he read the Trois et le Mule manuscript in March In Part One of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars he briefly refers to the work, describing it as poorly written and unsuitable for publication. 20 Two old friends of de Mohrenschildt, Yolande and Pierre Giraud, who lived in Paris, were apparently working to professionally rewrite the manuscript during the early 1970s. 21 As we learn in Part One the efforts by Oltmans on de Mohrenschildt s behalf to interest publishers in the Netherlands, France, and Italy were unsuccessful. Although de Mohrenschildt had already written about his friendship with Lee and Marina Oswald prior to meeting Oltmans it wasn t until the end of January 1969, and at Oltmans s urging, that he began to work on a book in earnest. 22 It was Oltmans s understanding from the start that the editor s introduction xv

10 project was an equal collaboration: The three of us will work on the manuscript and share the revenue. 23 With Oltmans acting as the de Mohrenschildts representative the initial response from Random House in New York was promising. 24 Less than a month later on February 14 and 15, 1969, de Mohrenschildt, his wife, and Oltmans went to the Dallas studios of CBS television and recorded George reading from an early draft of this manuscript, which had the working title The Harvey Lee Oswald I Knew. 25 A copy of the tapes was delivered to Random House by Oltmans two days later. 26 When the assassination conspiracy trial of businessman Clay Shaw in New Orleans, led by District Attorney Jim Garrison, resulted in an acquittal after less than hour s deliberation on March 1, 1969, interest in their manuscript abruptly ceased. 27 The project was shelved. 28 De Mohrenschildt returned to working on our project, i.e. The Harvey Lee Oswald I Knew, around the end of As just indicated Oltmans from the beginning viewed himself as a partner entitled to an equal share of sales generated by both de Mohrenschildt s book and the tapes he had recorded with the de Mohrenschildts in February With de Mohrenschildt s suicide these projects came to an abrupt end and Oltmans was left holding the bag. He and de Mohrenschildt s lawyer, Patrick S. Russell, considered all of George s unpublished writings for publication in early 1978 but due to their condition did very little with them. 30 In addition to copies of Trois et le Mule and The Harvey Lee Oswald I Knew, both so poorly written as to be deemed worthless (waardeloos) by Russell, there was yet another manuscript, a third written story about Nazi atrocities and the murder of Jews. Jeanne de Mohrenschildt was convinced that George was the hero of the story, in a role similar to Pieter Menten. 31 More intriguingly Russell also told Oltmans he had discovered an envelope containing a manuscript written by Lee Harvey Oswald about his years in the Soviet Union, and that this manuscript had corrections in both the handwriting of George and Oswald. 32 Oltmans suggested contacting Michael Korda, the editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, which he did himself a few days later. 33 Efforts to find a publisher for this manuscript fell through. The National Enquirer made repeated inquiries about acquiring the document but offered too little money for an agreement to be reached. 34 Oltmans was disgusted when American newspapers, using Jeanne as their source, ran headlines in the spring of 1977 such as Widow: Oltmans Lying for Money. 35 Yet these same newspapers who knew nothing of any agreements reached years before or of the enmity that had arisen between Jeanne and Willem said nothing when she publicly offered to sell the tapes xvi editor s introduction

11 the trio had recorded in 1969 for $50,000. If Oltmans had only been looking to make a fast buck he could have made an effort to sell the tapes himself and collect the proceeds but he didn t. Instead, he contacted Jeanne and reminded her of their original arrangement. There are also indications Oltmans was contemplating writing a book about his friendship with the de Mohrenschildts, a project independent of The Harvey Lee Oswald I Knew, years before George s death. On November 18, 1974, Oltmans recorded in his journal Carel [Enkelaar] wants me to write a new JFK book and mostly let Gerard Croiset have his say. I m making a reporter s notebook, would write it in English, and want to call it Defiance, with a photograph of JFK s head in the car during the attack. 36 With George dead, and Jeanne making accusations in the press and refusing to collaborate, Oltmans simply turned to writing a book he had already intended to write. The most literal translation of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars would be A Report on Kennedy s Killers. Yet the book is emphatically not an exposé on the supposed real killers of President Kennedy. Nothing is ultimately proved, not even the alleged guilt of George de Mohrenschildt. As the book itself explains, its contents are primarily intended to be additional material for studying the conspiracy surrounding the murder of the American president. A looser translation but one more reflective of the book s content might be A Report on the Kennedy Assassination. But this title would overemphasize the content of the book to the exclusion of its form, and here the form is equally important. Combining a personal memoir with a factual account of reporting on this subject, the text chronicles Oltmans s investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy between his chance meeting with Marguerite Oswald in March 1964 and his testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in April For this reason the publisher and I have chosen to title the work Reporting on the Kennedy Assassination. 37 Act One In Part One Oltmans recalls his chance meeting in 1964 at JFK Airport in New York with Marguerite Oswald, the mother of the accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. She had been in New York to meet with Esquire magazine about publishing letters her son had written while living in the Soviet Union. Sharing the same flight to Dallas, she explains to him a number of discrepancies regarding the official investigation into the assassination. Intrigued by what she had said, Oltmans later invites her back to editor s introduction xvii

12 New York to conduct an interview for Dutch television and gives her a tour of the United Nations building. But the reader will note he hardly rushed into a full-scale investigation of Kennedy s assassination. Not until a fateful meeting in 1967 would he became more fully committed to covering the topic. It might come as a surprise to some readers that Carel Enkelaar, the head of the Dutch Broadcast Foundation (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting or NOS for short), was handing out journalistic assignments based on the advice of a psychic. 38 Gerard Croiset was hardly a run-of-the-mill clairvoyant, however. 39 His fame was on the order of his American counterpart and contemporary Jean Dixon, the Seeress of Washington, who had predicted in Parade magazine in May 1956 that a Democrat would be elected president in 1960 and that he would die in office. 40 By the mid-1960s Croiset had attained an international reputation for assisting the police in missing persons and murder cases and had been the subject of a book, Croiset, the Clairvoyant: The Story of the Amazing Dutchman, written by Jack Harrison Pollack and published by Doubleday. 41 Oltmans had first met Croiset acting as his interpreter during a tour promoting Pollack s book in the United States in The gathering took place on February 5, 1967, at seven in the evening. Enkelaar recorded what was said on tape while Croiset s son Henry took pictures. Based on what Oltmans had told Croiset about the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald the psychic now wanted to discuss images (beelden) he had seen of the assassination in Dallas. The suspected assassin, Oswald, he told us, had a special friend in Dallas who, in turn, had been friends with Jacqueline Kennedy s family. The friend had been in India. He was said to have received $900,000 for organizing the attack on JFK. He was middle aged and was a prominent figure in Texas oil industry circles, possibly a geologist. He had to be of European origin and had a two-part name with both de and a sch. He was a kind of father figure for Oswald. 42 A few days later Oltmans was formally tasked with determining whether or not the man from the petroleum industry with the two-part name... indeed existed. 43 From this time forward Oltmans always saw himself as investigating the Dallas affair primarily at the behest of Enkelaar and NOS and not, simply, on his own. And in working for Enkelaar he was to a certain extent committing himself to working with Croiset: Croiset relies xviii editor s introduction

13 on Enkelaar s counsel, and Enkelaar on Croiset s. 44 Traveling to Dallas to visit Marguerite he learns of the existence of Baron George Sergei de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum geologist and member of the Dallas Russian émigré community, who on several occasions had met Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife, Marina. Back in New York, as Oltmans is attempting to arrange an interview with de Mohrenschildt, the car he is driving is suddenly cut off by another vehicle. In the ensuing accident Oltmans s car is totaled and he is briefly hospitalized. He returns to Europe where he remains for the next several months. Act Two Part Two, which is the longest of the three parts, is first and foremost a tale of freelance reporting on the Kennedy Assassination over a nearly ten-year period. Rather than being some outlier in the assassination research community, an eccentric whose investigation tends to be discussed today as if it occurred in some kind of vacuum, Oltmans proves to have been in the thick of things, conducting televised interviews not just with George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt but also with figures such as Jim Garrison, Evelyn Lincoln, Loran Hall, Dr. Cyril Wecht, and Dr. John K. Lattimer. He may also be seen in the pages of this book interacting with figures well known in the assassination research community during the 1970s, including Bernard Bud Fensterwald Jr., Mark Lane, L. Fletcher Prouty, and Richard E. Sprague. In addition his journal depicts him communicating with, or at least aware of the work of, many other individuals including Walter Bowart, Peter Dawney, Michael Eddowes, Edward Jay Epstein, Paris Flammonde, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, and Jerry Policoff. The centerpiece of Oltmans s investigation, the element that provided him a unique advantage over all his colleagues and competitors in both the media and the assassination research community, was his ten-year friendship with George de Mohrenschildt. Returning to the United States in the fall of 1967 he travels to Dallas and conducts a long, filmed interview at the de Mohrenschildts home. Still pictures taken at the time of this interview are reproduced in the book s photo gallery. When Oltmans first meets the pair in October 1967 their appearance is not substantially different from the couple described in the Warren Commission testimony of their Dallas friends and acquaintances. George still drove the same white 1962 Ford Galaxie convertible he had chauffeured the Oswalds around in. He and Jeanne still owned the same two Manchester terriers that had met the Os- editor s introduction xix

14 walds in the fall of 1962, one named Nero, after the Roman emperor, and the other named Poppaea, after Nero s second wife. 45 Oltmans s text notes tennis rackets and tennis balls strewn about their home. George s passion for tennis had begun in the 1950s. In 1952 he met Sam Ballen, who would remain a loyal friend for the next twenty-five years. Ballen would record in his own memoir that throughout their early acquaintance George and I would play tennis at least three times a week. 46 Jeanne, who had been a professional dancer and was an accomplished ice skater, was George s partner in the couple s many mixed doubles matches. Professionally George still kept a hand in the oil industry but was gradually transitioning out of the business world into the world of academia, teaching French and Russian. Jeanne, who had been a successful fashion designer in the 1950s, had created her own line of tennis clothing but for a number of reasons was less successful. Frustrated and jealous, her already heavy drinking was beginning to escalate into full-blown alcoholism. Visiting the de Mohrenschildts two to three times a year provided Oltmans with firsthand observation of the couple, their deteriorating marriage and violent quarrels, the impact of the illness and death of George s daughter by another marriage, and George s teaching career as a full-time professor at Bishop College. Whatever its faults, and there are many, the text is a vivid and unique window into the lives of the de Mohrenschildts. When interest in the Kennedy assassination revives in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and revelations of various misdeeds by the FBI and CIA, George and Jeanne return to working on The Harvey Lee Oswald I Knew, updating it to include a new section on George s friendship with Oltmans as well as renaming it I Am a Patsy! I Am a Patsy! The manuscript is finished in July 1976 but, unknown to Oltmans, the eccentricities de Mohrenschildt had exhibited for years fears of persecution topping the list soon thereafter intensified into real mental illness, including four suicide attempts. 47 When Oltmans visits Dallas near the end of the year he learns through Jeanne and family lawyer Russell that George has been hospitalized and is being given both drug and electroshock treatments; he cannot be visited. Oltmans writes a letter to George that his friend will later claim was never delivered. Act Three In Part Three Oltmans begins by chronicling the time he spent with de Mohrenschildt in February and March It was as if he were living a movie: It s like a film unfolding before our eyes. 48 Seeing his friend in xx editor s introduction

15 person for the first time in over a year Oltmans is shocked by the changes he observes; George is often jittery, anxious, and irrationally fearful. Contrary to the often hostile things that have been written about Oltmans in the last four decades his book and journal reveal him as both alarmed and saddened by what he saw and heard. In the library of Bishop College de Mohrenschildt indicates to Oltmans that he feels responsible for Lee Harvey Oswald s behavior and hints that both of them were part of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Oltmans asks for more information but de Mohrenschildt insists he is not safe in the United States and will only talk about the matter in Europe. After several false starts the pair eventually catch a plane to New York, and then Europe, where a meeting is arranged in the Netherlands to discuss commercial rights to George s story. Negotiations lead to a tentative agreement being reached on the evening of Friday, March 4. The contracts will be ready for signing the following week. Sensing the already frail de Mohrenschildt is exhausted from the talks Oltmans suggests a drive to Brussels, which George had not visited in twenty years but had fond memories of. While in Brussels de Mohrenschildt decides to take a brief walk before joining Oltmans and a friend for lunch, but he never returns. When de Mohrenschildt is found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound in Florida later that month, Oltmans is caught up in a media whirlwind, during which he appears before the HSCA and gives three hours of testimony. Part Three then embarks on a critique of the practices of American and Dutch mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television. Being a journalist himself Oltmans was keenly aware of the power of the mass media: its ability to put a certain spin on events and to destroy anyone s reputation if it so desired. American journalists, unaware of Oltmans s blacklisting in the Netherlands as well as the petty jealousies and professional rivalries that existed between Oltmans and other members of the Dutch media much of it dating all the way back to the 1950s naively began to use those same Dutch media sources as objective judges of Oltmans s character. He could do little but ride out the storm, doing his best to protest the frequent distortions and occasional outright lies. He then begins work on an English version of this book. After fruitless negotiations with American publishers and lawyers he decides to return to Europe, rewrite the story in Dutch, and release it with a publisher based in the Netherlands that he has worked with on prior occasions, Bruna. editor s introduction xxi

16 Denouement In a brief afterword, written in June 1977 just before the book went to press, Oltmans responds to the public disclosure of a two-page affidavit found in George de Mohrenschildt s briefcase after his suicide. The affidavit, written in Brussels between de Mohrenschildt s disappearance on March 5 and his arrival in Florida ten days later, makes a number of wild accusations against the individuals present at the negotiations in Amsterdam. Having been warned by a source in Washington that the document threatened to undermine his credibility in the whole Kennedy affair, Oltmans speculates that, if the document is indeed genuine, his friend may have been forced to produce it under duress or he may have done so due to his state of mind after his hospitalization at the end of In the end, he writes, uncovering the full truth of what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, is something the HSCA and its investigators must now accomplish; such a task is beyond a single journalist. Supplements In addition to the translation of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars I have included in Appendix A the full transcript of Oltmans s April 1, 1977, testimony before the HSCA. While known to most assassination researchers, many of whom quote from it indiscriminately, the testimony is largely unknown to general audience readers. During his appearance before the HSCA a clearly nervous Oltmans, often struggling with his spoken English, makes a number of mistakes remembering details that are discussed more accurately in a decade s worth of journal entries and, later, the book published by Bruna. Despite this, his testimony is now the foundation of the largely negative depictions of him by assassination researchers writing in English. Unfamiliar both with the content of Een reportage over de Kennedymoordenaars and his journals, the discussions of Oltmans in these English works contain numerous misimpressions, misunderstandings, errors, and distortions. To set the record straight the HSCA transcript has been annotated using both the translated book and Oltmans s journals. In Appendix B a number of de Mohrenschildt s letters published in the original Dutch edition of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars will be included, along with additional letters and printed documents from Oltmans s journals that cast further light on the content of the book. xxii editor s introduction

17 Oltmans after de Mohrenschildt I want to dedicate my book to George de Mohrenschildt. But no one here recommends it. Why? William Oltmans, Memoires, April 17, 1977 The Unpublished English Edition George de Mohrenschildt s cremated ashes had scarcely been scattered into the waters of the Atlantic when a major American publisher approached Oltmans to write a book about his experiences. Ned Chase of Putnam and Sons in New York is after me, because he wants me to write a paperback about the affair. I am trying to convince my lecture manager, Robert Keedick, to go ahead now and book lectures with JFK as the subject. Bruna s agent in New York, Greenburger Associates, phoned to say they re willing to pay six figures for a book about Dallas, he noted while in New York on April 7, Three days later, back in the Netherlands, he must have been dazzled at the money figures being bandied about. 50 Jan Buis of Bruna recommends that I ask Putnam, via [my literary agent] Francis Greenburger, for $250,000 for a JFK book and then drop to $125,000. It would have to be a paperback. 51 Oltmans gathered the most important material he could find, including letters from de Mohrenschildt and pages from the notebooks that made up his journal, and returned to New York. He began dictating his story, in English, in Greenburger s office on April 12 and would continue to do so over the next several days. The title he envisioned for the book was The Russian Count and the Ex-Marine. 52 On April 13 he met for lunch in a restaurant on 56th Street with Chase and Greenburger. Oltmans was harboring some resentment toward Chase, as he had been trying to get him on the phone for the past two years, without success. Ned asked me a lot of questions and then actually answered them himself, and after twenty minutes he said that he had an idea about what my book would be like. I responded that he obviously didn t have a clue what he was talking about. This was followed by five tense minutes. In the meantime, Francis Greenburger was apparently wetting his pants for fear the deal wouldn t come off. Chase stuck to his guns and stressed that he was a senior editor at Putnam. He couldn t quote a figure, but $100,000 for my manuscript was among the possibilities. All s well that ends well. We parted ways amicably with the pledge that editor s introduction xxiii

18 I would deliver the first 100 pages before the week was out. Then there would be a firm contract. 53 Oltmans s friend the Hollywood screenwriter William Bast recommended hiring a legal professional to go over any proposed contract. Two days later he put Oltmans in touch with Ron Taft, a literary lawyer. 54 The vultures were circling overhead, and Oltmans knew it. When they smell dough they jump right in, he observed. 55 The money was potentially staggering, but so too were the cuts people were expecting. To publish a book in the United States, he noted in his journal on April 15, meant having a literary agent who took 15 percent of the 12.5 percent in royalties the publisher might offer you. Then the literary attorney would need to be paid to check the contract to make sure nothing in it allowed either party to cheat. Taft was asking $100 an hour and estimated the total cost to review the Putnam contract would be $2, You spend ten years in Dallas trying to figure out what role might have been played by the most intimate friend of JFK s assassin. The man is ultimately killed, and when you report your findings a throng of thieves lies in wait to snatch a piece of the pie. 57 Barbara Applegate, who had booked his lectures in the United States for many years and remained a favorite confidante, warned Oltmans against going beyond the facts to produce a potboiler. But it gradually became clear to Oltmans that a potboiler, not the reporter s notebook he had envisioned back in 1974, was what Putnam wanted. Ned Chase has read the manuscript, he would announce in his journal entry for April 18. He called Francis Greenburger at 11:30 that morning. He thought that the story gets going mostly after page 70 but that there were still things that need to be done. I responded that Ned was dragging his feet and wanted to reject the book. No, no, Francis said, but I would not like him to reject it because it was not in perfect shape. Meanwhile, he whined again about the typing costs. He mentioned a figure of $75,000 as an advance. It is gradually shrinking. I spoke to Peter [van de Wouw] in London. Soon they re going to be saying $50,000, anything is possible here, I told him. 58 Frustrated and growing impatient with all the maneuvering Oltmans called Jan Buis at Bruna in the Netherlands. Buis told him it might be possible for Bruna to get the book out and into stores in as little as six weeks. On hearing this Oltmans soon thereafter pulled the plug on the negotiations with xxiv editor s introduction

19 Putnam. Greenburger did not entirely concede defeat, sending copies of the manuscript to ten other publishers. Within a month several had already declined. 59 Eventually all ten would decline. On April 25 he phoned Oltmans in the Netherlands to report that Ned Chase now wanted to publish his book, but the advance would be just $25,000. Oltmans, now in the middle of writing his Dutch edition for Bruna, declined. 60 The Bruna manuscript, as we learn from the book s concluding remarks, was written in less than a week, without assistance and, so it would appear, largely from memory and foregoing careful utilization of all his journal notebooks and letters from de Mohrenschildt. 61 Bruna queried him on the necessity of including a few matters (the discussion of Oltmans s Polish ancestors in Part Two and the discussion of Cees van Drongelen in Part Three), but neither was dropped from the book. 62 The publisher also wanted to delay the release until October, but Oltmans refused; with a print run of perhaps 10,000 the book was released in July. There was no mention of payment from Bruna until Oltmans himself brought up the subject; he accepted an advance of 7,500 guilders, expecting the real payoff would be the book s future royalties. Instead the figure was the only payment he would ever receive: Would (after the advance) never receive another penny. 63 Whatever its other merits, the published book was certainly sloppy. Oltmans himself conceded the narrative was very incomplete. 64 The Dutch historian J. W. Schulte Nordholt criticized the book for its profound carelessness, where even the names of well-known public figures such as Walter Cronkite and John Connally were consistently spelled wrong. 65 Oltmans s not wholly persuasive response to Nordholt, recorded in the May 20, 1978, entry of his journal, reads: It is true that I am extremely careless with names, spellings, syntax, and what have you. My number one priority is making a maximum effort to offer the most complete, accurate report possible, and that results in awkward phrasing and misspellings. I have absolutely no interest in that. What is the point of writing in perfect Dutch, as is always said of [Henk] Hofland, when what you get is underhanded journalism. 66 Another critic of the original Dutch edition, one D. Schaafsma, characterized the book as a compelling story but somewhat flawed and complained that Oltmans had overstepped my role as a journalist. 67 The journalist Jan van Beek thought the work candid and excellent but that it lost momentum in the last twenty pages. 68 He worried that Oltmans would editor s introduction xxv

20 be attacked for what he said about other journalists but Oltmans told him he could care less. After the first effort to publish an English edition with Putnam collapsed in the spring of 1977, author Mark Lane spent a considerable amount of time working with Oltmans during the summer of 1977 to translate Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars into English. 69 April Ferguson, Lane s assistant, was hired in July at a cost of $2, Her task, as Oltmans recorded in his journal on July 30, was both translation and developmental editing: Spoke with April Ferguson, the writer, who is translating my JFK book into English in consultation with Mark Lane for publication in the US. In other words, she s correcting my language usage. 71 In the November edition of the men s magazine Gallery, Lane would publish an eight-page article based in part, so Oltmans believed, on the book translation he had been helping to prepare. 72 Oltmans still expected his own book to appear in English shortly and just shrugged it off in his journal, writing That is okay. 73 Ferguson either never finished her work or Oltmans was dissatisfied with the result because the following June he describes himself as still busy working on the English translation of my JFK-book. 74 Then, finally, on July 9, 1978: The translation of the JFK-book in English is perfect: 236 pages. I feel fulfilled. 75 Oltmans had a friendly conversation with Carl Brandt of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc., on December 1, 1978, but came away from the meeting doubtful Brandt was interested in bringing the manuscript to market. 76 He was correct: the agency passed on the manuscript on January 26, Later that year, in October, the Memoires mention in passing that the manuscript was in New York with Oltmans s literary agent, Francis Greenburger. 78 The final mention of the English manuscript occurs in a journal entry for July 5, 1980, and then it drops out of sight. 79 The Competition Cashes In In the weeks and months that followed the publication of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars in the Netherlands a torrent of articles and books discussing the life and death of George de Mohrenschildt began to appear in English. Oltmans could only marvel at how ignorantly they characterized de Mohrenschildt, someone he had known for ten years, and seethe at how they depicted him. On August 18, 1977, he purchased Michael Eddowes s The Oswald File. 80 In his journal a noticeably irritated Oltmans described the hasty addition of a chapter on the death of de Mohrenschildt. It incorrectly xxvi editor s introduction

21 indicated Oltmans lived in Brussels and claimed he had made allegations to the Associated Press and NBC without being in possession of supporting documentation. 81 As Eddowes was convinced the Soviets had sent an Oswald double to the United States and later ordered him to assassinate President Kennedy, de Mohrenschildt s allegations about Texas oil interests hiring Oswald, and Oltmans s retelling of those allegations, only served to play into the hands of those who maintain that the Soviets were not the source of the conspiracy. 82 All nonsense, Oltmans responded in his journal. Eddowes wasn t through. On the last page of The Oswald File he wrote, It is possible De Mohrenschildt went to Europe with Oltmans in the hope that the KGB would help him to disappear. The easiest way to judge gossips, Oltmans wrote in his journal, is by looking at what they say about you. 83 He could scarcely believe his eyes when a half-page ad for Eddowes s book ran in the September 12 issue of Time magazine. 84 Eddowes s sensational allegations received mixed reviews. In its August 1, 1977, issue Publisher s Weekly said The Oswald File demanded attention, while a few months later, in its November 15 issue, Library Journal would conclude Geared to exploit the widespread interest in the assassination, this shoddy book is not recommended. Oltmans wrote Eddowes and told him his book was full of nonsense and that he d like to meet the author sometime. 85 Oltmans was also well aware of the October 1977 publication of Priscilla Johnson McMillan s Marina and Lee. 86 George McMillan, the author s future husband, had traveled to Haiti in 1964 to recruit the de Mohrenschildts for a program that aired on NBC television and George had told Willem about the visit. 87 Unknown to Oltmans de Mohrenschildt had written Mc- Millan on at least two occasions April 1967 and June 1968 about the photo of Oswald he had discovered after his return from Haiti. 88 This was the same photo of Oswald de Mohrenschildt had given to Oltmans. Through de Mohrenschildt, Oltmans knew that Johnson McMillan had been working on her book for a number of years and that she was eager to obtain a copy of the photo. 89 Hoping to share knowledge about George with the McMillans, Oltmans had called them on October 19, No sooner had he identified himself than George McMillan immediately said he was not willing to give an interview. The rest of the conversation is recorded, in English, in Oltmans s journal: What makes you think we would want to do that, I asked. If you want to speak to my wife, may I speak for her, the answer will be no. We know enough about de Mohrenschildt. editor s introduction xxvii

22 If that s the way you work, then I, too, know enough. A journalist never knows enough, ever, and I hung up. 90 For one reason or another, or so it seemed to Oltmans, the McMillans were allowed to monopolize (monopoliseren) discussion of the Kennedy assassination. 91 He cited two examples, the first being a review of the book November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury published in the New York Times on November 18, The book s author, David W. Belin, had been a lawyer on the Warren Commission; the review, penned by both McMillans, praised him in hyperbolic fashion for having done a better job of putting the evidence together than the one-volume Warren Commission Report, which was probably the most completely-documented story of a crime ever published. 93 The second example, published just four days later on the tenth anniversary of the assassination, was a New York Times Op-Ed piece by Johnson McMillan that upheld the findings of the Warren Report. 94 As someone well read in different schools of psychology and who had interviewed prominent psychologists over the years Oltmans scoffed at the article s Freudian pretensions: She babbles about neuroses and Oswald s oedipal emotions. 95 Her book, he would write in 1977, was just more of the same, confirming what she has always imagined. 96 Oltmans noticed that just as in Eddowes s book his own presence within Marina and Lee was little more than a last-minute addition, this time as an unnamed foreign journalist who was present with George in the weeks before his death. 97 The mainstream media in the English-speaking world fawned over the book, whose entire depiction of de Mohrenschildt in contrast to ten years of friendship in Oltmans s case was little more than a mélange of George s Warren Commission testimony and Marina s notoriously faulty memory. 98 The New York Times would review Marina and Lee and The Oswald File side by side. 99 On March 14, 1978, Oltmans would write, I bought Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald by Edward Jay Epstein. 100 In his letters to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt appears to show a fair amount of respect for Epstein, even going so far as to hope that his manuscript on Oswald, once published, would occupy a place next to a book Epstein published in the 1960s, Inquest. 101 For his part, Oltmans did not trust Epstein or Reader s Digest, which had helped finance Legend. 102 Glancing at his recent purchase Oltmans dryly observed there was little new and everything Epstein had to say about the de Mohrenschildts he, Oltmans, had already discovered years earlier. Surely Epstein knew how close he, George, and Jeanne were. xxviii editor s introduction

23 Yet Legend avoided mentioning the trip Oltmans and de Mohrenschildt had made together from Dallas to Europe in early The only detail in the book s 368 pages that Oltmans found informative was the revelation that a CIA agent in Dallas, J. Walter Moore, had advised George to contact Oswald in Over the next twenty-four hours Oltmans tried to contact Epstein repeatedly, but without success. Why would he talk to you, Tony Staffieri at Gallery magazine told Oltmans, you would perhaps tell him he wrote an asinine book. 104 A few weeks later The New Republic would review both Marina and Lee and Legend side by side. 105 There was no end to it. In a girly magazine, Velvet, is an article by Thomas Duffield about the JFK-assassination. I am mentioned in connection with my testimony on George de Mohrenschildt. This will now continue indefinitely. 106 He was right. The JFK Movie That Wasn t Willem Oltmans met Oliver Stone for the first time on January 23, 1970: Last night my friend Najwa Sarkis arranged a dinner party to introduce me to her new boyfriend Oliver Stone.... Oliver wants to write screenplays and direct. 107 The two began to correspond almost immediately. 108 References to Stone disappear from Oltmans s journal in the mid-1970s but then resume after de Mohrenschildt s death in In his journal entry for October 17, 1978, Oltmans wrote, without further comment, I saw the movie Midnight Express. What a disgusting story. 109 Several weeks later, on January 30, 1979, a similarly brief entry appears, reading Oliver Stone won an award for Midnight Express. Will write him. 110 Stone surprised Oltmans by showing up on his doorstep in the Netherlands on March 5, He spoke of being in London working on a new script but had decided to hop over to Amsterdam for distraction, something Oltmans opined as meaning the whores and the drugs (naar de hoeren gaan en drugs). 111 Lighting up one joint after another he flipped through Oltmans s newspaper clippings and notebooks. Oltmans proceeded to tell him the whole George de Mohrenschildt story (hele George-de Mohrenschildtverhaal). He was clearly impressed with Stone: Oliver is inquisitive. He wants to know everything as precisely as possible. He always asks more questions in order to understand what we are talking about. He seemed interested in my JFK-story. 112 On April 9, Oltmans recorded that he watched Stone accept his Oscar for Midnight Express, during which he made a plea for the world s political editor s introduction xxix

24 prisoners. 113 I m going to write Oliver, and I want to show him my George de Mohrenschildt text on the Dallas assassination again. 114 Although his journal does not clearly mention it, a copy of the English version of Een reportage over de Kennedy-moordenaars completed the year before must have been mailed to Stone around this time. A few weeks later, on July 7, Stone wrote to Oltmans telling him he would keep him informed about the opportunities for making a film on JFK. 115 A letter from Stone evaluating the manuscript arrived in Amsterdam on July 28, His critique, as summarized by Oltmans, was largely negative: Oliver Stone writes that he read the English translation of my book on JFK, your astonishing book. My manuscript is completely ill-suited as the basis of a movie, although I love your occasional diatribes at Mrs. de Mohrenschildt and your description of their shouting matches. Great. What surprises me is that he writes, I feel also there are some strong sexual implications about George de Mohrenschildt that you have left out. Is Oliver referring to homosexuality? I left out absolutely nothing. If George had gay tendencies, which I did once think, they were latent and had never been acted on. He had an eye for that, but he was 100 percent a ladies man. 116 Your book needs polish, Stone continued, It needs more structure. It needs a tenser chase on your part. He suggested he might pass the manuscript on to the William Morris Agency in New York but was dubious about the chances for success. I don t know what to do. Your book needs work to get published! It s messy, and worse, it doesn t pay off dramatically for the reader. It sort of peters out at the end, and the way you write (I am sorry) George and Donald Donaldson could be perceived as psychotics by these paranoiac monologues. 117 His letter concluded, On the other hand, I know!! You re close. And I am following up with Jack Anderson on the Cuban side for a possible film. I will keep you informed of my progress, but if I do anything it will be fictionalized. I cannot be a journalist in a business such as the movies. They will not finance facts, fragments or a whole. Stay healthy! You are a wonderful man and in this corner you have a true admirer. Love, Oliver. 118 The film business, screenwriter William Bast advised Oltmans in May 1981, is like the headlines in journalism. What they decide one day, they forget the next. 119 The words proved prophetic as a decade later Stone would begin a film project that was not fiction, but rather explicitly based xxx editor s introduction