Chapter Ten
The End of Camelot
Charles Harrison Frazier Jr. was the director of development for the Philadelphia Gas Works Division of United Gas Improvement Company and chairman of the board of trustees at Philadelphia General Hospital in 1963. Other members of the hospital’s board of trustees included Thomas J. Mullaney, Mrs. I. J. K. Wells, Americo Cortese, and Carroll Robbins Wetzel, who, at that time, was also a member of the advisory committee to the comptroller of the currency (James Saxon).
Katherine Rice Neuhaus Munson was also a member of the board of trustees at Philadelphia General Hospital in 1963. Her husband, Townsend Munson, was executive vice president of Western Saving Fund Society of Philadelphia and president of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania in 1963.
In 1933, Townsend Munson received a bachelor of arts degree from Yale, where his classmates included Eugene Zuckert, Tracy Barnes, and Eugene Rostow. During World War II, Townsend Munson served on the General Counsel Staff of coordinator Nelson Rockefeller of the Office of Inter-American Affairs. In 1968, Townsend Munson was treasurer of the Rockefeller for President Committee in Philadelphia.
Townsend Munson’s mother was the sister of Charles Cooper Townsend, whose wife, the former Ethel Hart Heckscher, was the cousin of Dick Heckscher. Townsend Munson and Happy Rockefeller are direct descendants of Samuel Harrison and his wife, Sarah Hunt Harrison, both of whom died in the 1700s.
On November 5, 1963, Charles Harrison Frazier Jr. wrote a letter to Frank Jackson. The letter stated that the nominating committee of Philadelphia General Hospital’s board of trustees wanted to know if Frank would be willing to serve on a committee chaired by millionaire philanthropist Frederic Rand Mann. Mann chaired the four-member board of trustees of the Philadelphia General Hospital Research Fund, which was seeking to expand to a nine-member board of trustees in 1964.
After receiving Frazier’s letter, Frank Jackson wrote back on November 7 and informed Frazier that he would be happy to accept appointment to the board of trustees of the hospital’s research fund. Frank’s letter was promptly mailed to Frazier as soon as it was typed, and a copy of the letter was furnished to Dick Heckscher at the Franklin Institute.
When Frank received Frazier’s letter, a group of twenty-two American businessmen was in Moscow on a tour put together by Time magazine. Among the businessmen were executives from General Motors, US Steel, and American Airlines. James A. Linen III and President Keith Funston of the New York Stock Exchange were two of the prominent Americans who attended a reception at the Kremlin on November 6, 1963. The reception, which celebrated the Bolshevik Revolution, was also attended by Nikita Khrushchev and KGB agents Yuri Nosenko and Leonid I. Yefremov. Angelo Bruno was a fugitive when Philip Charles Testa’s contempt of court citation was upheld on November 6, 1963. At that time, Testa’s bail was $25,000 on the contempt of court charge and $25,000 on the extortion charge. Testa was freed on bail on November 8, 1963, by circuit court judge Harry E. Kalodner Jr. Ten days later, Testa’s bail was revoked on the contempt of court citation by circuit court judges William Henry Hastie, Harry E. Kalodner Jr., and J. Cullen Ganey.
Testa was reincarcerated at Holmesburg Prison on November 18, 1963. He was still in the pokey when Angelo Bruno returned to the United States.
In November of 1963, Edward Grant Stockdale met with John F. Kennedy at the White House. The president asked Stockdale to raise $50,000 for Kennedy’s personal use, which would never be acknowledged to the donors. Kennedy told Stockdale to keep quiet about the money, and Stockdale went back to Florida, where he lived with his wife, the former Alice Boyd Magruder, in Coral Gables.
Edward Grant Stockdale went to Miami and raised $50,000 in cash, telling the donors it was for President Kennedy. Shortly before the president was shot, Stockdale took a briefcase filled with $50,000 to the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach and delivered it to the president. It is likely that Stockdale knew what the money was going to be used for.
For most of his political career, whenever Kennedy had a problem on his hands, he usually had James McInerney around to keep things quiet. Kennedy had sex with mistresses and prostitutes during the Camelot years, and it is this author’s opinion that the money raised by Stockdale was used as hush money for the purpose of keeping one of Kennedy’s sex partners quiet.
In 1963, US Army private Eugene Dinkin was a cryptographer stationed in Metz, France. The month before the president was shot, Dinkin wrote a letter to Bobby Kennedy that warned the attorney general that an attempt would be made on the president’s life on November 28.
The US Army made an appointment for Dinkin to be given a psychiatric examination at West Germany’s Landstuhl Hospital on November 4, but he went AWOL that day. He then traveled to Frankfurt, where on November 6, 1963, he reported what he knew to Overseas Weekly. Later that same day, Dinkin took a train to Geneva, where he spoke to reporters at the United Nations Office’s press room on November 6 and 7. While in Switzerland, Dinkin spoke to a Time Life writer, an editor for the Geneva Diplomat, and Peter De Whirst of Newsweek Magazine.
Dinkin believed that the murder plot involved the military, and he predicted that either a Negro or a Communist would be blamed for Kennedy’s death if the plot was successful.
Theodor Oberlander was linked to Deutsche National Zeiting und Soldaten Zeitung, a weekly West German newspaper published in Munich. In 1959, when Konrad Adenauer was the chancellor of West Germany, Oberlander was a former Nazi serving as West Germany’s minister of refugee affairs when Stepan Bandera was murdered in Munich. During World War II, Bandera worked closely with the Nazis in Germany as an underground leader with the Ukrainian Nightingales. There was speculation that Oberlander was behind the murder, and several months later, Oberlander was dismissed as minister of refugee affairs.
In 1962, Soviet defector and former spy Bogdan Stashinsky was tried and convicted of Bandera’s murder in Karlsruhe, at the West German High Court. Stashinsky, who defected to West Germany in 1961, confessed that he murdered Stepan Bandera on the orders of the Soviet MVD secret police. At the trial, Stashinsky spoke about MVD operations in both Europe and West Germany, and Judge Jagusch sentenced Stashinsky to eight years in prison.
At the trial, the lawyer who represented Stepan Bandera’s widow was Chicago native Charles Kersten of the World Anti-Communist Steering Committee. Charles Kersten represented Wisconsin’s Fifth District in the US House of Representatives from 1947 to 1949 and from 1951 to 1955. During his years in the US House of Representatives, Kersten served on the House Labor Committee with a young congressman named John F. Kennedy.
On November 7, 1963, Charles Kersten wrote a letter that was delivered to President John F. Kennedy, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. The letter advised President Kennedy that Bogdan Stashinsky had been trained by the Soviets to commit murders against anti-Communist leaders and was trained to participate in assassinations in both the United States and Great Britain. The letter also warned the president that assassins were currently being trained in Russia for the purpose of killing people in England and the United States.
Kersten’s November 7 letter also reported that the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security had been planning to conduct hearings for the purpose of probing the Bandera-Stashinsky case. According to Kersten, West Germany was willing to let Stashinsky travel to the United States and testify before the subcommittee, but a source had informed him that the US State Department was trying to delay the hearings.
When information regarding assassinations is shared between nations, it tends to expose the subversive nature of disposal operations. Shortly after Kennedy was shot, the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security briefly investigated the Kennedy assassination. Ruth Hyde Paine testified before the subcommittee on December 5, shortly before the subcommittee’s probe was shut down. On the day she testified, Bruce Solie of the CIA’s O...