Hey you history lovers!
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I had a recurring dream as a child. In my parents’ bedroom, JFK and Abraham Lincoln were locked in a brutal fistfight. The two throwing haymakers at one another as they crashed around the waterbed in the center of the room only to end with JFK pushing Abe out the window where he landed on the AC unit below.
Let’s not dig too deep into any sort of psychological aspects from this escapade, but to me that dream always cemented my love of history (and maybe the darker aspects of history at that) and fascination with the assassinations of both men.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The Kennedy assassination is one of those infinitely intriguing stories. The discussion around it has taken on a life of its own. My own ideas about what really happened change with whatever new book I’ve read. My personal best-case scenario: Oswald acted alone but was some sort of CIA asset, however low and however unbeknownst to him. Worst case scenario: Oswald was a player in a larger conspiracy probably perpetuated by the CIA to murder the president.
While I won’t be getting into the entire assassination, I have always found it interesting that the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’s assassination are built upon hundreds of little conspiracies. Conspiratorial LEGO bricks that theorists have taken and constructed their own stories from. These cover a wide swath that span the globe, but each one is very key to a specific conspiracy theory involving the President’s assassination.
There is one side story from the investigation into the President’s murder that has always intrigued me. This is the story of Dr. Julio Fernandez and how the conspiracy reached little ol’ Martinsburg, Pennsylvania.
I have a sliver of familiarity with Martinsburg, having some family who has worked/work there, and I know that is a very rural, very agricultural part of Pennsylvania. Right smack dab in the middle of the state situated about an hour south of State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University. Kinda the last place in the world one would expect to find an anti-Castro Cuban intimately involved in Kennedy’s assassination.
Here’s the gist of it. A life-long Martinsburg resident, Margaret Hoover, was out in the backyard of the property she shared with the Fernandez family in the middle of October 1963. In the leaf pile that the Fernandez family also used to burn trash, Hoover finds a train ticket envelope showing a trip from Miami to D.C. on September 25, 1963 and also a trailer flyer that had writing on the back which included the names “Lee Oswald”, “Rubenstein”, and “Jack Ruby”. Also written in pencil on it was the name of a certain city in Texas. (Hint: It’s where the Stars and Cowboys play.)
Hoover seemingly kept both pieces of trash, because who wouldn’t keep random bits of their neighbor’s trash. She ended up showing her refuse collection to her daughter, but forgot all about them until November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, TX. Two days later, the President’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, would be shot and killed by Jack Ruby. The same names and details that just happened to appear on the back of that trailer flyer found in the leaves below her porch.
It was all right there! Everything! All falling into place right in her own backyard. Well, Mrs. Hoover needed to tell someone about this, so she nagged and nagged her brother, Robert Steele, sufficiently enough to get him to drive into Hollidaysburg (county seat of Blair County where Martinsburg is located) to report it to the State Police. The State Police took down the particulars and passed them along to the Pittsburgh FBI Field Office. This was on November 27. The next day the FBI had two agents in Martinsburg interviewing Mrs. Hoover, her daughter, her son-in-law, and Dr. Julio Fernandez.
Mrs. Hoover told the same story to the FBI adding the details that she was estranged from her husband, who ran a trailer park, so trailers were kinda their business. She had moved from where the Fernandez’s were living now to the back of the same building late in September of 1963. And while she produced the train envelope showing the details of that trip, she couldn’t for the life of her find that trailer flyer with Oswald, Ruby, and Dallas in handwriting.
In his interview with the FBI, Fernandez was very keen to come off as pro-American and anti-Castro. Julio provided the agents with a very nuanced assessment of his life in Cuba and in the process offers an excellent glimpse into life in Cuba at the tail end of the Batista dictatorship and the early Castro regime.
As an owner and operator of multiple newspapers and magazines, Fernandez felt the pressure to be supportive of the Batista regime as any show of criticism could have meant his publications being shuttered and possibly imprisonment for publishing dissent. He also had family members who worked for the Batista regime.
He goes on to say that at the end of the Batista regime, 99% of Cubans preferred anyone to Batista and they were ready for a change in power. In the beginning of Castro’s campaign and subsequent regime, his publications openly supported Castro. However, Castro’s reforms became more and more oppressive. What was most troubling to Fernandez was the confiscation of personal property by soldiers, and that fear prompted him and his family to make arrangements to leave Cuba, which they did in 1960. First going to Jamaica, obtaining a tourist visa there, and then entering the United States in 1961.
Once in America, Fernandez and his wife began trying to establish a new life in the States. His wife found work in social work activities, while he bounced from job to job for the next two years while living in Miami. However, that changed when he was hired as a Spanish teacher at Cove Junior High in Martinsburg in September of 1963.
He came to Martinsburg to begin teaching and was joined shortly thereafter by his wife and youngest children, with his 19-year-old son, Julio Cesar Fernandez, Jr., joining them later. His was the train ticket from Miami to D.C.
And that was that. The FBI agents left and filed their report, which would make it into the full, 26 volume version of the Warren Report towards the end of the very last volume.
I think it is important to reiterate just how quick the FBI acted on the situation. Within in a week of Kennedy’s and Oswald’s deaths they were in Martinsburg investigating this one report and doing a thorough job (IMO). The day after they received the information two agents were driving halfway across Pennsylvania to interview all the particulars involved in the story. That is not to say that there weren’t acts of deception and purposeful misdirection on the part of J. Edgar Hoover and some other agents during the investigation, but those seem to be confined to any foreknowledge and contact the Bureau had with Oswald and not necessarily the investigation that happened afterward. I could be wrong there though.
Then, another Julio Fernandez pops up, conflating the whole situation. The second Julio appears to have been the figment of Clare Boothe Luce’s imagination.
Luce was an interesting character all her own who had a long, distinguished, and sorted career that ranged from being a writer, to a politico, to sponsoring anti-Castro activities in Cuba. In a taped phone call, she relates the story of receiving a phone call from Julio Fernandez the night of JFK’s assassination. This Fernandez was a member of a clandestine CIA backed group of Cubans who did “intelligence gathering” missions to Cuba. Darting in and out on fast boats. Not quite the lifestyle of a middle-aged former newspaperman/junior high Spanish teacher.
Well, this Fernandez and his crew were forced out of their home base in Miami and moved to New Orleans, where they were approached by none other than Lee Harvey Oswald, who offered up his services to kill Castro. Oswald bragged about being the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens, and being about as suspicious scrawny white boy can be when approaching a bunch of Cubans to kill the Communist leader of their country. This whole episode seemed to imply that somehow Castro ended up hiring Oswald to kill Kennedy. The ol’ switcheroo. That Julio Fernandez though flittered away never to be heard from again.
Where the problem really comes up is when JFK Conspiracy researchers started trying to connect the dots while drawing a whole bunch of new dots to connect those dots to. Lots of dots here. Like William Kelly on his JFKCountercoup Blogspot site. He reproduces the entire episode much like I have done very faithfully but adds the caveat that he talked to Mrs. Hoover in the early 70s. She said that Fernandez worked late into the night typing a manuscript and that his son, Julio Jr., was enrolled as a student at Penn State University. She added that Fernandez and his family up and moved out of Martinsburg despite having signed a 3-year teaching contract and was renovating a new house.
We’ll get to a couple of those, but then he tries to tie Fernandez, Jr. and Sr. to involvement with British Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt, who had accepted a 6-week summer teaching gig at Penn State. A known Soviet spy was once within an hour’s drive of someone related to someone else who was loosely alleged to have been involved in the Kennedy assassination. Though the keyword there is summer teaching gig, and by the fall when the Fernandez family rolls into Central PA, Blunt had already skeedaddled back to England. Never the two (or three) shall meet. But hey what a qwinky dink! Also, Blunt was a Soviet and Fernandez was an anti-Castro, so I’m not sure they would be all that simpatico.
Kelly goes on to say Fernandez packed up and left town, only to be “pursued fruitlessly by HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi” though Fonzi said that he did track down Fernandez in New York where the good doctor was living and working as a college professor. He seemingly worked as a professor for much of the 1970s before moving back to Miami, where he passed away in 1992 at the age of 83, having played no known important roles in any other presidential assassination conspiracy.
It is telling that conspiracy theorists have place 100% belief in Mrs. Hoover’s statements. This slightly crazy, overbearing, incredibly nosy (which all of this comes from her own family’s description of her in the FBI report), old lady neighbor. This has cast nothing but suspicion and doubt on the over-educated, Hispanic, political asylum seeking, newspaperman and teacher. If it smells of racial profiling, it’s because it is racial profiling. Definitely on the behalf of Hoover and probably more than a little bit on the parts of conspiracy theorists who put forth this story as an example of anti-Cuban factions working towards killing Kennedy.
The 1960 census listed 1,772 people living in Martinsburg, PA. For ALL of Pennsylvania, 0.1% of the population was non-white and non-black. That 0.1% included Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, any person of color who was not identified as being black. So for a town like Martinsburg, statistically speaking, there could have been up to 2 possible non-black people of color in the town in 1960. And I’m betting dollars to donuts it was closer to 0 non-black persons of color living there.
When that lily-white, rural American town sees a Hispanic family of five move in AND they happen to be from Cuba, a Cuba that America had just poorly invaded, a Cuba that very recently housed nuclear weapons pointed at America, well you can start to see how hackels can get raised by a certain, white woman, who has recently been under great stress caused by the dissolution of her marriage.
Major doubt has been thrown onto Dr. Fernandez, unfairly in my eyes, additional doubt was sowed when it was revealed that he took his family out of Martinsburg shortly following the incident. Now why he would stick around seeing that in the two months he was there he had been accused of being a part of the JFK assassination conspiracy by his crazy, nosy neighbor who brought the FBI knocking on his door. This after having to walk a tightrope of political correctness during both the Batista regime and then the early days of Castro’s. This brush with the federal authorities was probably all that he was trying to avoid happening in Cuba only to be subjected to it thanks to his neighbor who swore she had seen Oswald, Ruby and Dallas, TX all written on a trailer flyer, which may or may not have been his.
Great recollection.
We can’t wait for Lemuria! Forget Atlantis.