Bartholomew Versus the Wheel
An Illustrated, Annotated Edition of the Abstract for My Rambler Monograph
Author’s note (Aug. 15, 2024): In 1997, assassination researcher and author John Kelin asked me to write an abstract summarizing the indications of my Rambler monogragh as a forward to its first online appearance in Kelin's Fair Play Magazine. I present it here for the first time with images and annotation. The text is unchanged. The title of this edition mimics the classic 1964 Warner Bros. animated short, Bartholomew Versus the Wheel1 (for both obvious and metaphorical reasons). The cartoon is based on the idiom, “the dog that caught the car,” and tells how catching cars caused a dog named Bartholomew to see the world differently. This abstract summarizes the story arc of a strange car I caught 25 years later — a car that changed my own world view.
Forward
This foreword is a proposition for those familiar with my monograph, Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used in the JFK Conspiracy,2 and a prognosticative prologue for those who are not. While based on the facts presented in the monograph, facts in its subsequent updates, and facts from research not included here, this is an interpretation of those facts, meant only as a simplified supposition, to be used as a rough guide through the complex material that follows.
In the 1930s, two anti-communist guerrillas, James Burnham and George Lyman Paine, went undercover as communists, infiltrated the leadership of the American Trotskyist movement — the world’s largest Trotskyist organization — and helped tear it apart. In 1940, their mission ended with the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City.
One of the two anti-communist guerrillas, James Burnham, went on to teach the newly formed CIA about covert operations. He also went on to teach philosophy at Yale and recruit CIA agents from among his students.
In 1950, Burnham recruited a Yale student, William F. Buckley, Jr., and introduced him to CIA agent E. Howard Hunt.3 Hunt was a favorite of CIA Director Allen Dulles. Buckley’s father also knew the Dulles family, having shared foreign-policy adventures in Mexico with Dulles’ uncle, Robert Lansing, when Lansing was President Wilson’s secretary of state.
Buckley, as Hunt’s advance man, went to Mexico City to recruit informants for the CIA’s soon-to-be Mexico City station. There, Buckley met and recruited a 28-year-old Spanish student from Philadelphia, George Gordon Wing, as an informant among the left-wing student groups at Mexico City College. Hunt arrived soon thereafter and arranged for Wing’s CIA payment, which was disguised as a student grant.4 Wing was an older student because his studies had been interrupted by World War II. He served as a Naval aviation bomb-sight technician, fire controlman and ordnance specialist.
In 1952, Wing continued his Spanish studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Upon earning his Ph.D. in Spanish in 1961, Wing joined his former boss, Hunt, in Little Havana, Miami. From there, he trained with the CIA’s Operation Forty assassins on No Name Key, in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
In the fall of 1962, Wing followed in James Burnham’s footsteps and became a professor and CIA recruiter, but at the University of Texas at Austin.5 UT’s past leaders had served in Wilson’s cabinet with Allen Dulles’ uncle, Robert Lansing. UT was also the alma mater of Lansing’s friend, William F. Buckley, Sr.
Wing’s association with the Dulles family became closer when John Foster Dulles’ son, Jack, came to know him personally as a fellow professor in Latin American studies at UT. Professor Wing was thus in a perfect position to be useful to the plotters of President Kennedy’s assassination. In fact, Wing’s last name appears on the manifest of the same flight which brought the Oswalds from New York to Texas in 1962.6
In early April, 1963, the date for Kennedy’s trip to Texas was set for November 21st. The occasion was an appreciation dinner in Houston for Kennedy’s friend, Texas Congressman Albert Thomas. On April 23rd, Lyndon Johnson made a cryptic statement at a press conference in Dallas that included a phrase about reporters figuratively shooting Kennedy during his Texas trip.7 The next day, April 24th, Marina Oswald moved into the home of her friend Ruth Hyde Paine.
That same day, Lee Harvey Oswald departed for New Orleans, arriving on April 25th. On April 26th, George Wing acquired a used Rambler station wagon from C.B. Smith Motors, an Austin, Texas dealership owned by C.B. Smith, a life-long student of Latin America, and one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest friends. The sales manager was Smith’s son, C.B. Smith, Jr. The salesman, R.L. Lewis, died under unusual circumstances seven weeks after Kennedy’s assassination.
The senior Smith’s mentor, Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb, was an intimate friend of those planning Albert Thomas’ dinner. Webb died suddenly in late April, 1963, in a one-car accident near Austin.
Although Wing was a lowly associate professor whose first semester — fall, 1962 — was typically overburdened by the least desirable assignments and responsibilities, he was allowed to take a leave of absence for the entire fall semester of 1963. It was the only extended absence of his academic career. He later continued to teach without interruption, even after a heart attack in 1971.8
That fall, Ruth Hyde Paine helped arrange Oswald’s employment at the Texas School Book Depository. Another employee in the same building was Fronia Smith, the ex-wife of C.B. Smith, Sr. and the mother of C.B. Smith, Jr.9
Wing’s whereabouts and activities during that semester are unknown, but a Rambler station wagon identical to his was photographed in the parking lot of the Texas School Book Depository, within ten minutes of the shooting on November 22, 1963.10
And a Rambler station wagon, whose description fits Wing’s car, was used to covertly extract guerrillas from Dealey Plaza immediately after they succeeded in killing John F. Kennedy.11
Lee Harvey Oswald told his police interrogators that the Rambler station wagon in which he was seen leaving Dealey Plaza, “belongs to Mrs. Paine.” He was referring to either Ruth Hyde Paine or Ruth Forbes Paine, the daughter-in-law and the ex-wife, respectively, of George Lyman Paine — James Burnham’s partner in the destruction of Trotskyism. Ruth Forbes Paine was also a long-time friend of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’ wartime lover and his chief contact with one of the leaders of the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.12
Photographs, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton of Vice-President Johnson taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One at Love Field, show President Johnson and Congressman Thomas winking and smiling at each other immediately after the grim ceremony. The original negative to that photo is the only one missing from that series of 13 exposures.
Hard to believe? Read on.
Richard Bartholomew, April 20, 1997
END NOTES:
Bartholomew Versus the Wheel, animated short film, Merry Melodies, Warner Bros., February 29, 1964.
For the backstory of this monograph, see, “Roger and Me: Steganography & Roger Craig’s Getaway Car — An Appended, Illustrated Post of My 1995 Essay.”
Hunt and Buckley both wrote serial pulp spy fiction in the tradition of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Buckley’s 1985 spy novel, See You Later Alligator, is about a Kennedy back-channel diplomatic mission to Cuba after the Bay of Pigs. In it, Buckley’s autobiographical protagonist partners with a fellow CIA agent who had secretly assisted in Trotsky’s assassination.
Wing received a 1951 “travel grant” from the “International Institute of Education.” According to Julius Mader, in his book, Who’s Who in CIA, (Berlin: Self-published, 1968), the “Institute of International Education” received money from the CIA conduit J.M. Kaplan Fund.
For further UT involvement in JFK’s assassination, see my essay, “The Lies of Texas: Alma Mater Coniurationis (Mother of Conspiracy).”
In Warren Commission Vol. 26 there is a Secret Service report (CE 3075) with attachments. One of the attachments is the manifest for Delta 821, the flight the Oswalds took from New York to Dallas on June 14, 1962. At the bottom of the alphabetized list is the name “Wing.”
For the full story of LBJ’s apparent “go signal,” see my essay, “Gone to Texas.”
I gave a copy of my book to a former coworker, Pat Mieski, in 2019. She had not previously known of my book and knew nothing about my research. Surprised to learn what it was about, she told me she had been a residential neighbor of Dr. Wing’s in 1963 and remembered his Rambler. I asked her about her memories of 11/22/63, and whether they included anything about Wing that day. She said yes, that he was away from home and his car was not in his driveway where he usually parked it.
Fronia Ellen S. Smith was employed at the third floor, 411 Elm Street office of Macmillan Publishing Co. at the time of the assassination. She lived in Fort Worth and worked at Macmillan there prior to 1963. Telephone directories show she moved to Dallas when Macmillan also moved its Fort Worth office to 411 Elm Street.
An HSCA document dated March 31, 1978 (National Archives Record Number 1801007610360; Agency File Number 006795) refers to investigations of possibly this very Rambler and links it to a David Ferrie FAA flight plan and to Gen. Edwin Walker from April 8-10, 1963. Its cover-sheet “Contact Report” reads: “Here is flight plan. Check light colored station wagon bought in Houston, Texas in Feb. or Mar. (Wagon was 1959 model) of 1963. Check this wagon at Walkers on April 10th 1963 and at Garland Texas airport and on railroad parking lot behind book depository. (See Hollands testimony to Commission on this wagon.)”
Soon after the shots, Richard Randolph Carr saw two of three men, who had come from behind the Texas School Book Depository, enter what was apparently the same Rambler parked next to the building on Houston Street. He saw the third man enter the car seconds later on Record Street, one block east and two blocks south of the TSBD.
James P. Hosty, Jr., the FBI special agent investigating the Oswalds just before the assassination, has stated that George Paine phoned his son, Michael, from Los Angeles the night of the assassination and said, “‘We all know who did this,’ and told his son to be careful.” If true, the Warren Commission’s conflicting evidence about this phone call indicates that it was distancing George Paine’s name from the one consistent fact in that evidence: the statement by the caller that someone other than Oswald was responsible for the assassination. (Edward J. Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald [New York: McGraw Hill, 1978] p. 205. Peter Dale Scott, Government Documents and the Kennedy Assassination, [self published manuscript] ch. II, p. 4. James P. Hosty, Jr., Assignment: Oswald [New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996] p. 39; cited in Martha A. Moyer and R.F. Gallagher, “The Babysitters,” The Fourth Decade, Sept. 1996, p. 3.