Oswald's Closest Friend: A Review
My 1995 Examination of Bruce Adamson's Voluminous De Mohrenschildt Study
Author’s note (March 27, 2023): There is, for me, a coincidental timing to this post. It is the 46th anniversary week of George de Mohrenschildt’s strange death,1 and as I just learned today, the week that the The Texas Observer board voted to end its 68-year publication history.2 I personally knew Bruce Campbell Adamson in the early-to-mid 1990s. That’s one reason why John Kelin commissioned me to write this book review for Kelin’s former online journal, Fair Play Magazine. The events that led to my knowing Adamson began years before our first contact. As an illustrator in Austin, I was a contributor to The Texas Observer and worked with several of its editors, including David G. Armstrong. Texas insurance magnate Bernard Rapoport, publisher of the Observer, was the long-time power and money behind Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Observer. Rapoport had barely tolerated Armstrong’s honest reporting on the JFK assassination throughout 1990-91. The last straw was Armstrong’s three-part exposé, “Where Was George [Bush],” which they refused to publish, forcing Armstrong to leave the Observer3 and publish the series in the Austin Chronicle.4 That series led directly to Adamson’s research on George de Mohrenschildt and eventually to Russell Baker’s5 book, Family of Secrets, about George H. W. Bush. Both Adamson and Baker, after reading Armstrong's series, called Armstrong and me in Austin to get more information.
My association with Adamson ended around 1996, when Erwin Schwartz, Abraham Zapruder’s former business partner, stopped talking to JFK researchers because of the way he was treated by Adamson. Adamson had made an amateurish mistake. He called Schwartz and acted like a criminal prosecutor instead of a journalist, accusing Schwartz and Zapruder of being part of the conspiracy. Schwartz thought Adamson was rude at best, and nuts at worst. Adamson was singlehandedly responsible for ending my efforts of more than a decade at nurturing Schwartz as a willing source and witness.6 Erwin Schwartz died December 22, 1999, taking to his grave answers to many more questions about the assassination. With that hindsight, I could see Adamson's unprofessional behavior foreshadowed in this review.
Bruce Campbell Adamson, Oswald’s Closest Friend: The George de Mohrenschildt Story (Santa Cruz, CA: self published, 1993-1995)
In the academic year 1976-77, my first year at The University of Texas at Austin, I lived in a small off-campus dormitory with, among others, Berke Breathed. I was an art major. He did not study art, but was a photographer for the school newspaper. Donning an apron on Wednesday nights, Breathed also served chicken wings in the dorm’s dining room.
Breathed, creator of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Bloom County comic strip, became one of the most famous cartoonists in the country. I became a lesser known editorial cartoonist.
Are Breathed and Bartholomew in cahoots? No. We barely knew each other then. And we do not know each other now. If he had not become famous, I would have forgotten about him long ago, just as he has forgotten about me.
Connections do not a conspiration make. However, more than anything else, conspiracy investigation is about connections.
In Bruce Campbell Adamson's eight-volume, self published work in progress, Oswald’s Closest Friend: The George de Mohrenschildt Story, and its companion volume, The JFK Assassination Timeline Chart you will find absolutely no proof that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy. That is arguably a major omission. It is arguable because the conspiracy that killed Kennedy has long been sufficiently proved by the weakness of the well-known direct evidence, plus the strength of several lesser-known “smoking guns.”
Adamson represents a newer class of citizen-investigators of Kennedy’s murder who have gone beyond minute debunking of multiple, conflicting single bullet theories. They are instead attempting to identify and name conspirators. For many of the newer students, the final straw inspiring their search for truth was Gerald Posner’s book of big lies, Case Closed. Adamson is one of a slightly earlier generation of investigators who was inspired to begin his study after seeing Oliver Stone’s film, JFK. There are now over three decades of such personal breaking points that started serious students on their quests for Camelot.
Adamson’s nearly 10,000-page study cannot be adequately reviewed in a short review. But in brief and on balance, Adamson’s work is more good than bad. He has done a wide-ranging study of a pivotal suspect in the conspiracy — one who had never before been this widely studied.
Uncovering the fullest truth of Kennedy’s assassination requires that somebody start somewhere and publish the result. Uneducated amateurs cannot be easily dismissed in a vacuum of educated professionals.
For those who are not students of the JFK assassination, and who have not rented Oliver Stone’s movie lately, George de Mohrenschildt was the distinguished, gray haired, educated, upper-class, anti-Bolshevic, Russian-exile, international spy who became a CIA agent, a Texas oilman, and, by the time he was in his late fifties, a very close friend of 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald in 1962 and 1963.
As Adamson duly notes, despite this cosmopolitan man’s seemingly bizarre friendship with the future accused assassin of a U.S. president, “De Mohrenschildt did not become [known as] a central figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy until 1976 when he began telling the press that wealthy Texas oilmen, including H. L. Hunt, were behind the assassination.” The next year, de Mohrenschildt died when he blew a hole in his own head with a shotgun after receiving shock treatments, and just before Congressional investigators could interrogate him.
The unlikely friendship between de Mohrenschildt and Oswald brought Oswald within a degree or two of separation (far less than six) of powerful anti-Kennedy men like, among many others, former CIA director and future Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles; Vice President (soon-to-be president) Lyndon Baines Johnson; future vice president Nelson A. Rockefeller; Texas oilman, future CIA director and future president George Bush; and media giants Henry Luce and William S. Paley. Of those, only Bush is still alive, and he is not talking.
The most unfortunate downside of Adamson’s research is that while his study is wide, it is shallow, illiterate, and graphically amateurish to the point of tastelessness. In one of many examples, Adamson repeatedly notes that Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed the famous home movie of the assassination, had known and worked at a clothing factory with de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jeanne LeGon, ten years before the assassination. This fact, initially reported by Adamson in his first volume, is hardly supported in end note 35: “Santa Fe Public Iibrary, newspaper article, Nov. 3, 1968; personal interview with Bailen at La Fonda.” While probably true, such unschooled citations force readers to take Adamson’s word as “proof.”
While Adamson only implies it in his books, he has stated with more conviction in his email broadcasts and more private email that the former association of Mrs. de Mohrensehildt and Mr. Zapruder, combined with the fact that Zapruder did not “duck and cover” during six seconds of gunfire while operating his camera, proves that Zapruder knowingly and willingly filmed the murder as part of a CIA assassination plot. That is, of course, a non sequitur.
I questioned Adamson about this, naively expecting harder evidence for such an extraordinary claim. Rather than support the claim, he multiplied the non sequitur by accusing me of unfairly defending Zapruder in a conflict of interest because I am related by marriage to Zapruder’s former business partner. He further multiplied it by citing, after falsely claiming for a month that it was secret, his long-published claims about Zapruder’s interest in the Dallas Council on World Affairs and the Crusade For Free Europe.
Nonetheless, uncovering the fullest truth of Kennedy’s assassination requires that somebody start somewhere and publish the result. Uneducated amateurs cannot be easily dismissed in a vacuum of educated professionals. This first extensive study of Oswald’s closest friend is an admirable, though defective, start by Bruce Campbell Adamson.
(Originally published in Fair Play Magazine, Issue 25, November-December 1995)
On Sunday, March 27, 1977, George de Mohrenschildt, the CIA handler of Lee Harvey Oswald, began a planned 4-day interview with author Edward Jay Epstein that was arranged by Reader's Digest magazine. Two days later, after they “broke for lunch and decided to meet again at 3 p.m.” de Mohrenschildt apparently committed suicide. He had just revealed to Epstein his role in the conspiracy to assassinate JFK and frame Oswald as the sole assassin. George’s wife Jeanne did not accept that her husband had died by suicide. (http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdemohrenschildt.htm) “...Reader’s Digest’s Washington bureau ‘has been serving as a primary conduit for CIA and FBI propaganda, self-promotion, and disinformation since the days of Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover....’” (http://bfeldman68.blogspot.com/2009/08/readers-digests-hidden-history-part-1.html)
Sewell Chan and Brandon Formby, “Texas Observer, legendary crusading liberal magazine, is closing and laying off its staff,” Texas Tribune, March 26, 2023. Accessed March 27, 2023. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/26/texas-observer-shutting-down/
After David Armstrong was essentially fired, he dug as far as he could into the founding of The Texas Observer in the 1950s and found lots of CIA fingerprints. While finishing his doctorate at UT, he helped me investigate the UT connections to the JFK assassination, and I helped him with research for his dissertation on Walt Rostow. He then became the bureau chief at Joseph Trento’s National Security News Service in Washington, D.C. They coauthored the book, America and the Islamic Bomb. (https://www.amazon.com/America-Islamic-Bomb-Deadly-Compromise/dp/1586421379) The main thing to know about Ronnie Dugger and The Texas Observer is that he and the powers behind him were some of the best, longest-serving leftist gatekeepers in the business.
See David G. Armstong’s 3-part series on Bush:
Part 1 - “Where Was George?”:
Page 1- https://www.dropbox.com/s/b4ufnc3n9qb97ij/Where%20was%20George%201of3.jpeg?dl=0
Page 2- https://www.dropbox.com/s/osh3haiek558fyc/Where%20was%20George%202of3.jpeg?dl=0
Page 3- https://www.dropbox.com/s/sos58aitsx06o5z/Where%20was%20George%203of3.jpeg?dl=0
Part 2 - “Who Was George?”
Page 1- https://www.dropbox.com/s/h8vxnbxnxon7zkd/Connecticut%20Cowboy%201of3.jpeg?dl=0
Page 2- https://www.dropbox.com/s/21mjf3lk87ux5m5/Connecticut%20Cowboy%202of3.jpeg?dl=0
Page 3- https://www.dropbox.com/s/5pleh0ohfatsriy/Connecticut%20Cowboy%203of3.jpeg?dl=0
Part 3 - “Sins of the Fathers”
Page 1- https://www.dropbox.com/s/krgwv7pew6hz74s/Sins%20of%20the%20Fathers%201of2.jpeg?dl=0
Page 2- https://www.dropbox.com/s/zozdkn9ffn4vzk6/Sins%20of%20the%20Fathers%202of2.jpeg?dl=0
See Baker’s Substack newsletter, Going Deep With Russ Baker, russbaker.substack.com.
See “Erwin Schwartz Interview, Nov. 21 1994,” bartholoviews.substack.com.