Being There: Eye Witness To History - Softcover

Caddy, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1634241142 ISBN 13: 9781634241144

Publisher: Trine Day, 2018

Synopsis

Douglas Caddy was the attorney for E. Howard Hunt, one of the key persons involved in both the JFK assassination and Watergate. Being There: Eye Witness to History is his autobiographical account of these events by accidentally being in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time. Episodes include being with Lee Harvey Oswald and Guy Banister in New Orleans, investigating the founding of the modern conservative movement and where it went wrong, looking inside the JFK assassination and the Watergate Conspiracy, uncovering JFK’s secret son and why he came to fear for his life, analyzing LBJ’s murder victims and his rise to the presidency, interpreting the Moody Foundation Scandal, Russia's involvement in Trump’s election, and more.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas Caddy has been listed for decades in Who’sWho in America and Who’sWho in the World and has had articles published in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Barron’s Financial Weekly.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Being There

Eyewitness to History

By Douglas Caddy

Trine Day LLC

Copyright © 2018 Douglas Caddy
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63424-114-4

Contents

cover, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Publisher's Foreword, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Preface, 
The Early Years, 
Birth Of The Modern Conservative Movement, 
Watergate, 
Part 1, 
The Burglars' Arrests at Watergate, 
Judge Sirica Holds Me in Contempt of Court, 
The Oval Office Tapes, 
How Dean Misled Nixon, 
Back Before the Grand Jury, 
FBI Internal Report on Watergate, 
Dean's New Book, 
The First Watergate Trial, 
How Everything Turned Out For Me, 
The issue of my being gay, 
U.S. National Archives documents, 
Part 2 Robert Merritt and Carl Shoffler, 
Part 3 Robert Merritt's Secret Files Disclosed in 2018, 
The Huston Plan, 
Part 4 Who Killed Gabe Caporino?, 
The Kennedy Assassination, 
JACK WORTHINGTON, 
Kennedy Family Deaths and Sidereal Time, 
Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, 
Detective Rothstein's Report, 
The Aftermath:, 
Tongsun Park and Koreagate, 
The Moody Foundation Scandal, the IRS and the Tax Court, 
Billie Sol Estes and LBJ, 
The State of Texas vs. Michael Douglas Caddy, 
The Truth About the Stonewall Riots, 
Trump And Russia, 
About Larouche, 
About Roger Stone, 
Selected Relevant Emails, 
Final Thoughts, 
Afterword, 
Appendix, 
Gaeton Fonzi's List Of Miami Witnesses, 
Exhibits, 
Index, 
Contents, 
Landmarks, 

CHAPTER 1

The Early Years

My most important life changing event took place three months before I was born.

There is an historical record of it published in the Eureka, California, Humboldt Times, "Thrills of 'Wash-Out' Adventure During Flood Written by Scout Chief" of December 13, 1937. Raymond O. Hanson, its author, was a regional Scout executive en route from San Francisco to Eureka on the Northwestern Pacific Railroad to give the principal address at the annual Boy Scout meeting of the Redwood Area Council. The train on which he was a passenger got trapped by a rock slide near Bell Springs, south of Eureka.

My mother was on the same train with my brother age four and sister age two. She was traveling to visit a relative in Eureka and was six months pregnant with me.

Hanson wrote in part:

Trapped for three anxious days and four long December nights, in a canyon of the Big Bend, with the turbulent Eel River rising sixty-four feet toward the tracks, which held the Northwestern Pacific overnight train to Eureka, was a novel if not harrowing experience of twenty-five passengers who emerged today into the open country and the prospects of home-coming reunions.

Caught in the early hours of Friday morning between two great slides, with road beds washed out by torrential rains, and tons of rock, gravel and dirt covering the rails, the train, thanks to the efficiency of the railroad service, escaped precipitation into the rushing and roaring river below.

Two mothers with children claimed major attention for naturally the little ones find it difficult to adjust to unusual situations.

Little did the party realize the extent of the danger which had threatened them earlier until this morning as railroad officials began transporting passengers toward Willits in motor speeders. About nine miles south there suddenly loomed a scene that struck terror in the hearts of all for three hundred feet of track hung suspended in mid air above the river. A few hours after the train had passed Thursday night, the slide had begun to take formation.

Gradually the small cars made the forty-eight mile trip, stopping here and there at one washout after another, while men, women and children walked around the depressions and train men carried the equipment to other track extensions.

It was a cheerful and grateful group which finally arrived in Willits, realizing from radio and newspaper reports that others in flooded areas throughout the state had fared far worse.

When my mother, decades ago, gave me a copy of Hanson's article she talked about the stress that she had endured during the traumatic event, foremost of course worrying about the imminent danger in which the passengers and train crew found themselves, and also about her two small children being hungry due to the small amount of food that was available for the three days.

The event was traumatic for me also, being in my mother's womb for six months and born three months later on March 23, 1938 in Long Beach, California.

The personal significance of this intense experience for me was brought home in a recent article by Hemley Gonzalez, "Science has a New Explanation for Homosexuality," published on May 7, 2017, at unitedhumanists.com. The article was based on a TED talk given by medical doctor James O'Keefe. O'Keefe had an 18-year old son who had come out publicly as gay. As his father, O'Keefe "wondered about the genetic and evolutionary factors that made his son gay."

Gonzalez wrote that "epigenetics basically states that similar genes express themselves in different ways based on external circumstances." O'Keefe declared in his TED talk found at https://youtu.be/4Khn_z9FPmU that: "If the family is flush with plenty of kids and/or it's a stressful place in time, nature occasionally flips these epigenetic switches to turn on the gay genes. This alters brain development that changes sexual orientation."

"You probably have gay genes in your DNA," O'Keefe told his audience, "but unless they were activated in your mother's womb, they remained coiled up and silent."

I was born gay, my sexual orientation having been determined three months previously by the stress endured by my mother in a harrowing experience that lasted three days, one that she remembered her entire life. In the back of my mind I have a feeling that she gave me the Hanson article because she and my father had come to realize that I was gay through no choice of my own. While they were alive we never discussed the subject of my sexual orientation, and I never publicly acknowledged that I was gay until after their deaths, not wanting to embarrass them in any way. None of my brothers and sisters are gay, nor are any of their children.

So this is my story of being an eyewitness to history, born gay, and as a result, having to overcome the immense difficulties encountered in being dealt such a hand in life. Among these was my being targeted for murder because of my sexual orientation by military intelligence Agent Carl Shoffler under the Huston Plan in the early days of the Watergate scandal, who also feared that I knew too much, not only about Watergate, but also the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This was because of what my close friend, Howard Hunt, a key figure in both historical scandals, might have told me about the role of military intelligence and the CIA in both events. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Both my mother and father were born in the early 1900s. My mother was raised on rural land that is now the Nashville, Tennessee airport, and my father grew up in sparsely populated Wyoming, attending a one room school with 25 students, half of whom were Indians. He rode to school on horseback. He later attended Stanford University from which he graduated with a degree in chemistry in the early years of the Great Depression and soon got a job with Shell Chemical Company. During World War II the government exempted him from military service because he was a key chemist at the Torrance, California plant of Shell Chemical that manufactured synthetic tires for our armed forces. My two brothers and two sisters and I at the time attended public schools in the Long Beach area.

I had an Aunt Nina who lived in Hollywood, just off Hollywood Boulevard and four blocks from Hollywood and Vine. I stayed with her and my uncle frequently during the war years and we would occasionally go to the movies at the neighborhood theaters: Graumann's Chinese, The Egyptian and the Pantages. My aunt was a member of the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church that was directly across the street from where she lived on Gramercy Place. RonaldReagan attended services at the church. In 1946 when I was eight years old my aunt decided to take me to the Spiritualist Church in Hollywood. At one point in the service she had me stand on a chair and asked the spiritualist to predict my future. I can still see the scene in my mind's eye these many years later. The spiritualist looked at me for a full minute and then pronounced that I would never reach society's first level to become a national leader, but would reach the level directly underneath where I would know and work with many who did and witness how the world works.

The summers of my formative youth were spent in Mill Creek Canyon, part of the San Bernardino National Forest, above Redlands where our family had a mountain cabin not far from Lake Arrowhead. These were my happiest early years.

Shell Chemical in 1954 transferred my father to Louisiana, where he had the responsibility of building a new chemical plant at Norco. Our family took up residence nearby in New Orleans.

I attended Alcee Fortier High School in New Orleans from September 1954 until June 1956, when I graduated. The school provided its students with a superior education and nourished us on school days with the same lunch of red beans and rice.

In late 1954 two local activists, Kent and Phoebe Courtney, announced that they were holding a public meeting in a pavilion in Audubon Park to enlist citizens who opposed the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy pending before the U.S. Senate. Our residence was only a few blocks from Audubon Park, so I decided to attend as my parents admired McCarthy's spirited fighting against communism.

An enthusiastic crowd of about 40 persons attended the Courtneys' meeting and assignments were handed out. My assignment was to set up a card table in the plaza in front of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter to collect signatures on a petition that opposed the censure of McCarthy as part of a national petition drive headed by General Bonner Fellers. I had little difficulty in collecting signatures as the Catholics who attended services at the Cathedral were sympathetic towards McCarthy who was a fellow Catholic.

A few months later Kent and Phoebe announced they were starting a monthly conservative publication, Free Men Speak, which subsequently became TheIndependent American. I volunteered to work on the publication after high school. As a result Kent started taking me to meetings such as Toastmasters International and to a radio station where he had a weekly radio show. Several times during the period of 1955-1956, while still in a high school student, I would accompany Kent to meetings with Guy Banister, a former FBI agent, then Assistant Supervisor of the New Orleans Police Department. The topic at these meetings was the extent of organized crime in the city and more particularly the efforts of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans headed by Aaron Kohn to combat it.

So how did Lee Harvey Oswald manage to enter into the picture during this period? Well, he was living with his mother in the Vieux Carre section of the French Quarter, less than a five minute walk from Banister's office. Oswald was then about 16 years old and enrolled in a different high school than the one I attended.

During his early childhood and adolescence in New Orleans, Lee Oswald lived with his divorced mother at a number of different locations, usually in small rented houses or apartments in a moderate-to-lower-income section of the city. While the record of residences is not complete, one address was 126 Exchange Alley. During her testimony before the Warren Commission, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald indicated that she and her son lived there when Oswald was about to 16-years old, roughly the years 1955-56. They were "living at 126 Exchange Place, which is the Vieux Carre section of the French Quarter of New Orleans." During her testimony, Mrs. Oswald noted that "the papers said we lived over a saloon at that particular address ... that is just the French part of town. It looks like the devil. Of course I didn't have a fabulous apartment. But very wealthy people and very fine citizens live in that part of town." ... While Mrs. Oswald correctly noted that "wealthy" citizens resided in some sections of the French Quarter, Exchange Alley was well known as the location of other elements; it was an area notorious for illicit activities. As the managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, AaronKohn recalled, "Exchange Alley, specifically that little block that Oswald lived on, was literally the hub of some of the most notorious underworld joints in the city." He noted further that Exchange Alley was the location of various gambling operations affiliated with the Marcello organization. Noting the openness with which such activities were conducted there, Kohn said, "You couldn't walk down the block without literally being exposed to two or three separate forms of illicit activities and underworld operations."

Guy Banister and I continued to be involved in joint activities even after I enrolled at Georgetown University after graduating from high school in 1956:

In 1959, a New Orleans man, Richard C. Bell, in conjunction with a Chicago group, organized a group of students to attend the 1959 World Youth Conference in Vienna. His plans attracted opposition from the local American Legion, especially Kent Courtney, Festus Brown and James Pfister. The Legion organized a Free Enterprise Seminar "to alert local college students to the dangers involved in attending the communist-sponsored World Youth Festival in Vienna." Speakers at the seminar include Guy Banister, Medford Evans and Douglas Caddy. Bell and his group did make it to Vienna.

In 1963 President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Oswald was branded the alleged assassin. Banister gained instant fame as someone who had interacted in a mysterious way with Oswald in New Orleans in the months before the assassination – allegedly being his handler (they shared the same business address). Years later I ended up representing Howard Hunt, an alleged key figure in the assassination, who claimed that Lyndon Baines Johnson was at the top of the conspiracy. Later, I also was destined to represent Billie Sol Estes, LBJ's bagman and silent business partner, who maintained to his death that LBJ killed JFK.

But in 1955 Oswald, Banister and I were within walking distance of each other but, of course, none of us had any inkling of what the future held.

CHAPTER 2

Birth Of The Modern Conservative Movement

In 1956, after graduating from high school, I enrolled at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the country. My ultimate goal was to join the country's diplomatic corps. I was a Protestant and so was the first student that I met, Tongsun Park, who was from a wealthy Korean family. He had an engaging personality and our talk soon turned to campus politics. With two other newly enrolled students we formed "The Four Freshmen" and in a class election Tongsun was elected president of the freshman class and I was elected class treasurer. Tongsun years later was the major figure in the Koreagate scandal that followed on the heels of Watergate in which a number of members of Congress were implicated and resigned – one went to prison. Still later Tongsun got caught up in a scandal involving the buying and selling of oil from Saddam's Iraq and was sent to prison.

In my sophomore year I became class president and editor of the Foreign Service Courier, the school's student publication. I never met John F. Kennedy, but he did enter my life for a brief moment in a most unusual way. Three of the girls on the Courier's staff had baked a birthday cake and planned to surprise me with it at a staff meeting. Senator Kennedy and Jackie lived on N St., N.W., just a few blocks from the university's campus. By chance Senator Kennedy came out of his Georgetown townhouse just as the girls walked by and seeing them carrying the cake inquired what the occasion was. Once that was explained to him to the shock and delight of the girls he took a finger and pushed it part way into the cake, tasted it and pronounced the cake "delicious." Then with a smile and a wave of his hand JFK entered his vehicle and was driven away. The girls were beside themselves with excitement when they arrived shortly thereafter at theCourier's office, and we sat around for awhile trying to figure how the cake could be preserved for posterity. In the end the cake was eaten and since it was my birthday I got the piece that bore the hole where JFK's finger entered. Today I wonder if I got some of JFK's DNA in me when I ate that piece, since beyond the grave he has continued to play a role in my life.

Jackie Kennedy attended night classes at Georgetown and took a course in government under Professor Jules Davids, who wrote a first draft of several chapters of what later became JFK's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage. Years later Professor Davids' son, Paul, a prominent Hollywood producer, and I engaged in correspondence about his father's role in launching JFK's famous book that propelled him towards the presidency.

In my second year at Georgetown I was offered a part-time working scholarship at Human Events, the conservative publication. The conservative movement at that time was non-existent. David Franke, my roommate who was also a scholarship holder at Human Events, and I believed that a national conservative movement could be organized and to achieve this we decided to form the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath to keep the oath in the National Defense Education Act. Senator John Kennedy was sponsor of legislation to remove it. The New York Times published a letter-to-editor on February 5, 1960, that I wrote about our group's effort that brought us some publicity, some favorable and some not. Gerald Johnson wrote a scathing article in The New Republic titled, "A Plea for Servility." William Shannon, columnist for the New York Post, interviewed Franke and me and by his reaction we could tell that he was surprised at how dedicated we were to our mission.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Trine Day
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1634241142
• ISBN 13: 9781634241144
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192