Miami University – A Good Man Is Hard to Find — My Search for Ronald H. Tammen, Jr.

Champion Paper & Fibre, Miami University, Psychology Department

The psychology majors

It’s April 19, 2024—71 years since Ronald Tammen disappeared from Miami University—and it’s wonderful to see you again. I’m truly honored that you’ve made a point to stop by this website on this day to see if there are any updates concerning the story of Ronald Tammen. It’s taken us seven years to develop the level of trust we have going on here and I will do my best not to disappoint.

And we do have updates.

Today’s topic has to do with an elephant that’s been occupying the room since this time last year, when I broke the news that, shortly before he disappeared, Ronald Tammen had cashed a check written on Oxford National Bank by a woman named Dorothy Craig, a long-time employee at Champion Paper and Fibre Company, in Hamilton, Ohio. My theory was, and still is, that someone from Champion—quite possibly its President Reuben B. Robertson, Jr.—had helped fund the work of St. Clair Switzer in Miami’s Department of Psychology and had assigned check-writing duties to Dorothy.

But, as I say, there’s a ginormous question wafting in the breeze that’s in need of some attention. It concerns how a person who’d been politely described by one colleague as “somewhat brusque”; another colleague as “difficult,” “very private,” “very military,” and “not overly friendly,”; and another colleague as “not one of everybody’s favorites” would have intersected with the warm, gracious, and perpetually personable Reuben Robertson, Jr., whose principal interest was papermaking and whose office was 11 or so miles from Oxford on North B Street in Hamilton.

No, I’m serious—how did the paths of these two total opposites cross?

Doc Switzer’s life consisted mainly of his faculty position at the university as well as periodic stints with the Air Force Reserves. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, he didn’t socialize much. He wasn’t a member of any men’s groups like the Kiwanis Club or the Rotary Club or the Y. He didn’t seem to have outside hobbies, such as woodworking or photography, nor did he engage in sports like bowling or tennis. He didn’t mentor young children or some other noble cause that would put him in touch with fellow members of his community.

When he was an undergraduate at Miami, St. Clair Switzer had joined a fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and according to a bio written after he died, he served for a time as president. Letters he wrote to mentors and fellow grad students during his young and hungry years sound perfectly congenial. He even had a sense of humor. But people change as they grow older. Some people mellow. Others become full of themselves. Still others, resentful. I think Doc had developed into a toxic blend of the latter two by the time he reached 50, when Ron was a student at Miami.

Doc Switzer wasn’t a chit chatter. He didn’t confide. One of his students said he gave off impatient vibes when she stepped into his office seeking advice. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but I can’t exactly picture him smiling at a stranger on the street or taking a quick break from whatever he was doing to pat a dog on the head. Switzer’s social interactions consisted mainly of the everyday maneuverings of work, whether in Old Main (aka the old Harrison Hall), where the psychology department was located, or on some military base. At the university, he attended departmental meetings, he served on committees, and he taught. While doing so, he tended to make lower-level people feel smaller while kowtowing to the bigwigs.

But despite Doc’s deference to people in power, I can’t envision him picking up a phone and cold-calling Reuben Robertson, Jr., to see if he might be willing to support a government project involving Ron Tammen. He was more of a letter writer than a cold caller, and this wasn’t the sort of ask that could be put into writing. Plus, how would he have known that Reuben Robertson might be a good fit?

No, in order for Doc Switzer to come into contact with Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., or one of the top-tier managers at Champion Paper, I’m inclined to think that it would’ve happened in a manner that was more organic and less, um…weird. Put simply, I think someone probably served as a go-between.

But who? For starters, I think the middleperson would have to be someone who did get out into the community. They’d be someone who genuinely liked people and enjoyed reaching out to a fellow human and getting to know them. In addition to their general outgoing nature, I can think of three primary criteria for this person: 1) I think they’d have to be familiar with Doc Switzer or at least have a warm spot in their heart for Miami’s psychology department; 2) It would be helpful if they served in the military—WWII ideally—with bonus points if they had connections at the tip top levels of national security or intelligence or even the White House; and 3) Most of all, I think they’d have to be on a first-name basis with one or more officials at Champion Paper and Fibre.

I can think of two such individuals.

Before we continue, I’d like to state unequivocally that the two people I’m about to name, now deceased, were well known and highly respected in their fields. Also, we don’t know for sure whether one of these persons stepped in as a middleperson between St. Clair Switzer and Champion Paper and Fibre. We only know that, given their visibility and business connections, it’s possible that one of them was involved. Also, if either of them did provide a personal link between Switzer and Champion Paper, they would have believed they were doing so in service to the U.S. government, as their patriotic duty. Plus, there’s no law against it.

And so, here we go: let’s talk about the two common denominators who had the means and wherewithal to help Doc Switzer get from Point A, a prickly psychology professor in need of funding for a secret government project involving Ronald Tammen, to Point B, or, rather, North B Street, in the Office of the President at Champion Paper and Fibre.

The two people we’ll be discussing today are John F. Mee and John E. Dolibois (pronounced DOLL-uh-boy], both of whom were esteemed alumni of Miami University. Interestingly, both men also happened to be psychology majors when St. Clair Switzer was a member of the faculty.

Note that we’ll be primarily focusing on the period of time leading up to 1953, when Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ron Tammen. To learn more about each man’s life, both of which were full and fascinating, I’ve provided links to their university bios below their background write-ups.

First, a little background on John F. Mee and John E. Dolibois:

John Frederick Mee

John F. Mee was born on July 10, 1908. He grew up on a farm in Darrtown, Ohio, a rural community about 5 miles outside of Oxford. His family was wealthy, thanks in large part to Mee’s grandfather and namesake, who raised stock (cattle and such) and was good with money. But just as money has never solved everything, it managed to instill some father-son tension between Mee and his dad. Mee’s father, R. Kirk Mee I, was a cowboy-hat-wearing character who enjoyed rubbing elbows with politicians great and small. (He looked almost exactly like Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard, which is kind of amazing since he predated that show by more than three decades.) FDR visited their house when Roosevelt was a nominee for vice president. Although Kirk Mee held respectable positions—he was the sergeant at arms for the Ohio Senate under two governors and he even ran for the Ohio Senate himself in 1942—his son John, perhaps unfairly, felt that his father lacked the drive to pursue a career in which he would generate his own wealth. He was always closer to his mother. (You can find photos of the Mee family, including R. Kirk Mee I and John F. Mee as a young man on this webpage.)

Mee was six years and one day younger than St. Clair Switzer, who was born in 1902. As an undergrad at Miami, he’d been an assistant in the psychology department’s experimental laboratory, which is how he and Switzer had gotten to know each other. They were practically contemporaries. Mee graduated from Miami in 1930, just as Switzer was completing his first year as an instructor. Thinking he wanted to be a psychology professor too, Mee went on to obtain a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Maine. He was on track to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology at Ohio State, when something fluky happened. He was visiting the campus to sign up for graduate courses, but first stopped off at the business school to say hello to someone. As it turned out, the business school professors liked him and made an offer he couldn’t refuse. He took classes while serving as placement director at Ohio State. In 1939, Mee was hired as the placement director at Indiana University’s School of Business in Bloomington as well as assistant professor of management. Strangely enough, he didn’t earn his Ph.D. from Ohio State until 20 years later, in 1959, which was…unbelievably late. (To be honest, I thought it was a typo in his bio, but I guess life had gotten in the way for him. That, plus the rules were laxer back then.) Nevertheless, it didn’t seem to tarnish his career, as you’ll soon see.

John F. Mee bio

A photo of John F. Mee from a 1940 news clipping can be found here:

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-indianapolis-star/145625208

John Ernest Dolibois

John E. Dolibois was born on December 4, 1918, in Luxembourg, the youngest of eight children. Tragically, his mother had died of the Spanish flu shortly after his birth, so he never really knew her. Though he recalled his childhood as a happy one, the family experienced a lot of hardship. In 1931, his father decided to start a new life in the United States. John’s oldest sister had moved to the States after marrying an American soldier she’d met during WWI, and his father decided that he and young John should join them. Their ship arrived in New York Harbor on the most iconic day possible—the fourth of July. John and his father settled in the North Hill community of Akron, Ohio, a historically multicultural neighborhood that had been a welcoming destination for immigrants and refugees since WWI. It still is.

Dolibois was a quick study in his new country. He mastered English early on through the sink-or-swim method, and, by high school, he’d managed to rise to the top of his class. He was voted senior class president, and, come graduation time, he was also named valedictorian. (He graduated in 1938 at the age of 19, so he was a little older than his classmates.) Dolibois never passed up an opportunity to praise the organization that he believed helped him adapt so well to his new country: the Boy Scouts. He adored scouting. He became an Eagle Scout—the president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber pinned on his badge—and he went on to help mentor other Boy Scouts for the rest of his life. In an interview conducted in September 2006, he proudly stated that he was still involved in scouting—he was 87—and was the oldest registered “scouter” in his community.

Dolibois continued to excel after high school. His brains and exceptional people skills helped him obtain a four-year scholarship to Miami University. He joined the fraternity Beta Theta Pi, where he would become president of that organization too. Although he was a psychology major, he decided to load up on business courses during his senior year, and, after his graduation in 1942, he was hired as a management trainee with Procter and Gamble.

But the year 1942 had other plans in store for men of a certain age. John Dolibois and John Mee, not to mention St. Clair Switzer and Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., would leave their positions to serve their country in WWII. That momentous war, which we’ll discuss more shortly, would be a turning point for both men.

John E. Dolibois bio

A photo of Dolibois from a 1950 news clipping can be found here:

https://www.newspapers.com/article/madison-county-democrat/145624622

Criterion 1: Ties to Doc Switzer and Miami’s psychology department

John Dolibois

It’s unclear how well John Dolibois might have known Doc Switzer during his undergraduate years. The only thing we know for sure is that Dolibois was a psychology major, so he most likely knew the department chair, Everett Patten, as well as a few other professors in the department. Although it’s probable that he would have met Switzer then, it doesn’t really matter. In 1947, Dolibois was hired as the first alumni secretary for Miami University. It was in his job description to know the university’s programs inside and out as well as any of its funding needs. It was also his job to tie potential alumni donors to those needs. So even if John Dolibois didn’t know St. Clair Switzer all that well from his undergraduate days, and we don’t know that that’s the case, he would have at least been acquainted with him through his position at the university. And if Doc Switzer was experiencing a funding need, John Dolibois would have likely been brought into the loop.

John Mee

We already know that John Mee and St. Clair Switzer knew each other at least somewhat, since Mee was an assistant in the psychology laboratory when Switzer was a newly hired instructor. But I also have evidence that he and Switzer were friends, and that friendship continued until at least July 1950, when Mee wrote a letter to Doc. Among other details, Mee told Switzer that he’d be visiting Darrtown for three weeks in August, and that he planned to help Switzer paint his house during that time. He credited Switzer with influencing his career path in management, telling him with an implied wink, “Looks like you may have started me on a steady job.” In addition, Mee let Doc know that he’d provided a “glowing letter of recommendation” to the University of Tennessee for him, so apparently Doc was putting out feelers again. Finally, Mee had just edited a book, titled “Personnel Handbook,” and Doc had authored the chapter on testing. Mee wanted to bring him up to speed on that endeavor as well.

In 1961, after receiving a promotion to be the Mead Johnson Professor of Management at Indiana University, John Mee donated $1000 to Miami’s psychology department, an amount that would exceed $10,000 in today’s dollars. According to a news article, an accompanying letter he’d written to Switzer and Patten said that: “While he had ‘some very superior teachers’ in many fields at Miami as an undergraduate, ‘the giant step in my education and eventual decision to enter the academic profession’ had resulted from his association with Switzer and Patten in the psychology laboratory.” In 1962, he donated another $500 to Miami’s psychology department.

So, I think we can say with confidence that both John Dolibois and John Mee were well acquainted with St. Clair Switzer and/or Miami’s Department of Psychology at the time that Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ronald Tammen.

Moving on to Criterion 2…

Criterion 2: Ties to WWII and national security, intelligence, or the White House

John Dolibois

John Dolibois had perhaps one of the more extraordinary experiences during WWII, as he would eventually come face to face with some of the most notoriously hard-core Nazis the world has known. Because of his language skills—he was fluent in German, as well as French and Luxembourgish—he was transferred to military intelligence (known as G-2) and sent to Camp Ritchie in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland, to receive specialized training in the interrogation of prisoners of war. (He was one of the celebrated “Ritchie Boys.”) Dolibois was soon part of the Army’s elite group known as the IPW (Interrogation Prisoners of War), and he became so expert in the methods of interrogation that he was called upon to train others in the skill as well.

In May 1945, after V-E Day, Dolibois was chosen for a special assignment: to interrogate some of the highest-level Nazi prisoners in preparation for the first trial at Nuremberg. Working for the Nazi War Crimes Commission, he was stationed at the Central Continental Prisoners of War Enclosure 32, which, serendipitously, was a location he knew well as a child. The POW enclosure had formerly been a resort known as the Palace Hotel of Mondorf-de-Bains, in Luxembourg. When Dolibois arrived, the once magnificent edifice had been made over into a bare-bones prison, with armed guards, barbed wire, and the sparest of accommodations. In an open swipe to the people who were interred there, it was given the nickname Camp Ashcan. Dolibois’ job was to engage with the Nazi prisoners, encouraging them to talk about their horrific deeds throughout the war so that the War Crimes Commission could determine who should be tried before the International Military Tribunal. Dolibois’ people skills came through for him again. Referring to himself as Lieutenant John Gillen—he decided it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to give the Nazis his actual name—he came to be known as a listening ear, earning the prisoners’ trust, and often getting them to dish on each other. Among the prisoners he would come to know were Hermann Goering, Karl Doenitz, Hans Frank, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, Alfred Jodl, and Alfred Rosenberg.

The Nazi prisoners at Camp Ashcan, many of whom interacted with John Dolibois on a regular basis. Hermann Goering, the head of Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, is seated in the front center. Credit: Public Domain

After 24 prisoners had been identified for indictment, they were moved to Nuremberg Prison in preparation for the first trial. Dolibois was transferred there as well and put in charge of prisoner morale. Because of his translation skills, his overall likability, and perhaps a little of the psychology he’d learned in college, he assisted Army psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley as Kelley analyzed the prisoners to ensure they were mentally fit to stand trial. (Kelley’s tragic story is detailed in the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, by Jack El-Hai, which is currently being made into a film starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.) Dolibois left Nuremberg Prison in October 1945, ahead of the first trial, though he attended several of the sessions.

Interestingly, during his time at Camp Ashcan, Dolibois also got to know a man named General “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which oversaw U.S. intelligence activities during the war. In his post-wartime role, Donovan became involved in the interrogation procedures that Dolibois and others were doing. In his book “Pattern of Circles,” Dolibois said that Donovan “spent a lot of time with us. He stressed the techniques of getting and evaluating information. We were urged time and again to study closely the personal relations of the various internees with a view of playing them off against each other.” Donovan, who had a degree from Columbia Law School, also served as assistant to Robert H. Jackson, a Supreme Court justice who was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. After the war, the OSS was disbanded, but reemerged in 1947 as the CIA, though Donovan had moved on to other legal pursuits.

After Dolibois’ time in the war had ended, he went back to Procter and Gamble. He’d been placed in their Fatty Acid Division to handle personnel matters, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was an extrovert of the highest magnitude, and he needed his innate skills as a networker extraordinaire to be put to use. He was approached by a friend with strong Miami connections about a new position that he felt Dolibois would be perfect for: alumni secretary. Dolibois threw his hat into the ring, and of course he got the job, beginning May 1, 1947. Because this was the first time the university had such a position, the people in charge of the purse strings didn’t understand why he’d need a budget to cover the costs of travel and refreshments—two essential line items for anyone who hoped to foster fruit-bearing relations between a university and its graduates. Dolibois soon began giving talks about his experiences in WWII—with provocative titles such as “Recollections of an Interrogator” and “I Knew the Top Nazis”—and donating his speaker earnings to his alumni activities. In doing so, he also managed to build a highly visible brand for himself in communities throughout the tri-state area and well beyond.

Several news articles describing Dolibois’ WWII experiences mentioned that he held a reserve commission as captain, including one article that was written on February 27, 1953. I presume he still held his reserve commission at the time that Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ronald Tammen.

John Mee

John Mee’s experience in WWII focused less on Nazis per se and more on the staffing of a U.S. Army that, in the build-up to America’s entry into the war, had been multiplying exponentially. After stepping away from his responsibilities at Indiana University in the spring of 1941, he was doing for the Army what he did for IU’s graduating business majors: finding the right person for the job. Specifically, his role was the commissioning of officers, which he did in the Office of the Adjutant General in Washington, D.C.

Mee, who started out at the bottom of the ladder, found a way to quickly move up: by making himself into an authority. He studied up on pertinent topics that no one else knew much about…topics like whether a person could become an officer if they’d been convicted of a felony or if they weren’t a natural-born citizen. In an oral history interview he gave in 1985, he said “…then I learned something that I didn’t know. You know, I was a psychologist. People, when they got accustomed to coming to you for one thing, they started coming to you for other things.” As a result of his self-made indispensability, he was put in charge of the appointments section, which, according to Mee, was responsible for the commissioning of officers for the entire Army, “from the military cadets at West Point to the ROTCs to the training courses,” etc.

Mee eventually tired of D.C. though. He didn’t want to have to go back to Indiana University without having seen some overseas action. He requested to be transferred to the Army Air Corps and was named assistant chief of staff in charge of personnel at the European Wing of the Air Transport Command. He later went on to become chief of military personnel in the entire Air Transport Command. By the war’s end, he was a colonel who’d been stationed in Europe, India, China, and the Philippines.

When Mee returned to Indiana after the war, things had changed for him and the other faculty members who’d served. He could no longer live the simple, genteel life of a professor in a quaint college town. Once the military knew where he lived, they didn’t forget.

Said Mee: “…they traipsed up and down the corridors, knocking on the doors, see, because here’s where the knowledge was. And they drew those college professors out of those classrooms to give them knowledge in psychology, botany, _____ business, anything, see. And the college professors came back to their classrooms and offices, but the doors remained open, see. And today, see, in many areas the college professors have one foot on the campus and one foot in the government, or one foot in the firms, you see, and all this. See, the World War II spoiled the dreamy life of a college professor.”

He said that in 1985. Imagine what it was like in 1953.

In 1950, Mee was approached by someone he’d met while he was in the Air Transport Command, a man by the name of Donald Dawson. Although Dawson was born the same year as Mee, he was rather low in the Army’s hierarchy, a second lieutenant compared to Mee’s lieutenant colonel. Nevertheless, Mee was nice to Dawson.

“I took care of him,” he said, and Dawson hadn’t forgotten about that kindness.

After FDR died early in his final term of office, Harry Truman became president. Truman apparently didn’t give a rat’s patooty about military hierarchy as far as the Oval Office was concerned. Somehow, some way, Donald Dawson became one of his six principal assistants.

After his election to a second term, Truman felt he needed new ideas for presidential appointees. He wanted to put politics aside and find the names of actual experts in the various areas of specialization. He turned to Dawson to head up a group that would propose and vet the experts’ names, and in May 1950, John Mee was called upon to serve as the staff director. The group was referred to as the Little Cabinet, and it included such heavy hitters as the deputy undersecretary of state, the assistant attorney general, the assistant secretary of labor, the assistant secretary of the Air Force, and the assistant secretary of the Army.

According to Mee, the group needed to find people to fill hundreds of posts, including the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Civil Service Commission, and many others. Mee would scour his contacts and his contacts’ contacts for the right people with the right credentials and give the name or names to Dawson. Then this convo would happen:

“He’d say, ‘Do you know him?’”

“And I’d say, ‘Yah.’”

“’Well, call him up and see if he’ll serve,’ you see.”

“So I’d call the guy up and he’d…of course, they all say ‘yes’ and that, because everybody wants to have a presidential appointment. And then they’d come in and meet Dawson. And if Dawson approved them, they’d get about ten minutes with President Truman, and never see him again, you see, but then start off to be these other things.“

Donald S. Dawson, who oversaw Truman’s Little Cabinet; John F. Mee served as staff director under Dawson from May 1950 until the end of Truman’s second term in office; Credit: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library

Mee served in this capacity from May 1950 until the end of Truman’s second term, which was officially January 1953, likely a few months before Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ronald Tammen. But that doesn’t mean Washington had forgotten about John Mee or that he’d stopped caring about topics of national import. In early July 1954, Mee was under consideration for the position of assistant secretary of the Air Force. I kid you not. He’d traveled to D.C. to meet on the matter with Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson and Air Secretary Harold Talbott, an aviation engineer and industrialist with strong ties to Dayton, Ohio. (Talbott had worked alongside Orville Wright!) Mee would have accepted the job too—he said so when his possible nomination was made public. To quote the news article:

“’It depends upon my clearance and the approval of the two senators from Indiana,’ Mee said. ‘If everything goes through, and it is agreeable with Indiana University, I will accept.’”

Something must have gotten in the way though because, as it turns out, he didn’t get the job. A guy named Lyle Garlock became assistant secretary instead.

One last thing: Remember John Mee’s letter to Doc Switzer? It was written on July 30, 1950. So, John Mee, who was serving as the staff director of President Truman’s Little Cabinet, had written a letter to Doc Switzer at that time, letting him know that A) he’d be spending three weeks in Darrtown in August, and B) he was still planning to help Doc paint his house. Props for that.

Moving along to Criterion 3…

Criterion 3: Ties to Champion Paper and Fibre

Perhaps the most critical question we need to ask on this blog post is: did John Dolibois and/or John Mee know someone important at Champion Paper and Fibre at the time in which Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ronald Tammen? Because without a previous relationship, there’s no introduction to St. Clair Switzer, and with no introduction to Switzer, well, there’s no check from Dorothy.

John Dolibois

Obviously, Miami University officials knew all about Champion Paper and Fibre Company. The earliest example of a working relationship that I’m able to find is that Alexander Thomson, Sr.—chairman of the board of directors at Champion, son of Champion founder Peter G. Thomson, and husband of Mary Dabney Thomson—was a member of Miami’s Board of Trustees beginning in June 1938. His term was supposed to last until 1947, however he abruptly died from complications of pneumonia one year later, in June 1939. Then there’s Mary Dabney Thomson, who was connected to Champion by way of her marriage to Alexander Thomson, Sr., and who’d served as president of the Western College for Women, just across the road from Miami University, from 1941 to 1945. But those obvious ties precede John Dolibois’ hiring as alumni secretary in 1947, and I doubt that Dolibois knew Alexander and Mary Dabney Thomson when he was a student at Miami.

But Dolibois did know several officials at Champion Paper, and he knew them quite well, thanks to the Boy Scouts. Despite evidence of earlier attempts by others, Dolibois is credited with organizing the first Boy Scout troop in Oxford—Troop #30—soon after he arrived at Miami in the fall of 1938. In 1939, he was named its scoutmaster. (He would have been named scoutmaster sooner, but there was a rule that you had to be 21.) In the summers of 1940 and 1941, during Dolibois’ junior and senior years, he was the camp director for the Fort Hamilton Boy Scout Camp, a 50-acre rental property near Somerville. During that same period, he was hired as a “cubbing commissioner,” and he traveled around Hamilton and organized Cub Scout packs in the elementary schools. He’d been hired for both positions by the Fort Hamilton Boy Scout Council, which oversaw all scout troops in the region, and which, at that time, was led by two Champion officials: Calvin Skillman, who was president of the executive committee, and Alexander Thomson, Jr., who was vice president.

This is probably a very good time to say that Champion Paper LOVED the Scout program. The company believed so hard in scouting that it sponsored its own Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, and it even had its own camp on Darrtown Pike, Camp Chapaco. The company’s news magazine, The Log, celebrated scouting’s 40th and 50th anniversaries with splashy spreads that drew praise from the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA’s) PR director and the regional executive of the BSA’s National Council.

Let’s get back to 1940 and 1941 when Dolibois was by and large working for Calvin Skillman and Alexander Thomson, Jr. It’s pretty obvious who Alexander Thomson, Jr., was: he was Alexander Thomson, Sr.’s and Mary Dabney Thomson’s son, and a vice president of Champion Paper and Fibre. As it turns out, Alexander Sr. had also been a big proponent of scouting, so Alexander Jr. had ostensibly picked up the reins from his father. Sadly, Alexander Jr. passed away from a recurring illness in 1944, five days before his 36th birthday.

Dwight Thomson, son of Alexander Sr.’s brother Logan Thomson and another of Peter G. Thomson’s grandsons, would carry on the Boy Scout tradition—perhaps more enthusiastically than anyone else in the family. In 1950, he served on the development committee for the Fort Hamilton Council’s new camp lodge at Camp Myron Kahn, the council’s official camp that had opened in 1942, and he spoke at its dedication on Sunday, June 24, 1951. He was president of the executive board in 1954 and ‘55, both of which Dolibois sat on. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both Thomson and Dolibois sat on the executive boards of the Fort Hamilton Boy Scout Council and, after 1959, the Dan Beard Council, based in Cincinnati, when the two councils had merged. In 1965, Dwight Thomson was named president of the Dan Beard Council. By that time, his credentials included serving as chair of region IV, which encompassed Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia, and sitting on the National Executive Board.

What I’m trying to say here is that John Dolibois and Dwight Thomson were both very passionate about scouting in the 1950s and 60s (and beyond), and even though I haven’t been able to locate any pics of them sitting at the same table at some 1952 chicken dinner or solemnly standing side by side at some circa 1953 awards ceremony, I have documents putting them on the same council in 1954, with Thomson serving as president. Do I think that John Dolibois, former director at the Fort Hamilton Boy Scout Camp, attended the dedication of Camp Myron Kahn’s new lodge in June of 1951? I do! Do I wish a newspaper photographer had snapped a candid shot of him chatting away with Dwight Thomson as evidence? I wish that very much! Nevertheless, I’m positive they knew each other by the time Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ronald Tammen.

As for Calvin Skillman—Cal to his friends and colleagues—he’d managed to work his way up into the upper echelons of the company despite his not having the last name of Thomson or Robertson. In 1940, while he was presiding over the Fort Hamilton Boy Scout Council, he was the personnel manager at Champion. In 1945, he was supervisor of employee relations. In 1949, he was named assistant director of public relations, working directly under Dwight Thomson, who was vice president in charge of Industrial and Public Relations. Skillman was also serving in an editorial role for The Log during those years. In 1947, he was managing editor, in 1948, he was editor, and in April 1953, at the time when Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ron Tammen, Cal Skillman was still assistant director of PR and one of three editorial advisors for The Log. The other two were Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., and Dwight Thomson.

Something else I find interesting about Cal Skillman is that he was in the same class as Dorothy Craig at Hamilton High School—the graduating class of 1920. Granted, Dorothy dropped out after her sophomore year, but I’m sure that the two of them knew each other fairly well, especially since they’d worked for the same employer, in the same building, for years.

I’ve made a couple other discoveries worth noting about Champion Paper and Miami University—discoveries that happened long after Dorothy Craig wrote a check to Ron Tammen. One is that Champion Paper and Fibre was a leading fundraiser for Miami University’s Hamilton campus in 1966. Remember Karl Bendetsen, the man who’d overseen the deplorable internment camps that imprisoned Japanese Americans during WWII, who went on to become president of Champion Paper after Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., was killed in a traffic accident? Bendetsen organized a fundraising effort in which Champion Paper offered matching funds of up to $250,000 toward the university’s million-dollar campaign.

Another fascinating tidbit is that Karl Bendetsen’s former home, which had been nearly decimated in a fire on January 24, 1961, was rebuilt and, according to information gleaned from two news articles, had been donated to the Miami University Foundation in 1969 by the Champion Paper Foundation, a charitable arm of the company that was established in 1952. The university used Bendetsen’s former home as a conference center for several years before selling it in 1973.

John F. Mee

We’ve already established that John Mee was the director of placement in the business schools of two large state universities—first at The Ohio State University and then at Indiana University, where he was also a professor of management. The job of a placement officer is to get to know people in corporations and industries where students can seek employment. He was from SW Ohio. He would have made it his business to know whom to call on at Champion Paper and Fibre.

Also, featured on page 777 of John Mee’s “Personnel Handbook” is a reproduced letter from Reuben Robertson, Sr., to “All Champion Employees.” The letter was used as an example of the proper way for a business to communicate with its employees about controversial issues. (In Reuben Sr.’s case, he was discussing the Taft-Hartley Act.) So again, John F. Mee was well acquainted with the powers that be at Champion Paper.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Of course he was. But did he know anyone there really well, on a first-name basis?”

I believe he did, and evidence indicates that he knew the big cheese himself, Reuben Robertson, Jr. What’s more, I’d venture to say that, if John Mee had contacted Reuben Robertson, Jr., in early 1953 about the possibility of funding a government project led by his friend Lt. Col. St. Clair Switzer, Reuben might have felt as if he actually owed John a favor.

Here’s why:

John Mee had been named staff director for Truman’s Little Cabinet beginning in May 1950. Shortly thereafter, he was in Washington, D.C. brainstorming names for presidential appointees to run by Donald Dawson. In November 1950, the Wage Stabilization Board was completed. Do you remember who was appointed to the Wage Stabilization Board? Reuben Robertson, Jr., for one.

I believe that John Mee was the person who suggested Reuben Robertson, Jr.’s name for consideration to that board, and I also believe that John Mee was the person who called Reuben on the phone to ask if he’d be interested in serving. I also believe that this appointment made Reuben Robertson, Jr., much more of a household name to other agencies in need of smart and savvy people. After serving on the Wage Stabilization Board, Reuben was invited to be part of the Commerce Department’s Business Advisory Council (January 1953), the Mutual Security Agency’s lead representative in Germany to assess the economic situation there (February 1953), a member of a Hoover Commission task force to study the organization of the Department of Defense (January 1954), and last but not least, deputy secretary of defense (July 1955).

Thankfully, we actually have evidence to support this theory. Here’s a link to the subjects in the files of Martin L. Friedman at the Harry S. Truman Library.

Martin L. Whonow?, you may be asking. Sorry, I realize I’m introducing his name late in the game, but Martin L. Friedman was Donald Dawson’s go-to assistant on the Little Cabinet. Don’t worry—this takes nothing away from John Mee, who was still the staff director and still very much overseeing the process by which the names of potential appointees were added to the pool of candidates. According to an oral interview, Friedman appeared to handle most of the security issues—running the names of prospective nominees by the FBI and figuring out what to do based on the results. The reason I’m bringing up his name now, so late in the post, is that most of Friedman’s file folders have to do with the commissions and boards that required the Little Cabinet’s input. In box 7 is the Wage Stabilization Board.

So, I think it’s safe to conclude that the Little Cabinet was responsible for the presidential appointees on the Wage Stabilization Board, which means that John Mee was the person who called Reuben Robertson on the phone and asked him if he wanted to join. You might say that Reuben Robertson, Jr., entered the national arena thanks to John Mee.

I’m going to start wrapping things up here, even though I’m skipping over one additional criterion—that of a potential association with Oxford National Bank. In part 1 of my April 19, 2023, post, I talked about how both A.K. Morris (president of the bank) and Don Shera (vice president) had extremely close ties to Miami University that, at times, ventured into conflict-of-interest territory. There were a couple other people at the university with close ties to the bank as well, one of whom was Ron Tammen’s academic adviser, J.B. Dennison, who was on the bank’s board of directors when Ron disappeared.

I’d simply like to add that John F. Mee’s grandfather had been one of the founders of the Oxford National Bank. John’s younger brother, R. Kirk Mee II, would sit on its board of directors beginning in 1956.

There’s one final discovery about Oxford National Bank that I can’t keep to myself, even though it’s a little off topic. And that discovery is: At the time that Ron Tammen disappeared, one long-time Oxford National Bank employee had two sons, both of whom had very close ties to the FBI. One son had worked as a special agent in the Cincinnati field office for two years before quitting in 1952, the year before Ron disappeared. The other son, who was older, had become a special agent for the FBI in the late 1940s and he would continue his life-long career with them in Washington, D.C.

You’d think that they’d have an interest in Ron’s story, especially since both men were Miami graduates.

OK, I’ve probably said too much.

****

As always, I welcome your comments about any of the above. Because we are discussing people who are well known and because lots of people will be reading this post, I will be a little more selective in posting comments publicly. If I don’t post your comment on the website, I will respond to you directly by email. Thank you!

Joe Cella, Miami University, Potential Tammen Sightings, Ron Tammen's Personal Life, The Investigations

A deep dive into what Carl Knox, Doc Boone, H.H. Stephenson, and others said about Ron’s disappearance in ‘The Phantom of Oxford,’ circa 1976

After my most recent blog post about when Carl Knox stopped investigating Ron Tammen’s disappearance, a reader and I were discussing the 1976 documentary produced and narrated by Ed Hart of Dayton’s Channel 2. For those people who haven’t watched it yet, I encourage you to do so. It isn’t very long—less than 1/2 hour total. I’ve embedded the two parts on my home page, but you can also link to them here:

The Phantom of Oxford

Part 1

Part 2

What’s special about this documentary is that key people tied to the investigation in 1953 have given on-camera interviews in 1976, and what they say is revealing. This got me to thinking that I should transcribe their quotes and post them online. That way we won’t forget the things they said in light of any new information that we’re able to uncover.

As it turns out, creating a transcript of their quotes wasn’t that time-consuming. I recalled that I’d found a transcript of the program in Miami University Archives early in my investigation and had filed it away. I’ll discuss that transcript in more detail a little later, since I believe it reveals something about the person or persons who created it. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t Ed Hart.)

And so, here you go…the quotes from The Phantom of Oxford along with my thoughts below several of them:

Quotes from The Phantom of Oxford

PART 1

Joe Cella, Hamilton Journal News reporter [0:06]

[Opening]

“I believe Ron Tammen voluntarily walked off campus. I believe he’s somewhere out in the world today…alive, under an assumed name. Everything has been…erased with him…uh…and I believe he’s still out there.”

Oh, man, me too, Joe, with one slight difference: I think Ron was driven off campus. But other than that, I totally agree with you, 100 percent, that Ron Tammen was still very much alive in 1976.

Charles Findlay, Ron Tammen’s roommate [5:40]

[Describing his return to his and Ron’s room in Fisher Hall on Sunday night, April 19, 1953]

“I came back to campus, to Fisher Hall, and went to my room as normal and the light was on in the room. And in the room, the door was unlocked, and Ron’s book was open on his side of the desk. And uh…the desk chair was pulled back as though he got up and went somewhere. So I thought not too much about that and I studied I think till eleven o’clock that night. I got back to school about nine o’clock, went to bed as usual, and got up the next morning and didn’t see Ron in his bed. I still wasn’t too excited about it because I thought he might have spent the night at the fraternity house.”

For the life of this blog, I’ve been reporting that Chuck had arrived back at Fisher Hall at around 10:30 p.m. I’ve reported that time because A) that was the time reported by Joe Cella in his one-year anniversary article in the Hamilton Journal News on April 22, 1954, and B) Carl Knox had written the time 10:30 on one of his note pages along with the words “Light on – Door open but he never returned.” Carl didn’t say what happened at 10:30, but I presumed that’s when Chuck had arrived at the room, as corroborated by Cella. I’m now wondering about that time. This has nothing to do with Cella, by the way, who was an excellent reporter. But it might have something to do with what someone had told Cella when he was writing his one-year anniversary article.

In the video, Chuck says that he returned to Miami at 9 p.m. I figured that, with 23 years having transpired since he’d recounted the story, that detail may have become a little fuzzy. However, when I went back to read the earliest news articles, I found this in the April 28, 1953, Miami Student, which was overseen by journalism professor Gilson Wright, who also reported on the case: “Tammen, a counselor in Fisher Hall, disappeared sometime between 8 and 9 on a Sunday night.” How do they know it was before 9 p.m.? It may just be sloppy reporting, but could Chuck Findlay have arrived at 9, which is how they would have been able to provide that timestamp? And if that’s the case, what would the 10:30 signify in Carl Knox’s note? Of course, it may indeed be the time of Chuck’s arrival, but what if it was something else—such as the time Ron had walked back to the dorms with Paul (not his real name) and Chip Anderson or the time someone may have spotted Ron sitting in a car with a woman before driving off? Something to ponder…

Addendum: I’ve added Carl Knox’s note to the bottom of this post.

Charles Findlay [6:36]

[Describing the next day, Monday, April 20…]

“And it was sometime later that afternoon, the evening, we had a counselors meeting. And that’s when I think we discussed a little more, a little further, as to what, where Ron was and what the situation was.”

Charles Findlay [7:40]

[Describing when it first hit him that Ron probably wasn’t coming back]

“I think probably the first three or four days I wasn’t concerned. But I really realized he wasn’t coming back, he wasn’t coming back as he normally would, when the ROTC was out and they were dragging the pond, I get concerned. Cause I remember sitting at my desk and looking out the window and watching them drag the pond…and that was kind of an eerie feeling.”

Ed Hart: Someone must have thought that there was foul play involved. Did you?

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t think so because at that time, even now, you go back and you think about a college student, what 19, 20 years of age. How do you make an enemy? And who would think that a college student would have much money?”

As we’ve discussed in the past, if Ron was gay, then there was a chance that he could have been the victim of a hate crime. However, because we now have evidence that the FBI expunged Ron’s fingerprints in 2002 due to the Privacy Act, that tells us that Ron was still alive in 2002. (Per the FBI: only the subject of the record can request an expungement of that record.) Therefore, I don’t believe Ron was a victim of foul play.

Jim Larkins, fellow sophomore counselor in Fisher Hall [8:40]

[Describing why he felt it didn’t make sense for Ron to run away]

“He is just the last person that you would ever expect just to merely take off uh… for as far as I was concerned there would be no reason for his having done it. From all that we could…all that we knew about him and could learn about him he just seemed to have everything going for him.”

Carl Knox, dean of men at Miami University, who oversaw the university’s investigation into Ron’s disappearance [9:33]

[Describing students in the 1950s and a little about Ron as a person]

“Much more it was known as the apathetic period of time. It was certainly uh…far different from the Sixties but uh…it was generally a fairly happy time, sort of normal activities taking place. This young man was uh…well appreciated around campus because of his musical talent. He played bass with the Campus Owls uh…he did and was one of few people on campus who had a car permit in order to transport that bass viol around. And one of the oddities of the thing because he prized it so highly was the fact his car was found locked up with the bass inside and uh…no Ron.”

In his role as the dean of men, Carl Knox was responsible for all male students on campus. He made a point of knowing the students, especially the ones who were most active. I’ve been told that he likely knew Ron Tammen, though probably not very well. H.H. Stephenson, who was an employee of Carl’s, would have known Ron a lot better. We’ll get to H.H. in a minute.

Ronald Tammen, Sr., Ron’s father [10:52]

[Describing his perceptions of the last time he saw Ron, who’d been in Cleveland playing with the Campus Owls the weekend before he disappeared]

“He just seemed to have fun the whole time he was there. There was never anything at all that would indicate there was a (laugh) he had a problem or a thing was bothering him. Nothing at all.”

That’s how Ron’s father may have perceived his son, but there was obviously a lot more going on inside that “fun” veneer. If something was bothering Ron, especially if he was dealing with the sorts of stresses that I think he was dealing with—his grades, his finances, his sexuality—I doubt that he would have gone to his father, who was known to be decidedly not fun in certain situations.

Joe Cella [11:25]

[Describing his impression of how the investigation into Ron’s disappearance was conducted]

“I wasn’t too keen on the initial investigation that went on. It was very abruptly done. To me there was no thorough investigation. And that’s the reason I stayed with it. Over a period uh…of years that followed, we were able to accumulate a lot more, much more, than we ever had initially.”

THANK YOU, Joe, for sticking with it! It’s because of the leads you chased down that we’ve been able to get to the place we are now.

PART 2

Dr. Garret Boone, physician and Butler County coroner [0:16]

[Describing his experience when he tried to notify Miami officials at that time about Ron’s visit to his office in November 1952 to have his blood type tested]

“On one occasion…uh…led to some uh…sharp words between a…uh…between me and two Miami University personnel who did not appreciate uh…my uh…being concerned about the problem of his disappearance.”

Ed Hart: Why?

“Well, I really don’t know. Uh…they might have been bored with me and maybe they got fed…been fed up by reporters and TV men, I’m not sure…which.”

Wouldn’t you love to know who the two Miami personnel were? Doc Boone may have given us a couple clues. What I’m getting from his comment is A) he went to the university in person, since he was ostensibly talking with two people at the same time; and B) the personnel seemed to be the types of people who frequently dealt with “reporters and TV men.” Therefore, it sounds as if one of the two persons handled media relations. Was the other person Carl Knox? It’s my understanding that he was a soft-spoken man who employed a velvet-hammer type of leadership style. For this reason, it’s difficult to imagine him engaging in “sharp words” with a public official who was offering to lend his assistance in the investigation.

Ronald Tammen, Sr. [1:20]

[Describing his impressions of the investigation]

“I was happy that we got the FBI to be involved because of the broad coverage. But uh…I can’t say that I’ve ever been happy about anything that’s happened in the case, because nothing’s ever happened.”

Ronald Tammen, Sr. [1:51]

[Describing the effect Ron’s disappearance had on Mrs. Tammen]

“So much with the wife that uh…big problems occurred with her health. It was just beyond her…she just couldn’t take care uh she couldn’t take it and her health started failing and that was…that was the cause, I believe, of her death was his disappearance and no evidence or solutions at any time.”

This is probably Mr. Tammen’s most revealing statement. First, he refers to Mrs. Tammen as “the wife,” which is about as impersonal as he could be. Maybe it was how they talked in the 1950s, but in the ’70s? I’d think he could have spoken more affectionately…how about “my wife,” or “Ron’s mother,” or, best of all, “Marjorie”?

Mr. Tammen’s biggest slip was when he said “she just couldn’t take care uh she couldn’t take it.” As we’ve discussed, Marjorie was an alcoholic for years before Ron disappeared. As you can imagine, his disappearance didn’t help in that regard. When Mr. Tammen said she “couldn’t take care,” I believe he was about to give away too much information about her condition. Was he going to say that she couldn’t take care of herself? Their two younger children, Robert and Marcia? I don’t know. But he caught himself just in time.

Carl Knox [2:40]

[Describing why Ron’s disappearance had stood out for him throughout his career]

“On other campuses where I’ve been located there have been disappearances and there have been tragedies, but nothing which has sort of popped out of…

No background of explanation, no way of reasonable…uh anticipation, but just suddenly happening and there you were with uh…uh…egg on your face, deepfelt concerns and yet uh…no answers for any part of it.”

Ed Hart: And yet something tells you Ron Tammen is alive?

“Yes, I feel this. I feel it…keenly.”

I believe Carl Knox had discovered information about Tammen’s life and disappearance that he was not making public, likely after having been told by someone in a position of authority. Remember how he’d had a buzzer installed on his secretary’s desk for Tammen-related calls? Or how his secretary was given a list of words that she was instructed not to say to reporters? And we’ve since learned that he’d discovered that Dorothy Craig of Champion Paper and Fibre had written a check to Ron shortly before he disappeared. When asked 23 years later if Ron Tammen was alive, he said, “Yes, I feel this. I feel it…keenly.” This tells me that Carl had some indication that Ron was in ostensibly trustworthy hands when he left Miami’s campus. Like the U.S. government’s perhaps?

Barbara Spivey Jewell, daughter of Clara Spivey, who was at her mother’s house in Seven Mile, Ohio, when a young man who looked like Tammen showed up late at night on Sunday, April 19, 1953 [3:33]

[Describing when her mother and she notified the Oxford police about the young man’s visit]

“Well, we saw his picture in the paper about a week afterwards and my mother said, well that’s the boy that was here at our door. And so we went to Oxford to the police station and talked to them. But uh…I was at the door with my mother also and I’m um…positive it was him.”

It was actually two months later, not a week. Also, a third person in the room, Barbara’s eventual second husband, Paul Jewell, told Detective Frank Smith in 2008-ish that he was “absolutely confident” it wasn’t Ron. He thought it was a local ruffian.

Barbara Spivey Jewell [4:07]

[Describing whether she’s still convinced that it was Ron]

“I would still say that it was him. I’m positive. I can still see his dark eyes and his dark hair.”

H.H. Stephenson, Miami housing official who saw a young man who looked like Ron dining in Wellsville, NY, on August 5, 1953 [4:44]

[Describing his experience in the Wellsville, NY, restaurant]

“When my eyes would look toward him I would find he was looking at me. And I had that feeling that uh… that he was sort of looking right through me. Uh… for some reason uh… that I’ll never know I said nothing about uh… the fact that I thought maybe this young man was Ron Tammen. I didn’t speak of it to my wife during the meal. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

H.H. Stephenson (he went by Hi, short for Hiram) knew Ron Tammen, whereas Mrs. Spivey didn’t. In 1953, Hi was the director of men’s housing and student employment. He would have interviewed Ron for his counselor’s position. He also gave Ron his permit to have a car on campus. Most of us wonder why Hi didn’t walk up to the young man when he had the chance, and he obviously would agree. But Hi told his boss, Carl Knox, the next day. Why didn’t the university follow up on that potentially big lead?

Sgt. Jack Reay, Dayton Police Department, Missing Persons [6:30]

[Describing his check on Ron’s Social Security number in 1976]

“When I checked with the state, this uh…Social Security came back negative. There was no record of it, which would indicate that, in the past few years, since we’ve had the computer, uh…and things have been entered into the computer, there’s been no activity with that Social Security number.”

The fact that Ron never used his Social Security number again is incredibly important. This means that he didn’t just run away to be with some forbidden love interest, be they female or male. If he lived—and we have evidence that he did until at least 2002—then he had to have gotten a new Social Security number, which is extremely difficult to do. There is a list of circumstances for which a person can request a new Social Security number and running away to become a new person isn’t on the list.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a transcript of The Phantom of Oxford in Miami’s University Archives. I’m missing the first page, but I have the rest of the pages, which end at 23. The transcript appears to be written by someone in the business. It’s typewritten in two columns. On the lefthand side is a description of each video clip (photos, videotaped interviews, B-roll, and reenactments) and on the righthand side is a description of the audio (narration and interviews) that accompanies that clip. I’d always thought that the transcript was provided by someone with the TV station to the university, but now I don’t think so. I think someone affiliated with the university typed it up because they only cared about the narrative and the interviews with people tied to the university. There is one person whom they didn’t care about—Sgt. Jack Reay. Even though he wasn’t involved in the Tammen investigation, he was a great resource and had a lot to say about missing person cases. The only words typed on page 21 are “MISSING PERSON THEORY,” which covers all of Sgt. Reay’s air time. I feel that his comments are elucidating too, which is why I’ve included them here.

Sgt. Jack Reay [7:16]

[Describing how rare it is for a person to disappear completely without a trace]

“It’s very difficult for a person to just drop completely out of uh…civilization and not somebody else know who he is or where he is or something about him…or him to relate back to some of his early childhood. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying that, percentage-wise, for someone to just completely drop out would be very small in comparison with the missings and runaways.”

Agree. I think it would have been impossible for Ron to have carried it off without A LOT of help.

Sgt. Jack Reay [8:00]

[Describing what kind of person would voluntarily leave family and friends forever]

“If somebody is really set on…getting lost, I think that they can, but they’re going to have to be a very strong individual. And as far as a 19-year-old…I don’t know. It takes an awful lot of willpower to sit back and say, there’s nothing back there that you ever want to be related to again.”

Also agree. But, as we’ve discussed numerous times, the 1950s were different. If Ron was gay, it would have been extremely difficult for him, especially if he was at risk of being outed. I honestly think that, in his 19-year-old brain, he decided that his family would be better off thinking that he was dead as opposed to being gay.

Sgt. Jack Reay [8:29]

[Describing the potential of identifying Ron’s remains decades later if he’d been a victim of foul play]

“If he was a normal individual and never really had any contacts with any type of…law enforcement or any type of identifying thing [mumbled], it would be a little bit difficult to identify that individual today. In fact it would be very difficult.”

Marcia Tammen’s DNA is on file in CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System. If there is ever a discovery of unidentifed human remains, law enforcement should be able to ascertain if it’s Ron. But, as discussed above, I also don’t think he was a victim of foul play.

Ronald Tammen, Sr. [8:42]

[Describing his thoughts with regard to ever seeing his son again]

“I…I have uh…have never lost hope that sometime, somehow something would come up so we’d have some evidence of either his death or his disappearance or the reason, reasons for it or…I’ve never given up. In fact a lot of times I’ve thought that uh…you know, he’s gonna show up. He’s gonna show up here pretty soon.”

😔

Joe Cella [9:20]

[Describing his thoughts with regard to ever finding Ronald Tammen]

“I don’t know whether I would recognize him today if…if I saw him, but uh… Richard gave me a photograph of Ron and uh…he gave it to me 23 years ago, believe it or not. I’ve been carrying it in my wallet…hoping some day in my travels around the country that, you know, who knows…it might be him coming down the street.”

I have it on excellent authority that Joe carried Ron’s photo in his wallet for the rest of his life.

**********

ADDENDUM

Carl Knox’s note in which he’s written the time of 10:30 but doesn’t mention Chuck Findlay’s name

Carl Knox Investigation, Joe Cella, Miami University

When did Carl Knox stop looking for Ron Tammen?

You guys, I’ve had a serious change of heart about something pertaining to the Ron Tammen case. It has to do with the length of time that had transpired before Carl Knox, Miami’s dean of men who was tasked with conducting the university’s investigation into Ron’s disappearance, stopped looking for him. This was despite the fact that Ron’s family and friends, not to mention Miami students, faculty, and staff; alumni; people living in the tri-state area; and anyone else who might have happened upon Ron’s story, were still devouring any piece of information the university could provide.

Recently, I had an email conversation with a reader on the topic of Dorothy Craig, and it occurred to me that, even though I’ve probably alluded to my evolved feelings on this website, I hadn’t really put them into actual words. It’s time to fix that.

What I used to think

In the past, I’ve cited two occurrences that enabled us to establish a before/after timeframe to delineate when Carl Knox had stopped looking for Ron. Mrs. Clara Spivey of Seven Mile, Ohio, provided the “before” date, the latest date on record when I believed Carl was still looking for him. Two months after Ron had disappeared, Mrs. Spivey had contacted investigators with the claim that a young man matching Ron’s description had shown up on her doorstep late at night on April 19, 1953, looking disheveled and confused and seeking directions to a nearby bus stop. At first, the time was reported as being around 11 p.m., but then the reporter, Miami journalism professor Gilson Wright, had changed it to midnight for subsequent articles. Mrs. Spivey had come forward shortly after June 20, 1953, after having read a recent article in the Hamilton Journal News in which Wright had basically retold the story and said there were no new leads. Oscar Decker of the Oxford Police had embraced Spivey’s story and the media were thereby alerted.

“It was a blustery night, with some snow flurries, and traffic was light,” Decker said. “He could have easily walked the 11 miles from Oxford to Seven Mile in two and a half or three hours.” (I beg to differ, chief, but please, do go on.)

The paper then paraphrased him saying that “If the youth in question was Tammen, it reinforces the theory that he suffered a sudden attack of amnesia.”

Because the university was publishing this new development in the Miami Student, it appeared to me as if Carl was still looking for clues as late as June 29, 1953.

The “after” date, the earliest date on record when we could conclude Carl was not still looking, was, in my view, one day after Miami housing official H.H. Stephenson had returned from his vacation in upstate New York. On August 5, 1953, Stephenson was having lunch in a hotel restaurant with his wife, in Wellsville, NY, when he was convinced that he spotted Ron, whom he’d actually known at Miami, eating at a table with several other young men. Weirdly enough, H.H. didn’t approach the young man at that moment, and by the time he returned to the dining room to find out if it was indeed Ron, he was too late. The young men had left.

According to a 1976 article by Hamilton Journal News reporter Joe Cella, Stephenson had told university officials—probably Carl himself—about his experience the next day, on August 6. However, as far as I can tell, Carl didn’t follow up on this lead. He didn’t call the hotel in Wellsville or notify the FBI or anything else he might have done to see if he could track down the young man. Likewise, unlike their reaction when Mrs. Spivey had stepped forward, university officials had kept H.H.’s potential sighting away from news reporters. Joe Cella had to chase that lead down himself 23 years later.

As a result, my earlier hypothesis was that Carl Knox had stopped looking for Ron Tammen sometime between June 29 and August 6, 1953, which I felt was surprisingly soon after Ron had disappeared.

What I think now

I think it was way sooner.

Why I’ve changed my mind

Carl was doing all the right things early in his investigation—conducting interviews, compiling notes, coordinating a campus search, talking to bank officials, and working with law enforcement. Best of all, he was following leads. If someone gave him the name of a person who might know something—someone like, oh, I don’t know…Doc Switzer, for example?—Carl would dutifully write down that person’s name on his pad of paper and contact them.

Another example was when Carl had jotted down the name of a girl Ron used to date as a freshman, Joan Ottino, along with the names of two of her family members. Joan had moved to Denver, Colorado, to attend nursing school over one year earlier, but Carl was undeterred by the distance. A week and a day after Ron disappeared—April 27, 1953—Carl had sent a telegram to Joan, asking “SHOULD YOU HEAR FROM, OR SEE, RONALD H. TAMMEN, PLEASE WIRE OR PHONE COLLECT.”

See what I mean? He’s not simply going through the motions to make it appear as if he’s doing something. He’s really doing something.

On May 4, 1953, an article appeared in the Hamilton Journal News informing readers that several of Ron’s fraternity brothers had recently traveled to Cincinnati in response to a landlord who thought her new tenant looked like Ron’s photo. Unfortunately, she was mistaken. Although the article doesn’t say this, I have it on excellent authority that the person driving those Delts to Cincinnati was Carl Knox. This means that, shortly before May 4, 1953, Carl Knox had been accepting phone tips and contacting his back-up witnesses and hitting the road in search for Ron. I’ve also learned that he was gathering info from his passengers on the drive to Cincy and back as well. It was on that car trip that Carl Knox learned of Paul’s (not his real name) and Chip Anderson’s late-night walk home from the Delt house to Symmes and Fisher Halls after song practice the night Ron disappeared.

But do you know what? That’s also roughly the point in time when the urgency in finding Ron Tammen seemed to wane for Carl. And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t discovering new information. Although we don’t know precisely when he discovered the information about Dorothy Craig’s check, I think it had to have been early in his investigation. Dorothy’s name is written at the top of a page of scribbled notes that establish what Ron was doing before he disappeared. It’s the sort of info an investigator would collect on day one—the condition of the room, an hour-by-hour breakdown of where he was, that sort of stuff. It could be that his note about Dorothy’s check was added at the top on a later date, though, even if that were the case, I’d still think it would have been early on.

I think Carl was instantly intimidated by Dorothy Craig’s check. Something about it—Was it the amount? Was it her powerful employer?—may have astonished him so much that he immediately stopped putting any further details into writing. I’ve thought for some time that as Carl was being informed by the bank official about the check, it was the pivotal point in which he’d halted his investigation. Now I’m thinking: if Carl had learned about Dorothy Craig’s check before May 4—and my hunch is that he had—maybe he did look into it, and someone else had put a stop to that part of his investigation. Maybe they said something like: “Look, Carl, if you want to drive to Cincinnati to check out the landlord’s tenant, fine, knock yourself out, but don’t go near Dorothy Craig.” No matter what happened or how, I think that Dorothy Craig’s check factored heavily into the reason the university soon lost interest in Ron’s case.

And let’s not forget about Dr. Garret Boone, the cranky Hamilton physician whose office Ron visited in November 1952 to have his blood type tested. In 1973, reporter Joe Cella had revealed that Boone had attempted to notify university officials about Ron’s visit but had been rebuffed. Although we don’t know exactly when Dr. Boone attempted contacting the university, I think it was also early.

An excerpt from the 1953 Hamilton, Ohio, telephone directory with Garret Boone’s entry in bold and all caps; click on image for a closer view

As Boone told Cella, “I offered the information (the medical file card contents) to local authorities at the time, but it was always discounted.”

His use of the phrase “at the time” sounds as if he didn’t wait around for two months until approaching them, as Mrs. Spivey had done. Mrs. Spivey attributed her tardiness to the fact that she hadn’t seen the story in April and had only been reminded of her front-porch visitor after reading Gilson Wright’s June 20 article stating Tammen was still missing and there were no new leads. Dr. Boone’s situation was different though. In addition to being a practicing family physician, Boone was the county coroner, which means that he was an elected official. It was his job to keep up on the news of Butler County, especially anything having to do with a potentially life-and-death matter regarding one of its citizens. He would have seen the April news articles and he knew the importance of stepping forward as early as possible in such cases.

But when he did, university officials—I’m guessing Carl was one of them—had zero interest in what he had to say. That doesn’t sound like the old Carl—the one from before May 4. This tells me Doc Boone likely contacted them shortly after that date, after he’d had time to rifle through his files for Tammen’s medical card.

By then, Carl Knox was assuming a more passive role in the investigation and letting Oxford police chief Oscar Decker take over. When Mrs. Spivey’s potential Tammen sighting was announced on June 29, 1953, it was Decker who was the spokesperson ballyhooing the news.

And so, at the moment, I think Carl Knox and Miami University were no longer investigating Ron’s case by May 4, 1953—two weeks and a day after Ron went missing. Of course, if we ever find evidence that Doc Boone had reached out to university officials earlier than that day, we’re going to have to push our date up even further.

Champion Paper & Fibre, Miami University

I’m like 99 percent sure that the check Dorothy Craig wrote to Ron wasn’t for a gig

Hi, how goes it? It’s been a while since we last chatted. I’m still researching a bunch of questions in Tammen world and beyond, but I thought…what the hey? Why not provide you with an update regarding a relatively small question to help kick off the weekend? Why not rule out one possible theory in a vexingly long list of them?

This post has to do with Dorothy Craig, the long-time Champion Paper and Fibre employee who’d written a check to Ron Tammen shortly before he disappeared. We don’t know the date of the check. We don’t know the amount of the check. Most significantly, we don’t know why the check was written. However, what we can be sure of is that a representative of Oxford National Bank had told Carl Knox about said check and with that new bit of intel, Carl had scribbled the following question at the top of the ridiculously small notepad that he was using to conduct his investigation: “Where was it cashed?”

Those four words told us that Dorothy had written the check to Ron and not the other way around. So as mad as I am at Carl for not providing any more of the details that he’d no doubt been hearing on the other end of the phone line, he at least managed to put that into writing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: thanks, Carl!

When I presented this information for the first time in April 2023, a few of us threw out some possible reasons for the check, and one of the more popular ideas was that perhaps Dorothy had hired Ron and a few of his musician friends for a gig—maybe she’d rented out a hall for a bash she was throwing or perhaps she hired them for a church thing. Because that was something else we’d learned about Dorothy—in addition to her family and her friends and her job at Champion Paper, she was all about her church.

Dorothy and her husband Henry were members of the St. Paul Evangelical and Reformed Church, located on Campbell Avenue, between North 7^th and 8^th Streets, in Hamilton. (The building’s still there, but it’s now being used by another congregation.) But Dorothy was no “strictly Sundays” kind of congregant. Church was front and center in her life, and she was called upon frequently to serve.

Credit: Google Maps; The former St. Paul Evangelical and Reformed Church

In 1950, Dorothy was president of their adult Bible study group, which also hosted fundraisers to help pay for the church’s Sunday school equipment and building repairs. For one of the fundraisers, she oversaw the publication of a church cookbook, which couldn’t have been easy, what with her needing to corral content providers, dole out tasks, and make sure deadlines were being met—not to mention, after it was in print, having to get out there and sell sell sell. She planned the group’s annual picnic too. In February of 1953, not long before she wrote the check to Ron, she was elected to the church’s Board of Trustees.

The two take-homes from that previous paragraph are: 1) Dorothy Craig helped write a church cookbook in 1950, and if you happen to see it on eBay or anywhere else, could you pulleeeze let me know so that I can buy it and post it on this website?; and 2) People who attended St. Paul would have known Dorothy Craig quite well—so well, in fact, that many probably called her by her nickname…Dot.

If you’re thinking that that might be how Ron would have known Dorothy, alas, no. I’m not sure how much church Ron attended, but when he did attend, he went to the Presbyterian church in Oxford.

But there was someone else who attended St. Paul—someone whom Dorothy would have been far more inclined to contact if she ever needed to book a band. That person was Franz E. Klaber, a German immigrant who’d made a very big name for himself in Hamilton and throughout the region with his eight-piece Franz Klaber Orchestra. Their forte was polkas and other German folk music, but Franz wasn’t afraid to try other genres too.

The Klaber family had been members of St. Paul beginning at least in the late 1930s, and the family remained members after Franz Sr. passed away in 1963. Of course they’d play for church events. In fact, Franz and his family played at the St. Paul Church lawn social in August 1953. Therefore, hiring a band would have been a no-brainer for Dorothy Craig. I’m quite sure that Franz would be the first person she would’ve asked. To be honest, I think he would have been hurt if she hadn’t.

Franz Klaber’s sons, daughter, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren are active in the band—now known as the Klaberheads. You can listen to them here. https://youtu.be/PTCO3isgPv8

And where does that leave us regarding Ron Tammen? We still don’t know how a middle-aged woman whose life revolved around family, church, and work at a paper mill 12 miles from Oxford would have intersected with a sophomore business major who was about to become one of the biggest Ohio mysteries of the century.

Nevertheless, this helps us narrow our options with regards to how they might have met. Our only problem is that the one explanation that seemed most feasible of all—the explanation that seemed most reasonable and logical—is no longer on the table.

Champion Paper & Fibre, Miami University

Reuben Robertson, Jr. and Miami University President John Millett knew each other during WWII!

Hi. I don’t have a lot of time to write this, so I really need to hurry. This is going to be a mini post that’s light on words and heavy on links and jpegs.

But first, I’d like to wish our veterans a happy Veteran’s Day, and to thank you for your service to our country. I’d also like to take this opportunity to discuss my favorite wartime movie. Actually, it’s not just my favorite war movie, it’s the only war movie I ever watch. And that movie is:

The Best Years of Our Lives.

It’s so good, it’s on Steven Spielberg’s top five list. If you’ve never seen it before, TCM is airing it on Saturday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time. If you’re busy, DVR it. Then you can watch it whenever you want, and trust me, you’ll want to watch it more than once. I watch it at least once a year. If you’ve seen it before, be sure to mention your favorite parts in the comments. (Mine is when they go out clubbing the night they return home. I mean, does Boone City have an amazing night life, or what??)

OK, back to the real reason I’m writing this mini post—I’d like to focus on two veterans from WWII: Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., and John D. Millett. As you may recall, Reuben Robertson, Jr. was the much-loved, heavily dimpled president of Champion Paper and Fibre, in Hamilton, Ohio, from 1950 to 1960. In 1955, Reuben temporarily stepped down from that post to serve as deputy secretary of defense under Secretary Charles Wilson. In 1957, he went back to being president at Champion but, tragically, three years later, he was assisting a driver whose car was stopped in the middle of a highway and was killed by a drunk driver.

John D. Millett was Miami University’s 16^th president. He’d been elected president in March 1953 after a committee that Reuben Jr. was a member of selected him as their preferred nominee. As far as Miami’s presidents go, I’d guess that Millett is considered one of their best. Steven Spielberg puts him in the top five. (Just kidding.) Millett didn’t officially start his duties at Miami until the fall of 1953, but, as president-elect, this was going to be a huge jump for him in his career. Before he came to Miami, he was a full professor at Columbia University. He’d done some impressive things, but from what I can tell, he didn’t have any administrative experience at a university. He likely wanted to hit the ground running. He attended the June meeting of the Board of Trustees. I’m sure he was doing other things to prepare as well.

As my most dedicated readers know, a woman named Dorothy Craig, whom I’ve narrowed down to being one of Reuben Jr.’s employees, wrote a check to Ronald Tammen shortly before he disappeared. Oddly enough, Dorothy Craig’s name was never, ever mentioned in any newspaper articles, even though Carl Knox had written it down in his notes. How did they manage to keep her name out of the papers? I think it may have to do with a friendship that goes back to WWII.

That’s right, just as the headline says, Reuben Robertson, Jr. and John Millett knew each other during the war. How do I know that they knew each other? Because I now have it on excellent authority that both men were working in the same extremely small branch of the same division of the Army Service Forces at the exact same time.

So let’s cut to the chase:

Both Reuben Robertson, Jr. and John D. Millett worked for the Control Division of the Army Service Forces.

The Army Service Forces was the part of the U.S. Army that was responsible for making sure that Army personnel had the necessary supplies and services to do their jobs. The Control Division was the part of the Army Service Forces that focused on improving efficiency. Control Division officers would travel to Army bases and monitor how things were being done. They helped reduce paperwork and whatnot. I’m sure they did more, but I have guests coming at 2 p.m. and I haven’t even started cleaning the downstairs yet.

OK, so where were we? Both men worked in the Control Division. But that’s not all.

Both men were officers in the same branch of the Control Division.

Which branch?

The Administrative Management Branch.

How small of a branch was it?

Really small. We’ll get to that in a minute.

OK, so this is the part where I stop writing words and start showing you pictures.

Here’s the preface to a book titled Organization of the Army Service Forces, a 700-plus page tome written by John D. Millett. In the preface, he describes his role in the Administrative Management Branch of the Control Division.

Here’s a document from Reuben Robertson Jr.’s separation papers that describes his time with the Army. In the first paragraph of the summary section, it describes his time in the Administrative Management Branch of the Control Division, a position he held for 18 months, beginning in March 1943. Although he did go to Georgia later, he was in Washington, D.C., for a portion of that time.

And lastly, here’s a citation from a book on the history of operations research in the Army that tells us how many people worked in the Control Division’s Administrative Management Branch.

We’re talking 28 officers and 3 civilians, all housed in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1943. Reuben Robertson, Jr. and John D. Millett were two of those officers.

Reuben Jr. was such an extrovert, he could get to know 30 other people really well by lunchtime. John Millett strikes me as a major people person too. You guys, they knew each other.

For this reason, I think Reuben Robertson Jr. probably encouraged John Millett to apply for the presidency at Miami when Reuben was asked to sit on the selection committee. John had Reuben to thank for that very large boost to his career, from professor to president. It would only make sense that Reuben would have John’s ear if he ever needed to keep a bothersome detail out of the paper.

Mind you, this is just a hypothesis.

Your thoughts?

CIA, Hypnosis, Miami University, MKULTRA, Office of the Surgeon General, Psychology Department, United States Air Force

When Doc met Jolly: the sequel

I think it’s time we elaborated a little on our theory about St. Clair (Doc) Switzer and famed MKULTRA researcher Louis Jolyon (Jolly) West. For a while now, I’ve been frantically waving a document in everyone’s faces from January 1953, and using it as evidence that the two men must have known each other and even worked together in some capacity.

So…THEN what, right?

Right. This blog post is all about what happened to Doc and Jolly AFTER the January 14th memo. Admittedly, it mostly has to do with Jolly, but, based on events that came to pass in his career, we can deduce how Doc was affected as well.

But first, let’s have a little recap.

Our running theory

In September 1952, the CIA was rounding up experts to conduct research for Project Artichoke. One of the locations at the top of their list was an Air Force Base—Lackland AFB, to be exact, in San Antonio. The reason they were drawn to Lackland was likely two-fold. First, it was where all incoming basic trainees were psychiatrically screened and where “questionable” Air Force officer candidates and pre-flight cadets were more fully evaluated psychiatrically. That’s a lot of baseline data concerning what was going on inside pretty much every airman’s head.

Second, the new chief of the Psychiatric Service had arrived at Lackland AFB in July 1952—Jolly West. He had just completed his residency at the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York City, which was part of Cornell University Medical College. As it so happens, people in the Payne Whitney Clinic were friends with people in the CIA. Harold G. Wolff, an expert on headache and psychosomatic illness, was one of those people. He would go on to head the Human Ecology Fund, which funded MKULTRA-focused research, and to coauthor a 1956 comprehensive report on communist interrogation and indoctrination methods—aka brainwashing. Jolly, having developed strong skills in hypnosis while at Payne Whitney, was now in charge of the entire psychiatric division at Lackland’s 3700^th USAF Hospital. If that’s not a perfect fit for Project Artichoke, I don’t know what is.

At roughly the same time in which the CIA was scrutinizing Jolly West, someone else’s name had made a little ping on their radar. That person was Miami University psychology professor Doc Switzer, who was brought to their attention by way of a memo written on March 25, 1952. Chief among Doc’s selling points were his having worked under noted psychologist and hypnosis expert Clark Hull and for his being a pharmacist before becoming a psychology professor. By September, however, the CIA was having their doubts about someone—Doc, I believe—and, despite his Artichoke-friendly credentials, they didn’t think he had much to contribute toward the research they desired.

As it turns out, Doc could be useful in a different way. Doc was well-connected in the Air Force, whose surgeon general would have to approve whether Lackland could be a site for CIA-funded Artichoke research. Not only had Doc made a name for himself during WWII, but he was on the rolls of the Air Force Reserves, and, most recently, during the summer of 1951, he’d served in a prestigious post at the Air Research and Development Command (ARDC) in Baltimore.

On September 23, 1952, a CIA rep had spoken with a colonel in the Air Force’s Office of the Surgeon General, and the colonel had said that the person whom the CIA was uncertain about—the person I believe to be Doc Switzer—would be “essential” to be “cut into the picture” because they thought very highly of him. Four months later, on January 14, 1953, Jolly (I’m 100% sure) and Doc (I strongly believe) are named in a memo with regards to the creation of a “well-balanced interrogation research center.”

Jolly West; Credit: Oklahoma Department of Public Welfare; Fair use.

The hot shot and his rival

The winter of 1953 turned into the spring of 1953, with all of its happy trappings:

the flowers were blooming…

the birds were singing…

the bees were buzzing…

…and, on April 13…

…the director of the CIA was signing a memo establishing MKULTRA, an amped-up version of Project Artichoke.

(Due to a lack of time, we’ll forgo discussing how, six days later, a certain student from Miami University who had Doc Switzer for his psychology professor seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. We can discuss that little coinkidink another day.)

Our story picks up two months later, in the summer of 1953, when Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb, who oversaw the CIA’s MKULTRA program, are discussing the to-be-implemented operation at Lackland AFB. Jolly couldn’t have been more gung-ho. On June 11, a 28-year-old West wrote to a 34-year-old Gottlieb a detailed letter about his short-term and long-term goals with regards to the hypnotizing of human subjects—a resource he ostensibly had an endless supply of—as part of his new project for the CIA. Among those readily available subjects were basic airmen, whom he could summon by simply telling the folks in HR to: “Send us 10 high I.Q. airmen at 0900 tomorrow,” he bragged. Other potential subjects would include volunteers who worked on the base, hospital patients, and a miscellaneous category of “others,” including prisoners in the local stockade and returning POWs.

He had the subjects. He had the know-how. He had the drive. He had the space—though he’d need to purchase some suitable new equipment. He could hire the necessary staff.

But there was a problem, Jolly informed Sidney. The problem’s name was Robert Williams, who, by the way, should not be confused with Robert J. Williams, who oversaw Project Artichoke in the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence before it was reassigned to Inspection and Security. Nope, this guy was Robert L. Williams, who was chief of Neurology at Lackland AFB. Jolly informed Sidney that, after Williams had received his certification by the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry—with coaching from Jolly in preparation for the psychiatry portion of the exam, he pointed out—Williams started eyeing Jolly’s territory. Williams persuaded Colonel Robert S. Brua, commander of Lackland’s 3700^th Medical Group, to combine the two divisions into one and to put Williams on top.

As you can imagine, Jolly was fuming over this power grab. Here was someone Jolly described as being “several years my senior professionally although his experience in psychiatry is considerably less than mine” getting in the way of Jolly doing whatever he wanted. He’d be a giant roadblock to the hypnosis research the two men were discussing, Jolly contended.

“This is a most unhappy turn of events from the point of view of our experiments,” he lamented.

“Dr. Williams is extremely acquisitive and will be an uncomfortably close scrutinizer of my activities,” he said. “The fact that I am still Chief of Psychiatry doesn’t alter the fact that it is now merely a section in this new Service, and that many of my administrative and even professional decisions can be hamstrung.”

He later added: “And, most unfortunately, he is one of those conservative traditionalists who actively opposes research or treatment involving hypnosis, states that it is ‘tampering with the soul,’ and spoken out against some of my previous work; he will undoubtedly hamper my efforts in many ways.”

Jolly had some suggestions on how to fix this unlivable situation. Going back to the old organizational structure was one possibility. Transferring Williams the heck out of San Antonio to some other base was another one. Or, geez, maybe Jolly should, you know…leave. That last option wasn’t very realistic though. Because the Air Force had foot the bill for Jolly’s medical training, he was obligated to serve there until June 1956. For him to even entertain the possibility of leaving in July of 1953 was indicative of…what…his immaturity? His arrogance? His bullheadedness? Take your pick—I can’t decide.

“The ultimate solution to the repeated occurrence of this type of situational crisis is, of course, a return to civilian status. If I were back on the staff at Cornell Medical Center where my previous research was done, there would be no problem. I could receive some funds from you disguised as a U.S. Public Health Service grant, or some such thing, gon [sic] onto a half-time research basis, and plub [sic?] away at the problem with considerable independence. This future eventuality we’ll have to discuss at a later date; meanwhile, we have the local problem to solve. If someone in the Surgeon General’s office, or the Surgeon General himself, were in on this whole complicated situation, it might make the solutions a little easier.”

Um, I’m sorry, but has this 28-year-old never had a boss before? I mean, sure, it’s a drag that his division got usurped and all, but who among us hasn’t had something like that happen at our jobs without our feeling the need to run to our boss’s boss’s boss in hopes that they’ll fix it? Plus, some might say that Jolly could have used a little more supervision at that time, don’tya think? (Did I mention he was 28?)**

**Dear 28-year-olds: I have nothing against you. If you happen to be in this age group, that’s fantastic. It’s a super fun age to be. It’s just that, occasionally, people in your age bracket have been known to think they have all the answers when in fact they really don’t. (Not you. Other people.)

Listen to the Traveling Wilburys. They’ll tell you what I mean.

Sidney Gottlieb was undeterred by the likes of Robert L. Williams. He asked Jolly for the names and contact information of Lackland’s top brass, which were Col. Brua, Col. Cowles (who oversaw the Human Resources Research Center), and Brigadier General Steele (who commanded the entire base). Although Sidney wasn’t willing to give these men all the goods on MKULTRA just yet, he would explore obtaining Top Secret clearance for each one, just in case. He also would contact Donald Hastings, a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota who was to collaborate with Jolly on the project. Hastings had been chief of psychiatry for the Army Air Forces during WWII, so he was much more seasoned in dealing with military brass. If anyone could arm wrestle them into acquiescence, he could probably do it without their having to bother the surgeon general over trivial workplace politics.

Sidney closed his letter with “I feel that we have gained quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you. We will work this thing out one way or another. It is of the greatest importance to do so.”

Less than a year later, Jolly wanted out of Lackland. Maybe he’d predicted correctly, and Robert L. Williams had rained all over Jolly’s MKULTRA plans. Or maybe it was plain old bureaucratic red tape. The laboratory where he needed to conduct his research still hadn’t been built. No matter the reason, at some point along the way, Jolly decided to look elsewhere for a job. As far as his obligation to the Air Force was concerned, he’d have to cross that bridge when he came to it.

In April 1954, he arrived at the bridge. He’d been offered the position of professor and head of the Department of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and he would now need to seek approval from the Office of the Surgeon General before he could accept the position. Of course, he’d have to do so strategically and with finesse, since he had no intention of taking no for an answer.

University officials did what they could to get the Air Force to relinquish Jolly. The dean of the medical school promised to build Jolly the laboratory he needed to conduct his “special research assignment” for the CIA and USAF, including technical assistance and equipment. The laboratory was to be called the Air Force Psychosomatic Laboratory, likely as camouflage. Best of all, he would be able to conduct his research as he saw fit, with no questions asked. Still, months went by as Jolly tried to convince the assorted colonels and generals that the Air Force would be better off with him in Oklahoma than in Texas. He proposed transferring to Tinker Air Force Base, in Oklahoma City, where he could split his time between the university and military base, but the Air Force said no. Practically speaking, there was no need for a psychiatrist of his stature there.

Despite the string of disapprovals, the Office of the Surgeon General began coming around to see things Jolly’s way. In August 1954, they offered a compromise in which Jolly would be granted 60 days of unpaid leave per year over and above any accrued leave he had, all of which he could use to work for the university. On September 26, 1954, the university announced that Jolly West would be joining their faculty.

After all was said and done, Brigadier General H.H. Twitchell, in the Office of the Surgeon General, let Jolly know what had gone on behind the scenes that brought about the Air Force’s change of heart.

“It seemed ill advised to establish the Air Force Psychosomatic Laboratory either at Lackland or an Air Force base in Oklahoma only to have to abandon the project upon your release from the service 20 months from now. Therefore, General Powell, Major Hughes, Major Kollar, and myself conferred to discuss the best way to get your special research project underway on a continuing basis. It was decided that the Air Force Medical Service should withdraw from the project as it now stands leaving you and Major Hughes free to organize the program within your department at the University on a contract basis with the Agency that Major Hughes represents. Major Hughes indicated that other than the slight delay involved in establishing your program at the University of Oklahoma this will not seriously interfere with the conduct of the research since the acceptance of your professorship was predicated upon the unquestioned full support of this project. Major Hughes also indicated that he would discuss the details of this matter with you in the near future.”

Hmmm. Major Hughes sure sounds as if he had a lot of sway in the matter, doesn’t he? But who was he? Brigadier General Twitchell and General Powell both worked in the Office of the Surgeon General. Major Kollar worked at Lackland AFB. But this was the first I’d ever heard of Major Hughes.

My guess? I think Major Hughes was our friend Sidney Gottlieb. Here’s why:

Sidney liked to use pseudonyms. In his July 2, 1953, letter to Jolly West, he signed his name Sherman C. Grifford, a pretend person who was affiliated with the pretend organization Chemrophyl Associates. In a meeting with the military men, I can see him taking on a more suitable pseudonym for the occasion—something with a rank that was respectable, but not too high—and a last name that was a little more forgettable than Gottlieb.

Major Hughes was representing an Agency—with a capital A. General Twitchell was being cautious with his wording, but there’s no question that he was referring to the CIA.

Major Hughes seemed to be closely tied to Jolly’s research project. In fact, the way General Twitchell described it, Major Hughes and Jolly would be working together to organize the program in Jolly’s new department.

The person from the CIA with whom Jolly was working most closely on this project since June 1953 was Sidney Gottlieb.

Credit: CIA; Was Sidney Gottlieb Major Hughes?

In December 1954, Jolly wrote to a friend telling him that he’d started at Oklahoma, and by January 1955, he’d submitted a proposal to the Geschickter Foundation (another CIA front organization) for MKULTRA funding. By March 1955, he’d received approval for a $20,000 grant to begin his infamous work which came to be known as Subproject 43.

That pretty much sums things up, except there may be a little more to the story. In an article for the investigative site The Intercept, authors Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring brought to light a gut-wrenching story in which Jolly West played a critical role. It concerns a murder that took place near Lackland Air Force Base at around midnight July 4, 1954. The victim was a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton who’d been playing in the parking lot of a tavern while her parents and brother were inside. (Helicopter parenting was definitely not a thing in the ‘50s.) A search went on, and, tragically, her lifeless body was found in the nearby gravel pit.

The man who was charged with the murder, Jimmy Shaver, had come walking up from the gravel pit before her body had been discovered, almost as if he was in a trance. His body was bloody and scratched from brambles. Chere Jo’s underwear were dangling from his car door. An Associated Press story that ran the following day said that Shaver had written in a statement that he remembered putting her in his car and driving away. His last memory was of removing her from the car, and “then I blacked out.” Shaver was employed at Lackland AFB as a drill instructor. Up until that moment, he’d been a law-abiding citizen.

According to the Waco Times-Herald, Jolly testified at Shaver’s trial that Shaver was “given over to his care two months after the crime.” During that period, Jolly had given Shaver sodium amytal which, according to the paper, “put Shaver into an hypnotic trance.” A United Press wire service story said that West had examined Shaver “under hypnosis and truth serum.”

Jolly stated to the court that Shaver had been ridiculed and abused as a child by a little girl, and when he saw Chere Jo, Shaver was mentally transported back to his childhood. He killed her—a voice in his head had told him to do it—but he thought he was killing the abusive girl, Jolly told the court. Shaver was “insane” at the time of the killing and “did not know right from wrong,” the paper quoted him as saying.

Jimmy Shaver died from the electric chair on July 25, 1958.

It’s a horrible, tragic story that I’ve avoided writing about for a while. Here’s why I want to discuss it now: First, this was all happening while Jolly was trying to leave Lackland AFB. At the time of Chere Jo’s murder, Jolly had already been offered the job, and he was trying to convince the Office of the Surgeon General that he’d be of more use to them in Oklahoma than in Texas. In September, during Shaver’s trial, Jolly’s name, along with the name of Lackland Air Force Base, was being splashed on newspapers across Texas, and beyond. It was precisely at this time when the Office of the Surgeon General gave the green light for Jolly to conduct his research elsewhere.

Could it be that the surgeon general decided to make the Jolly West P.R. problem go away by approving his early move to Oklahoma? They’d allow him to continue with his experiments, but just not on their turf.

The reason I pose this question is that in Tom O’Neill’s and Dan Piepenbring’s piece, they raise the question of whether Jolly West may have actually been conducting hypnotic experiments on Shaver before the murder and perhaps even introduced false memories during his hypnosis sessions after the murder. You can read the story and see the evidence for yourself.

I’d like to focus on one detail. Jolly had said under oath that Jimmy Shaver was “given over to his care two months after the crime.” But in O’Neill’s and Piepenbring’s piece, O’Neill had actually spoken with another psychiatrist at Lackland, a man named Gilbert Rose, who’d taken part in the sessions with Jolly West and Shaver.

In 2002, he said the following:

“[Rose had] also never known how West had found out about the case right away. ‘We were involved from the first day,’ Rose recalled. ‘Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder. He initiated it.’”

If what Rose said is true, then Jolly had committed perjury when he told the court of his later involvement. Why would he say that if he didn’t have something to hide? And again, were any of the Air Force officials knowledgeable?

There’s one last person we need to discuss, and that person is Doc Switzer. Where does Doc factor into all of this?

In our running theory, Doc was considered “essential” by the Office of the Surgeon General in September 1952. At that time, the surgeon general was Harry G. Armstrong. However, when Jolly West received the OK to move to Oklahoma in 1954, the surgeon general was Dan C. Ogle. And once West was doing his work at the University of Oklahoma, the Office of the Surgeon General had purposely written themselves out of the equation.

I have no idea what Surgeon General Harry Armstrong wanted from Doc Switzer. Perhaps he helped keep him up to speed on things. But by the time Jolly West moved his laboratory to the University of Oklahoma, there would have been no need for his services, at least in that regard.

To look at it another way, could it be that the perfect window of time when Doc Switzer was considered “essential” to Project Artichoke happened to coincide with the time that Ronald Tammen disappeared from Miami University?

Miami University, The Delts

Remembering Bob Schuette, aka ‘Shoots,’ who helped solve 2 mysteries regarding Ron Tammen

I’m so sorry to report that we lost a member of our Good Man family recently. He was one of my sources, and he’d spoken with Ron Tammen shortly before Ron disappeared. That person was Bob Schuette (pronounced SHOOT-ee), an Oxford businessman—a legend in that town, really—who passed away at the age of 96 on July 13.

Bob didn’t know Ron well—but then again, I’ve yet to meet anyone who did. Bob seemed to be Ron’s polar opposite. Ron was generally quiet and kept to himself. Bob Schuette—“Shoots” to his friends—was generally not quiet. He was a gregarious go-getter in cream-colored khakis and a white Oxford rolled up past his elbows. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. He was a people magnet who could work a room like nobody else.

Bob pledged Delta Tau Delta the same year as Ron. But Bob was no run-of-the-mill freshman pledge. Born in 1926, he was seven years older than everyone in his class. He’d enlisted in the Navy before he even considered attending Miami University. During WWII, while his fellow pledges were still learning where to find Japan on a map, Bob had been serving in the Naval Construction Battalion—the Seabees—in Okinawa. Of course everyone in the fraternity looked up to him. They’d wanted to make him president of the entire chapter his sophomore year, but that would’ve been unheard of. They made him vice president instead.

We can thank Bob for solving two mysteries for us regarding the Tammen story. One is clear-cut, as in: here’s the question, there’s the answer. The other is still a little blurry, as in: here’s the answer but we still don’t know what it means. Both have contributed to our understanding of the person that Ron Tammen was, even though no one had really known him at the time.

Mystery #1: Was Ron Tammen asked to step down as the Delt song leader?

I wrote about the first mystery in my June 2017 blog post. In that post, Bob is the person whose pseudonym is “Bill.”

In 1956, journalist Murray Seeger had written an anniversary piece about Ron’s disappearance for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and included a rather strange detail I’d never seen anywhere else. The second-to-last paragraph read as follows:

“About a week before [Ron’s disappearance], the fraternity had asked Ron to drop out as a leader of its singing group because his other activities were so demanding. But this did not seem to upset him unduly—he took a place in the singing group and let someone else direct it.”

Weird, right? To have the entire fraternity ask you to “drop out as a leader” sounds like a big deal. It was as if he was shirking his duties so badly, they’d voted on whether to give Ron the boot, and the “ayes” had carried it.

Well, that’s not what happened at all, and Bob helped straighten things out. The fraternity didn’t ask Ron to step down as song leader. No way. Ron had discovered that he couldn’t be there on the night of the performance—even if he hadn’t disappeared, that is—so he passed the conductor’s baton to someone else.

The singing group Seeger was describing was a group of Delts who would be performing in the Intrafraternity Sing, an annual competition among Miami’s fraternities that was scheduled to occur on Mother’s Day weekend. Bob was in charge of the Delts’ entry in the competition. He was the main contact even though he didn’t sing in the group.

According to Bob, it was Ron who’d approached him. They met for coffee at Coffee Pete’s on a Thursday, and Ron had told him he had a scheduling conflict for the weekend of the big event. He was going to be playing with the Campus Owls at the University of Kentucky on the night of May 9, 1953, and couldn’t lead the Delts in their song. Bob said that Ron had worked everything out, even going so far as to find his replacement—Ted Traeger.

Here’s how Bob described their last interaction to me: “He went through the whole deal, what Traeger was going to do, and when that concluded, we shook hands, and I said, ‘Have a good weekend,’ and he said, ‘You too. Everything will be all right,’ and to be honest with you, that was the last I ever saw Ron.”

Bob’s story checks out despite one minor discrepancy. Whenever he would tell me the story, and he told it to me several times, Bob would recall the time interval between the coffee meeting and the Mother’s Day performance to be days, not weeks. But that’s impossible, since Ron had disappeared three weeks earlier than Mother’s Day weekend. Even so, the date of the Intrafraternity Sing was on the same date in which the Campus Owls had played at the University of Kentucky. Ron indeed had a scheduling conflict that would have needed addressing back then.

Also, what stood out clearest in Bob’s memory was that he and Ron had met at Coffee Pete’s on the Thursday before Ron had disappeared. That would establish their meeting to have occurred on April 16, 1953. Could he have been right that it was the last time that he saw Ron? Absolutely.

Lastly, we can thank Murray Seeger for providing the assist that established that, despite Ron’s no longer leading the singing group, he still attended song practice on April 19. As Seeger had written in his 1956 article, Ron “took a place in the singing group and let someone else direct it.” Because the Delts only practiced on Sunday nights, the only date in which that could have happened was April 19, the night of Ron’s disappearance.

This supports Paul’s story (see June 16, 2017 blog post), who placed Ron at song practice that same night, before he, Ron, and Chip Anderson walked back to the dorms together, just moments before Ron disappeared.

Thanks to Bob Schuette, not only do we know that Ron was simply being responsible when he stepped down as song leader, but, with a little help from Murray Seeger, we have corroboration of Paul’s story.

Mystery #2: Did Ron Tammen sleep over at the Delt house on occasion?

When Charles Findlay, Ron’s roommate, returned to their room on Sunday night to find Ron wasn’t there, he wasn’t that worried, according to news reports.

Gilson Wright, a journalism professor at Miami who had a side hustle as an on-call correspondent for area papers, provided this write-up on April 25, 1953, for the Hamilton Journal-News:

“When his roommate, Charles Findlay, Dayton, also a sophomore, returned later that evening he found the lights on in the room and Tammen’s books open on a study table. He assumed Tammen had gone out for the rest of the evening and when he failed to return he thought perhaps Tammen had decided to spend the night at his fraternity, Delta Tau Delta.”

In November 1953, Wright wrote: “It wasn’t that unusual for Tammen to spend an evening at his fraternity, Delta Tau Delta.”

A year after Ron’s disappearance, on April 19, 1954, Wright similarly wrote:“Findlay had some classes the next morning and again didn’t worry about Tammen. After all, he thought, the lad might have stayed overnight at the Delt house.”

I don’t care what Gilson Wright says, staying overnight at the Delt house seems unusual, especially for a residence hall counselor who’s paid to look after a corridor full of freshman men. That goes double for someone who’s a studious, non-drinking introvert, whose own dorm room is a 10-minute walk away.

Wright’s reporting was different than what Joe Cella had written three days later for the same paper. Cella, a reporter for the Hamilton Journal-News who had uncovered most of the pertinent discoveries of the case, wrote this in a full-page article on April 22, 1954:

“Charles (Chuck) Findlay, 22, a junior in business administration who lives in Dayton, returned to Fisher Hall Sunday night around 10:30 p.m. to find his roommate’s book open on the table, the lights on, and most of Tammen’s personal effects in the room. He assumed his roommate had gone to his fraternity house, Delta Tau Delta.”

It’s one thing for Chuck to assume Ron was at the Delt house at 10:30 p.m., as Cella had written. That’s normally where Ron would be at that hour on a Sunday night because of his weekly song practices, and, according to Paul, that’s exactly where Ron had been walking back from at around that time on April 19. It makes sense for Chuck to make that assumption.

But the way Gilson Wright phrased things, it sounded as if Ron had slept at the fraternity house a few times before and Chuck had simply presumed he was staying there again.

I needed to pin down whether Ron ever stayed all night at the Delt house, and if not, whether Ron had used that excuse before with Chuck. In other words, was it a pretend alibi he used if he was planning to be somewhere that he didn’t want Chuck to know about?

According to Bob Schuette, it’s extremely doubtful that Ron ever stayed all night at the house.

Here’s Bob’s and my conversation about it in our first phone call:

BS: “…We all slept upstairs in bunk beds. We didn’t have a roommate to sleep with or anything. Everybody was up there.”

JW: “Oh, really? You guys all shared this giant room?”

BS: “Yeah, it was almost like the attic. Let me tell you something, it was not plush.”

JW: (laughs) “So it was like a barracks or something, just a giant room with a bunch of bunk beds?”

BS: “Yes, it was just like being up in the attic.”

So if you were a Delt and you lived in the Delt house, you shared a room with someone, but that room would be where you could go to study or to have a little privacy and to store your stuff. But you couldn’t have a bed in your room. All of the beds were up in the attic.

Also, at bedtime, the attic was characteristically loud and rowdy, and Bob, who needed his sleep, would frequently have to yell at his fellow Delts to knock it off and go to sleep.

Bob doesn’t ever recall seeing Ron up there.

And why would he? Why would quiet Ron want to spend the night with a bunch of noisy Delts instead of in his own bed, which was a short walk away? Answer: I don’t think he would.

In late 2014 or early 2015, I was chatting by phone with Charles Findlay. It wasn’t the first time we spoke, and I had a long list of topics I wanted to cover with him. Here’s what Charles was able to recall when I brought up the issue of Ron’s night life:

JW: “So you had mentioned when we were talking last that [Ron] really wasn’t around a lot, right?”

CF: “No, we really didn’t have much contact. We went our separate ways.”

JW: “Yeah…did he stay out of the room a lot…like stay all night elsewhere?”

CF: “Sometimes he would stay at the fraternity house, I’m pretty sure.”

JW: “Uh huh…so he would tell you, ‘I’m going to be staying at the fraternity house’?”

CF: “You know, it’s been so many years ago. You’re trying to build facts or something and I don’t want to sidetrack you. I don’t remember.”

(I totally get that. Chuck wanted to be helpful, but he also wanted to be careful not to say something that wasn’t factual, which I can appreciate.)

JW: “OK. But you thought he was staying at the fraternity house?”

CF: “Yes.”

Several years later, in 2017, I tried reaching out to Chuck again after learning new details concerning the case. That was when I’d learned the sad news from Chuck’s son that Chuck had passed away in May of that year.

So this is where things stand: Chuck Findlay had remembered thinking that Ron had stayed overnight at the Delt house, possibly more than once. However, based on Bob Schuette’s description, the Delt house wasn’t exactly amenable to overnight guests. And neither Bob, nor any other fraternity member I’ve spoken with, remembers Ron every spending the night in the Delt house.

Bob Schuette went on to lead a remarkable life. Every time we talked, he’d share stories about his wife and family, who were the center of his universe. He earned a business degree from Miami in 1955. From the mid-1950s through the early ‘70s, he worked hard in the food service and bar industry, becoming owner of two legendary Oxford establishments, the College Inn and The Purity. In 1972, he went into real estate, and remained active in that field, not just into the ‘90s, when many of his friends were retiring, but into HIS 90s. I don’t know if I’ve met anyone who loved Miami University and the city of Oxford more than Bob Schuette. His office on High Street was a veritable museum filled with some of the most incredible Miami memorabilia and photos I’ve ever seen.

Bob Schuette gives me a tour of his office in May 2017.

But that’s just the froth on the pilsner—there’s so much more to Bob Schuette. When you have a moment, I encourage you to read the beautiful obituary his family wrote. And be sure to play the video montage at the bottom. You’ll see what I mean.

Miami University, Psychology Department, United States Air Force

The book project

Once upon a time, a person that we both know set out to write a book.

It started out as an idea—a random, what-if, out-there sort of idea that the person happened to think up one day, and then…as time wore on…became accustomed to.

After all, lots of people have written books. Why not this person? This person knew some things. They had a perspective to provide. And besides, they liked to write.

And so…outlines were drafted. Notes compiled. Words typed. Pages paginated.

It wasn’t long before the book began to dominate the person’s thoughts and even how they were feeling on a given day. On days when they could work on the book non-stop, they’d feel satisfaction and, if things were going particularly well, exhilaration. If a day or two slid by with no progress, they’d feel frustration and guilt.

It goes without saying that the book became their go-to answer when someone asked them how they were doing.

As the years rolled by, the topic of the book became a little embarrassing. After all, a person can only talk about the book they’re writing for so long without there being, well, an actual book to point to.

That’s why, in 1937, I’m sure St. Clair Switzer was feeling the heat. By then, he’d been talking about his book for nearly three years with nothing to show for it.

Oh, wait. Did you think I was talking about my book? Nah…we’re talking about Doc Switzer’s book. Mine is…you know…still in the works.

Switzer had started talking about writing a book since at least September 1934, shortly after he’d earned his Ph.D. under psychologist Clark Hull. He’d already had some experience in book publishing, having assisted Hull with Hypnosis and Suggestibility: An Experimental Approach, which had been published in 1933.

The page-turner Switzer envisioned would focus on the topic of conditioned reflexes. After all, the title of Switzer’s dissertation was “The Modifiability of the Conditioned Reactions,” and it yielded publications such as this, this, and oh yeah this one too in scientific journals. His master’s degree had something to do with eyelids and the blinking of said eyelids upon the presentation of some sort of stimulus. So he had the requisite expertise to write about conditioning—forward conditioning, backward conditioning, all the different directions of conditioning.

What are forward and backward conditioning, you ask? Remember Pavlov’s dogs, where a bell is rung before the dogs were given their food to the point where the ringing bell alone would cause the dogs to salivate, even if no food arrived? That’s forward conditioning. If Pavlov had used backward conditioning instead, the bell would ring after the dogs were given their dinner. Because the dogs wouldn’t associate the bell with a soon-to-arrive dinner, a ringing bell alone wouldn’t cause the dogs to salivate. It might bring about some very annoyed doggy looks though.

Whew! Fun, huh? I’m sure there’s a lot more to the subject—there’s got to be—but I don’t think we need to dig any deeper for this blog post. (You’re welcome.)

At first, Doc thought he might like to coauthor the book with a fellow psychology professor at Miami University who’d received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin two years before Switzer had gone there. Hull knew that person too, but, for some reason, didn’t care for him. I know this because I’ve read letters that Hull had written to Switzer that are on file at the National Museum of Psychology, in Akron, Ohio, and some of his comments were mean and petty.

When Doc wrote to Hull in September 1934 telling him of his plans, Hull was unenthusiastic. Not about the book, mind you. Hull had nothing but encouragement for Doc’s book. He said his choice in book topics was “extremely fashionable,” and that he genuinely felt that Doc was wholly qualified to write it. He just didn’t think he should write it with the other professor, whom he viewed as Switzer’s competitor, or worse, his nemesis, who would take all the credit while doing little of the work.

“Surely you have turned out as much experimental work on conditioned reflexes as Hilgard or Razran, and I am sure you are able to write more readily and more effectively than either one of them,” said Hull.

That was quite the compliment. Agewise, Ernest (Jack) Hilgard and Gregory Razran were peers of Switzer’s (Hilgard was actually two years younger than Doc and Razran was a year older) but they were well on their way to becoming world authorities on conditioning and other psychological principles. Switzer had become friends with Hilgard during his time at Yale when Hilgard was still an instructor there, before he moved on to Stanford. Switzer had hoped to work in Hilgard’s lab at Stanford the following academic year with the assistance of a fellowship from the National Research Council. Unfortunately, in April 1934, Doc learned that the fellowship hadn’t come through. Two months later, he learned of Hilgard’s intention to write a book on conditioning. Switzer encouraged Hilgard in his letter, though, for some reason, he didn’t mention that he, too, was contemplating such a book. Who knows, maybe he was still mulling things over.

“I think you are just the man to give the subject a sane and lucid treatment,” Doc had told Jack.

It’s important to point out here that, fashionable as the topic was, in 1934, there was still plenty of room for someone to make a name for himself or herself by publishing a definitive work on conditioning. Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov had published his landmark book, Conditioned Reflexes, relatively recently, in 1927, and Razran, who’d emigrated from Russia to live in the U.S., had published Conditioned Responses in Children in 1933. But America’s heaviest hitters still hadn’t published. You’ve heard of B.F. Skinner? His first book, The Behavior of Organisms, An Experimental Analysis, wouldn’t be published until 1938. Hilgard’s book, Conditioning and Learning, which he coauthored with another Yale guy, Donald Marquis, didn’t come out until 1940. In September 1934, Switzer had the opportunity to truly become a household name in conditioned reflex circles both domestic and abroad, and Hull was doing all he could to push him in that direction.

“I suggest that you go after that,” encouraged Hull in his letter written September 27, 1934. “Anything that we have here or that we are likely to have should be available to you, and I will undertake to use what influence I have to help you get a publisher. As a matter of fact, a book written as well as you can write one should not need any influence.”

Clark Hull was being his usual magnanimous self. Without question, if St. Clair Switzer had written his book on conditioned reflexes, Clark Hull would have helped him secure a good publisher. And if that had happened, if the book were as good as Clark Hull had predicted, then Switzer’s name might have been likened to the names of Jack Hilgard, Donald Marquis, and Gregory Razran. Maybe even Clark Hull himself.

But Switzer fretted and stewed. He didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes, certainly not Jack Hilgard’s or Donald Marquis’. Or maybe he didn’t want to compete with those two. How would it look if their book took off and his tanked?

“My dear Switzer,” Hull began in a letter written November 13, 1934—the same way that he began all his letters to Switzer. “Yesterday Marquis was in and told me that you were worrying about the propriety of your going ahead and writing your book on conditioned reflexes. He asked me if I wouldn’t write you and assure you that you should go ahead with it. As you know, I have felt all along that there was no ethical question involved in any number of people writing books on any subject at all. Surely you have as much right as anyone else to write a book on conditioned reflexes.”

He went on to say this about Marquis, who seems to be a very above-board kind of guy: “He believes, as I myself do, that while an increase in the number of books will doubtless cut down the royalties which should be received from anyone, it is a distinctly wholesome thing for the development of this branch of science that a number of good works should be published. From all indications this seems assured.”

The Marquis-Hull intervention must have worked. For the time being, Doc stuck with it.

In September 1935, Hull had this to say to Doc:

“I was under the general impression when I talked with you at Ann Arbor that you were a little despondent about the progress of your book. I am writing this letter mainly to remind you in a somewhat emphatic manner that the writing of a good book will make a tremendous difference in the possibilities of your getting into a better job without waiting for some perfectly healthy person to die off. I wonder if you get my meaning?”

Oh, Clark Hull, I believe I do get your meaning. I could be wrong, but I think Hull was referring to the professor on Miami’s faculty whom Hull didn’t like very much. I sincerely doubt that he was referring to Everett Patten, Miami’s psychology department chair and a former Hull student whom Hull did like very much. But let this be a lesson to readers: be careful what you put in writing, because it might end up in an archive somewhere and everyone may see the darker side of you. As it turns out, the person whom I believe Hull was referring to died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1940 at a very young age.

In November 1935, Hull wrote this to Doc:

“I am very happy to know about the encouraging prospects of your book. You must set your teeth into that and stick to it until it is done. I believe that the publication of this book may do you a lot of good. After that you must get back into the laboratory, if you hope to save your scientific soul!”

He sounds, I don’t know…exasperated? Hull was probably sort of kidding around, but for him to tell Switzer that he was in danger of losing his scientific soul is harsh. I’m sure Doc cringed over that line.

And that’s it. That’s the last time Clark Hull had anything to say to Doc Switzer about his book according to my records, which tells me that Doc had either told him that he’d given up or he’d just stopped talking about it.

About a year and a few months later, on February 20, 1937, Hull had one thing and one thing only to say to Switzer and he did it in a letter that contained one terse sentence. He said:

“A day or so ago I heard that Hilgard has a leave of absence from Stanford for the last quarter, and is coming here to finish the book on conditioned reflexes by himself and Marquis.”

Was he scolding Switzer? Was he trying to shame him into finishing his own book? The answer, I think, could be a little of both. It was as if he was saying, “See? This is what authoring a book actually looks like.”

As I mentioned earlier, Hilgard’s and Marquis’ book came out in 1940. It’s now a classic. That same year, Hull was part of a team that published a 329-page book titled Mathematico-deductive Theory of Rote Learning. Three years later, he published his classic, Principles of Behavior.

But by then, Doc was doing something else entirely. In 1942, he did an about-face and enlisted in the Army Air Forces to do his part during World War II. There, he was warmly welcomed for his skills in psychological testing, which involved assessing and placing Army Air Forces personnel according to their vocational strengths. By the war’s end, he’d worked himself into a lofty post at the Pentagon, where he was chief of the demobilization procedures section, and, according to a letter Doc wrote to Miami’s vice president, was “partly responsible for speeding up the release of a quarter million Air Forces men.” After the war, Doc was given the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he became a member of the Air Force Reserves. From that point on, he had two bosses: Miami University and the United States Air Force.

So there would be no book on conditioned reflexes. But that doesn’t mean Doc didn’t think he had a book inside him.

On June 30, 1951, as Doc was writing to Major H.G. Rollins of the Air Research and Development Command (ARDC) about a temporary job opportunity in Baltimore, he had this to say:

“Incidentally, I can be reached at my office at the university in the mornings. The number is 277-J. I am in the midst of writing a text on INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY and my afternoons are taken up with that task, which I carry on at home. The home phone is 487-M.”

A book on industrial psychology would have been perfect for Doc. He’d developed the business psychology course at Miami and, as with conditioning, he knew the subject backwards and forwards. And even though he seemed to be out of touch with his former mentor, Clark Hull, I’m sure there were no hard feelings between them. If Hull could have helped him get it published, I believe he would have. Also, even though Miami University didn’t have its own publishing operation at that time, other universities did. If he’d finished his book, I’m confident that he could have found a publisher.

But he didn’t finish that one either. From what I can tell, he didn’t work on his book during his sabbatical in 1956-57, and by his retirement in June 1966, he didn’t mention any plans to complete his book when asked how he’d be spending his newfound time.

No, after Doc Switzer worked for the ARDC in 1951, he seemed to lose all interest in publishing a book on a topic he’d been passionate about for so long.

Could it be that he became busy doing other things? Depending on what those other things were, and who they were for, not only is it possible that Doc had lost his scientific soul, but there’s a chance that he ended up selling it to the devil.

CIA, Miami University, MKULTRA, Office of the Surgeon General, Psychology Department, United States Air Force

Why I think the USAF Surgeon General’s Office wanted St. Clair Switzer to be their liaison to Project Artichoke

In the spring of 1951, St. Clair Switzer was in a predicament. The war was on in Korea, and he’d been ordered to report to Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama, for a four-day processing period to determine his eligibility for active duty as an instructor at Air University. Making matters worse, he’d received his orders at around noon on April 14, a Saturday, and he was expected to show up at Maxwell by 2 p.m. on Monday, April 16, which isn’t a whole lot of notice. Although he may have managed to make the trip to Alabama for the required four days, there wasn’t enough time for him to obtain a written statement from Miami officials as to whether they approved his release for active duty or if they would request a delay. On April 21, Ernest Hahne, Miami University’s president, wrote a letter to George C. Kenney, commanding general of Air University, scolding him for the ridiculously tight turnaround, and letting him know how important Dr. Switzer was at Miami, what with his teaching and advising responsibilities and all.

“It is our urgent request that Professor Switzer be released from this call to duty at this time,” Hahne wrote.

Hahne’s letter worked. Switzer didn’t become an instructor at Air University in 1951.

Nevertheless, the Air Force didn’t put Switzer’s name at the bottom of the pile either. In June of that same year, Major H.G. Rollins, chief of the Military Training Branch at the Air Research and Development Command (ARDC) in Baltimore, Md., had reached out to Switzer, seeking assistance. Rollins had been placed in charge of a high-level project that involved the recruitment of scientific personnel, and a friend of Switzer’s from his WWII glory days had volunteered his name as someone who could potentially help in that cause. As usual, Doc Switzer was ready and willing to hightail it out of Oxford. (Truth be told, I think he’d have been happy to relocate to Alabama too if President Hahne hadn’t interceded.) Doc submitted his lengthy application one day after receiving the form, and by August 6, 1951, he was on the government’s payroll, working in the Sun Building at 5 West Baltimore Street.

I’m sure he loved it. Who among us doesn’t adore that gritty city with its glittery Inner Harbor, its memorial to master poet and writer of scary stories Edgar Allan Poe, and its crab cakes? (My God, the crab cakes.) As for his living arrangements, he was staying in room 1022 of the iconic Emerson Hotel. Niiiiice, Doc.

According to records I’ve obtained, Switzer worked for the ARDC from August 6 through the pay period ending September 22, 1951, and he was paid $35 per day. That may not sound like much, but during that month and a half period, Switzer earned a gross income of $910, which translates to roughly $10,679 in today’s dollars. That’s pretty good in this girl’s opinion, especially when you factor in the prestigiousness of the position.

Because, make no mistake, working for the ARDC was pretty huge. It was officially established in April 1951 to oversee all research and development for the Air Force.

I probably need to say that last part once more with the caps lock turned on: the ARDC oversaw ALL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT FOR THE AIR FORCE.

As in all of it.

As in every last bit.

Although its initial home was Wright Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio—a place I’ve mentioned before on this blogsite—in June 1951, an “advanced echelon” was moved to Baltimore and “charged with recruiting additional scientific personnel,” according to that month’s Air Corps Newsletter.

So if the ARDC was started in April of 1951 and an advanced echelon of the ARDC had moved to Baltimore in June of 1951, then St. Clair Switzer, who’d been approached by Major Rollins also in June of 1951, was getting in on the ground floor. As far as Switzer’s role in the operation goes, he submitted the following blurb to a Miss Marshall for publication in the autumn 1951 issue of Benton Bulletin, a newsletter that was ostensibly written for university administrators occupying Miami’s Benton Hall:

“Prof. S.A. Switzer spent August and the first part of September as a civilian consultant with the headquarters of the Air Research & Development Command in Baltimore. Dr. Switzer assisted in formulating the long-range training program for Reserve officer scientists who have research and development assignments in the Air Force.”

Doc went on to tell Miss Marshall that “I am enjoying this work very much, and I believe that I am being much more useful to the Air Force in this assignment than I would have been in the one for which they planned to call me to active duty last June.”

He’s probably referring to the Air University gig in that last comment. Sadly, nowhere in his four-page letter does he mention the crab cakes.

So, in sum, the ARDC was very big and very important and, consequently, it would have had the attention of big and important people within the Air Force.

With all of this in mind, let’s now direct our attention to a CIA memo that had been written on September 23, 1952.

The memo was written almost a year to the day after St. Clair Switzer had ostensibly stopped working for the ARDC. I say “ostensibly” because there were signs that he had some sort of ongoing working relationship with them. On January 2, 1952, again, ostensibly after his ARDC stint was over, he’d applied for a Social Security account number and listed the Air Force as his employer. For his employer’s address, he wrote down ARDC’s address on West Baltimore Street. (If you’re wondering why he didn’t already have a Social Security number, he hadn’t needed one before that time. Then as now, Miami University employees were enrolled in a separate public retirement system.)

St. Clair Switzer’s Social Security application; click on image for a closer view.

The number assigned to Doc Switzer was 216-32-8226, with the “216” prefix designated for Baltimore applicants. Based on the history of how Social Security numbers were assigned in those days, his number tells me that he must have been in Baltimore the day after New Year’s in 1952, when Miami U was still on break, to submit his application. He would’ve had to get back on the road soon, however. Classes were scheduled to start the next day.

So the question of whether he continued working for ARDC every so often—be it remotely, at Wright Patterson AFB perhaps, or through some other arrangement—or if his work ended in September 1951 remains a small mystery.

Back to the memo of September 23, 1952, which is four paragraphs long. I’d now like to dissect this memo, paragraph by paragraph, to see if anything new can be gleaned from it. But first, to help with our dissection, I’ve isolated a couple letters that were typed within that same memo which I think will come in handy in certain places.

Here’s a capital S.

And here’s a lower-case r.

Let’s go!

Paragraph 1 – The transfer

We really don’t care about paragraph 1. When the memo was written, Project Artichoke had been handed over to the Inspection and Security Office by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and they were busily working through the logistics of that transfer. No big revelations here.

Paragraph 2 – The doctor who had ‘nothing to contribute’

Paragraph 2 focuses on a doctor whose redacted name is mentioned in the first line. The consensus concerning the doctor was that he had “nothing to contribute in the line of research.” Above the noncontributing doctor’s name are the words “U.S. commander,” which is a clue to his identity.

A “commander” could be someone in the Navy or the Coast Guard as is shown on the below chart.

But if you look above those lines on the chart, you’ll see that the rank of commander is the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the Army, Marines, or Air Force. Indeed, in military speak, lieutenant colonels are also considered commanders, in that they are put in command of various types of squadrons. The person who wrote the term above the doctor’s crossed-out name could have been referring to a Naval officer, sure, but they also could have been using the term generically.

We can whittle down the possibilities even further since only the Army, Navy, and Air Force were involved with Project Artichoke. I happen to believe the person with the pen was referring to someone in the Air Force. You’ll see why in the next section.

Next, if you zoom in on the redacted name of the U.S. commander, a few letters appear to stand out, with some standing out more than others. Do I think the first letter of the first name looks a lot like a capital S? I do, but, admittedly, it’s iffy. Does there appear to be a second capital S beneath the “n/d” in commander? There kinda does, but again, I wouldn’t stake my life on it. We’re going to go the conservative route here and say that it appears that the last letter in his last name is an r.

Finally, as we discussed in a previous post, someone from OTS—the Office of Technical Service, which was run by Sidney Gottlieb—may have visited the doctor/U.S. commander on September 19, 1952, to explore the question of whether he might be able to contribute to Artichoke research.

To summarize, I believe the 2nd paragraph is telling us that a commander in the U.S. military (which will be narrowed down further in the next paragraph) whose last name ends with an r had been considered for Artichoke research, though the consensus was that he had nothing to contribute. Someone affiliated with Sidney Gottlieb’s group may have explored that question with him during a visit on September 19, 1952. Moving on…

Paragraph 3 – The colonels

Although there are still areas of uncertainty, I think we can put together a few more pieces to the puzzle that is paragraph 3.

The first thing we notice is that the term Col. is placed in front of a number of names throughout paragraphs 3 and 4, which means we can eliminate the Navy. The Navy doesn’t have colonels. Therefore, the writer is speaking about people from the Army or Air Force. And because we already know from paragraph 3 of the January 14, 1953, memo that a major in the USAF’s medical corps (whom I believe to be Louis J. West) is being considered for a well-balanced interrogation research center in addition to a certain lieutenant colonel (whom I believe to be St. Clair Switzer), I think we can safely conclude that they’re talking about the Air Force in this memo too. So Air Force it is. On this I will stake my life.

If it’s the Air Force we’re talking about (and it is), then the surgeon general who’s referenced in paragraph 3 has to be the Air Force’s surgeon general at that time, Major General Harry G. Armstrong.

In order to be a surgeon general, you need to have a medical degree, and Major General Armstrong had received his in 1925 from the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He was the second person to serve as surgeon general of the Air Force, succeeding his mentor, General Malcom Grow, in 1949.

In 1939, Armstrong published Principles and Practice of Aviation Medicine, which was groundbreaking at the outset and remained the field’s authoritative text for decades. According to a write-up in the February 2011 issue of Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, his research focused on protecting the body against the dangers of high altitudes, such as extreme temperatures and reduced oxygen levels. After General Grow successfully spearheaded the creation of the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Patterson AFB, Armstrong became its first director, overseeing the laboratory from 1934 to 1940. I’m sure when he moved to the Surgeon General’s Office, in Washington, D.C., in 1949, he continued to have a soft spot for his old stomping ground in Dayton, Ohio.

Despite the above accomplishments, Armstrong and Grow were the men whose brains had conjured up Operation Paperclip. As you may recall, Operation Paperclip was the infamous military operation in which Nazis with strong scientific credentials were brought to the United States, many to Wright Patterson AFB, so that the U.S. could benefit from their expertise. Operation Paperclip was also viewed as a defensive move, to prevent the Soviets from getting to those scientists first. The name originates from the sanitized cover sheets that were paperclipped to the Nazis’ papers to help move the process along.

So…there’s that.

Back to paragraph 3. Let’s skip over the first part, especially the part about the person they were going to go easy on from a security standpoint because he had a “propensity to talk.” I still don’t have an inkling of who that person was, and I can’t understand why someone from the CIA would want to go easy on anyone who had such a propensity.

Instead, let’s focus on the last sentence of paragraph 3.

Without worrying too much about the owners of the names that have been redacted, let’s first concentrate on what the writer is saying: According to the new Artichoke protocol, OTS (aka the Office of Technical Service, which was led by Sidney Gottlieb) “will be obligated to check with OS” (aka the Office of Security, led by Sheffield Edwards) and OS (the Office of Security) “would automatically check with REDACTED in view of the fact that REDACTED is a consultant of, and of primary interest to the Surgeon General.”

In other words, according to the last sentence of paragraph 3, even though Harry G. Armstrong’s name has never been officially linked to Project Artichoke, certainly not to the degree in which Sidney Gottlieb’s has, he appears to have had veto power over Sidney Gottlieb when it came to the Air Force’s involvement in Project Artichoke.

So…there’s that too.

And what of the person with whom the Office of Security was supposed to check? That person’s name—likely his surname—began with the letter S. Clearly. There is no other letter that fits.

Paragraph 4—the person who needed to be ‘cut into the picture’

In 1952, the USAF’s Office of the Surgeon General was composed of the following people:

The colonel from that office—the one with whom another colonel had recently spoken—was in all probability Col. Jack Buel, who was in charge of special projects for the Surgeon General’s Office. (The other colonel in the office was an assistant for veterinary service, so it couldn’t have been him.) As it so happens, Jack Buel had earned a Ph.D. in psychology from UC Berkeley in 1935, one year after Switzer had earned his Ph.D. at Yale. Before his time with the Office of the Surgeon General, Buel had published articles on finger mazes and polygraphs. A few of his later publications are listed on the National Library of Medicine’s biomedical research website known as PubMed.

I believe that it was Col. Buel who advised the other colonel whose name is redacted that “he thinks very highly of REDACTED and that it will be essential to keep him cut into the picture.” As I’ve stated in a previous post, I think that Doc Switzer is the person that the Surgeon General’s Office thought very highly of and whose involvement they wished to retain. But I was having a tough time figuring out how they would have known him. As you may recall, I thought perhaps Switzer had conducted behind-the-scenes book research for the Air Force or CIA since he lived so close to the Armed Services Technical Information Agency, in downtown Dayton. Who knows, maybe he still did that. I also thought the word “research” above the person’s redacted name was how they wished for him to be used in the Artichoke project—to do book research for them perhaps.

I guess what bothered me about that theory was the illegible word in front of the word “research” above the redacted name. It appeared to be a short word of three letters. The letters are light and slanty and difficult to decipher.

But after spending some time zooming in on those letters very closely, I now believe I know what’s written there. Air. As in Air Research.

Where have we seen that phrase before?

OK, so let’s put together everything we’ve learned to see if we can make sense of things:

A doctor—maybe an M.D., maybe a Ph.D.—who was also a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and whose last name ended with an r had been considered by the CIA for possible Artichoke research. However, the consensus was that they didn’t feel he could contribute.

On another front, according to a new protocol, a person whose name starts with the letter S was to be the USAF surgeon general’s point person for Project Artichoke. The CIA’s Office of Technical Service would first check with the Office of Security, which, in turn, would approach the surgeon general’s point person, a Mr.—or Dr.—S for his input and approval.

Finally, an official in the Office of the Surgeon General whom I believe to be Jack Buel made it clear to a fellow colonel that someone that the CIA was on the fence about—quite feasibly the doctor/lieutenant colonel from paragraph 2—was essential to the program. And the reason was because Buel (and, by extension, Harry G. Armstrong) thought highly of this person, who had experience in “air research.”

And what do we know about air research? We know that if a person had experience with air research, then they likely had connections to the ARDC, since the ARDC oversaw all research and development for the Air Force.

Final thoughts

There are still plenty of details we can’t be sure about. We don’t know if the doctor/lieutenant colonel whose name ends in r is the same guy as the surgeon general’s point person whose name starts with S.

We don’t even know if the surgeon general’s point person whose name starts with S is the same person as the consultant who was of “primary interest to the Surgeon General.”

With that being said, I think it’s likely that the doctor/lieutenant colonel (whose name ends in r) was the person that the CIA was considering cutting out of the picture, and therefore, the person that Jack Buel stood up for. For that reason, I think the doctor/lieutenant colonel was the same person who had work experience with the ARDC.

Was this person St. Clair Switzer? If it was, then Doc Switzer had the ear of the USAF Surgeon General’s Office, and they had requested him as their liaison to Project Artichoke.

I can’t imagine him saying no, can you?

CIA, Fisher Hall, Miami University, MKULTRA, Psychology Department

Did St. Clair Switzer know Sidney Gottlieb, the father of MKULTRA? A document from March 1953 tells us he did

What’s more, I think Sidney Gottlieb (or someone who worked for him) was on Miami’s campus in September 1952

Remember the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”? (If you don’t, you can read about it here.) Back in the 90s, my brother and his partner, who live in NYC, had two Akitas named Oscar and Chanel. Oscar was the smaller of the two, a chocolaty brown color, while Chanel was big and white, a chaise lounge on four furry legs. They were sweet, mellow doggies. When they went out on their walks, everyone knew them by name. “Hi Oscar! Hi Chanel!” people would say to them, and Oscar and Chanel would say hi back in their sweet, mellow way. Two of the people who used to say hello to them on a regular basis were Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. No lie. According to the game, that would make Oscar and Chanel one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. And because I, too, was a friend of Oscar and Chanel’s, that would make me two degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, which, to this day, is something I’m enormously proud of. I can’t believe we haven’t talked about this before.

So, what if we were to play the same game with the father of MKULTRA, Sidney Gottlieb? Most people would hope for as many degrees of separation as possible from that guy. And in 1953, anything fewer than 10 degrees would be much, much too close. But, as I’ll be showing you today, St. Clair Switzer was, I strongly believe, one degree of separation from Dr. Gottlieb, which means that he knew the man. And because Ronald Tammen knew St. Clair Switzer, that would place Ron at two degrees of separation from Sidney Gottlieb, which, in 1953, is uncomfortably close for anyone, let alone a vulnerable college student who respected persons of authority. And that’s presuming that they didn’t meet. There’s a chance that Ronald Tammen and Sidney Gottlieb actually did meet.

I have a lot of info to share, and not much time today in which to write it all down. Let’s do it this way. I’ll be posting several documents that explain why I believe St. Clair Switzer was of vital importance to the CIA in the days of MKULTRA. I’ll also be showing you how Sidney Gottlieb and St. Clair Switzer likely came into contact with one another as well as the actual date when I believe Sidney Gottlieb or one of his associates paid a visit to Switzer in Oxford, Ohio. For each case, first I’ll post the document, and below that, I’ll include a brief narrative regarding why I think it’s important, pointing out some of the can’t-miss parts. Of course, the documents are heavily redacted—you won’t see anyone’s name except for Sidney Gottlieb’s—but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their clues.

Sound fun? Let’s go!

Setting the stage

As we discussed in my last blog post, someone whose writing style had a Switzer-y ring to it had written a report for the Psychology Strategy Board (PSB), a high-level group of military and intelligence officials who oversaw the military’s psychological operations. The report was a thorough review of Artichoke-related research findings to date with extensive bibliographies for each chapter, except for two. For some reason, the researcher’s thoughts on lobotomy and electric shock and memory had no bibliography. The report was dated September 5, 1952, which happened to be exactly two weeks to the day before the start of the fall semester at Miami University.

At the time of the PSB report, the CIA had been seeking guidance from the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Research and Development Board (RDB) regarding the feasibility of using hypnosis, drugs, and other mind-altering methods as part of the process of interrogating prisoners of war. Because the PSB membership had many of the same people as the CIA and DoD, someone in that group likely figured that the PSB could lend a hand in providing a literature review, which is how I believe the PSB report and its accompanying bibliographies came to be.

In the blog, I argue that St. Clair Switzer was indeed the report’s author, since he was in the perfect place in which to write it—Dayton, Ohio, home of the Armed Services Technical Information Agency, or ASTIA, which contained all of the technical studies funded by every branch of the U.S. military. In addition, Switzer was supremely qualified to conduct such a study. His name had recently been given to Commander Robert J. Williams, of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, who at that time was the project coordinator of Artichoke. Switzer was an Air Force lieutenant colonel who had studied under the eminent psychologist and hypnosis expert Clark Hull and who had earned a pharmacy degree to boot. Switzer had another connection. Sidney Souers, adviser to President Truman and the creator of the PSB, was a Dayton native and Miami University graduate. Needless to say, the PSB study was well-received by both the military and intelligence people. Switzer’s report and its accompanying bibliographies were in high demand.

Therefore, in the fall of 1952, I’m guessing that St. Clair Switzer was feeling rather full of himself. People who held our nation’s most sensitive jobs were clambering for his report. From what I can tell, they were even referring to the report by his name—the Switzer Report.

September 23, 1952

Credit: Thanks to The Black Vault for use of this document. Click on image for a closer view.

This memorandum describes a couple conversations that had taken place concerning Artichoke on September 22 and 23, 1952, a Monday and Tuesday. In the first paragraph, the writer is discussing the transition that’s been in the works for a while. The oversight of Project Artichoke had been passed from the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) to the Inspection and Security Office (I&SO, or just plain OS), and therefore, a couple staffers were planning to spend some time in OS on the 24^th to help them process files. They also said they’d keep an eye out for anything that might be of interest to OTS, which stands for the Office of Technical Service, the office that was now responsible for overseeing Artichoke research. Even though OTS was headed by Willis Gibbons, the office’s point person on Project Artichoke was Sidney Gottlieb, who ran OTS’s Chemical Division. When MKULTRA officially kicked off on April 13, 1953, Gottlieb would be put in charge. However, according to Poisoner in Chief author Stephen Kinzer, even though Gibbons was Gottlieb’s boss on paper, Gottlieb answered to Richard Helms, who was the chief of operations in the Directorate of Plans, the extremely powerful group that directed all of the CIA’s covert activities. When you see an OTS in these memos, think of Sidney Gottlieb, since he was running the show in the area of Artichoke research.

It’s paragraphs 2, 3, and 4, that interest me the most, especially 2 and 4. In paragraph 2, the writer is discussing a person whose name is crossed out, above which I believe someone has written “U.S. commander.” Here’s the full paragraph:

On the subject of Dr. REDACTED, REDACTED thinks that the consensus is that he has nothing to contribute in the line of research. I asked him whether Dr. REDACTED might not have been exploring this further on the occasion of his 19 September visit and, although Mr. REDACTED does not believe this to be the case, he will check with OTS.

Here’s why I think they’re talking about Doc Switzer:

Switzer had just produced a noteworthy document for the CIA and military, and his background would have seemed a perfect fit for Project Artichoke. It would be normal for them to wonder if they could continue using his services in some way.
In the Air Force, the term “U.S. commander” can be translated to lieutenant colonel, which is Switzer’s rank. If you’re wondering if they could have been discussing Commander R.J. Williams, we know that they aren’t, since Williams was neither an M.D. nor a Ph.D.
It’s true that Doc Switzer didn’t have the same research capabilities as, say, a Louis Jolyon West, who’d moved to Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, in July 1952. West had access to a laboratory and other facilities for conducting the sort of testing that the CIA was interested in, whereas Doc Switzer’s role at Miami University was that of a professor.
On the date of September 19, 1952, a Friday, someone associated with OTS had visited with the person they’re discussing. The writer asks if perhaps they were exploring the person’s research capabilities, and the other person said they’d check with OTS.

As I’ve mentioned, September 19, 1952, was the first day of classes at Miami University. Oddly enough, a few days prior to that, several men were reportedly on the front porch of Fisher Hall recruiting students for a hypnosis study through the Psychology Department. Could someone from OTS—possibly Sidney Gottlieb himself—have notified Dr. Switzer that he would be paying a visit, and in preparation, people affiliated with the Psychology Department were rounding up volunteers for the OTS representative’s visit? I mean…it’s possible, right?

Paragraph 3 is harder to discern. The writer is discussing the Surgeon General’s Office. You may not know this (I certainly didn’t) but each branch of the military (Army, Navy, and Air Force) has its own Surgeon General in addition to the “main” Surgeon General, which is the Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service. Because of documents that I’ll be providing momentarily, I believe they were referring to the Surgeon General of the Air Force. The CIA writer in the Office of Security is discussing working with them, and he also said that they plan to go easy on someone’s security clearance because they’re a talker, which doesn’t sound like Switzer at all. I’m still trying to figure out this paragraph and whether it’s relevant. Let’s skip it for now and move on to the fun stuff.

Paragraph 4 seems more clear, especially in light of the January 14, 1953, memo below. As luck would have it, the person who would have had to give his OK to interrogation research on an Air Force Base was a guy by the name of A. Pharo Gagge. (The A stood for Adolph. I’m sure you can understand why a WWII officer would avoid using it.) Before he was in his position as chief of the Human Factors Division in the USAF Directorate of Research and Development, he was chief of the Medical Research Division of the Surgeon General’s Office, and before that, he was director of research and acting chief of the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He was born in Columbus, Ohio. Without question, he would have known Doc Switzer.

It makes sense that the CIA would refer to anyone in the Directorate of Research and Development as being part of the Surgeon General’s Office, since the directorate was directly overseen by the Surgeon General’s Office. In addition, A. Pharo Gagge was a Ph.D. and a colonel. Here’s the paragraph that I adore:

On 23 September, Col. REDACTED called to say that he had talked to Col. REDACTED of the Surgeon General’s Office and that REDACTED had advised him that he thinks very highly of REDACTED and that it will be essential to keep him cut into the picture. I advised REDACTED of my conversation with Mr. REDACTED and of the procedure outlined by him. Col. REDACTED is very pleased with this arrangement and considers that this coordination will give him maximum CIA support.

Here’s why I think they’re talking about Switzer again:

From what I can tell, there’s only one person in this memo that the CIA was considering dropping, and that person was the man in paragraph #2, the person I believe to be St. Clair Switzer. And if it is indeed Switzer that they were considering not using further, someone in the Surgeon General’s Office put an end to that talk. The word they used was essential—as in, it would be “essential to keep him cut into the picture.” After the writer seemed to assuage the colonel’s concerns, he was “very pleased,” and the CIA was that much closer to moving forward on their project.
Above the person’s scratched-out name on line three of the fourth paragraph, it appears as though someone has written the word “research.” I can see Pharo agreeing to the use of Switzer in this capacity—the book kind of research, versus the laboratory kind—which is an idea that was reinforced later on.

January 14, 1953, page 1

You’ve seen this memo already—I’ve referred to it many times. It’s the one where, in the third paragraph, they’re seeking three people, two of whom are named, for a “well-balanced interrogation research center.”

The first person, Major REDACTED, USAF (MC), is Louis J. West, without question. If you zoom in on the paragraph, you can actually see the word Louis at the front of his name, and you can make out other key letters too. They describe him as being “a trained hypnotist,” which is a colossal understatement. He was chief of the Psychiatric Division at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Maybe the writer of the memo figured his audience already knew that part?

The second person, who is not named, is described as “another man well grounded in conventional psychological interrogation and polygraph techniques.”

And the third person, Lt. Col. REDACTED, isn’t described at all. The only thing they say is that they’re hoping that “the services of Lt. Col. REDACTED” can be obtained, along with the other two men, for their well-balanced interrogation research center.

So this fits too. Lt. Col. Switzer’s name would be there because A. Pharo Gagge wanted it there. They don’t specify the services he’d provide because they’re leaving the possibilities open. I probably would have called him a liaison/researcher. You’ll see why in a second.

March 5, 1953

53-03-05-146065-Download

The last memo I’m sharing with you has to do with one of the regularly scheduled Artichoke meetings—this one having occurred on February 19, 1953. For some reason, the only participant whose name isn’t redacted is Sidney Gottlieb, representing OTS. (Many thanks to the redactionist for this act of kindness!)

Because these minutes cover a lot of territory, we’re only going to concentrate on two sections. The memo is also difficult to read, so I’ve typed a transcript of the entire document in case you’re interested.

53-03-05-146065-minutes-of-Artichoke-meeting-transcribed-1 Download

First is section 2B., the first paragraph of which reads as follows:

REDACTED pointed out that REDACTED and REDACTED had come aboard and both REDACTED and REDACTED discussed the project at REDACTED involving REDACTED and the using of his facilities for a testing and research ground for our material. It was pointed out that REDACTED was to be our liaison between Headquarters and REDACTED since he knows REDACTED personally and has numerous contacts in the essential city.

The writer is discussing three people, which we’ll call person 1, person 2, and person 3. The first sentence describes persons 1 and 2 coming on board and how they’d be working together on a testing and research ground at someone’s facility “for our material.” (By “material,” I’m pretty sure they mean mind-altering chemicals.) I believe strongly that Louis Jolyon West is person 1 and, based on letters that I have between him and Sidney Gottlieb, the facility they’re speaking about would be at Lackland AFB. As for person 2, I believe that he is Donald W. Hastings, another psychiatrist, who was at the University of Minnesota’s Hospital, and who was very gung ho about the program. I don’t have time to discuss him today, but he’s mentioned in the letters between Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb, which I’ve included copies of at the end of this post.

Person #3, I believe, is St. Clair Switzer. If I try to fill in the blanks of the second sentence in that paragraph, I believe they’re saying that Switzer was to serve as a liaison between the CIA’s Headquarters and the USAF Surgeon General’s Office since he knows General Gagge personally and has numerous contacts in….Dayton? Could Dayton be the “essential city” because it’s home to Wright Patterson AFB and ASTIA?

Section 2B. continues:

REDACTED pointed out that REDACTED [a consultant] was to be used in a very broad survey of the entire field. He also pointed out that REDACTED was not going to be used specifically to dig into one particular field but would study all ideas across the board and in connection with REDACTED, Dr. Gottlieb and REDACTED would help determine where important lines of interest lie and whether or not discoveries in the scientific and medical field are worthy of our interest, research and study.

The writer appears to be elaborating on Person #3. It’s here that he says that he’ll be used as a consultant to conduct a broad survey of all of the potential areas of interest regarding Project Artichoke. And get a load of who’s going to help him: Sidney Gottlieb plus another person whose name is redacted.

Now let’s jump to section 11, where the group is discussing the Research and Development Board’s Ad Hoc Study Group’s Report. As you’ll recall in my last post, people who were up to their necks in Project Artichoke weren’t enamored with the RDB Report because A. they disagreed with some of the members’ views, and B. it wasn’t focused on the sorts of operational things that they were already doing. Here’s what they had to say:

Following the above, a general discussion was held concerning the RDB Report and the REDACTED Reports. REDACTED pointed out certain differences in the point of view of the members of the Ad Hoc Committee and those engaged in actual operation work. REDACTED stated that the RDB Report was an overall survey of projects going on in the field and was not pointed at the type of work ARTICHOKE is engaged in since this was at the operations level and not in the broad research-experimental field.

Immediately following those comments, the REDACTED Report was brought up—what I believe to be the Switzer Report. Here’s that part of section 11:

During the discussion, REDACTED pointed out to REDACTED and REDACTED that he anticipated receiving from Dr. Gottlieb the bibliography attached to the REDACTED Report soon and he would have it photographed and would turn over a copy to REDACTED for study. Dr. Gottlieb stated he expected the report soon and he would turn it over to REDACTED when he received it. (Bibliography is now being processed.)

So there we have it. Sidney Gottlieb, who was now in charge of all research pertaining to Project Artichoke, had taken a great interest in Doc Switzer’s PSB Report. Surely, he would have followed up with Doc to discuss the report as well as the accompanying bibliographies. And once that door was opened, who knows what other areas of collaboration might have come to pass.

******

As an added bonus, here are the letters between Louis Jolyon West and Sidney Gottlieb, who disguised his name as Sherman Grifford. These letters are part of West’s papers that are held at the UCLA Archives, which I visited a few summers ago. In these letters, West and Gottlieb discuss how to create a research facility at Lackland AFB involving hypnotizing human subjects. At the end of his letter dated July 7, 1953, West adds this:

“It makes me very happy to realize that you can consider me “an asset.” My interest in the entire body of work on which you are engaged is a keen and perhaps even a relatively enlightened one. Any services that I can render, along the lines you have indicated or in any other way, are gladly and eagerly offered. Surely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.”

LJW-to-SG-6-11-53 Download

SG-to-LJW-7-2-53 Download

LJW-to-SG-7-7-53 Download