{"id":3810,"date":"2023-11-15T09:55:12","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T09:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3810"},"modified":"2023-11-28T10:03:03","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T10:03:03","slug":"is-wanda-june-is-catherine-jerrie-is-jerrie-june","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3810","title":{"rendered":"Is Wanda June? Is Catherine Jerrie? Is Jerrie June?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reading A Woman I Know by Mary Haverstick for The Telegraph, 15 November 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

This is an anxious, furious, forensic contribution to the study of the assassination of US president John F Kennedy. Forensic, because Haverstick has spent a dozen years learning how to read the US National Security Archives; furious, because the subject of this work, begun as a hymn to female empowerment, turned out to be a monstrous double-agent who maims cats and poisons drinking water; anxious because, as Haverstick is at pains to point out, these forays into espionage, assassination and casual violence have taken her about as far away from her creative comfort zone as it is possible to imagine.<\/p>\n

Haverstick is an independent filmmaker. Home, her feature starring Marcia Gay Harden, came out in 2008. Her publisher\u2019s web page says that Home came out in 2009. There is in fact a French documentary called Home released that year. Explaining to IMDB that the \u201cHome\u201d I was after was a \u201cdrama\u201d from \u201c2008\u201d threw up a touching French comedy, also called Home, starring Isabelle Huppert. If looking up a movie generates this amount of fuss and bother, imagine what Haverstick\u2019s been wading through for the last dozen years. Very early on in researching the life of female aeronaut and NASA hopeful Jerrie Cobb, Haverstick was taken aside by an unaccountably friendly woman from the Department of Defense and told that Jerrie\u2019s government paper trail was largely \u201cclassified\u201d and not worth the bother. It\u2019s possible that she was genuinely trying to do Haverstick a favour.<\/p>\n

Haverstick\u2019s subject is Jerrie Cobb, one of the \u201cMercury 13\u201d — female flyers who many observers assumed would participate at some point in NASA\u2019s space programme. Their (never official) training programme was scrubbed in September 1962. In 2009 Jerrie agreed that Haverstick should tell her story, and strongly implied that this story was bigger — much bigger — than it first appeared. What she absolutely wouldn\u2019t do was share her story: instead the elderly Jerrie spent years dropping expertly timed clues into Haverstick\u2019s lap as the two travelled the world on cruise ships — trips that were \u201cexotic, stressful, exhilarating, scary, and fascinating but never exactly enjoyable\u201d. (Much the same could be said for this book. Haverstick has a sizeable and material axe to grind, and has little time for Dealey Plaza neophytes.)<\/p>\n

The book draws together several figures who may or may not be real people, and are anyway rarely the people they say they are, even when there\u2019s only one of them to contend with, which is almost never. (Welcome to spycraft.) There\u2019s Jerrie Cobb, the disappointed astronaut. There\u2019s June Cobb, the double agent who arranged for the delivery of poison pills to US enemy number one Fidel Castro. Jerrie and June aren\u2019t related, though they\u2019re of an age and came from the same town — and are you thinking what I am thinking? There\u2019s Catherine Taaffe, who\u2019s no relation at all to Jerrie and definitely a person in her own right — only how come Jerrie bears scars from a knife wound that are supposed to belong to Catherine? And — the cherry on this teetering cake — there Wanda Baran (savour that name), a Belgian con-artist whose company suckered in communist countries looking for nuclear materials. Is Wanda June? Is Catherine Jerrie? Is Jerrie June? Well, yes. Or sometimes. Or something.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m being flippant only because flippancy saves space. Haverstick has over five hundred pages to explain her case — that the privately funded astronaut project we\u2019ve come call Mercury 13 was, among other perfectly legitimate things, a cover for the case officer driving the Kennedy assassination. She needs every single one of those pages and she does not waste a line.<\/p>\n

Did I buy into every one of her speculations and inferences? No. No-one will. This genre has form. Arguably the most successful espionage book of all time, 1976\u2019s A Man Called Intrepid, about the adventures of Sir William Stephenson, turned out to be the melancholy fabulations of a man suffering catastrophic memory loss.<\/p>\n

At the same time, I\u2019m certainly not going to throw the first stone. Haverstick is in earnest here and has a memory like a filing system and a filing system like a vice. The least this book could possibly be is a compelling real-life thriller, full of passion, free of writerly fuss, woven from the most intractable archival cat\u2019s cradle imaginable.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what you\u2019ve got, even before you think to take it seriously — and I\u2019ll bet the farm that you will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading A Woman I Know by Mary Haverstick for The Telegraph, 15 November 2023 This is an anxious, furious, forensic contribution to the study of the assassination of US president John F Kennedy. Forensic, because Haverstick has spent a dozen … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[1125,945,951,1124,901,1127,596,597,1126],"class_list":["post-3810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-assassination","tag-cold-war","tag-espionage","tag-kennedy","tag-manned-spaceflight","tag-mercury","tag-nasa","tag-space-exploration","tag-spies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3811,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810\/revisions\/3811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}