The Journey 66. Todd Elliott: It Was a Coup d’état

Publisher RA “Kris” Millegan talks with Todd Elliott about his book, “A Rose by Many Other Names: Rose Cherami & the JFK Assassination,” the woman thrown from a car in Louisiana by men, she told police, who were going to kill JFK in Dallas two days later, which they did.

Kris: What led you to write your book about Rose Cherami?

Todd: In middle school, I was interested in the coincidences between the assassinations of Kennedy and Lincoln. Later in life, doing research and obsessing over all the facts, the first piece I wrote for a magazine eventually led to the book.

Kris: You live in New Orleans, right?

Todd: The New Orleans metropolitan area. [But] I grew up in southwest Louisiana. In what they would call Cajun country. The story of Rose kind of happened in my backyard. I moved to Eunice when I got a job at “Eunice News.” And I researched her story, another fascinating footnote [to the JFK assassination].

In our popular culture, she exists in the first sequence of Oliver Stone’s masterpiece film “JFK.” She is seen thrown from a moving vehicle in Eunice, Louisiana, some 48 hours before Kennedy was assassinated. She had foreknowledge of the assassination, saying the men she was travelling with were on their way to Dallas to kill Kennedy on Friday.

Kris: She was a colorful lady, would you say?

Todd: She was a lady of the night, a known drug addict and a mother. Her son was living in Texas. Her family was from Texas. Jim Garrison was very keen on having Rose testify [in the trial of Clay Shaw] but by 1967 she was already dead.

Kris: She was involved with drug smuggling.

Todd: Definitely. It seemed like she was running heroin with some of the organized crime families out of New Orleans, mainly Carlos Marcello. People like that. The story she told was very haunting [foreknowledge of the assassination].

Kris: It’s my understanding that when you have these big operations, the word kind of gets out. There were people who made money on the stock market when Kennedy died.

Todd: No one believed her wild tale. But one state trooper, the day Kennedy was assassinated, he became a believer and he was adamant about getting her out of the state hospital. They thought she was crazy and had had her committed. That state trooper probably heard a lot more from her on the long ride to the hospital in Jackson. It’s a little unclear as to why he went to get her out after the assassination. There was apparently an urgency to get her out Louisiana and drop her back in Texas.

Kris: I started on this when my dad talked to me and I started researching CIA-drugs and I’d look at the Kennedy assassination and I started to see that a bunch of these people who are involved with CIA-drugs were also involved in the assassination.

Todd: I didn’t really think I was going to be the first person to write a book about Rose Cherami. Turns out I am. There’s more disinformation out there now on the Kennedy assassination than [before]. Some of the people that I interviewed had snippets of the truth in the seventies and eighties. All that’s been muddied up. People were still afraid to talk about the Kennedy assassination because they knew that there was corrupt intelligence at the federal level down to organized crime in New Orleans. People were afraid of Carlos Marcello when I would do interviews with them.

Kris: I would open conferences, I would say, “You’re going to hear somebody say ‘this’ and you might hear somebody say the complete opposite. But there are a couple of things that we can agree on, and one is that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t do it and it was a coup d’état.” There’s a lot of mis- and dis- [out there] and it’s about controlling the narrative.