Now I'm Intrigued

In 1969, when UCLA recruited him to head up the department, the West family packed up their life in Oklahoma and traveled to their namesake. They went West to Los Angeles, he and K and all three of their kids in tow. Los Angeles would change Jolly and cement his legacy. This is where he became a celebrity and it’s where he was able to solidify those words his mother had spoken over him, “you will do great things.”

He was enthralled with celebrities except for one aspect. There was a darker side of Hollywood that Jolly didn’t jive with. He became enemy #1 of the Church of Scientology WAY before anyone else ever publicly spoke out against them. In this episode, we explore the war between Dr. Jolly West and the Church of Scientology.

Dr. Jolly West's death is just as controversial as the incredibly complex and vibrant life he lived.

For the full story, please go purchase John West’s "The Last Goodnights, Assisting My Parents With Their Suicides." It’s available on Amazon.com.

Show Notes

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Sources

https://www.latimes.com/local/la-scientology062990x-story.html

https://youtu.be/Z8scMW9H1F0

https://youtu.be/7PUfSlYvKLA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMacCIf11k

West, John. The Last Goodnights, Catapult.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kevorkian

So imagine you are a nineteen-year-old college student, hanging out at your apartment with your boyfriend and you step into the hall. A group of people grabs you and neighbors watch as they take you out of the building and throw you into a vehicle. The reason the neighbors don’t help… these people are shooting at them just so they can take YOU. 

This is the setting of our story today. The story of Patty Hearst, an American Heiress who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small, armed revolutionary group with an incoherent ideology and unclear goals, birthed out of the crazy 1970s bombing extravaganza. Patty Hearst, who proceeded to brandish a weapon and rob a bank and was apprehended by the FBI instead of being rescued. The story of how Jolly West became one of the psychiatrists who evaluated her, wrote over 300 pages about her brainwashed condition and his impact on her trial. 

SHOW NOTES

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SOURCE MATERIAL

EVERY SECRET THING Patricia Campbell Hearst with Alvin Moscow Doubleday & Company Inc. NY 1982

https://www.npr.org/2016/08/03/488373982/whose-side-was-she-on-american-heiress-revisits-patty-hearst-s-kidnapping

https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/patty-hearst

https://nybooks.com/articles/1976/06/24/no-charge/

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/patty-hearst-kidnapped

https://nybooks.com/articles/1976/04/29/the-people-v-patty-hearst/

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/27/archives/psychiatrist-says-he-believes-miss-hearst-on-role-in-bank-robbery.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMacCIf11k

Today’s story puts us in an office in Haight - Ashbury in the 1960s. Haight- Ashbury is a district in San Francisco, California named for the intersection of those two streets. It’s a name synonymous with the Hippie and counterculture of the 1960s.

Into this environment in 1966, enter Dr. Jolly West on the precipice of the Summer of Love. He was supposedly there to study hippies and LSD. He felt he just had to witness what was happening in Haight-Ashbury first hand. So… he did what researchers do. He secured a grant and took a yearlong sabbatical from the University of Oklahoma saying he was pursuing a fellowship at Stanford.  But... he was setting up a fake Hippie Crash Pad, a place both comical and creepy.

SHOW NOTES

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SOURCE MATERIAL

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/haight-ashbury-in-the-1960s_n_1967664

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haight-Ashbury

http://www.rockument.com/blog/haight-ashbury-in-the-sixties/

https://allthatsinteresting.com/haight-ashbury-1967

https://journalnow.com/opinion/columnists/david-smith-charles-manson-was-nightmare-from-the-summer-of-love/article_4f8b8eb8-ce35-11e7-b07f-179fd09fb8c2.html

O'Neill, Tom. Chaos. Little, Brown and Company. 

iHeart Radio, Project Midnight Climax Podcast

https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments

On April 26, 1964, West hopped on a flight to Dallas, scheduled to examine Jack Ruby in the county jail that afternoon. The Dallas papers reported it in their final editions that evening: West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West proclaimed that Ruby “was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.

 Why in the world did Ruby seem sane when Jolly went in but insane forevermore after he came out of that cell?

SHOW NOTES

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SOURCES
Tikkanen, Amy. "Jack Ruby". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Jan. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jack-Ruby. Accessed 22 September 2021.

https://emuseum.jfk.org/objects/21745/t25-report-of-psychiatric-examination-of-jack-ruby-by-dr-lo?ctx=57fbc0eb-e3dc-43b1-bb6f-3d8c888017fc&idx=3

https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/november-22-1963-death-of-the-president

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ruby

O'Neill, Tom. Chaos. Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

This is the story that Dr. Jolly West is most notorious for. The one that earned him the most press and attention in real-time. The one the press lambasted him for. The story of a feisty teenage-like creature named Tusko.

Jolly was 38 years old when he invited a crowd to come to watch his latest experiment. Tusko, an adolescent bull elephant, had been purchased from the Phoenix area for $3,500 which would be around $35,000 today.

The day before the experiment, a compressed air rifle was used to shoot a placebo control dose of penicillin into Tusko. He exhibited the expected symptoms “immediate startle response… 2 or 3 minutes of restlessness followed by normal behavior throughout the day.” The real experiment would be the next morning at 8am. 

Show Notes

Suppport the Show → https://www.patreon.com/swagfampodcastnetwork

SOURCES

O'Neill, Tom. Chaos . Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

https://tulsaworld.com/archive/ex-ou-psychiatry-department-chair-dies/article_4a4081f0-654c-5f31-9a0a-05ce183af38c.html

https://thislandpress.com/2013/07/29/the-electric-elephant-acid-test/

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/feb/26/research.science

https://www.treehugger.com/historical-timeline-of-animal-rights-movement-127594

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Spring_monkeys

In episode 3 of our Season One on Dr. Jolly West, we explore Jolly's involvement with the CIA and their controversial MK-Ultra program.

Project MK-Ultra was the code name given for illegal experiments on actual humans done by the CIA.  This was an actual thing that happened in US history, it’s not just a theory. These experiments were supposed to develop procedures and figure out what drugs (like LSD) could be used in interrogations to weaken humans and force them to confess by using brainwashing and psychological torture.

We explore Dr. West's involvement with the notorious CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb who was nicknamed the “Black Sorcerer” for developing crazy ways to drug unknowing people up with LSD - high potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, poisoned toothpaste, handkerchiefs, cigars. Anything for mind control experiments.

Finally, this episode tells the tragic story of three-year-old Chere Jo Horton's horrific murder on the Lackland Airforce base, Jimmy Shaver's arrest and Dr. West's involvement. Was Jimmy Shaver an unknowing participant in the MK Ultra mind control experiments?

SHOW NOTES

Support the Show →https://www.patreon.com/swagfampodcastnetwork

SOURCES

Sources

O'Neill, Tom. Chaos. Little, Brown and Company. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

http://wla.1-s.es/barclays-tax-avoidance-scm-censored-guardian-2009/AT-june07-Price-PT1.pdf

https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments

https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/bs-md-frank-olson-lawsuit-20121208-story.html

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/

 Jolly and K make a big move to San Antonio, Texas where Jolly, now a full-fledged doctor, serves as Lieutenant to Major in the U.S. Air Force where he is Chief of Psychiatric Service. Jolly’s time at Lackland is his debut in the field of brainwashing and will also start him on a path with the US government that will link him to conspiracy theorists for the rest of his life and beyond. 

In the 1950s, West was appointed to a panel to discover why 36 of 59 airmen captured in the Korean War had confessed or co-operated in Korean allegations of war crimes committed by the United States. These POWs had “falsely” confessed to germ warfare. His experiences with these men sparked a lifelong interest in helping victims of imprisonment, torture, and coercive persuasion otherwise known as "brainwashing".

It’s super important to understand at this point in the story how pivotal to our history. If the communists could control minds, then they could control interrogations, memories, the actions of leaders, and more. And guess what? The US had not even started to think scientifically about how this might be achieved yet. It meant we were behind, it meant we were vulnerable, it meant we were losing a war we didn’t even know had started.

P.S. I apologize in advance for how much I talk about bugs in this episode. It's super detailed. I promise it's important for this episode and our next episode that includes the story of CIA Scientist Frank Olson and his infamous death.

SHOW NOTES

Support the Show →https://www.patreon.com/swagfampodcastnetwork

SOURCES

https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c84j0hcd/entire_text/

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/

https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Louis_Jolyon_West

https://koreanwarlegacy.org/chapters/the-pow-experience/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMacCIf11k

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/endicott-biological.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warfare_in_the_Korean_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Schwable

https://www.history.com/topics/korea/korean-war

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/27/reviews/990627.27reg.html

https://www.amazon.com/BIOLOGY-DOOM-Americas-Warfare-Project/dp/080505765X

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/09/us/louis-j-west-74-psychiatrist-who-studied-extremes-dies.html

We invite you to season one of Now I'm Intrigued.  I’m going to tell you the incredible story of a man involved in CIA brainwashing experiments, who participated in the MK -Ultra mind control program (which was an actual real thing… not just a conspiracy theory) and had connections to some of the most interesting people in recent history. People like Patty Hearst, Charleton Heston, and Jack Ruby. He was also my boss. Join me for season one as we take a deep dive into the fascinating life of Dr. Jolly West.

Support the Show --> https://www.patreon.com/swagfampodcastnetwork