Kennedys and King Test host626

Author: James DiEugenio

  • Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 3

    Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 3

    Martyrs to the Unspeakable – Pt. 3

    By James W. Douglass

     

    Because James Douglass wrote an entire volume about the presidency and the assassination of John Kennedy, it is that case which gets the least attention in Martyrs to the Unspeakable. Which is a justifiable decision.

    But, having said that, Douglass still does deal with JFK. He brings up the case first in its relation to our current troubles: That is, President Kennedy’s dispute with David Ben Gurion and Israel. (p. 10) This important issue is finally getting the attention it deserves through writers like Rick Stirling, Ken McCarthy, and Monica Wiesak. Douglass shows that, quite early, Kennedy was aware of the need for America to come to the aid of the Palestinians who had been impacted by the Nakba. He addressed the problem in 1951. (p. 10). Later on, the author shows that Kennedy never stopped supporting that cause. He was trying to pass a UN resolution to grant relief on November 20, 1963– one which Israel vociferously objected to. (pp. 64-67)

    As Kennedy was about to enter the White House, he was alerted by the outgoing Secretary of State, Christian Herter, that there were rumors that Israel might be trying to build an atomic bomb. The problem mushroomed as Douglass notes, because “No American president was more concerned with the danger of nuclear proliferation than John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” (p. 11). The conflict between Kennedy and Prime Minister Ben Gurion began at their first, and only, head of state, face-to-face meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in late May of 1961. At this meeting, Kennedy expressed his curiosity about the size of the atomic reactor at the Dimona site, but Ben Gurion insisted that it was only for desalination. Which, of course, was false.

    Kennedy’s interest was in not starting an atomic arms race in the Middle East. (p. 14). Specifically, he thought the possibility existed that if Israel developed a bomb, the Russians would aid Egypt in doing the same. As Douglass notes, this canard by Ben Gurion would mushroom two years later into a direct confrontation, which would result in Ben Gurion’s resignation.

    Douglass notes an important conversation that JFK had with Amos Elon, an American reporter for Haaretz. As early as 1961, Kennedy was realizing that the American/Israeli relationship was more useful to Tel Aviv than Washington. And he specifically said, “We sometimes find ourselves in difficulty due to our close relations with Israel.” The president said that the important thing was that the Israelis get along with the Arabs. And if that meant Israel adopting a neutralist stance, he would consider it. As long as there would be an Israeli/Arab settlement. (pp. 16-17)

    Douglass now goes to another complicating factor in the Middle East equation. This was Kennedy’s attempt to forge a relationship with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Before his meeting with Ben Gurion, Kennedy wrote to Nasser about a peaceful settlement to the Arab/Israeli conflict and also a viable solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, based on repatriation or compensation. (p. 17) This, as JFK knew, was very important to Nasser.

    Ben Gurion was worried about Kennedy’s aim of regular inspection at Dimona. He even encouraged the prominent Jewish lobbyist Abe Feinberg to discourage Kennedy from insisting on this. But Feinberg reported back that Kennedy would not be thwarted. Therefore, as related by former Mossad chief Rafael Eitan, the Israelis built a phony control center over the real one at Dimona, “with fake control panels and computer-lined gauges.” The goal was to make it look like a desalination plant. To top it off, none of the American inspectors spoke Hebrew, which made it easier to conceal the camouflage. (p. 20)

    This all escalated until May of 1963 when Kennedy insisted on scheduling full, unfettered and biannual inspections. And if these were denied, he was threatening to pull funding for Israel. After an exchange of four letters, Ben Gurion resigned. This allowed a delay to take place while a new prime minister was chosen. Two months later, the same ultimatum was issued to Levi Eshkol. Eshkol stalled on Kennedy’s request before agreeing to it. But Kennedy’s assassination then occurred, and, as in many other areas, Lyndon Johnson curtailed, stopped and then reversed Kennedy’s policy on both Dimona and the Palestinian refugee dilemma.

    In fact, as Douglass writes later, there is evidence that CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton actually helped Israel produce its first bomb. Angleton ran the Israeli desk at the CIA. He helped by referring an English scientist named Wilfred Mann to the Israelis. But Angleton denied ever being involved with shipping fissionable materials. In other words, he wanted no part of the NUMEC scandal out of the Pittsburgh area. (p. 58; click here for that story https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/05/25-years-of-cn-how-israel-stole-the-bomb-sept-11-2016/)

    II

    Bobby Kennedy did not forget his brother’s devotion to nuclear non-proliferation. He noted it prominently in his maiden speech in the Senate. In that speech, he specifically mentioned how Israel was a problem in this regard. Although they were little noted in the USA, the comments were noted prominently in Israel. Mainly because of RFK’s support of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which did inspections of nuclear plants. (p. 61) These types of professionals would likely have unearthed the Israeli ruse about Dimona. Tel Aviv wanted no part of that.

    From here, Douglass shifts the focus to Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Specifically to the lengthy—150 hours– hypnotic sessions sponsored by the legal team of William Pepper and Laurie Dusek. The late Harvard psychologist, Dr. Daniel Brown, concluded that Sirhan was one of the most susceptible hypnosis subjects he had ever encountered. Brown concluded that he was “…the perfect candidate.”(p. 69)

    Sirhan had two disturbing events happen to him in rather close proximity to each other. The first was the death of his sister, who died of leukemia when he was 21. The second event was when he fell off a horse at Granja Vista Del Rio Horse Farm. Sirhan was treated at the Corona Community Hospital emergency room by a Dr. Nelson. He was discharged four hours later. But according to his brother, he was gone for two weeks. (Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, p. 434). Yet he only received four stitches over one eye. Both his mother and a friend tried to find out where he was. (Douglass, p. 73)

    With Sirhan under hypnosis, Brown discovered that he was in a ward with no windows and with about seven other patients, all with head injuries. Doctors would approach him each day with clipboards, taking urine samples, and asking him how he felt. When he did return, those close to him detected a personality change; he was more reserved and argumentative. (Douglass, p. 74) But further, you only visit a doctor once to get four stitches removed. So why did Sirhan then visit a doctor 13 more times over the next year, from 1966 to December of 1967? (Pease, p. 435)

    III

    From here, Douglass goes into the RFK career and his murder. In my view, this was a real highlight of the book. For the Bobby Kennedy of 1968 was probably the most radical candidate for president since Henry Wallace. Douglass goes into RFK’s disputes with President Johnson on civil rights and Vietnam. For example, Marian Wright of the NAACP wanted to attract political attention to Mississippi, since so many African/American children were suffering from hunger. Bobby Kennedy did go down as part of a small sub-committee on poverty. He was greatly impacted by what he saw and wanted Johnson to declare a state of emergency–which he would not. From there, he went to Indian reservations, Appalachia and New York City ghettoes. He wanted to see firsthand what Michael Harrington called the Other America. (Douglass, p. 88)

    When LBJ would not act on this issue, even after the riots of the summer of 1967, RFK decided that the man who could act was King. He told Marian Wright to tell King to bring the poor to Washington. So while in Atlanta, she did just that. And as she later said, “Out of that, the Poor People’s Campaign was born.” And King decided that this was then going to be the prime focus of his career. (Douglass, p. 91)

    But, as Douglass points out, it was not just this joint opposition to poverty that was worrisome to the Powers That Be. It was also their mutual opposition to the Vietnam War. Kennedy had made a speech against that war in the Senate on March 3, 1967. Almost exactly one month later, on April 4th, King delivered his polemic at Riverside Church in New York.

    Most people in this field are aware of President Kennedy’s conversation with Charles de Gaulle about the Vietnam War. What most people do not know is that the French president had a very similar conversation with Bobby Kennedy about the same subject. And Douglass describes it in detail in this book. (pp. 392-94) RFK took a European tour in late January and early February of 1967.

    He had two important topics he wished to discuss with some of the leaders he met: atomic weapons and the Vietnam War. He quickly found out that each one of the emissaries he met with thought Johnson’s war policy in Vietnam was so misguided as to be termed mad. When RFK met with de Gaulle, they talked for over one hour. And the exclusive subject was Vietnam. The president reminded Bobby of the advice he had given his brother, namely that the USA should not go into Vietnam. He then said that by directly entering that conflict, America’s special place in the world—one of respect and admiration—had been torn to tatters:

    The United States is in the process of destroying a country and a people. America says it is fighting Communism. But by what right does it fight Communism in another people’s country and against their will…. History is the force at work in Vietnam. The United States will not prevail against it. (p. 394)

    When they walked to the door, with the 6’4” de Gaulle hovering over the 5’10” Kennedy, the French president gave the senator some sage advice:

    Do not become embroiled in this difficulty in Vietnam. Then you can survive its outcome. Those who are involved will be badly hurt, because your country will tear itself apart over it. A great leader will be needed to put it back together and lead it to its destiny…. You must be that leader. (ibid)

    How could anyone not be impacted by someone like this? De Gaulle was the man who risked his own life, many times, to get France out of Algeria. Something JFK had advised France to do back in 1957. Douglass had done us all a favor in describing this little-known meeting.

    IV

    Kennedy’s visit to France had some big blowback when he got back to the USA. There was an article in Newsweek saying that he had received a “peace feeler” from Hanoi while in Paris. The senator did not understand what the report was about, and he told his press secretary that. (p. 409)

    What had happened is that on the same day that he had met with de Gaulle, he had a meeting with the Far East desk officer in the French Foreign Office. Kennedy was accompanied by a translator from the American embassy. The desk officer said that North Vietnam was willing to enter negotiations in return for an unconditional bombing halt. The senator did not think this was very important. But the translator did. He cabled his superiors in Washington about the story. And that is how it got in Newsweek. And from there it spread to the MSM, including TV.

    President Johnson was quite offended by this story, as he took almost everything RFK did as a personal affront. He thought that Bobby had leaked the story in order to promote himself as a peacemaker. But it was even worse than that. Because Johnson–under the influence of his Vietnam overall commander, William Westmoreland—thought that he was on the verge of winning in Indochina.

    When RFK got word of this MSM story, he wanted to straighten things out with the president. So he went to see Johnson. This was a mistake. Instantly, LBJ accused him of leaking the story. Kennedy replied with, “I didn’t leak it. I didn’t even know there was a peace feeler. I think the leak came from somebody in your State Department” (Douglass, p. 410)

    Johnson took this reply badly. He said it was not his State Department. It was Bobby’s. Meaning that it was still filled with Kennedy loyalists.

    Kennedy tried to change the subject. He offered him what his plan would be to settle in Vietnam: stop the bombing, go to the negotiating table, do a staged cease-fire and create a coalition government governed by an international commission to hold elections as a final solution.

    About a year from Tet, Johnson was not in a state of mind to listen to any peace agreement. He made no bones about it either. He began with “There’s not a chance in hell I’ll do that.” Then it got worse:

    I’m going to destroy you in six months. We’re going to win in Vietnam by the summer. By July or August the war will be over. You and every one of your dove friends will be dead politically in six months. You guys will be destroyed.

    What is really kind of bizarre about this is that it appears that Johnson believed it. He really thought that General Westmoreland was giving him the right info and predicting the correct outcome. RFK had finally gotten a glimpse into Johnson’s real psyche about the most divisive conflict since the Civil War. He appropriately walked out. He now understood de Gaulle’s advice. There was only one way to end the war. Even if it meant the end of him.

    V

    I would like to close with two sterling episodes from the book.

    The first is another conversation I had never seen before. This was between Bobby Kennedy and Giorgi Bolshakov in May of 1961. (pp. 469-70) Bobby called him in and told the Russian spy that his brother thought there could be a lot more cooperation between their two countries. But Jack was taking over from a former general, namely Eisenhower, as president. Therefore, he was stuck with people like Lyman Lemnitzer as chair of the Joint Chiefs and Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA.

    Now recall, this was after RFK’s duty on the Taylor Commission investigating the Bay of Pigs. He understood how that debacle had occurred. He knew the CIA had deceived the president, and the Joint Chiefs had approved the operation. So he now delivered the punchline: His brother had made a mistake in not firing Dulles and Lemnitzer right away!

    Again, I had never seen this quote before. If you ever wondered where Bobby Kennedy’s later radicalism came from, here it is. He would have gotten rid of Lemnitzer and Dulles on day one. He then expanded on this point:

    These men make outdated recommendations and suggestions which are out of keeping with the president’s new course. My brother has been compelled to go by their mistaken judgments in decision making. Cuba has changed all our foreign policy concepts. For us, the events in the Bay of Pigs are not a flop, but the best lesson we have ever learned. So we are no longer going to repeat our past mistakes. (Douglass, p. 469)

    RFK knew that this attitude by his brother would put a target on the president’s back: “They can put him away any moment. Therefore, he must tread carefully in certain matters and never push his way through.” This remarkable discussion—four hours’ worth– went on until nightfall. When RFK gave Bolshakov a lift home–at or after 10 PM, the Russian could barely sleep. The next morning, he cabled his summary to Moscow. This is what began the secret communications between JFK and Khrushchev. So intricately described in JFK and the Unspeakable.

    If anyone has any knowledge of something similar to this happening since, I would like to hear it. I know nothing like it occurred during the Truman or Eisenhower administrations. It might have been possible under Gorbachev, but Reagan blew that opportunity. Thus paving the way for him to be deposed.

    VI

    As most of us know, the so-called Bobby Kennedy open and shut murder case was not open and shut. But there were signals at the start that the game was going to be rigged. For instance, as Roger LaJaunesse of the local FBI told Bill Turner, both he and the regular command of the LAPD were shoved aside almost immediately. The LAPD Chief of Detectives, Robert Houghton, installed an elite team of his own officers to run that investigation. It was called Special Unit Senator. And the two men who were in charge were Lt. Manny Pena and Sgt. Hank Hernandez. Both of them had ties to the CIA. And they did their best to keep that angle out of the trial and to censor any exculpatory material to the defense.

    But it was actually even worse than that. Thomas Noguchi was the man who performed the autopsy on the senator. He wrote a 62-page report on his findings. The late pathologist Cyril Wecht once called it the finest piece of medico-legal reportage he had ever read. For whatever reason, Noguchi was the last person to testify for the prosecution. In his testimony, both his report and some photographs were admitted into evidence. As Noguchi was beginning to describe the damage to Robert Kennedy’s skull that was revealed during his examination, the lead defense lawyer objected. Grant Cooper said the following:

    Pardon me, Your Honor. Is all of this detail necessary? I would object on the ground of immateriality. I hardly think that this testimony of the doctor is necessary in dealing with the cause of the man’s death. I am not suggesting, Your Honor please…this witness may certainly testify to the cause of death, but I don’t think it is necessary to go into details. I think he can express an opinion that death was due to a gunshot wound. (p. 377)

    This is astonishing. Because it is Noguchi’s findings that exculpate Sirhan as the killer of Robert Kennedy. And here was Sirhan’s defense attorney handing the prosecution their guilty verdict on a silver platter. As anyone who has read some of the better books on the RFK case should know, all the projectiles that entered the senator were from behind, at upward angles, and at very close range. The wound that Noguchi was about to describe was at contact range, about 3 inches away. (Douglass, p. 388) Which means the gun was so close to the head that expelled particles had nowhere to escape into the air. So they created a tattoo ring on the rear of Kennedy’s skull. (Douglass, p. 387) Sirhan was never behind the senator, and no one ever said that his gun arm was aimed upward or that he was in point contact with the rear of Kennedy’s head.

    So why would Grant Cooper object to having the best witness he could have testify to those particular elements of the crime scene?

    The answer is simple: Johnny Rosselli. Cooper was serving as attorney for a cohort of Rosselli’s in the Friars Club case right before he took on the RFK case. Maurice Friedman was a Las Vegas frontman for the mob’s casino ownership. Both Friedman and Rosselli ran a card cheating ring at the club, which was frequented by some high rollers from the entertainment industry, like Phil Silvers. Because of the sophisticated cheating apparatus, Friedman won hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rosselli got a cut since it was on his mob turf. (Douglass, pp. 400-401)

    But on July 20, 1967, the FBI raided the club. The ring was exposed, and Rosselli and Friedman were indicted. They were worried about being convicted, so they bribed a court reporter for the grand jury minutes in their case. A copy of Phil Silvers’ grand jury testimony was found on Cooper’s desk during the trial. At first, Cooper lied and said he had no idea where it came from. (Douglass, p. 404)

    Cooper eventually came clean about what had happened. And it was clear he was facing an indictment. But the inter-agency task force on the Sirhan case was told that this decision would not be made until after the RFK trial. Well, after his less-than-zealous performance for Sirhan, Cooper ended up not being indicted. Defended by a member of the Warren Commission, Joseph Ball, Cooper got off with a slap on the wrist. And a mild one at that. He was fined a thousand dollars. (Click here for the decision https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-supreme-court/1827338.html)

    It is quite difficult not to see this in tandem with his horrendous performance in defense of Sirhan. Where he actually stipulated to the prosecution’s evidence.

    Jim Douglass has done a fine job in describing and then defining the epochal impact of the four high-level murders of the sixties. They were not the result of aimless violence by disturbed assassins. They were all cleverly worked out plots, and the net result was a large diversion of American history. Which does not get into textbooks. This book is a worthy successor to JFK and the Unspeakable.

    The book is available here. Editor’s note: An advance copy was provided for this review. The prior link may also be used for preordering, with an expected release date of Oct 28.

    Click here to read part 1.

  • Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 2

    Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 2

    Martyrs to the Unspeakable – Pt. 2

    By James W. Douglass

     

    James Douglass was the only American print journalist in attendance at the entire civil trial in Memphis on the King case in 1999. He was there as a correspondent for Probe Magazine. Court TV was originally going to cover that proceeding, but according to Douglass, they pulled out just a couple of days before. The Memphis Commercial Appeal’s reporter on the King case was not allowed to attend. So he waited each day for Douglass to emerge in order to get the rundown on what happened. The jury in that trial found for the plaintiffs, the King family, against defendant Loyd Jowers. They decided that the King murder was the result of a conspiracy in which local tavern owner Jowers took part. Jim’s report was first published in Probe, and then excerpted in the anthology The Assassinations.

    As with Malcolm X, J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with the so-called rise of a Black Messiah. Therefore, he did everything he could to discredit King. The first charge was that King was really a secret communist who had infiltrators from Moscow amid his entourage. In fact, Stanley Levison was a private businessman who contributed to the CPUSA but had halted his contributions by late 1956. The FBI knew this, and they also knew that his evolving interest was in the civil rights movement. He was now going to turn his fundraising abilities to that cause. So the FBI tried to get him to return to the party as their informant. He turned them down. (p. 141) So Hoover tried another track: Levison was steering the civil rights movement for Moscow.

    The other target for Hoover was Jack O’Dell. Again, O’Dell was a former member of the CPUSA who went to work for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Beginning in 1961, he was an associate editor for Freedomways, an African-American political journal. He was a good office organizer for the SCLC, especially out of New York.

    As many commentators–like the late Harris Wofford–have noted, Hoover used these accusations of communist influence to drive a wedge between the Kennedys and King. As Douglass notes, the constant harangue by Hoover to expose King as a pinko with communist influences in his camp was, at least, partly successful. President Kennedy told King that if Hoover could prove he had two communists working for him, “…he won’t hesitate to leak it. He’ll use it to wreck the civil rights bill.” (p. 155). Kennedy had fallen for what was at least partly disinformation on Hoover’s part, and he asked King to jettison both men. The president was very sensitive to what Hoover could do to both himself and King. He said in a private conference, “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down too. So we’re asking you to be careful.” (p. 156) King resisted this request on Levison and left the decision up to him. They decided to keep the relationship on a private basis. In 1963, he asked O’Dell to resign, which he did. But King continued to consult with him occasionally.

    What makes this more interesting is that both men fully understood the pressure being brought to bear on all three men: both Kennedys and King. And they understood that whatever they could do for the SCLC, what the Kennedys could do was more important.

    II

    The problem was that the Kennedys had backed the March on Washington. Which turned out to be a smashing success. (pp. 160-61) This had been preceded by President Kennedy’s June 11, 1963, televised declaration on civil rights, the most powerful statement on the matter by any president since Lincoln. In other words, King’s actions, in tandem with the Kennedys, were becoming very potent on a national level. After a thorough study of the FBI files, writer Kenneth O’Reilly stated that the FBI’s,

    …decision to destroy King was not made until the March on Washington demonstrated that the civil rights movement had finally muscled its way onto the nation’s political agenda. (p. 163)

    Under even further pressure from Hoover, he got Robert Kennedy to approve a wiretap on the SCLC’s and King’s phones out of Atlanta. Why did RFK agree to do this? The deal was for thirty days. So “If the taps proved King innocent of Communist associations, then the FBI would have to leave him and Kennedy both alone.” (p. 164). The problem was, as RFK’s personal liaison with the FBI, Courtney Evans, noted:

    …That the assassination of President Kennedy followed these events reasonably close in point of time, and this disrupted the operation of the Office of the Attorney General. ((p. 165)

    If anything, that was an understatement. What happened after JFK’s murder is that Hoover ripped out Bobby Kennedy’s private line to his office. He knew that RFK would not be around very much longer. The rabid racist also knew that his neighbor, Lyndon Johnson, would now allow him much more freedom in his vendetta against King.

    On December 23, 1963, a nine-hour meeting was held at FBI HQ to plan an intensive campaign against King. The aim was to use any technique in order to discredit the man. This included planting a good-looking female in his office:

    We will at the proper time, when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain…. (p. 165)

    The Church Committee adduced testimony that the aim was plain and simple: character assassination. Quite literally, no holds were barred. It was as if King were a dangerous KGB agent. And because Hoover oversaw the Bureau as a monarch, no one dared raise any questions of legality or ethics. It was all made worse when King was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year at the end of 1963. Now, with no one’s permission, the Bureau began to install hidden microphones in the rooms King would stay at on the road. (p. 168). In the spring of 1964, Hoover also got the influential syndicated writer Joseph Alsop to write a communist smear column against King. This was followed a week later by a similar article in the New York Times. (p. 170)

    As he had been warned by President Kennedy, who was not around anymore, King immediately suspected Hoover was behind both pieces. At an airport press conference in San Francisco, he pretty much threw down the gauntlet:

    It would be encouraging to us if Mr. Hoover and the FBI would be as diligent in apprehending those responsible for bombing churches and killing little children, as they are in seeking out allegedly Communist infiltration in the civil rights movement. (p. 171)

    Hoover responded in kind. The tactic now shifted from the Levison/O’Dell angle—which proved to be pretty much a dry well—to the wiretaps and bugs in the hotels. Hoover began this practice at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC in January of 1964. This campaign was ratcheted up even further when it was announced that King would be given the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964. In other words, one of the highest international honors was being bestowed on Hoover’s beta noire. Hoover retaliated in public against this by calling King “the most notorious liar in the country.” His assistant urged him to qualify that remark as being “off the record”, but Hoover would not. Hoover then doubled down and said King was “one of the lowest characters in the country” and he was being “controlled” by his communist advisors. (p. 173)

    III

    When King was alerted to this attack, he was on vacation in Bimini, preparing his Nobel Prize address. He replied with:

    I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure. He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office. (ibid)

    That reply initiated the infamous blackmail tape and letter sent to the Atlanta SCLC HQ in late November of 1964. The entire letter was not found until 2014 by Yale historian Beverly Gage, and Douglass prints it in his book. (pp. 174-75) It is six paragraphs long. The letter is clearly complementary to the alleged taping. In the 4th paragraph, it says the following:

    No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. I repeat—no person can argue successfully against facts. You are finished. You will find on the record for all time your filthy, dirty, evil companions, male and females giving expression with you to your hideous abnormalities….It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies…This one is but a tiny sample….King you are done. (pp. 174-75)

    Toward the end, the letter states: “You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” (p. 175 ) The FBI mailed it from Miami about five days before Thanksgiving of 1964. But the package sat at the Atlanta headquarters for over a month. It was not opened until after King received his Nobel Prize in Oslo. And it was opened by King’s wife Coretta. She notified her husband, and he and his advisors immediately realized it was from the FBI.

    There has been an ongoing debate over two matters in the package. The letter gave King a deadline of 34 days to act. Some believe that, considering when the package was mailed, this would mean Christmas. Others say it was timed for the Nobel Peace Prize honor, which was about two weeks earlier. The second matter was the aim of the package. The SCLC maintained it was for King to take his own life. The FBI, in the person of William Sullivan, who oversaw the composition of the letter, said they wanted King to resign, as they were already grooming his successor, one Samuel Pierce. (p. 169)

    Whatever the timing, whatever the goal, King concluded correctly that the FBI was out to break him. Through their surveillance, the FBI knew he knew and told Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach that “King was emotionally distraught and feared public exposure.” (p. 179)

    King decided to continue in his efforts, knowing that neither of the Kennedys was now in office and Hoover’s venom was virtually unfettered. He must have felt even more forlorn when Malcolm X was killed the next month. As some have noted, Malcolm was killed just two weeks before President Johnson sent the first combat troops to Vietnam.

    IV

    Johnson had escalated the war in Vietnam to heights that President Kennedy would have found appalling. By early 1967 there were nearly 400,000 American combat troops in theater. Johnson had activated the air campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, to complement the combat troops. There ended up being more bomb tonnage dropped in Indochina than had been disposed of during World War II; by a factor of 3-1, the ratio was not even close. The problem was that the bombing campaign inevitably included civilians, since, unlike Germany, Vietnam did not have a highly concentrated industrial base.

    In January of 1967, King was looking at a Ramparts magazine photo/essay entitled “The Children of Vietnam”. Many of the pictures showed little children in a hideously burned state. The article was by attorney William Pepper. King then met with him, and Pepper showed him more photos. It moved King to now begin a sustained assault on Johnson’s prosecution of the war. His first speech was in Los Angeles on February 27th, called “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam”. This was followed up by the more famous address at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. As Douglass appropriately notes, a year later, King was dead.

    There were those—like Ralph Bunche– who advised against King taking on the war. But King thought it was hypocritical to send African-American troops to fight in Vietnam for rights that some did not have at home; and to kill so many innocent civilians along the way.

    Another aspect that made King determined to speak out on Indochina was that he had done so in 1965, and then backtracked. At that time, he said that Johnson had a serious problem in this regard because “The war in Vietnam is accomplishing nothing.” (p. 351) About a month and a half later, in April of 1965, he told some journalists in Boston that the United States should end the war. On July 2, 1965, in Petersburg, Virginia, King said that the war must be halted and a negotiated settlement should be achieved. (p. 352). But the SCLC board members did not want King to continue in this vein.

    So King instead had a meeting with UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg in September to voice his concerns and urge Johnson to negotiate a truce. King even suggested that it would be possible to bring the Chinese into the negotiations. Both Goldberg and Senator Thomas Dodd voiced opposition to these types of talks. (pp. 355-57) And Dodd went further by saying King had no knowledge to speak on matters so complex as Indochina, and further, he was undermining Johnson’s foreign policy. King thought Johnson had put Dodd up to this criticism.

    As others, Douglass sees King’s decision to return to the Vietnam issue, coupled with the stirrings of the Poor People’s March, as raising his targeting from character assassination to outright elimination. As per the latter, what King ultimately hoped to gain from the Washington demonstrations was the following:

    1. A full employment program
    2. Guaranteed Annual Income
    3. Funding for 500,000 annual units of low-cost housing (p. 310)

    King wanted to do in Washington what he did in Birmingham. Through peaceful civil disobedience, he would tie up the city and force its leaders to act on his proposals. But King was going to go even further and unite the two goals:

    After we get to DC and stay a few days we’ll call the peace movement in and let them go on the other side of the Potomac and try to close down the Pentagon, if that can he done. (p. 311)

    King was now talking about closing down both Congress and the Pentagon. The reader should recall that this is on FBI tapings. As Bernard LaFayette, a coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign, later said, “You see, the Poor People’s Campaign was clearly economic rights. Now, it’s not low volume; it’s high volume.” (ibid). Or as Vincent Harding, the man who drafted King’s Riverside speech, later said: King was moving in “some radical directions that few of us had been prepared for.” He clearly suggested that this necessitated his assassination. (p. 314)

    V

    James Earl Ray escaped from prison in late April of 1967. After working as a dishwasher for a couple of months, he stashed enough money to buy an old car and crossed the border to Montreal, Canada. There, at the Neptune Tavern, he met a man he knew simply as Raul. Although Ray had been attacked for creating this character, a witness who testified at the 1999 King trial confirmed it. Seaman Sidney Carthew also met Raul at the same bar. And he saw him with Ray. (pp. 339-40)

    As Douglass describes it, Ray’s partnership with Raul ended up being a minor gun-running and drug-smuggling operation. It went from Canada to the USA, particularly California, and then to Mexico, and back to the southern part of the USA, ending with Ray being asked by Raul to go to Memphis and buy a rifle. But it was the wrong one. So Raul ordered him to go back and buy another one. As attorney Arthur Hanes testified at the King trial, it was that rifle which was dropped at the door of Canipe’s novelty shop a few minutes before the actual assassination. And that would be the weapon Ray was charged with in killing King. (p. 340) Even though that rifle was never calibrated for accuracy.

    Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Ray’s journeys after his escape is his use of multiple identities, i.e., Eric Galt, Ramon George Sneyd, Paul Bridgeman and John Willard. As Philip Melanson originally noted, all four lived in a suburban area of Toronto; and within a five-mile radius of each other. But beyond that, three of the aliases—Galt, Bridgeman, Sneyd—approximated Ray’s general appearance, that is, in height, weight and hair color. Further, there is no evidence that Ray had been to Toronto before the assassination of King.

    What makes this even more startling is that Ray signed the Galt alias with the wrong middle name of ‘Starvo’, which came from a scrawl Eric used for ‘St. V’, which actually stood for St. Vincent. But here is the capper: “When Galt shortened it to the initial ‘S’ Ray… did the same.” (p. 341) As Douglass concludes, only someone with access to Galt’s security file at Union Carbide, where he worked, could have known about these nuances.

    Douglass now moves to the preparations made for the King’s murder. First, King’s normal all-African-American security team was removed the morning of his arrival. The replacement team of caucasian guards was then removed late in the afternoon, about an hour before the shooting. Two black officers from the fire station across the street were reassigned to different stations for that day. The tactical police units around the Lorriane Motel, where King stayed, were moved back earlier on April 4th. The first three negated any security, and the last made it easier for an escape. (pp. 343-44)

    Was it even more prepared for than that? The reason King returned to Memphis was because, in his first visit there, about a week earlier, there was a raucous disturbance in the demonstration. That disturbance was caused by the Invaders, an African American youth group modeled on the Black Panthers. (p. 448) A prominent member of that group was Marrell McCullough, who was later uncovered as a police informant and then worked a long career as a CIA officer.

    When King decided to return, the FBI then put out a story that on his original visit, he ignored the Lorraine, which was black owned. He had stayed at the Holiday Inn motel, which was white owned. Therefore, King was initially booked into an interior courtyard room at the Lorraine for his return. Someone, no one knows who, had that room switched to a street-level room. It would have been difficult to assassinate King in that first room. The room on the street made it easier. (pp. 448-49)

    On the day of the murder, Raul delivered a rifle to Loyd Jowers’ eatery, Jim’s Grill. The back door opened up to a bush area across from the Lorraine. There is a dispute as to where the shot that killed King originated. At least two credible witnesses say it did not come from the flophouse where Ray was booked at. It came from that bushy area, and Douglass agrees with that. But the point remains, those bushes were inexplicably cut down early the next morning. (p. 455)

    As the reader can see, there is good reason that the MSM did not cover the Jowers/King trial in 1999. Because they suspected that the King family would win out. Which they did. Jim Douglass does a good job presenting that evidence, which helped Bill Pepper win a judgment.

    Next: JFK and RFK are eliminated. Click here to read part 3.

  • Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 1

    Review of James Douglass’s New Book – Pt 1

    Martyrs to the Unspeakable – Pt. 1

    By James W. Douglass

     

    In 2008, James Douglass published JFK and the Unspeakable. That book became, more or less, an instant classic in the field. One reason being that Douglass did something quite unusual. Instead of having Kennedy’s presidency as a backdrop to his assassination, he made his assassination a backdrop to his presidency. But, beyond that, Douglass delved deeper into that presidency than virtually anyone in the field had done. He brought in things that had not been studied before, and he dug further into aspects that had been gone over previously. With those explorations, he made the case as to why President Kennedy was assassinated.

    Douglass appropriately ended his fine book with the fact that both Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy knew what happened to JFK. And, through envoy William Walton, they communicated to Moscow that the John Kennedy/Nikita Khrushchev attempt at détente would now have to be placed on hold; but Bobby Kennedy would soon resign, run for office, and then run for the presidency. At that time, the quest could be resumed.

    The Douglass book struck a chord with the public. After Oliver Stone endorsed it on television, sales zoomed upwards. It was then picked up by Touchstone, which was a division of Simon and Schuster. In all formats, it has sold well over 100,000 copies. It is the rarest of JFK books in that it was both a critical and commercial success. (Click here for my review https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-by-james-w-douglass)

    At the time of that book’s publication, Douglass was supposed to pen a trilogy about the major assassinations of the sixties. The second book was going to be about the Malcolm X and Martin Luther King assassinations. The third was going to focus on the Robert Kennedy murder. Since the road to completion took 17 years—interrupted by his book on the life and death of Gandhi–the decision was made to collapse them into one volume. So we now have Martyrs to the Unspeakable.

    II

    Douglass begins the book with a pungent quote from Malcolm X:

    It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way. But I’ve learned it. And that’s the significant thing. (p. xvii, p. 459)

    This is one of the sub-themes of the book. One lurking not far below the surface and infrequently but explicitly mentioned: Namely, that all four men understood that they were in danger, they were gambling with their lives in advocating the paths they were taking. Malcolm, with his UN resolution condemning America for human rights violations against African-Americans; King, in his organizing of the Poor People’s March on Washington; JFK, in his quest for détente with Cuba and Moscow; and Bobby Kennedy, with his impending victory in the Democratic primary and his pledge to end the Vietnam War. (Douglass points out the little-known fact that the Poor People’s March was Bobby Kennedy’s idea. p. 90)

    Explicitly, Bobby Kennedy told Walter Fauntroy that “…there were guns between me and the White House.” (p. 97). He said about his brother that if the Russians did not meet his attempts at détente halfway, “…his enemies may go to any length, including killing him….” (p. 502)

    JFK said the same thing about himself. He was once asked why he did not move faster for a rapprochement with Moscow. He replied: “You don’t understand this country. If I move too fast on US/Soviet relations, I’ll either be thrown into an insane asylum or be killed.” (p. 503)

    I do not have to tell the reader about King predicting his own death the night before he was assassinated. Why was there this impending doom? Douglass underscores that what these four men were striving for was simply too radical for the national security complex to tolerate. Therefore, they had to be done away with before they could succeed. It is important to note that it was only during John Kennedy’s presidency that all four men were alive and operating at their peaks. As I have noted elsewhere, there was more done on civil rights in those three years than had been achieved in the prior three decades. (Click here and scroll down https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-3) For that reason 1.) There could be no Kennedy dynasty, and 2.) There could be no confederation, which was impending, between Malcolm and King.

    III

    The book is structured into three major headings. Part One is called The Witness. Part Two is called The Way. Part Three is titled The Why.

    In the first part, we see certain policies being advocated by the four major players. For instance, Malcolm going international with a meeting with Achmed Sukarno in 1957 (p. 113); hearing Patrice Lumumba speak at Howard University in July of 1960 (p. 123); his arrangement to have Castro take a room at the Hotel Theresa, and his meeting there with him after midnight on September 19, 1960. (p. 125) This last caused quite an uproar in Harlem since the Cuban leader was going to be charged a $20,000 deposit at the Shelburne Hotel. By the time Malcolm made the arrangements to switch hotels, there were 2,000 people waiting in the rain, fully understanding why the Cuban leader was being forced out of downtown:

    To Harlem’s oppressed ghetto dwellers, Castro was that bearded revolutionary who had thrown the nation’s rascals out and who had told white America to go to hell. (p. 125)

    What these instances did was to broaden both the appeal of Malcolm, and also his intellectual horizons. Malcolm was now not just a regional figure in the USA, but he was seen as associating with figures on the world stage. And these men happened to be striking figures in the rising Third World. But then this was all topped. Because Nikita Khrushchev happened to be in New York, and he decided to join Castro at the Hotel Theresa:

    By going to a Negro hotel, in a Negro district, we would be making a double demonstration: against the discriminatory policies of the United States of America toward Negroes, as well as toward Cuba. (p. 126)

    Malcolm had helped arrange a slap across the face to the Establishment. And make no mistake, they did not like it.

    The Cuban leader’s diplomatic triumph over the US government in Harlem was a dramatic counterpoint to his UN speech. It was facilitated by Malcolm X. When US intelligence agencies focused their attention on Fidel Castro in New York, they discovered Malcolm X standing right beside him, welcoming Fidel and the Cuban revolution to Harlem. By joining forces with Fidel, Malcolm, too, had become a target. (p. 129)

    As Douglass notes, the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro began around this time. (p. 128) But as someone close to Malcolm also noted, this meeting with Castro began to divert Malcolm’s thinking away from the narrow restrictions of his loyal service to the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad, e.g., black power, black nationalism, and racial separation. He began to see that there were other oppressed groups like American Indians, Chicanos and Hispanics, and theirs could be a common struggle. (ibid)

    There were two other elements that began the notorious split between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam (NOI). There was the matter of Malcolm’s inquiries about Elijah Muhammad’s numerous infidelities. (p. 254) Which Malcolm felt were unbecoming for a Holy Man. And there was his Hajj, which ended up lasting much longer than planned, and with Malcolm visiting countries outside the Middle East, including France and Egypt. He then visited Africa again. All told, he went to Africa three times. He became a member of the Organization of African Unity, and adapted it in the USA as the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Which he saw as a Pan African group extending to the USA. (p. 242) Further, he could use their leaders to facilitate his aim at bringing about a UN resolution condemning American treatment of blacks. As he said:

    You must realize that what I am trying to do is very dangerous, because it is a direct threat to the entire international system of racist exploitation. It is a threat to discrimination in all its international forms. (p. 244)

    IV

    One last element that had caused Malcolm’s split from NOI was his suspension after his perceived inappropriate remarks upon the murder of President Kennedy, which he called the chickens coming home to roost. This suspension was originally for 90 days. But it lasted longer, and Malcolm tended to look at it as personal since he was getting more attention as a NOI representative than Elijah was.

    When Malcolm went on his Hajj, he now began to see that there were all kinds of people visiting Mecca, many of them Caucasian with blonde hair and blue eyes. Which also began to make him question the fundamental tenets of NOI and whether it really was Muslim at all. So he decided not just to split from NOI but to convert to Sunni Islam and form the Muslim Mosque. All these elements did not endear him to Elijah or his followers, like Louis Farrakhan.

    In fact, he wrote a letter to a NY Times reporter where he noted that he now regretted the 12 years he had spent in NOI, and called it a “pseudo-religious philosophy”. He then capped that with this:

    I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes, who through my own evangelistic zeal, now believe him more fanatically and more blindly than I did. (pp. 245-46)

    It is appropriate to note that years before he became Vice President, Lyndon Johnson had a talk with J Edgar Hoover of the FBI. Hoover said they would not have a problem if they could get these black leaders fighting among themselves to the point they would kill each other off. (p. 241) Although they were likely speaking of King and Malcolm, there is no doubt that Hoover later adapted this divide-and-conquer philosophy to other African American groups, most successfully with the Black Panthers. In fact, there is plentiful evidence that Hoover used this technique in exacerbating and inflaming the split between the NOI and Malcolm. This was done through placing informants in both camps and a clear agent provocateur against Malcolm in the NOI camp. The latter was John Ali. (pp. 249-250)

    Ali began with Malcolm in New York in 1958. The next year, Malcolm recommended him to the NOI headquarters in Chicago. That was a recommendation that he came to strongly regret. When Elijah Muhammad moved to Phoenix for health reasons, Ali essentially took over the Chicago HQ. He even got Malcolm’s brother to read a prepared statement denouncing Malcolm and accusing him of being mentally unbalanced. (p. 272) Elijah essentially called for his elimination with this: “Elijah Muhammad said they had better close his eyes.” In early 1964, the message went out that Malcolm had to be liquidated. (p. 256)

    But this could not have succeeded without help from the CIA, the FBI and the NYPD. The last was through their undercover intelligence group called BOSSI. Douglass does a nice job outlining all of this. There was a previous attempt to murder Malcolm by poison in Cairo. Malcolm was rushed to the hospital and had his stomach pumped. Malcolm had retroactively recognized his waiter, who afterwards had disappeared. Malcolm concluded, “I know that our Muslims don’t have the resources to finance a worldwide spy network.” (p. 427). But further, after an engagement in London on February 9th, he flew to Paris to make another speech. At Orly Airport, the French police intercepted him and said he was not allowed to enter France. Why? Because French intelligence had been told, “That the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil”, and they did not want that to occur on their watch. (p. 437)

    On February 14, 1965, Malcolm’s home in Queens, which was in dispute between him and the NOI, was firebombed. A day later, BOSSI undercover agent Gene Roberts witnessed a dress rehearsal for Malcolm’s murder. Roberts then predicted to his superiors that the real assassination would take place the following Sunday. Hoover had Malcolm monitored for the last 17 days of his life and had an agent at BOSSI each and every day during that time. He had to know this. (pp. 440-41, p. 450)

    V

    As Douglass notes, one of the most tragic aspects about the murder of Malcolm is that not only was he breaking from NOI, he was trying to forge a relationship with King. One complaint Malcolm had with Elijah Muhammad was that the Nation of Islam would not do anything in public unless it impacted one of their own. They basically sat out the whole civil rights movement. So once he split with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm journeyed to the epochal Selma demonstration in early February of 1965. The talk that he was coming had barely started when he arrived at a meeting of the SCLC and SNCC workers. Coretta King was in attendance while her husband was in jail. He told her, “I have not come to Selma to cause difficulty for Dr. King. I only want to show support.” (p. 435)

    When Malcolm spoke at the Brown Chapel that afternoon, he leaned over the podium and said to the media in front, “You had better listen to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or you will have to listen to me. Dr. King wants the same thing I want—Freedom!” (p. 436) Unfortunately, this was not to be. For Malcom would be dead in a little more than two weeks.

    On the morning of February 21st, Malcolm was on the phone with his sister. He said, “Ask Allah to guide me, because I feel they may have me doomed for this day.” She said, “Not this day.” Malcolm replied, “Yes, this day.” (p. 451) Making this even more prophetic, Malcolm refused to allow his guards to search people coming into his talks. One of his escorts resigned over this policy after telling him he was going to be killed.

    Once the warning came in from Roberts about the dress rehearsal and the day it would occur, the NYPD should have been in the Audubon ballroom and ready to detect and stop the attempt. They were not and did not. They placed their men in rooms away from the ballroom. And they were not allowed to move in that direction unless given radio permission to do so. But when the shots rang out, the walkie-talkies went dead. Therefore, the police ended up entering the scene fifteen minutes after the murder. (pp. 449-450)

    In other words, egged on by the FBI and allowed to proceed by the NYPD, Malcolm was killed by a NOI plan that the authorities specifically knew about in advance. In other words, it was allowed to happen. Douglass has done a fine job on the relatively ignored case of the assassination of Malcolm.

    Next: The Murder of Martin Luther King. Click here to read part 2.

  • Review of RFK Legacy film

    Review of RFK Legacy film

    Sean Stone and Rob Wilson: RFK Legacy

    Rob Wilson produced JFK Revisited for director Oliver Stone. He has now produced RFK Legacy for director Sean Stone, Oliver’s son. This new documentary seems to me to be unique in its field. Because it deals with three Kennedys: John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Robert Kennedy Jr. And the concentration is on Senator Robert Kennedy: his life, and also his assassination.

    It begins with Robert Kennedy announcing that he is running for president in 1968. It then briefly deals with three primaries in that race: Indiana, Oregon–the first election a Kennedy lost– and the triumph in California on June 4th over Senatorial rival Eugene McCarthy. We see RFK at the podium reciting his now iconic (and final) public phrase, “On to Chicago and let’s win there.” The film then cuts to the aftermath of that victory: the utter shock, disbelief and hysteria of the crowd as some of them see, and the rest of them learn, that RFK has been assassinated. Recall, this is just two months after the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis. And it is the second Kennedy to be assassinated in five years. The grief at what had just happened at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was almost palpable. The Jungian consciousness behind it all was this: it was the premature burial of the sixties.

    The film follows as RFK’s body was transported from California to a requiem at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, as that was the state from which he was senator. To make the passing of the era even more symbolic, on that plane were not just Ethel Kennedy, but both Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King. Bobby Kennedy had paid a large part of the cost for King’s funeral in April. And the night of King’s murder, he gave what was probably his finest speech—one which prevented Indianapolis from going up in flames, as almost every other major city in America had. Jackie Kennedy strongly objected to RFK running for president. She feared that what had happened to her husband would happen to him. He had become the substitute father to her children.

    What then followed the service was the train ride from New York City to the burial at Arlington Cemetery in Washington, DC. Arthur Schlesinger was on that train. He had originally thought Bobby was a lesser candidate than Jack. He had since changed his mind. At the end, he thought RFK would make an even greater president than his brother. One reason was that he had become more radical than Jack. He wrote in his diary, “We have now murdered the three men who, more than any other, incarnated the idealism of America in our time.” He pledged never to get this close to any other such candidate. It was too tragic. (David Margolick, The Promise and the Dream, pp. 385-86)

    The film flashes back to RFK’s career with commentators like Lisa Pease in the present and Ed Murrow from the past. We see a young Robert Kennedy as lead counsel for the McClellan Committee going up against the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and, later, Sam Giancana. Members of the press now pronounced Kennedy “ruthless’ for exposing the Cosa Nostra so relentlessly. Which is something that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were reluctant to do.

    When his brother won the presidency, RFK continued his crusade against organized crime as Attorney General. He also, like no other previous AG, pursued the breaking down of segregation in the South and civil rights for African Americans. Further, as the film shows, it was RFK who exposed to JFK that the CIA had deceived him about the Bay of Pigs operation. They knew it could not succeed without Pentagon support. In fact, they knew it would fail. But they thought JFK would commit American power to salvage it. He did not. Therefore, JFK fired Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Dick Bissell.

    This split with the Agency was made worse by the fact that the CIA had secretly contracted out with three members of the Cosa Nostra—John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante—to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is after RFK had ordered a full court press on organized crime, and ordered an almost total surveillance over Giancana. When the FBI (accidentally) discovered these plots and informed Bobby about them, he asked for a briefing by the CIA. The Agency told him the plots had stopped. They had not. And the Agency knew they had not when they lied to him about it.

    By midway through 1961, Bobby became an advisor to JFK on foreign policy. During the Missile Crisis, there was no one more trusted by the president than Bobby. When there was true fear of having to resort to the Greenbrier Underground Shelter –which the film depicts—President Kennedy opted for the blockade alternative. For which he was harshly criticized, especially by the Joint Chiefs. When the Russians communicated a truce agreement, it was RFK who advised his brother on the terms to accept.

    As the film notes, after the double assassinations of JFK and then Oswald, Bobby Kennedy began a metamorphosis. He now became a gentler, kinder, more sensitive politician and person. This was typified by his visits to Mississippi at the request of Marian Edelman, and to California for Cesar Chavez. (I was personally told by the late Paul Schrade that it was Cesar’s idea to approach RFK on this.)

    In keeping with the title of the film, we now shift to RFK Jr. He consciously followed his father’s footsteps by first attending Harvard and then the University of Virginia School of Law. He developed a chronic drug problem after his father’s death, which included running away from home. He was eventually arrested for heroin possession in South Dakota. As part of his probation, he worked for the conservation group the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It was that experience which transformed him into an environmental lawyer of the first rank.

    Some of his successful crusades were his legal actions over pollution of the Hudson River, during which he joined the Riverkeepers group, which had started with fisherman John Cronin. It was this longstanding Hudson River campaign which many feel was the real beginning of the environmental movement in the USA. Kennedy also took on Monsanto and General Electric. He became well known in New York and was featured on the cover of several popular magazines for saving the Hudson River from becoming a cesspool. New York magazine captioned him as “The Kennedy Who Matters”. He wrote a book called Crimes Against Nature, railing against George W. Bush’s environmental policies. This and his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 got him interviews with Jon Stewart and then Stephen Colbert. He was so in demand that he was doing almost 200 speeches per year.

    The film deals with what eventually caused the MSM to turn on Kennedy. It began with his campaign against mercury in pollution and the fact that it was in some vaccines wrapped in a preservative called thimerosal. He was not the only person to warn about this. Congressman Frank Pallone had done so in 1997. The film also features people like psychologist Sarah Bridges, actress Grace Hightower and essayist Lyn Redwood on the issue. I am not qualified to render any kind of definitive judgment on the subject, so I will not.

    The film then deals with the other issue that turned the MSM against Robert Kennedy Jr. That would be his view of the assassinations of his uncle and then his father. As the film shows, RFK Jr. was first suspicious about his uncle’s death. This was based on the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. He could not understand why Ruby did what he did in public and in front of TV cameras. He later found out that Ruby was much more than just a patriotic strip club owner. At this point in the film, Sean Stone brings in David Talbot, who does a very nice job describing what happened when RFK heard the news from J. Edgar Hoover that his brother was dead. He immediately suspected a conspiracy, as Talbot described in the early part of his book, Brothers.

    RFK could not stay for the rest of the LBJ term. So after he, Thomas Kuchel and Hubert Humphrey got his brother’s civil rights bill through the Senate, he departed. (As Clay Risen shows in his book The Bill of the Century, what LBJ did on this bill has been greatly exaggerated.) As senator from New York, Kennedy became what author Edward Schmitt called the President of the Other America. He was there for the poor, the young, and the downtrodden.

    He was obviously the candidate to run against Johnson in 1968. After all, as he himself told Daniel Ellsberg, his brother’s policy would not have allowed Vietnam to escalate as under Johnson. (Ellsberg at Harvard JFK seminar in 1993). As Talbot states, by 1968, RFK was going to run on civil rights, poverty and withdrawing from Vietnam. Contrary to popular belief, and as revealed by author Jules Witcover in his book 85 Days, Kennedy had decided before the New Hampshire primary that he would run. McCarthy’s strong showing in that primary, plus the devastating Tet Offensive, forced Johnson out. As Witcover notes, Johnson would have lost in Wisconsin. And he knew that.

    The film closes with two powerful strophes. First is President Kennedy’s advocacy for Rachel Carson. Specifically in her battle against DDT and other pesticides in her 1962 classic Silent Spring. Carson had attended the May 1962 White House conference on conservation. And she testified before JFK’s Science Advisory Committee. She was battling breast cancer at the time, and she passed on in April of 1964. She was viciously attacked by the chemical companies, but she stood her ground.

    The second strophe is the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy Jr admits that he had accepted the orthodoxy on this case until he talked to Paul Schrade. Schrade was one of the victims of the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel that night. When the trajectory of the bullet that hit him was explained, he knew that the LAPD was passing horse manure. He eventually convinced Bobby to read Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report. That did it for RFK Jr. Thankfully, Sean Stone features Lisa Pease in this last segment. There is no better authority on the RFK murder than Lisa. And her book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, is mandatory reading for anyone interested in that case. Stone’s closing twenty minutes or so is quite pointed intellectually and well done artistically. Kudos should also go to Oliver Stone, who did the face-to-face interview with RFK Jr., editor Kurt Mattila, composer Jeff Beal and cinematographer Egor Povolotsky.

    I would recommend viewing the film to our readers. It is being streamed at Angel.com (https://www.angel.com/blog/rfk-legacy/posts/where-to-watch-rfk-legacy).

  • Clay Shaw in Italy – Part 2

    Clay Shaw in Italy – Part 2

    Clay Shaw in Italy: Amid Permindex and Gladio, Part 2

    In Part 1, we have established the enormous influence of Licio Gelli and Propaganda Due, and its association with Permindex/Centro Mondiale Commerciale. This was through someone, only Michele Metta discovered, namely, Roberto Ascarelli. As noted, both groups met in his offices, and he served on the board of Permindex/CMC. Now that we have presented this new and compelling information, it is appropriate to review some already established material before proceeding forward again.

    As noted, Clay Shaw always denied he had any association with the CIA. He did this in public, and he also declared it under oath on the stand at his trial. This, of course, turned out to be a canard. The declassified record adduced by the ARRB has proven it as such. As William Davy showed in his book, Shaw had a covert security clearance, and he was so valued that he was issued a Y file. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 195, p. 199). As Joan Mellen later discovered, Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract agent. (Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54-55) In an internal communication, the ARRB’s CIA analyst, Manuel Legaspi, stated that the Agency had severely altered Shaw’s 201 file. But, as previously mentioned, we do know that Shaw did work for the CIA “over a five year span in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100)

    When Ference Nagy first announced plans for a business organization in Basel, this met with criticism in the papers due to some of the people involved. That would include Nagy himself, since the year before he had been referred to as “a long-time asset of CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Frank Wisner.”(Maurice Phillips’ blog, 10/15/10) According to the Soviets, Nagy had a role in the Hungarian uprising of 1956. (New York Times, 11/8/56) In declassified documents by the ARRB, Nagy was revealed to be “a cleared contact of the International Organizations Division. His 201 file contains a number of references to his association with the World Trade Center.” (CIA document of 3/24/67)

    When the financial banking for Nagy’s new enterprise was announced, it raised even more controversy. (State Department Memo, 1/15/57) The first bank announced was J. Henry Schroder’s. This bank was closely associated with the CIA and Director Allen Dulles. The Dulles law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, used Schroder’s in dealing with the Nazis in the late thirties. When Dulles became director, that bank was a repository for a 50-million-dollar contingency fund he controlled. (Davy, p. 96) That financial conglomerate was a prime source as a conduit for CIA fronts like the Kaplan Foundation and a half dozen others like it. (ibid)

    So Schroder’s now denied its backing. Another bank stepped in, namely, Hans Seligman’s. The State Department was curious about this since Seligman’s was a much smaller house than Schroder’s. When the American consul interviewed Nagy and Seligman, he found them to be rather cautious in revealing the firms backing the project. But Seligman had a reputation for cooperating with the fascists during the war. And also, like Schroder’s, Seligman’s bank was also in the Sullivan and Cromwell financial orbit. (State Department cables of 2/1/57 and 11/7/58; S. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, p. 297)

    Due to the characters involved, the questionable backing, plus attacks in the press, the project stalled. But it was now ascertained that the International Trade Mart was a model for Permindex, and that Clay Shaw of the ITM had shown “from the outset great interest in the Permindex project.” (State Department cables of 4/9/58 and 7/18/58) This prompted a visit to New Orleans by certain Swiss officials in 1957. (State Department cable of 11/7/58) In the spring of 1958, Enrico Mantello and his father Giorgio—a main player in the Permindex scheme—traveled to New Orleans and met with Shaw. This was after an exchange of letters between the two parties. (Nagy collection at Columbia University, sourced by Ed Berger.) Nagy seemed to be determined now to move to Rome, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles somehow heard of this. In a memo of September of 1958 requesting aid for Nagy in Italy, the document originates at Commerce but it has Foster Dulles’ name on it at the end.

    Nagy then announced that Permindex would be opening up an affiliate called Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome. According to a Time-Life internal memo, Shaw visited their new HQ prior to its official opening. This was a 37,000 square foot office building originally constructed in 1942. Shaw was then reported by the State Department to be on the Board of Directors. (State Department cable of 11/7/58)

    As Maurice Phillips and Metta have pointed out, there was a Canadian connection to CMC. This was through former Major Louis Bloomfield. In a letter written by Bloomfield on February 4, 1960, he noted that Nagy had met with David Rockefeller the previous day. Bloomfield was supposed to be there, but due to a temporary health affliction, he could not attend. Bloomfield described the meeting as successful, and he planned on meeting with Rockefeller in a week or so. (From Bloomfield to Ernest Wolf) As the Bloomfield archive, as excavated by Maurice Phillips, showed, it was not just Rockefeller who was in the Permindex outer circle, but also Baron Edmund de Rothschild. Both men were being solicited as investors. In other words, those involved in Permindex were in contact with two of the richest and most powerful men in the world at that time. (Letter by Bloomfield to Abraham Friedman of April 1, 1959)

    II

    There was another side to Permindex/CMC. As William Davy notes in his book about Jim Garrison, Ferenc Nagy was a close acquaintance to, and supportive of, Jacques Soustelle. (Let Justice be Done, p. 99) Soustelle had been the governor-general of Algeria and had worked for President Charles DeGaulle. But he had broken with the president over his policy of an independence solution to the war with Algerian rebels—a policy which President Kennedy had advocated since 1957. Soustelle had traveled to Washington in the early sixties and met with CIA officers. He was pleading for support for the OAS, a group of breakaway military officers trying to overthrow and/or kill DeGaulle. According to Andrew Tully in his book CIA: The Inside Story, the meeting was a success. Many years later, it was revealed to the Church Committee that the Agency had aided in a scheme to assassinate DeGaulle. (Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1975)

    We should also note something on a lower level that is pertinent. In the 1961 raid on the weapons cache in Houma, Louisiana DA Jim Garrison discovered that some of the arms that were lifted and sent to Guy Banister’s office were CIA stockpiled weaponry on loan to the OAS group. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 90) In tracing the money used to finance the plots against DeGaulle, French intelligence discovered that about $200,000 in covert funding had been sent to Permindex accounts in the Banque de la Credit Internationale. In 1962, Banister sent to Paris his lawyer colleague Maurice Gatlin, who was a member of Banister’s Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. Gatlin reportedly had a suitcase full of money for the OAS, estimated at around $200,000. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 499-500)

    This relates to another explosive disclosure by Michele Metta in his first book on the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. Enrico Mattei was the miracle man who turned the National Fuel Trust (ENI) of the Italian government into a formidable force in petroleum markets on the world stage. Mattei was controversial in his policies as he made key petroleum deals in the Middle East and significant agreements with the USSR. In the former instance, he agreed to lower concessions in order to gain new drilling rights. In the latter case, he agreed to purchase 12 million tons of Russian crude oil. (Time, 11/2/62)

    Mattei’s maneuvering weakened the Rockefeller/Shell/British Petroleum-controlled Seven Sisters oil monopoly that had dominated oil markets through the 20th century. (The attorney for that oil monopoly was John McCloy of the Warren Commission.) Mattei also broke with tradition in his policies toward countries where the oil was discovered. He insisted that they get up to 75% of the profits. He stated that he thought the giant foreign oil companies were preying on the Italian market by rigging higher prices. In a clear jab at the Seven Sisters, he once said:

    The policy I am following has permitted me not only to free my country from the grip of the cartel, but to benefit from prices lower than those which our neighbors pay. (Ibid)

    Mattei was so successful in his endeavors that he expanded the reach of the ENI into motels, cafes, service stations, newspapers and factories producing synthetic rubber. ENI was estimated to be worth 2 billion in 1962. Mattei was said to have played a major role in spurring the enormous growth in the Italian economy during his years as director. He donated his salary to an orphanage. And one should also note this: like Kennedy and DeGaulle, he wanted France out of Algeria.

    III

    Mattei’s brilliant reign came to an end on October 27, 1962. He perished in a mysterious plane crash, which recalled the murder of Dag Hammarskjold the previous year. (See the book Who Killed Hammarskjold? by Susan Williams) At the beginning of 1962, Mattei’s pilot discovered an attempt to sabotage his plane. Therefore, Mattei now ordered an identical aircraft which he would choose between on short notice. After his death, the wreckage was removed very quickly, and the identical plane was sold off in parts to parties in America. Film director Francesco Rosi commissioned a script after a journalist reported a significant discovery in the case. That journalist then disappeared –forever. But not before he said, “I have a scoop that is going to shake Italy.” (See, “The Mystery of Enrico Mattei’s Death” at Ecco le marche web site; see also La Repubblica, story by Attilio Bolzoni 6/18/2005)

    Although Rosi did make his film, it did not get very much exposure in America, and neither did Mattei’s death. But the matter did inspire much private inquiry in Italy. Vincenzo Calia was one of the more important researchers. In fact, Calia changed the verdict about the crash for most later biographies of Mattei. His work altered those references from a plane malfunction to sabotage of Mattei’s aircraft. Calia advanced powerful evidence that the plane went down because of an explosion. (Michele Metta, CMC, p. 132)

    Metta was loaned Calia’s research materials. In one of the interviews Calia did, he talked to a writer named Fulvio Bellini. In one of Bellini’s books, he had gone over the problems Mattei was having with his immediate superior, who was opposed to some of his policies and, in fact, was close to Borghese. Bellini referred to the Centro Mondiale Commerciale as: “The terminal in Italy of the group who attend to all the dirty work in world politics, including the assassination of Enrico Mattei.” (Italics added)

    Bellini then went even further. He said that, to understand the death of Mattei, one had to follow the trail to none other than Soustelle. Bellini said Soustelle was given the job of performing, what he referred to as, Operation Mattei. He then concluded that Soustelle was given around 100,000 dollars to do so from Montreal through Permindex. (Ibid., p. 133)

    We can speculate about the Montreal connection. That is where Bloomfield operated from with the shares of Permindex stock. And he was enlisting the likes of David Rockefeller and Edmund de Rothschild as investors. I do not have to refer to how much interest Rockefeller had in the Seven Sisters: two of the seven were Rockefeller-controlled, Chevron and Exxon.

    Two more elements should be mentioned regarding this Metta discovery. A young man named Jules Ricco Kimble was a friend of David Ferrie’s who introduced him to Clay Shaw. One day in late 1961—perhaps early 1962—Ferrie called him and asked if he wanted to take a plane ride with him. Kimble agreed and met Ferrie at the airport, where he learned that Shaw would be joining them. Ferrie made some stops to refuel, but their last stop was Montreal. The trip was for an overnight stay, and Shaw did not rejoin them until the next morning. A bit later, Ferrie called him again to make another flight into Canada, but Kimble declined. (Garrison, p. 118)

    Finally, to add more intrigue to what Bellini noted, Metta reports that Soustelle was meeting with former Italian prime minister Fernando Tambroni in Rome in the latter part of 1961. Tambroni had been financed by a member of P2. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 362) Tambroni’s son-in-law was a member of the CMC. Tambroni had been involved in the central government in three different positions for eight years prior to becoming prime minister. But he was so right-wing that riots took place against him, and he lost office after about five months. Tambroni and Soustelle met at the building housing a reactionary group of Tambroni’s called Civil Order. Italian intelligence also suspected it to be the headquarters of the OAS in Italy. (Metta, CMC, p. 131)

    IV

    Gladio experts Philip Willan and Daniele Ganser mention the role of Frank Gigliotti in reviving masonry, and aiding Gladio in Italy after the war. Willan, for instance, describes Gigliotti as a former OSS and CIA agent. (Puppetmasters, p. 58) Gigliotti, who had spent years in Italy as a young man, was a Presbyterian pastor who was anti-communist and pro-Mussolini in the thirties. He then became an OSS agent against Il Duce during the war. He joined up with the CIA afterwards and, as noted, was quite active in the revival of Italian masonry. In 1960, he was very much pro-Nixon and anti-Kennedy. (Metta, CMC, pp. 10-12)

    Beyond that, more than one source has stated that it was Gigliotti who secretly recruited Licio Gelli. The Tina Anselmi P2 Commission thought it was important to note that when Gigliotti left the scene, Gelli took the stage. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 65) According to Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies, it was Gigliotti who instructed Licio to construct an anti-Communist network in Italy associated with the Rome CIA station. In fact, CIA Director Allen Dulles was actually contributing millions of lire to funding this kind of militant neo-fascist network there. (Metta, CMC, p. 15)

    What makes this even more intriguing is this: one of Kennedy’s enemies, William Harvey, was stationed in Ganser’s Rome CIA station in 1963. Another enemy, Lyman Lemnitzer, ran NATO forces and, therefore, Gladio, in that same year. Both men had been guilty of insubordination at the White House in 1962.

    Lemnitzer’s rise in the Pentagon was largely owed to General Dwight Eisenhower; Lemnitzer planned operations in North Africa and Italy. Once he became president, Eisenhower made him commander of Far East forces, then Army Chief of Staff, and then JCS chair—all in the space of five years. (Cottrell, pp. 86-87) According to James Bamford, “in Lemnitzer’s view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over.” (Ibid., p. 92)

    To put it mildly, this was not what JFK thought. As chair of the Joint Chiefs, Lemnitzer was opposed to Kennedy’s policies in both Vietnam and Cuba. He was close to Col. Edwin Lansdale, who was in charge of Operation Mongoose. Lemnitzer had been in on a false flag plan against Cuba under the Eisenhower administration. (John Newman, Into the Storm, p. 372) Lansdale himself now thought up the idea of staging a fake Cuban attack at Guantanamo in order to provoke an American invasion. This actually preceded the infamous Operation Northwoods, the series of false flag plans devised by the Joint Chiefs to provoke an invasion of the island.

    The problem was that not only was Kennedy against such a provocation, he did not even want to hear about it. (Newman, p. 385) Yet on March 13, 1962, Northwoods was presented to JFK. Then Lemnitzer suggested that America did not even need a pretext; we could just invade, which Kennedy was clearly against.

    On Vietnam, Lemnitzer said that Kennedy’s policy would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.” He even said Australia and New Zealand would be threatened. (Newman, p. 391) Notably, this was after the November 1961 Kennedy decision that there would be no combat troops in Indochina, only advisors. According to a conversation John Newman had with the present writer, the JCS knew there were ICBM missiles in Cuba before Kennedy did. They wanted to force JFK’s back against the wall to see how he would respond. They did not care for the peaceful and equitable result. Kennedy ended up removing Lemnitzer in the fall of 1962 (Newman, p. 396). But he made a mistake and sent him to Europe to oversee NATO forces.

    V

    Bill Harvey began his career in the FBI, but he was too much of a hard drinker for J. Edgar Hoover to tolerate. So he joined the CIA, and he liked to needle the Ivy League officers by pulling out his gun during meetings and spinning the cylinder. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 469) He supervised the Berlin station and got to know Reinhard Gehlen and his network there. When he returned stateside, he wanted to run the Soviet Russia division, but he was assigned to Staff D, signals intelligence, with which he worked on with the National Security Agency. (ibid., pp. 470-71)

    Buried inside Staff D was a project called ZR/Rifle. This was the development of an assassination program commissioned by Dick Bissell. Prior to this, James Angleton supervised a small assassination team run by Colonel Borish Pash. (James Douglas, JFK and The Unspeakable, p. 143) Both men, Angleton and Harvey, visited with British intelligence officer Peter Wright about the subject of assassinations. (Wright, Spycatcher, p. 204) In fact, the Church Committee discovered that Harvey had made notes about blaming an assassination on a communist–either a Czechoslovak or a Soviet. He also noted that the patsy’s CIA 201 file should be rigged in advance. Which, as HSCA staffer Betsy Wolf showed, Oswald’s was. (Vasilios Vazakas, “Creating the Oswald Legend, Pt. 4” at Kennedys and King.) According to the Church Committee, both QJ WIN and WI ROGUE were Harvey’s recruits, and both were sent to Congo to take part in the plot to eliminate Patrice Lumumba. (See Midnight in the Congo, by Lisa Pease, Probe, Vol. 6 No. 3)

    In 1962, Harvey was supervising Task Force W, directly involved with Cuba. Bobby Kennedy was the ombudsman of the overall project called Mongoose. Harvey deeply resented RFK’s fastidious veto power over CIA requests for operations. As David Corn showed in his book on Ted Shackley, Allen Dulles approved of these by rote orally. Bobby wanted them in writing and in detail. Harvey grew to hate the Kennedy brothers, especially Robert. He said his actions bordered on treason. (Talbot, p. 472)

    What the Kennedys did not know was that Harvey was also in charge of the second phase of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro, which were going on while Mongoose was proceeding. Harvey had teamed with mobster John Roselli to try to assassinate Fidel. This went on for months on end; there is evidence that it extended into the spring of 1963. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, pp. 148-49) But what got Harvey in deep trouble was his actions during the Missile Crisis. At one of the hottest points of that confrontation, Harvey sent teams of “sixty agents into Cuba to support any conventional military operations”. (Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 151) Bobby Kennedy was enraged by this. At that moment, the slightest provocation could have brought on atomic warfare. RFK wanted him fired, but Richard Helms shuffled him off to Rome.

    VI

    While in Rome, Harvey formed an alliance with General Giovanni DeLorenzo, who, as we saw in part one, planned a 1964 coup called Piano Solo. Harvey was also friendly with the notorious Michele Sindona, the fraudster who almost caused the Vatican bank to collapse. Harvey also met with a man who was instrumental in the Strategy of Tension, Renzo Rocca. Harvey gave Rocca a list of names of far-right zealots who would help in carrying out that strategy. As with ZR/Rifle, Harvey wanted to create a team of thugs who would be “capable of killing, placing bombs and firebombs, and promoting propaganda.” One of the first people whom Rocca talked to after this meeting was Valerio Borghese, Angleton’s friend, and the man who would attempt another coup in 1970. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 88)

    Harvey was continuing an old CIA policy first implemented by Allen Dulles in a 1951 document. Dulles wanted the Christian Democrats to treat the Italian communists not as Italians but as communists. He wanted them discriminated against through legislative enactments, administrative harassment, suppression and also control. The project was called Operation Demagnetize, and it was cooperated on between the CIA and SIFAR, the then Italian secret service. (Ibid., p. 43) Years later, the Christian Democrats were very worried about how their full cooperation with the CIA would look if it was fully exposed to the Anselmi Commission on P2. And in fact, Anselmi’s notes make it clear that the Christian Democrats did all they could to close down her investigation. (ibid., pp. 64-65)

    The fear was real. Because eventually Judge Felice Casson came to the conclusion that P2 had been involved in the attacks of the strategy of tension “and that the secret society was acting as a proxy for the CIA.” And that inquiry concluded that P2 and Gelli were not just doing so in Italy but in Argentina, and that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who later became Pope Francis I, was cognizant of it. This is how powerful Gelli and P2 were. (Paul Williams, Operation Gladio, p. 110) They were involved with the assassination program in South America called Operation Condor. (Cottrell, p. 127)

    The only other part of Gladio that was likely as impactful as the P2/ Permindex aspect was Yves Guerin-Serac, who led another CIA shell company called Aginter Press. Guerin-Sac was part of the OAS plots to kill DeGaulle. When they failed, he fled to Portugal for what he called, “ …a truly western league of struggle against Marxism.” (Cottrell, p. 118) And, in fact, Aginter Press was involved in the Strategy of Tension in Italy by blowing up a bank in Milan in 1969. Guerin-Sac and Aginter Press were allied with Otto Skorzeny and his gun-for-hire Paladin Group. At one time, in the Paladin group bureau in Zurich, offices of both Permindex and the CMC were located. (Cottrell, p. 125)

    In Rome, Harvey’s deputy was F. Mark Wyatt. Wyatt acted as a buffer between the rather unrefined Harvey and the locals; and unlike Harvey, he spoke fluent Italian. He was knowledgeable about Harvey’s attempts through SIFAR and Rocca to carry out bombings on Christian Democrat offices and blame them on the left. (Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 475). Harvey also entertained the idea of using the Mafia to murder Italian communists. On the day Kennedy was killed, Harvey blurted out some disturbing remarks that stayed with Wyatt the rest of his life. In fact, his children wanted him to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He declined.

    But during an interview Wyatt did with a French journalist at his retirement home in Lake Tahoe in 1998, he did say something quite provocative. As the writer left, he said: “You know, I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November 1963.” The reporter was shocked. Wyatt explained that he bumped into Harvey on a flight to Dallas a bit before the assassination. When he asked his boss what he was doing there, Harvey said rather nebulously: “I’m here to see what’s happening.” (Talbot, p. 477) And thanks to the Luna committee we have just found out that CIA documents reveal that Harvey had permission to fly under an FAA-approved alias in 1963 in the USA.

    As the reader can see, those attempting to label Permindex a Russian disinformation story– like Max Holland–are simply and utterly wrong. It and P2 and Gladio and the Strategy of Tension were all too real.

    Click here to read part 1.

  • Clay Shaw in Italy – Part 1

    Clay Shaw in Italy – Part 1

    Clay Shaw in Italy: Amid Permindex and Gladio

    Back in 1992, when I initially went to New Orleans, I interviewed some of Clay Shaw’s remaining family and friends. One of the things that was repeated to me was that he liked to travel; it was not just part of his job as a businessman and as the face of the International Trade Mart. We know about some of these journeys through declassified records. For instance, Shaw filed reports with the CIA from various countries in Europe and Latin America: Peru, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Czechoslovakia. (William Davy, Let Justice Be Done, pp. 198-99)

    But further, Shaw was such a valued asset that the Agency gave him what was called a “Y” number. Shaw’s reports under that rubric include “Observations on International Fairs at Milan, Brussels, Basel, Paris and London/Comments on Western European Economics and Desire to Trade with the Soviet Bloc.” (Davy, p. 199). These journeys explain why Shaw frequented the VIP room of Eastern Air Lines and used his alias of Clay Bertrand to sign in there. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 278)

    But from these relatives, I understood that Shaw’s favorite countries in Europe were England, and even more so, Italy. Shaw was likely introduced to Britain during his service in World War II. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 76) But it is clear through Anthony Frewin–writing under the pen name Anthony Edward Weeks– that Shaw still held British contacts after the war. One of the pieces of evidence that DA Jim Garrison recovered from Shaw’s home was his address book. Since Frewin lives in England, he began to look up some of these persons and penned a 12-page article on the subject. He wrote that the first thing that struck him about the address book was that Shaw’s British contacts all lived in the best, most expensive areas, e.g., Belgravia, Mayfair, Kensington, etc. (see Lobster, No. 20) On a phone call I had with the author, he stated, this guy was not Joe Sixpack. As we shall see, that is an understatement.

    About Shaw’s visits to Italy, the FBI seems to have understood that they were not just social. As the Garrison investigation discovered through an acquaintance of Bureau official Regis Kennedy, “Shaw was a CIA agent who had done work, of an unspecified nature, over a five-year span in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100) As William Davy comments, this almost has to be in reference to Shaw’s service with Permindex/Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome. As Davy suggested, this is fascinating, and not just because of Permindex itself. But because one of the main organizers of that business group was Ferenc Nagy, the former prime minister of Hungary. Nagy fled Hungary due to a leftist overthrow in 1947. From the USA, he then became a backer of the Hungarian anti-communist émigré community.

    But Nagy was also a friend of Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle was a former Governor-General of Algeria under Charles de Gaulle. But he split with the French president over the issue of independence for Algeria. Soustelle became a backer of the OAS, the rebel military group that tried to both assassinate and overthrow de Gaulle over the independence movement in Algeria, which Soustelle opposed. There is very little doubt that Soustelle had implicit backing from the CIA on this issue. (Davy, p. 99; James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, pp. 99-100) And, as we shall see, Soustelle figures into the whole Permindex black op backdrop.

    There is another connection with Permindex and Shaw, which is important to note in advance. It was not revealed until 2003, perhaps as one of the Assassination Record Review Board’s (ARRB) delayed declassifications. An Agency document dated from June 28, 1978 described Clay Shaw’s service to CIA as encompassing from 1949-72. That document made reference to a claim “that CIA used Shaw for service in Italy with U.S. agent Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield.” Shaw’s part is described as making connections with political circles and the business world in Rome, and also with developing relationships with extreme rightwing groups. As we shall see, this was accomplished, and the Canadian high-powered lawyer Bloomfield was an integral part of it. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 389)

    II

    Since 1948, Italy had been a high priority for the then-nascent Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, it was the subject of the first National Security Council meeting in late 1947. (John Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 115) Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was concerned about a communist victory in the 1948 Italian elections. Therefore, a directive was issued initiating propaganda and psychological warfare activities to marginalize the leftist parties and promote the Christian Democrats as a bulwark against them. Both the CIA and the State Department participated in this campaign. It was implemented through both the Agency’s Office of Special Operations and, according to Christopher Simpson’s book Blowback, also through the law offices of Sullivan and Cromwell. The latter being the home of the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen. At that location, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, Bill Colby and others went to work supervising the rigging of the vote.

    There was a real possibility that the Italian communists and their allies would win the 1948 elections outright. Which meant they would have a foothold in Western Europe. (Simpson, pp. 89-90) For obvious reasons, this possibility was also a nightmare for the Vatican: to have Godless communism in your own backyard? As Bishop James Griffiths, an American emissary to the Vatican, wrote, they feared a “disastrous failure at the polls which will put Italy behind the Iron Curtain.” (Simpson, p. 90) According to Simpson, the CIA laundered ten million dollars to give directly to the Vatican for anti-communist agitation purposes. This was only one part of an enormous 350 million dollar overall total for the American crusade in Italy.

    This fear and this expenditure were justified to these Cold Warriors because in 1946, the Italian Communist party—at that time the largest in the world outside of Russia—and the Socialists had actually outpolled the Christian Democrats for the Constituent Assembly. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 23). But because they were separate parties, they had to settle for a coalition government under a Christian Democrat premier. In 1947, a party of American congressmen stopped off in Italy and announced the theme of the upcoming election:

    The country is under great pressure from within and without to veer to the left and adopt a totalitarian-collective national organization. (Blum, p. 24)

    The two leftist parties were going to unite in 1948 to form the Popular Democratic Front (FDP), and early in the year had won local elections in Pescara, defeating the Christian Democrats. As Bill Colby later wrote:

    It was primarily this fear that led to the formation of the Office of Policy Coordination which gave the CIA the capability to undertake covert political propaganda and paramilitary operations in the first place. (Blum, p 25)

    This is how important these elections seemed to Washington. Because there was a question in the CIA Director’s mind about legality, the forming of a new department was created to do such missions in the future. And this had both presidential and congressional permission. (Ranelagh, p. 115)

    James Angleton also had a special interest in Italy. His father, who had business in the National Cash Register company, moved his family there when Jim was fourteen. Hugh Angleton was a colonel in the OSS during the war. An operations officer, Max Corvo, said of Hugh’s politics, “He was ultra-conservative, a sympathizer with Fascist officials. He was certainly not unfriendly with the Fascists.” (Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior, p. 33) Hugh sent his son to England to get a boarding school education. During the war, young Angleton started out in the army and was then switched over to the OSS and stationed in London to handle the Italy desk. (ibid., p. 38) He was transferred to Rome in 1944 and made chief of counter-intelligence for the entire country. By all accounts, Angleton liked Italy and stayed there until the end of 1947. When he returned to the USA, he got a high position in the newly birthed CIA. (ibid., p. 44)

    III

    One of the things that Angleton did before he left Italy is important to note for our subject at hand. He and Junio Valerio Borghese organized what was called ‘Stay-behind’ units in Italy. (Paul L. Williams, Operation Gladio, p. 15) Borghese was a Navy commander during Mussolini’s reign and fought alongside the Nazis against the Allies. By most accounts, he should have been imprisoned for war crimes. But Angleton secured his release into US Army custody. He dressed The Black Prince in an American uniform and shipped him from Milan to Rome. As Paul Williams wrote:

    Angleton needed Borghese and the 10, 267 fascists who fought under his command to help establish the stay-behind units that would ward off any Soviet aggression. (Williams, p. 28)

    Angleton got Borghese off with about three years of preventive detention. He wanted The Black Prince to “lead a shadow government, along with a secret army that could manipulate Italian affairs throughout the coming decades.” (ibid) The State Department passed an edict which gave Angleton control over the police, military intelligence and the Italian secret services.

    With this power, Borghese was now running the newly formed Gladio forces in Italy, under sectors entitled sabotage, espionage, propaganda, escape tactics and guerrilla warfare. In addition, a training camp for the stay behind units was constructed on the island of Sardinia. This camp was not just for the Italian Gladio trainees but those from Germany, France and Austria. They were sent there by former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen. (ibid., p. 29) As Angleton had rescued Borghese from post-war justice, Allen Dulles had saved Gehlen. The two war criminals were now in business together. They had lost the war, but—through Angleton and Dulles—they had won the peace. Very soon, there were to be hundreds of these Gladio units infiltrated into Western Europe.

    They were not just a contingent military force, but as with Borghese, a potent political one. Borghese joined the MSI (Italian Social Movement), a neo-fascist party that was largely made up of former supporters of Mussolini. But that was not reactionary enough for him. He later formed the Fronte Nazionale (National Front), which wished to abolish parties and trade unions, and was much more devoted to a quasi-military state. (Philip Willan, Puppetmasters, pp. 93-94)

    He was hardly alone in this belief. There was also Stefano Delle Chiaie, founder of National Vanguard. That group also wished to work outside the political system to subvert democracy to the point that Italy would return to fascism. And it was not just in Italy; his group carried out bombings and killings in both Spain and Chile. (Williams, p. 112)

    These rightwing groups were so powerful and well-organized that they encouraged two coups in six years. The first, in 1964, was called Piano Solo. The previous year, the communists had arranged a large labor rally and, undercover as police, Gladio members smashed it, injuring 200. (Williams, p. 74) As a result, General Giovanni DeLorenzo, assisted by 20 other senior army officers—along with CIA station chief William Harvey, military attache Vernon Walthers, plus the director of Gladio–planned an overthrow which included National Vanguard and the Mafia. Piano Solo was to conclude with the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the installation of a handpicked Christian Democrat as president. It included extensive surveillance and the rounding up of leftwing activists and their imprisonment at a concentration camp in Sardinia. (Wilian, Puppetmasters, p.35) The coup did not proceed since Moro created a compromise between the socialists and Christian Democrats, plus President Segni—who was in on the planning—sustained a cerebral hemorrhage which forced his resignation. (Williams, pp. 74-75)

    IV

    The timing of all this, the huge communist demonstration and the crackdown, can probably be attributed to President Kennedy’s breaking of Dwight Eisenhower’s Italy policy. The idea for funding the Christian Democrats was to defeat the left; so obviously, that policy did not include making the socialists or communists part of the Christian Democratic government. At the urging of Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy was advocating for a policy of apertura, that is, an opening to the left. Schlesinger thought that by including the socialists in the government, one could split them off from the communists. Kennedy thought this was a good idea. So, in his 1963 visit to Italy, he decided to advocate the policy change. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, pp. 464-68)

    Both Angleton and former ambassador Clare Booth Luce strongly opposed it. Luce wrote JFK an over-the-top letter, and Angleton spread rumors that Schlesinger was a Soviet agent. CIA officer William Harvey also opposed it and recommended ways to defeat it. Richard Nixon also opposed it. (Michele Metta, CMC: The Undercover CIA and Mossad Station, pp. 40-41) Kennedy ignored this. On his trip to Italy, he talked to the Socialist leader, Pietro Nenni, directly. After which Nenni clasped his wife and started weeping with joy. By the end of the year, apertura was made policy. It was this violation of tradition which likely caused the attempted coup in 1964.

    The second coup attempt was in 1970. It was led by Angleton’s favorite son, Borghese. It was supported by Delle Chiaie’s group and over 200 forest guards who arrived in coaches near Rome. Borghese thought he had support from three army regiments, the police and the Air Force. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 91) Also, the plotters had met with the CIA and had financing from a Swiss company in advance.

    The Black Prince was so confident of success that he had his speech already planned and, of all things, he was going to back Italy’s intervention in Vietnam! Why? Because Borghese had established contact with President Nixon and with NATO units in Malta to implement the overthrow. One of the connecting points was a man named Pier Talenti, who had worked for Nixon since 1968 and had an estate and business in Italy. Angleton arrived in the country before the coup, and he left shortly after it was aborted. (Willan, Puppetmasters, pp 117-18) In fact, NATO ships were warmed up and ready to go. What went wrong was that the planned call to Nixon was not passed on from Malta. (ibid., p. 93) Another problem was that when the coup did not go as planned, Soviet ships entered the Mediterranean. (Ibid., p. 97)

    In addition to the attempted coups, Gladio’s so-called “strategy of tension” also included a series of bombings. The first one was in December of 1969 in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. Seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight were injured. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 123) That same afternoon, three other bombs exploded in Rome, killing fourteen. These bombings went on until the early eighties. The most famous one was the Bologna railway station bombing of 1980, where 73 people were killed and over 200 were injured. Collectively, these were known as the Years of Lead. As time went on, they were discovered to be false flag operations. That is, they were investigated originally as leftist plots but later discovered to be done by neo-fascist groups with support from the CIA. The idea was to destabilize the country out of Kennedy’s centrist/left coalition to a centrist/right one.

    V

    After Borghese’s failed coup, he fled to Spain. He passed away there in 1974. Many years ago, I noted an entry in Clay Shaw’s address book to a Princess Marcella Borghese, who had married into the Borghese family. In my very early investigation of Shaw, this was one of the first hints that he was not the Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal that he proclaimed himself to be. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 211) Another was the fact that he scrubbed his Who’s Who in the Southwest entry after either 1963 or 1964. Up until that time, his name appeared regularly. In those prior entries, he was listed as a member of the Board of Directors of Permindex. The exposure of Permindex would also have undermined his self-proclaimed liberal pose. Because Permindex and its offspring, Centro Mondiale Commerciale, appear to be a part of Gladio and this stay behind network in Italy. Shaw seemed interested in concealing this association.

    And for good reason. At that time, this network was so hidden and such a taboo subject that people literally lost their lives over revealing its scope and power. For example, Mino Pecorelli was an offbeat but insightful journalist in Italy in the sixties and seventies. He had some valuable sources inside “the underground state and secret services.” (Richard Cottrell, Gladio, p. 75). His stories about Gladio and its relationship to the kidnapping and eventual murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro clearly hinted at a connection between the two. Pecorelli was even in receipt of some letters Moro wrote his family while in captivity. Mino hinted that, behind the Moro kidnapping stood a “lucid superpower”, clearly hinting at the USA. He also noted that it was interesting that the State Department sent over a Deputy Secretary to advise the Italian government not to negotiate for Moro’s release. He also indicated a connection between Gladio and the Moro death. Shortly thereafter, he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting near his office in Rome. (Ibid) Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was implicated in his murder. He was first found guilty, then acquitted on appeal. (Richard Cottrell, Gladio, p. 78)

    Aldo Moro was a natural target of the stay-behind operations. Why? Because it was he who forged Kennedy’s left/center coalition back in 1963. (Talbot, p. 468). But what made Moro even more dangerous to the Gladio network was that, in the seventies, he was going to widen the window even more. He was going to include the communists, or PCI, in his government. In fact, in a visit to the USA, Henry Kissinger harangued him for advocating this policy, plus the fact that he leaned toward the Arabs in the Middle East dispute. It got so bad that Moro foreshortened his visit. Kissinger then slipped a story about it to the New York Times, warning that Italy could go communist. Senator Henry Jackson warned that if Moro did this, Italy would be kicked out of NATO. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 220-21; see also Williams, p. 103)

    After he was kidnapped and held in captivity for 55 days, some of the things he said during his so-called trial at the hands of the Red Brigades leaked out. He reportedly said that the strategy of tension was foreign-inspired but implemented with the help of the secret services. He referred to Gladio guerrilla training in case of occupation. Understandably, since he appears to have had a hand in his demise, he had nothing but venom for Andreotti–who was now acting Prime Minister–and Moro accused him of having meetings with the Agency. Moro also admitted that the Christian Democrats were funded by the CIA. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 291). But, and it’s a big but, his captors insist that he said even more, and these transcripts have been either lost or stolen. (ibid., p. 281, 284)

    Moro was kidnapped in a precision-type, carefully planned operation in March of 1978, with the killers in airline pilot costumes. The ambush was brilliantly executed: all five bodyguards were eliminated immediately, but Moro was kept alive in the hail of bullets. This happened on the day the debate about his new communist policy was to begin. (Williams, p. 103) In fact, it was so perfectly done that some commentators felt it was beyond the ability of the Red Brigades.

    VI

    Was there a central force behind this strategy of tension and the Moro kidnap/murder? There actually does seem to have been, not just a central force but a central character. His name was Licio Gelli, Venerable Master of the infamous Propaganda Due (P2). On the day of the Moro kidnapping, his secretary stated that Gelli was visited by two men. She overheard the following words exchanged: “The major part is over. Now we’ll see the reactions.” (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 228) This testimony was so explosive that the Tina Anselmi P2 Commission would not hear it in open session. In fact, when it was discovered that Gelli was the head of this secret group, the government collapsed. When his villa was raided, it was revealed that P2 had well over 900 members and from almost every power center in Italy: 43 members of Parliament, 4 cabinet members, heads of branches of the secret services, chiefs of the intelligence services (SIFAR and SISMI), leaders of the Treasury, finance ministers and chairmen of banks, among many others. It even included the clergy and the military. (Willan, The Last Supper, p. 115, p. 121; Metta, CMC p. 9). It was later discovered that during the Years of Lead, both prime ministers, Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi, were members of P2. (Williams, p 265)

    In other words, the exposure of Gelli confirmed that there was nothing fanciful about the idea that there was a shadow government overseeing the visible government. And if Gelli’s secretary was correct, that shadow government did control the political system. (Willan, The Last Supper, pp. 113-15). About his P2 lodge, Gelli told one writer, “It was an invisible army, just as Gladio was an invisible army.” (ibid., p. 117). And that was no understatement as, in addition to Moro, there was also evidence that Gelli got his intelligence services to plant ersatz leads in the Bologna bombing. (Williams, pp. 218-19)

    And there was a direct American connection. Because Gelli attended the inaugurations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 67) Gelli had connections to the Allies’ intelligence network during his service in World War II, and P2 was the main Masonic lodge that kept up relations with the CIA; reportedly, the Agency funded them to the tune of millions per month. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 70, p. 78)

    When he was exposed through the raid, and the vast power and reach of P2 was now in the open, he went on the run. About three months later, his daughter arrived at the Rome airport. She was searched, and a false bottom was found in her briefcase. It contained a trove of documents. One of them was entitled “Stability Operations, Intelligence—Special Fields.” It outlined how Army intelligence should respond to communist insurgencies in allied nations. Part of the manual suggested that insurgency movements should be targeted and then infiltrated “with a view to establishing clandestine control by US Army intelligence over the work of such agents.” And this specifically included the leadership level. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 209) This discovery fit into the notion that the Red Brigades had been penetrated, and this is how Gelli knew what was happening with Moro the day he was kidnapped. The question then became: Was he also knowledgeable about Moro’s murder 55 days later, and was this why he ran? We will likely never know since well over 40 members of P2 were involved in working on the Moro case. (Metta, CMC p. 156)

    How did Gelli ascend so rapidly in the hierarchy of masonry to become one of the most powerful men in all of Italy? The Anselmi Commission on P2 discovered that Gelli was pointed out by assistant Grand Master Roberto Ascarelli to Grand Master Giordano Gamberini, in terms of his ability to do great things and enlist qualified people to the lodge. Prior to joining P2, Ascarelli knew Gelli though a lodge called Hod. (Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 59; Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 73)

    And here is the capper: Permindex/CMC met in the same place as Gelli’s P2 group; in the offices of Ascarelli in the Spanish Steps area of Rome. Later on, in a book, Gelli admitted to this location. But further, Michele Metta discovered that Ascarelli was on the Board of Directors of Permindex/CMC. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison, pp. 72-73)

    There was a crossover between the two rightwing groups. In other words, the man who sponsored Licio Gelli–the most powerful fascist in Italy– served in the same group as Clay Shaw. So much for the myth of Shaw as the Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal.

    Click here to read part 2.

  • “Echoes of a Lost America” by Monika Wiesak – A Review

    “Echoes of a Lost America” by Monika Wiesak – A Review

    Echoes of a Lost America

    By Monika Wiesak

    Three years ago, in 2022, Monika Wiesak published America’s Last President. This remains one of the best, if not the best, of all contemporary books on the presidency of John F. Kennedy. If you have not read it, I strongly urge you to do so. (Click here for my review https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/last-president) Wiesak has now published a book about the assassination of President Kennedy, entitled Echoes of a Lost America.

    I

    She begins her new book by looking at the crime in a macroscopic manner. She describes some of the things that Kennedy was doing as president that likely disturbed people in the higher circles. She labels his foreign policy as anti-imperialist and mentions his attempt to forge a rapprochement with Fidel Castro in 1963. She uses a telling quote on Vietnam by Gen. Maxwell Taylor: “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against sending combat troops, except one man, and that was the president.” (Wiesak, p. 10; all references to paperback version) She then discusses how, after Kennedy’s murder, LBJ Americanized the Vietnam War and provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. (Wiesak, p. 6) She continues in this vein by mentioning reversals by Johnson of Kennedy policies in the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, and the Congo.

    Unlike almost all other authors in the field, Wiesak brings in Kennedy’s clashes with Israeli/Zionist interests as part of her overview. For one example, she mentions Kennedy’s backing of UN emissary Joseph Johnson’s Palestinian refugee plan. Kennedy supported this concept until the end of his presidency. It allowed three methods of repatriation for the Palestinians. Either they could stay where they were and be compensated for their loss during the Nakba; they could move elsewhere and the UN would pay for it; or they could return to where they were originally. Secretly, President David Ben Gurion violently opposed the Johnson Plan. (p. 16)

    She also brings in a rather ignored piece of information. Namely, the highly enriched uranium that was used by the Israelis at the Dimona nuclear reactor was very likely stolen from the United States. (p. 21). This data is examined in minute detail by author Roger Mattson in his book Stealing the Atom Bomb. (Click here for a review https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/11/how-israel-stole-the-bomb/) She adds that this heist was likely known to James Angleton. She concludes that Kennedy’s Middle East policy was overhauled in almost every aspect by President Johnson. And she adds this telling fact:

    The 92 million in military assistance provided in fiscal year 1966 was greater than the total of all official military aid provided to Israel cumulatively in all the years going back to the foundation of that nation in 1948. (Wiesak, p. 23)

    From here, she goes to Kennedy’s economic policies by beginning with an appropriate Kennedy quotation:

    The president must serve as the defender of the public good and the public interest against all the narrow private interests which operate in our society. (p. 26)

    Like many observers on this topic, she points out the importance of the appointment of James Saxon as Comptroller of the Currency. (p. 27). She wisely quotes from the famous interview that Saxon gave to US News and World Report just before Kennedy was killed. Saxon was trying to loosen bank regulations and also encouraging the opening of more state banks. He and Kennedy wanted an easier flow of credit and loans to small businessmen and farmers. This put Saxon at odds with the Federal Reserve Board. As the magazine summed up his policy:

    The Comptroller approved scores of new national banks, and branches, spurred key mergers, revised outmoded rules. Result: keener competition for deposits and customers. (p. 28)

    During this interview, Saxon said something rather bold. In reply to a question about if the Federal Reserve System should be updated or overhauled, his response was–in no uncertain terms–yes. He went as far as to say bank membership in the system should be voluntary. He clearly depicted himself as in opposition to the Fed, but he said he had Kennedy’s backing on this. He added that it was not surprising to him that the big banks in New York, like Chase Manhattan, did not like him. Because he wanted more open competition for deposits. At that time, Chase Manhattan was a Rockefeller controlled bank. This is an important point, and one that few writers have addressed, save perhaps Donald Gibson.

    II

    Amplifying on Kennedy’s economic reforms, she concentrates on Kennedy building a production-based economy—as opposed to a service economy. One way he was trying to do this was through the investment tax credit. In other words, he was giving companies tax credits if they would modernize their plant and equipment, which would result in higher production rates. This would lead to American products being more competitive in foreign markets. (p.29)

    He also tried to help those in need with welfare benefits by doubling the number of people eligible for surplus food, and also signing a bill extending unemployment benefits from 26-39 weeks. He raised the minimum wage and signed off on increased Social Security benefits. (p.29)

    She becomes the first writer to accent the showdown between Kennedy and the steel industry since Gibson. She rightly pictures the conflict as a battle. One between Kennedy trying to control inflation, the steel companies initially agreeing, but then reneging on the deal and confronting the president with an accomplished fact: they were raising their prices.

    As Gibson introduced the episode through John Blair:

    The April 1962 face-off between President Kennedy and US Steel had been described as the most dramatic confrontation in history between a president and a corporate management. (John Blair, Economic Concentration, p. 635)

    Kennedy felt he needed the steel company/labor union agreement to keep inflationary forces from spiraling throughout the economy. He figured his increase in minimum wages would be eaten up by what he called “the cruel tax of inflation.” (Wiesak, p 29) Kennedy thought he had an agreement that the workers would not demand higher wages and the company would not raise prices. But four days after the labor contract had been signed, on April 10th, Roger Blough, Chairman of US Steel, visited Washington. He then handed the president a PR release: the company would announce a 3.5 % price increase at midnight. (Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p.10) Kennedy reportedly said, “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now.” (Wiesak, p. 30).

    After five other companies joined US Steel to break the agreement, Kennedy decided that, if his economic policy was going to have any impact or credibility, he would have to begin a counter-attack. Which he did. This was through Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The former stated that no company that broke the agreement would be given any more Pentagon contracts. The latter began investigating charges of collusion and price fixing by issuing subpoenas, some at 3 AM. (Ibid). Kennedy also used the bully pulpit to hit back. On April 11th, he said that he thought the American people would find it difficult to accept,

    A situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interest of 185,000,000 Americans. (Gibson, p. 13)

    Within 48 hours of handing over the announcement, big steel had taken back the price rise. Her synopsis of the crisis is fine, I just wish she had done a bit more with the part of Gibson’s book that deals with Kennedy’s struggle against the CFR globalists.

    From here, she goes on to describe Kennedy’s advocacy of Rachel Carson’s work against the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Although Carson was attacked for Silent Spring, Kennedy formed a committee that vindicated the book in May of 1963. (Wiesak, p. 31) Kennedy also backed the work of Dr. Frances Kelsey against the drug thalidomide, and this then led to the FDA having approval over when a drug could be marketed. (ibid., p 32)

    With the banks, steel companies and big pharma, Kennedy was not looked upon as a friend of big business.

    III

    After adroitly laying out this backdrop, Wiesak now shifts over to the assassination itself. She begins with an examination of the alleged assassin, Lee Oswald. Was Oswald really a self-declared Marxist? There is a lot of evidence to indicate the contrary: namely that he was really an agent provocateur. And she wastes little time in mounting a case showing that he was. She includes the puzzle about Oswald’s 201 file, or the lack of the CIA opening one for the first 13 months after he defected to the Soviet Union. (p. 45). She adds that James Angleton’s successor, George Kalaris, gave a possible answer as to why it was finally opened: Oswald had made queries “concerning possible reentry into the United States.” (p. 45) This would suggest that Oswald understood he had failed to gull the KGB and wanted to return for reassignment.

    So once Oswald returned to Texas, he kept up this image by subscribing to communist and socialist newspapers. (p. 48). But at the same time, he is ingratiating himself with the White Russian community in Dallas, who all loathe communism and want a return to a monarchy. In the face of this returned Soviet defector and his strange behavior, inexplicably, the FBI closed their file on Oswald in October of 1962. Then they reopened it in March of 1963, allegedly based on communist periodical subscriptions that the Bureau already knew he had.

    Wiesak discusses the enigmatic figure of George DeMohrenschildt, nicknamed the Baron. Since he figured right into the midst of this whole contradictory White Russian/Oswald milieu. And she notes that the majority of the Baron’s contact with Oswald was during that six-month period when the FBI closed down their Oswald file. She also discusses the Baron’s acquaintance with Jean de Menil, president of the Schlumberger Corporation, which had close ties to the CIA; and through the Agency to the OAS, which was trying to overthrow French president Charles de Gaulle. DeMohrenschildt and his father also met and worked with Allen Dulles. (p. 49) In early 1963, DeMohrenschildt left for a reputed CIA assignment in Haiti. And now Ruth and Michael Paine have become the best friends of Lee and his wife Marina. And she examines their rather interesting connections to the higher circles. (p. 51)

    She concludes that Oswald appears “to be some sort of intelligence asset, either witting or unwitting, who James Angleton closely monitored.” (ibid)

    From here, the book segues into what she calls the “Lead Up to the Crime”. Jim Garrison thought the early announcement that Kennedy would be coming to Dallas, which was in the Dallas Times Herald in late April, marked the beginning of the maneuvering of Oswald away from the White Russians. (p. 53). In a bit over two weeks, Oswald would be looking for a job at Reilly Coffee Company in the Crescent City. She makes note that New Orleans DA Jim Garrison found out how some of Oswald’s cohorts moved on to the NASA base at Michoud. She then adds that Oswald thought he was going there also. (p. 54). Importantly, she also relates the heist by Oswald’s friend David Ferrie of arms from Schlumberger, which was operated by DeMohrenschildt’s friend Jean de Menil. These arms were then rerouted through Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street, an office at which several witnesses saw Oswald. It was also the address that Oswald placed on some of the pro-Castro literature he was handing out that summer.

    She turns to Clay Shaw and notes the fact that he was reliably identified by the local sheriff as being seen with Ferrie and Oswald in the Clinton/Jackson area in the late summer of 1963. (p. 57) Through the work of Whitney Webb and Michelle Metta, she then links Shaw with DeMenil and Canadian lawyer Louis Mortimer Bloomfield through Permindex. About Permindex, she advances the case that it was a hydra-headed creation: CIA, Italian intelligence and the Mossad. She fingers Bloomfield as a key figure in Permindex because he had access to the majority of the shares in that enigmatic company. (p. 59) She also states that those associated with Permindex were globalists in their views of a world economy, e.g., Bloomfield, Edmond de Rothschild and Shaw. She points out, briefly, that this was opposed to Kennedy’s nationalist views.

    She then offers both views of Oswald in Mexico City: that he may have been there, and he might not have been. But when he returned to Dallas, the FBI’s Marvin Gheesling took the FLASH warning on him off the Watch List. (p. 65). If he had not done that, Oswald likely would not have been on the motorcade route. Also, if Ruth Paine had told Oswald about a job offer that came in from Robert Adams of the Texas Employment Commission, he also would likely not have been on the route.

    IV

    About the assassination itself, in Chapter 4, she does a nice synoptic job of gathering the evidence that Kennedy was undoubtedly killed by a conspiracy. She does this in a microscopic way, but says we should always keep our eye on the Big Picture. (p. 83)

    She then turns to Jack Ruby, the slayer of Oswald. We know that Ruby was the original Man for All Seasons. A guy who had connections in many different directions. She connects him to Meyer Lansky, and uses Seth Kantor’s biography to do so. (p. 110) She also notes that Lansky had worked with the ONI and OSS to help create Operation Underworld, where the Mob helped the war effort during World War II. Lansky had large investments in Cuba before the revolution, and she notes he was also involved with the Haganah, a kind of umbrella paramilitary group devoted to the establishment of Israel. (p. 110). Ruby was also known to Mayor Earle Cabell, who ended up being exposed as a CIA asset.

    Wiesak notes the connection between PR man Sam Bloom and Ruby. Ruby had Sam Bloom’s contact information scribbled down on a card in his apartment. Bloom was also the PR man for Judge Joe Brown at Ruby’s trial. Ruby’s lawyer Melvin Belli commented that “Bloom was making legal history—the first public-relations counselor to a judge in the history of jurisprudence.” (p. 115)

    With Oswald dead and the world seeing Ruby as his killer on TV, the media and the Power Elite were able to fashion and snap on a cover-up almost instantly. To say that it was effective and all-consuming does not do it justice. Wiesak discusses the phone calls from Eugene Rostow and Joseph Alsop to the White House urging Johnson to appoint a blue ribbon commission, because no one was believing what was coming out of Dallas. She also writes that Earle Cabell labeled the assassination “the irrational act of a single man.” (p. 122) And, most pungently, how the New York Times labeled Oswald as the assassin of Kennedy after Ruby killed him. This about a man who always insisted on his innocence and never had a lawyer. Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach then cooperated with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to close the case in about 48 hours. (p. 125)

    What made that so problematic is that, from the beginning, the case against Oswald was full of question marks. And any serious journalist or investigator could have found them. Mark Lane did so in his article published in The Guardian on December 19, 1963. (Lane, Plausible Denial, pp. 335-60). When Lane asked to represent Oswald before the Warren Commission, he was turned down by J. Lee Rankin, the Chief Counsel. (Lane, p. 22) As Wiesak shows throughout Chapter 6, that was purely a decision made upon expediency, not on proper procedure or in the interests of justice. For the Commission’s case, as she demonstrates, was hapless. It would never have withstood the challenge of a properly prepared defense counsel.

    V

    She closes the book with chapters on the murder of Robert Kennedy, attempts to reopen the JFK case and a brief chapter on John F. Kennedy Jr.

    Her chapter on the facts of the RFK case is sharp and compelling. But I wish she had used more of David Talbot’s book on that issue. To give her credit, she does say at the beginning that critics usually consider the two cases as separate matters; but if one thinks that powerful forces killed JFK, then those same forces should be suspects in the removal of Robert. (p. 140) And she repeats this motif at the end of the chapter. (p. 192). If it had been me, I would have spent some more time on this issue, for example, showing that Bobby knew his brother had been killed by a large domestic conspiracy and that Dallas was the perfect place to execute such an action. Also, that he sent such a message to Moscow pertaining to this. (Talbot, Brothers, pp. 29-34)

    But I should mention something that I think was quite striking and relevant in this chapter. Quoting from the trial, Sirhan was asked what he thought about John Kennedy:

    I loved him, sir. More than any American could have….He was working sir, with the leaders of the Arab governments, the Arab countries, to bring a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. And he promised these Arab leaders that he would do his utmost and his best to force or to put some pressure on Israel to comply with the 1948 United Nations Resolution sir, to either repatriate those Arab refugees or give them back, give them the right to return to their homes. And when he was killed that never happened. (p. 186)

    As we have seen previously, Sirhan was correct on this.

    In her review of attempts to reopen the JFK case, she treats Jim Garrison and his case against Clay Shaw with respect. She then describes the figurative earthquake that took place when ABC showed the Zapruder film in 1975 and how that caused the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). She has notable disdain for the HSCA. Commenting that their version of the Magic Bullet is as bad or worse than the Warren Commission’s. (p. 205) She is one of the very few writers to note the almost thunderous irony of the alleged plot against Jimmy Carter in May of 1979. Which just happened to involve two men: one named Raymond Lee Harvey and the other Osvaldo Espinoza-Ortiz.

    Her chapter on JFK Jr. hits the important points in relation to the topic at hand. She mentions Meg Azzoni, a former girlfriend, who said, “His heartfelt quest was to expose and bring to trial who killed his father and who covered it up.” (p. 213) She also adds that George magazine was really a presidential platform for him. Interestingly, she describes how he was very interested in the Yitzhak Rabin assassination and published an article on that case, which he himself edited, containing lengthy interviews with shooter Yigal Amir’s mother. She believed that Amir had been manipulated by the Shin Bet.

    The capper to all this? JFK Jr. was going to run for governor in 2002. (p. 217)

    She concludes that what Americans have been handed on the JFK case by the MSM and the political establishment is a counterfeit history. One that its citizens should resist. She also says that she has little doubt that America would be a different place if JFK had lived. And she ends in reference to Kennedy more or less what Kennedy said about Dag Hammarskjold before the United Nations, “Let us not allow his efforts to have been in vain.”

  • “That Day in Dallas: …” by Robert K. Tanenbaum – A Review

    “That Day in Dallas: …” by Robert K. Tanenbaum – A Review

    That Day in Dallas

    by Robert Tanenbaum

     

    Back in 1996, attorney Robert Tanenbaum did an interview for Probe magazine discussing his role overseeing the JFK case as Deputy Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Many readers were impressed by the revelations in that interview. (Click here for it https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/robert-tanenbaum-interviewed-by-probe) One who contacted Tanenbaum was first-generation researcher Ray Marcus. Ray encouraged Bob to write a book on his experience in Washington with the case. Tanenbaum said he would think about it.

    Well, it appears that he thought about it for almost three decades. Because he has now released a rather slim volume entitled That Day in Dallas. In advance, I must say that I have known Tanenbaum for over thirty years and have visited him at his home in Beverly Hills on several occasions. He is a likeable man of many accomplishments, among them being the former mayor of Beverly Hills. He has maintained a strong interest in the John Kennedy assassination over the intervening years. So it is with reluctance that I have to say that his book, That Day in Dallas, is a disappointment. Made more so by his prominence as a leading attorney in the JFK field.

    I

    The author is from New York City. His father was a lawyer/businessman, and his mother was a teacher. (Tanenbaum, p. 36, all references to e-book version) He excelled at playing basketball in high school. At a summer camp, he met NBA all-star Bob Cousy, and Cousy recommended him to coach Pete Newell at Cal Berkeley. (p. 50) After a year at a prep school in Washington, DC, Tanenbaum decided to take up Newell on his offer. At Cal, he played basketball and attended their storied Boalt Hall School of Law. He then interviewed for a position under Frank Hogan, the DA of New York City. Hogan had a long and illustrious career of 32 years in the DA’s office. Tanenbaum felt fortunate to be selected for service in that office, and he devotes several pages to how that hiring process played out. (pp. 58-64)

    Tanenbaum rose to supervise the homicide department, oversaw the court schedule, and ran legal training in Hogan’s office. He never lost a felony case that he tried to verdict, and he was one of the most — if not the most — active court lawyers in the office. He has stated that if Hogan had not passed on, he likely would have stayed there. But after Hogan died, Tanenbaum thought the office lost its stature. Therefore, when Philadelphia prosecutor Richard Sprague called him to come to Washington to work with him on the HSCA, Tanenbaum accepted.

    The deceased Sprague was a first assistant in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office who had an excellent record. And most people believe that, given both his ability and work ethic, Sprague would have helmed the first full-court prosecution of the JFK case. The author clearly sees what happened with the HSCA as a legal proceeding sunk on the sandbar of politics. This is why he tries to fill in the background of his book with vignettes on how he was brought up and was instilled with a certain moral code. And it was not just by his family, but also certain professional mentors: like all-time great basketball coach Lou Carnesecca, and his colleague in the DA’s office Mel Glass. The former taught him the value of preparation. (pp. 42-43) The latter was a paragon of honesty about evidence. (p. 64) Tanenbaum notes this because he wants to get across the message that what he was faced with at the HSCA was something that was simply anathema to his upbringing.

    II

    The book has a circular structure to it. The author fills in the opening with the fact that the Warren Commission was a rigged game from the start since they largely relied on the FBI for their investigation. And J. Edgar Hoover had made up his mind on the case within about 48 hours of Kennedy’s death. (p. 8) So, in reality the Commission was a sham inquiry which ignored the importance of key witnesses. He identifies the Parkland doctors as an example of crucial testimony that was discounted. (p. 11). Tanenbaum also mentions the famous memo from Hoover to James Rowley of the Secret Service. That memo stated that FBI agents had listened to a tape supplied by the CIA of Oswald in Mexico City, and the voice on the tape did not match the Oswald the Bureau was questioning in Dallas. The memo also states that the picture produced by the Agency of Oswald in Mexico City does not look like Oswald. (Memo from Hoover to Rowley of 11/23/63)

    Tanenbaum read the memo and was very interested, especially since the Warren Commission had done little or nothing about Mexico City. He decided to ask CIA officer David Phillips about this tape, since he was stationed in Mexico City at this time. Phillips said it was CIA policy to recycle tapes every 6 or 7 days, so the tape did not exist after the second week of October. Tanenbaum handed Phillips the Hoover memorandum, which undermined his sworn testimony. Phillips folded the memo, placed it in his jacket pocket and left the room. (p. 14). Sprague had already questioned Phillips about the matter, but he did not have the Hoover memo.

    At this point in the HSCA inquiry, Tanenbaum told Sprague they needed to call Phillips back with his lawyer. The whole issue of perjury and contempt needed to be spelled out to him. But the committee balked at this.

    At this point in the volume, Tanenbaum now flashes back to his acceptance of the position in the first place. (p. 23) He and Sprague were under the impression that there would be no compromise in their search for the facts. He was now realizing that they had been gulled. Congress was not the right place for a high-profile murder investigation. He now describes how he was hit with a cold towel by this fact in one of his meetings with the chair of the HSCA, Congressman Louis Stokes.

    At this meeting, Tanenbaum told Stokes that he had strong suspicions about the Agency. This was not just based on his encounter with Phillips. It was also based on his meeting with Senator Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee. The senator told him the following:

    Beware, the CIA will stonewall your investigation, refuse to hand over key documents, and intentionally mislead to further advance its cover-up—all of which it has done monumentally already. You see, during my participation in the Senate investigation regarding possible intel Agency abuse, I came to realize that the godawful truth was that the CIA participated actively in the assassination of our president. (p. 24)

    Schweiker then handed him his Church Committee investigative file. Tanenbaum was trying to use that file, plus his own work, to convince Stokes to sign subpoenas. In what is probably the best scene in the book, Stokes declined. The reason he gave was that the HSCA would not go along with it because of the fear of Agency retaliation. This meant that neither Tanenbaum nor Sprague had the support of the committee any longer. When Stokes asked what the Deputy Counsel would now do, Tanenbaum said he would resign. When Sprague was informed of this impediment, he said he had no choice but to also resign.

    The problem with this being the best episode in the book is simple: we are only on page 26.

    III

    When I first heard that Tanenbaum would be writing a book on his experience with the JFK case, I thought he would be writing a memoir. That is, something like Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. But that is not what That Day in Dallas is. There is much that is left out of the book that the author has related to me or at conferences. For instance, after Senator Schweiker gave him the file, he and his investigator, Cliff Fenton, went back to his apartment. They stayed up all night reading it. When they were done, Fenton turned to his boss and said, “Bob, this is not a New York City felony case. We are in over our heads.”

    This would have been a telling follow-up scene. Well, Fenton is not even in the book. And Tanenbaum himself curtailed what happened in his meeting with Schweiker. Because before the senator took the file out of his desk, he asked that Fenton leave the room. This is the gravity with which Schweiker regarded what he was about to say to the HSCA attorney: He wanted no witnesses there. And, in fact, when I visited Schweiker in his Washington office many years later, he denied he ever said that about CIA complicity in the JFK case. I told Tanenbaum about this interview, and he called it out as BS. He said Fenton would back him up on this since he told him about it. But my point is this would have all made for a gripping material in a memoir about his experience on the JFK case. For whatever reason, that is not what the author decided to pen.

    From that scene with Scheiker, the book goes into his upbringing in New York, his basketball and academic career, and his hiring by Hogan– which I have already outlined. In other words, it breaks the actual JFK narrative. And this goes on for about thirty pages. As I said, this does have a thematic purpose. But does it merit almost one quarter of the book? What makes this even more puzzling is that Tanenbaum knows how to write this kind of finely hewn, intricately referenced book. Because he has done it before. Three times to be exact: in Echoes of My Soul, Badge of the Assassin, and Coal Country Killing. These were all about celebrated homicide cases, so it’s not like he does not know how to do such a book.

    It is not until he arrives at his meeting with Richard Sprague that he completes the circle and gets back to the JFK case. And he now presents some of the evidence for why he believes the Kennedy murder was a conspiracy. He gives us things like the exposure of the junk science around the Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis test that falsely linked the bullets to each other in the case. (p. 78) He then goes on to the dispute about the fingerprint evidence between Lt. Day of the Dallas Police and Sebastian La Tona of the FBI. (p. 80)

    He describes how the eyewitness testimony in Dealey Plaza links to that at Parkland Hospital. (pp. 88-98) He also tries to show that, through x ray analysis, one can demonstrate the direction of the fatal head shot at Z frame 313, although this needed some finer elucidation. (p. 104)

    Towards the end, the author does make a new revelation. He writes that he had evidence that intelligence agents literally rewrote testimony of key witnesses to make the single shooter scenario stick. Again, this is something I wish he would have expanded on. (p. 120)

    But there is something wrong with his presentation. And that is his backing of the McCone/Rowley document. (p. 124) This is a memo that CIA Director John McCone allegedly wrote in 1964 to Secret Service chief James Rowley, In it, McCone writes that Oswald was a CIA operative and some of their agents were involved in what he termed the Dallas Action. There are so many problems with this exhibit that I really do not know why the author included it, except he was not aware of the controversy surrounding it. In addition to there being no paper trail for it at NARA, there are also internal problems with it. I discussed them in a previous review. (Click here for that https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/groden-robert-absolute-proof)

    What makes the book even more disappointing is that I know the author did have new things to reveal. Because, for instance, he told me that Fenton had a back channel to the CIA giving him information about David Phillips using the name of Maurice Bishop. I also know that he saw documents showing that the CIA had surveillance on Garrison’s witnesses for harassment purposes, and the paper came out of Deputy Director Richard Helms’ office. I also know that his apartment in Washington was burglarized for certain documents he had there.

    All this and more could have made for a compelling, revelatory volume about one man’s journey into the abyss of the JFK case. In my opinion, Bob Tanenbaum missed a great opportunity.

  • Video Talk of JFK Relevancy Today

    Video Talk of JFK Relevancy Today

    View the video here.

  • An Open Letter to Fredrik Logevall

    An Open Letter to Fredrik Logevall

    An Open Letter to Fredrik Logevall

    Dear Dr. Logevall:

    I have just watched all five segments of Turning Point: The Vietnam War. My review appears at the website Kennedys and King.com. I would venture to say it is the longest and most detailed examination of that disappointing series you will find.

    I have written or contributed to five books on the JFK case. And I was the screenwriter for Oliver Stone for his two most recent documentaries on that case, JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed. One of the things that puzzled me about Turning Point is that I could not find a writing credit for the series. Because if one is going to do an over six-hour series on such a controversial, multi-faceted, complex subject, it is not wise to just wing it and hope the chips fall into place. And, as we will see, that is not what I think happened here. Let me explain why.

    As you must know by now, the series begins with the John Kennedy administration. Which is odd in and of itself. Because America was involved in Vietnam two administrations prior: under Truman and Eisenhower. In other words, for about ten years before JFK was inaugurated. Kennedy inherited the war from those two men.

    What this series does is something that is inexplicable. It leads with Kennedy, and spends the whole first segment on him. It then, in Part 2, tells us about what happened in the fifties. In other words, it flashes backwards, referring to something that should have been the lead in. And at that, it is an abbreviated treatment of those ten years. The key development, what actually got this country into Vietnam, was America’s breaking of the Geneva Accords and its installation of the Nhu family as the leaders of the manufactured country of South Vietnam. This was done by President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon. It had been presaged by Dulles’s planning of Operation Vulture to prevent the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu.

    There are simply no questions about any of this. America backed the French until the bitter end, and Dulles was willing to use atomic weapons to save the French empire. Dulles then broke his oral agreement at Geneva, i.e., to hold elections and then unify the country. He installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam and kept him in power with rigged elections. This is what started the war under America and caused the rise of the Viet Minh.

    To say the film skimps over all this is being much too kind. But it cannot be skimped over, because this was all a monumental miscalculation. Vietnam was never worth using atomic bombs over, and it was not worth creating a new country, led by a man who turned out to be a tyrant. A leader who spoke English, wore Brooks Brothers suits, and had an American styled haircut. This was the true origin of American involvement. And you know this. Because you wrote a book about it called Embers of War.

    But as poor as that aspect was, it was not the worst part of Turning Point. Because the film jumped from the fifties to 1965. Let me repeat that: from the fifties to 1965. In other words it skipped over 1964! I could hardly believe what I was witnessing. Why? Because unlike what the film tried to depict, there was no mystery as to how all those American combat troops got into South Vietnam. They arrived there on President Johnson’s orders. And Johnson was planning this expansion of the war and its Americanization throughout 1964. But there was one problem. He had to get elected. So he lied about his planning for America’s direct entry. Some of the people who he had planning for that entry were William Sullivan and Bill Bundy. As Joseph Goulden wrote in his book, Truth is the First Casualty, Sullivan’s first paper on this for LBJ said that this American involvement was necessary in order to halt the advance of the Viet Cong. (p. 88)

    But we don’t need Mr. Goulden in order to certify that 1964 was a sea change do we? Because again, you wrote a book on this very subject. It was appropriately titled Choosing War. In other words unlike Kennedy, who stated it was Saigon’s war to win or lose, Johnson was making it America’s war. As you note in your book, two milestones in 1964 made it that way. The first was NSAM 288 which mapped out an air war against the north. The second was planning for a casus belli to get America into the war. This was achieved through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which was written before the infamous incident happened, and which Johnson carried around in his suit coat. That was the equivalent of a declaration of war against the north. From there the first American combat troops landed at Da Nang in early 1965, as planned for by Johnson.

    When Kennedy was killed there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam than when he took office. Which means there were none. As everyone who has studied the war understands, and as Maxwell Taylor and McGeorge Bundy were explicit about, Kennedy was determined not to commit combat troops into Vietnam. And he did not. Even though, as Gordon Goldstein has shown in his book about Bundy, he was confronted with this proposition nine times. Yet he refused each overture. Johnson did not need to be so encouraged.

    You would have been an excellent interview subject for what Johnson did in 1964. Instead you uttered the phrase that Vietnam was not Kennedy’s shining moment. Oh really? Compared to who? Compared to Lyndon Johnson, who started Rolling Thunder and committed a half million ground troops into theater? Or compared to Richard Nixon? Who invaded both Laos and Cambodia; the latter bringing a holocaust to that country. President Nixon also dropped more bomb tonnage over Indochina than Johnson did. Or shall he be compared to Eisenhower; who was going to use atomic weapons at Dien Bien Phu, but he could not get the British to back him on that. Ike also told Kennedy that Laos was worth going to the brink over in Indochina. Thankfully, Kennedy rejected that advice.

    I first encountered you and your work through the book Virtual JFK. In the transcripts that make up that volume I thought you were a well informed and objective scholar. You then got involved with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. They had you do the reply to people like John Newman and David Kaiser and Jamie Galbraith on Kennedy’s withdrawal in the book that accompanied their bloated and utterly mediocre series. Galbraith replied to you on that issue quite strongly and appropriately. Yet you have now repeated that performance. Again, you are part of a film that ignores NSAM 263, the McNamara/Taylor Report, and Johnson’s conscious reversal of Kennedy’s policy. Maybe you did not know what this film was going to be like. After all there does not seem to have been a script. But you sure do know now.

    I’d wish you well on your relatively new high profile. But it’s not the profile I had imagined for you.

    ( This letter will be sent directly to the director and one of the producers of Turning Point.)