Kennedys and King Test host626

Author: James DiEugenio

  • How Max Holland Duped the Daily Beast

    How Max Holland Duped the Daily Beast

    The year 2017 contains two important milestones in the mystery of the John F. Kennedy saga—one dealing with the man, the other with the mysteries of his assassination. The end of last month marked the centennial of Kennedy’s birth in Brookline, Massachusetts. This was commemorated with glossy news magazine special editions and a few TV programs—at least one with Caroline Kennedy, the last surviving member of the immediate family. There was also an act of Congress recognizing this event.

    This October, another act of Congress will be honored in regards to John F. Kennedy. This one relates not to his life, but to his death. On October 17th, the National Archives will release well over three thousand documents relating to the assassination of President Kennedy. In other words, fifty-four years after his murder, 53 years after the Warren Report was issued, the American public will finally be allowed to read what the American government wanted to keep classified for still another 22 years. Because if it were not for Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, most of these documents would have remained classified until the year 2039. But due to the firestorm of controversy created by that film, an act of Congress was passed. That act created a citizens’ panel called the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). From 1994-98 it declassified over two million pages of documents dealing with the assassination of President Kennedy. But there were certain restrictions placed in the legislation that allowed for exceptions until the year 2017. Those exceptions will expire this October.

    The secrets already released by the ARRB from 1994-98 were underplayed by the news media, but in fact they were quite bracing. For instance, the records of a meeting in May of 1963 helmed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed that President Kennedy did have a plan to withdraw from Vietnam. Under questioning by ARRB chief counsel Jeremy Gunn, Kennedy pathologist James Humes revealed that he had burned both his notes and the first draft of his autopsy report. We learned from declassified records of the Church Committee that INS officers—on the trail of Cuban illegals—had followed David Ferrie to Guy Banister’s office in New Orleans. And they found Lee Oswald there.

    On April 28th of this year, Max Holland published an essay on the JFK case in The Daily Beast. Holland brought up a different milestone date. This one concerned the 50th anniversary of a story originally published on April 25, 1967 in the (now defunct) New Orleans States Item. Holland’s article was called “How the KGB Duped Oliver Stone.” Holland stated that the 50-year-old article—titled “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to Plot Probe”—was a triumph for Moscow.

    The article describes the arrest of Clay Shaw by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison on March 1, 1967. Holland characterizes the arrest of Shaw for conspiracy in the JFK case as “outlandish and baseless”. He adds that the reasons for Shaw’s arrest had already been reviewed back in 1963 by the FBI and found wanting.

    But the arrest of Shaw created headlines around the world. And this led to several articles about Shaw’s work in Rome for a mysterious business entity called Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). One Italian newspaper, which produced a series of articles, Paese Sera, was a leftwing publication that eventually wrote that CMC might have been a creation of the CIA, and a center of funding for illegal covert activities. Jim Garrison received copies of these Paese Sera articles. According to the author, this is how the DA now centered his investigation on CIA complicity in the Kennedy murder. The article then concludes that Garrison was really an unsuspecting dupe of Moscow. How? Because Paese Sera was really a conduit for KGB disinformation. And because Oliver Stone based his 1991 film JFK on Garrison’s memoir On the Trail of the Assassins, Stone was also made a Moscow dupe.

    Holland’s source for this? The controversial Mitrokhin archives. Vasili Mitrokhin was a former archivist for the KGB. In 1992 he defected to the United Kingdom. As Russian scholar Amy Knight has noted, the story behind Mitrokhin and his defection strains credulity. But it began a whole new genre of academic studies and books. With a skeptical eye, she surveyed the books in all of their questionable aspects, i.e., the sales and marketing of former Russian intelligence employees who spirit out their notes on KGB files. (See this article in the Wilson Quarterly)

    This new area of trade and barter reached its apogee in the instance of Alexander Vassiliev, still another former Russian intelligence officer who defected to England. In that case, it was shown that Vassiliev’s “notes” at times actually distorted the original memorandum beyond recognition.

    Once in England, Mitrokhin was furnished with an official in-house British MI5 author. In turn, Christopher Andrew set up a syndication deal with Rupert Murdoch. The subsequent volume was called The Sword and the Shield. In 1995, the political angle behind the barter was accentuated. Based on the word of still another Russian intelligence defector, Murdoch and his subordinates accused former Labor Party leader Michael Foot of accepting funds from KGB agents. Foot promptly sued for libel. Understandably, Murdoch did not want to appear in court, so he settled the case in Foot’s favor.

    Mitrokhin’s notes said that the late Mark Lane had been aided by two secret donations from the KGB: one for 1500 dollars and one for 500 dollars. As Lane later replied, the only donation he received even close to those amounts was from the extraordinarily wealthy Corliss Lamont, an heir to the JP Morgan fortune. Not a likely candidate for a KGB agent. Further, according to the Mitrokhin notes, the transfer occurred in New York City in 1966. As Lane has noted, he was living in London that year, finishing up and editing his book Rush to Judgment, which was being published by a British house. (Lane, Last Word, pp. 92-93) Third, the next largest donation Lane got for further research was from Woody Allen. It was for $50. Lane kept records of his donations. In other words, the Mitrokhin charges against him were quite dubious. Consequently, he challenged the veracity of the book in a letter to the author. Andrew never replied. (ibid, p. 96)

    II

    Which brings us to the pretext for this article. Clay Shaw was arrested on March 1, 1967. Three days later, Paese Sera began publishing its six-part series on the mysterious and suspicious activities of the CMC in Italy. The author tries to imply that there was a cause-effect relationship between the two events. He bases this on one of the notes in the Mitrokhin archive. That note says that in 1967, the Russians started a disinformation scheme in that Italian newspaper that was later picked up in New York. (ibid, p. 73) That is it. In other words, there is no specificity to the accusation. There is no mention in the Mitrokhin note of Jim Garrison, Clay Shaw, the CMC or any New York publication that picked up the story. Realizing how that paucity presents a problem, Holland had once said that there was a mention of the Paese Sera series in the socialist New York weekly the National Guardian. But this was only done because they had a contributor who lived in Rome.

    In prior presentations, Holland had realized how thin this case was. So he added the testimony of CIA officer Richard Helms before a congressional committee concerning Paese Sera. The problem with this was that Dr. Gary Aguilar exposed Helms’ testimony as being rather faulty. It turned out that Helms, in order to discredit Paese Sera, used a story in which they said the CIA was complicit in the attempts to overthrow French president Charles DeGaulle. As Aguilar ably pointed out, this story was true. Even a sympathetic CIA author like Andrew Tully admitted this as far back as 1962, after the attempted coup of the French generals over the war in Algeria. The complicity was reported even earlier than that in The New York Times by Scotty Reston. (NY Times, April 29, 1961) More recently, David Talbot hammered the point home with multiple sources in his biography of Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard. (See pp. 412-24)

    Another implication of Holland’s essay is that, somehow, the KGB dreamed up the story and gave it to Paese Sera on the occasion of Shaw’s arrest. As anyone in the newspaper business knows, usually the next day’s paper is locked down the night before. Which would mean that the KGB put the story together in about 48 hours. This author had the opportunity to read the six part series in translation. The idea that a foreign intelligence service could put together such a story on such brief notice is hard to buy. Clearly, the quite lengthy, detailed reporting was the result of a weeks-long inquiry into the whole business enterprise of the CMC. So unless this was all made up in Moscow—and it is hard to see how it could be—the idea of a KGB “planting” of the story is simply improbable.

    Why would Paese Sera be interested in such a lengthy exposé? Because the CMC was a mysterious business agency with a suspect past. Prior to moving to Italy, the enterprise had been kicked out of Basel, Switzerland in 1957. The reasons were similar to those that Paese Sera complained about: murky financing and the questionable character of the company directors. Which included one George Mandel, who had been accused of working the Jewish refugee racket during World War II. When this unsavory fact surfaced in the Swiss press, Mandel threatened to sue the paper—but he didn’t. The editor was disappointed. He commented, “Too bad. We would have heard some great things at the trial.” (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 216; State Department Memorandum of April 9, 1958)

    But further, as questions about the financing in Basel began to crest, another director of the firm, former Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Nagy, mentioned J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation as a source of funds. He also mentioned J and W Seligman. As William Davy writes in his book Let Justice be Done, Allen Dulles had been general counsel to Schroder prior to becoming CIA Director. When the Dulles brothers law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was still dealing with the Nazis in the thirties, they used Schroder’s as their conduit. When Dulles became DCI, he opened up a fifty million dollar emergency fund with Schroder’s. It was later reported that Schroder’s served as one of the recurring cut-outs for the Agency to transfer funds. (Davy, pp. 96-97) If one consults the book Millionaires and Managers, a 1969 analysis of the large Wall Street investment houses and legal firms, one will see that both banks—Schroder and Seligman—come under the purview and control of what the author calls the Sullivan and Cromwell/Marine Midland Group. This important back-story in Switzerland is ignored by Holland.

    In 1958, because of all the controversy in Basel, the enterprise moved to Italy. This is when Clay Shaw entered the picture. The major board players in Italy were much the same as in Switzerland. But they were augmented by people like a former member of Mussolini’s cabinet, and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, financial guru of the Third Reich. They represented “a small cross-section of the aging royalists with whom Shaw liked to hobnob on his European jaunts and whose names and phone numbers were kept in his address book.” (Davy, p. 98)

    Paese Sera was not the only newspaper that reported on the controversial company. So did Corriere della Sera, Il Messaggero and Le Devoir in Montreal. The latter likely reported on the enterprise because its general counsel was Louis Bloomfield, a Montreal corporate and international lawyer. Looking through what has been released of Bloomfield’s papers, researcher Maurice Phillips has discovered that Bloomfield was an important player in the CMC scheme. He actually coordinated meetings and investments for Nagy from some of the wealthiest men in the world, who were somehow interested in the CMC; e.g., Edmund deRothschild, and David Rockefeller. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. Imfeld, 2/10/60) Phillips has also uncovered documents that show that Nagy was a CIA asset and that he queried the Agency, offering them the use of CMC in any capacity. (March 24, 1967 CIA memo, released in 1998.) Phillips is now involved in a legal dispute with the Bloomfield estate, who wish to cut off any further access to these papers. This, in spite of the fact that Bloomfield’s will said his papers should be opened to the public twenty years after his death, and he passed away in 1984.

    Finally, there is information about the CIA and the CMC from FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who, along with Warren DeBrueys, was J. Edgar Hoover’s man on the ground in the Cuban exile community in New Orleans. He reportedly stated that, “Shaw was a CIA agent who had done work of an unspecified nature over a five year period in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100) That description, of course, perfectly matches both the time span and the location of the CMC. Therefore, in two strands of Holland’s sixteen-year old yarn—concerning the CIA and the DeGaulle overthrow, and the Agency connections to the Centro Mondiale Commerciale—it turns out that Paese Sera was right and Holland was, shall we say, obtuse. After all the controversy in Italy, the CMC left and went to Johannesburg, South Africa. Thus the idea that CMC was somehow connected with the Central Intelligence Agency is anything but disinformation.

    III

    But Holland goes even further here. In defiance of the ARRB declassified record, he conceals from the reader the new documents about Clay Shaw. The author writes that both the Warren Commission and the FBI investigated the true identity of a man named Clay Bertrand, who New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews said called him to go to Dallas and defend Oswald. Holland writes that the Bureau and the Commission determined that this allegation was false, and that Bertrand was not even a real person.

    First, there is no evidence that the Warren Commission itself ever did any kind of search for the true identity of Clay Bertrand. The FBI did investigate the issue. And the results were pretty much contrary to what Holland describes. In 1967, the Justice Department committed a faux pas about it. They admitted that the FBI had investigated Clay Shaw back in 1963. (Davy, p. 191) This announcement caused much consternation at FBI headquarters, because the obvious follow up question would be: Why was the FBI investigating Shaw as part of its original inquiry into the Kennedy murder? J. Edgar Hoover did not want to answer that question. So the Justice Department issued a second announcement: the FBI had not conducted any inquiry about Shaw in 1963.

    As the declassified record demonstrates, this was false. In fact, The New York Times actually printed the truth about this on March 3, 1967. They wrote, “A Justice Department official said tonight that his agency was convinced that Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Shaw were the same man … .” Behind the scenes, FBI official Cartha DeLoach admitted that, in December of 1963, several parties had furnished the FBI information about Shaw. (Davy, p. 192, italics added) Before Shaw was arrested, the FBI had multiple sources saying Garrison was correct: Shaw was Bertrand. (ibid, p. 193) The declassified record shows that the Bureau knew this and concealed it.

    One of the most questionable statements in Holland’s essay is that it was because of the Paese Sera article that Garrison began to focus on the CIA as his chief suspect in the Kennedy murder. Again, this does not align with the record, or even with what Garrison himself has written. It is very clear what led Garrison down this path: Oswald’s Russian language test in the military, and the flyers Oswald was passing out on Canal Street in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. The former was a strong indication Oswald was receiving Russian language training in the Marines. Which suggests he was being prepared in advance for his defection to Russia upon his early release. As per the latter, some of the flyers Oswald was handing out in New Orleans contained the address: 544 Camp Street. As depicted in Stone’s film, Garrison visited this building. It turned out that Oswald had been seen there at the office of former FBI agent Guy Banister. It turned out that, again, as depicted in JFK, Banister’s office was a clearinghouse for many Cuban exiles, along with Oswald’s longtime friend, David Ferrie. And Garrison later learned that both Banister and Ferrie were involved with both the Bay of Pigs landing, and Operation Mongoose, the secret war against Cuba, also depicted in Stone’s film. Both of these were CIA sanctioned, supplied, and backed. The more Garrison peeled back 544 Camp Street, the more he discovered how residents of the address, like Sergio Arcacha Smith, were related to the CRC. This was the CIA’s anti-Castro Cuban government in exile, created by Howard Hunt. Therefore, the only way to explain Oswald’s presence amid all these CIA agents and Castro haters was that he was an agent provocateur against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was billed on the literature as being located at that address. Garrison goes through all of this in his memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins. (See Garrison, pp. 22-25 and 34-36)

    But another point that caused Garrison to consider the CIA as a chief suspect was the infiltration of his office. And also the fact that suspects and witnesses in his case were being furnished lawyers associated with the CIA. Again, this point has been reinforced with the release of declassified files by the ARRB. Through that process we have discovered that the CIA maintains what they call a Cleared Attorneys Panel in major cities. This panel is called upon when the Agency gets stuck in sensitive situations. The Garrison investigation caused word to get out in the New Orleans legal community about this panel, and soon letters were being sent to CIA Director Richard Helms to volunteer for work on it. (Letter from James Quaid, May 15, 1967)

    This directly relates to the article Holland mentions in The New Orleans States Item. The Paese Sera article takes up two paragraphs in the over thirty-paragraph article. The reporting team had talked to one of the witnesses Garrison was trying to extradite back to New Orleans. Gordon Novel had volunteered for Garrison’s probe masquerading as an electronics expert who could ensure his office was not bugged. He ended up doing the opposite. Again, as Stone’s film shows, he wired the office for sound and sold some of the tapes to the producer of an upcoming NBC special. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second edition, pp. 232-34) When Garrison requested Novel testify before the grand jury, he fled the state. As the article reveals, Novel had worked for the CIA since the Bay of Pigs operation. And he planned on using those credentials for his defense—if Garrison ever got him back to New Orleans. Which he did not. In other words, a former CIA operative was ingratiating himself with the DA. He was then wiring his office and selling the tapes to an upcoming negative TV special. And, as Garrison revealed in his October 1967 Playboy interview, one of Novel’s attorneys was being paid by the CIA. Kind of interesting, no? But it is left out of Holland’s story.

    IV

    As one can see from what I have indicated above, the Mitrokhin Archives represents one notch of a string of former KGB agents who understood an important historical point in time had been reached. That, after the fall of the USSR, and especially after the rise to power of Boris Yeltsin and his disastrous economic policies, the writing was on the wall. One way to escape the oncoming socio-economic crisis was to curry favor with the American State Department, as depicted in the recent film, Ukraine on Fire. Another way was to win over the west with “notes” from the KGB Archives. (Evidently Mitrokhin did not have access to a copier for all those many years he was an archivist.)

    But the East/West exchange actually goes back before Mitrokhin. It stems from the relationship of former TV/Radio journalist Brian Litman with the KGB after the USSR began to collapse in 1991. At that time, while working for an American cable TV company, Litman was living in Moscow. It is there that he began a relationship with the KGB and sold the American rights to a book called Passport to Assassination. That book proposed that Lee Harvey Oswald actually did go to the Russian embassy while he was in Mexico City. There, he met with the embassy chief consul and two assistant consuls. This occurred even though no surveillance camera captured Oswald’s image upon entrance or exit; and there was no recorded tape of his voice inside the embassy. Even though the embassy was under multi-camera surveillance and the interior was bugged.

    The portrayal of Oswald in this book is that of a desperate man at the end of his rope. He carries a handgun with him since he thinks the FBI is following him around everywhere—even in Mexico. He says ominous things, like, “For me it’s all going to end in tragedy.” Or he breaks down and weeps, because he fears the FBI will actually kill him. This is allegedly due to the fact he wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington over the possibility of returning to Russia. In other words, by actually placing Oswald in Mexico City, this book countered what Mexico City CIA officer David Phillips said in public: namely, that when all the information is finally produced, there will be no evidence placing Oswald inside the Russian embassy. (Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 82) Thus began a long migration of convenient helpers from the KGB who would paper over problems in the CIA’s version of the Cold War—including its difficulties with the Kennedy assassination. For instance, in the Litman/Nechiporenko version of Oswald in Mexico, Oswald (oh so conveniently) pulls his jacket over his head as he leaves the embassy—as if the authors were aware that the CIA surveillance took no photos of Oswald entering or leaving. One wonders, did he also do that upon entering the compound? If so, how did he know about the surveillance?

    V

    But perhaps the worst part of the essay is the charge that it was Jim Garrison who caused a loss of belief by Americans in the democratic institutions of their government. Because it was not Jim Garrison who provoked serious doubts about the Warren Commission. It was a wave of books, articles, and radio appearances by the first critics of the Warren Report, who preceded Jim Garrison. That is, writers like Edward Epstein, Vincent Salandria, Harold Weisberg, and Mark Lane. By 1967, the Gallup Poll revealed that belief in the Warren Report’s Oswald-Did-It-Alone concept was at about 30%. What drove it even lower—to 11% in 1976—were three major events, which we all know about. They were, in order, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the exposés of the Church Committee concerning the crimes of the CIA and FBI. This all began in 1965—with the first insertion of American combat troops into Vietnam—and continued until the last reports of the Church Committee in 1976.

    The unfolding of these three events on national TV, radio, and in daily newspapers, was incessant and, in its cumulative effect, oceanic. They literally dominated all news cycles for over ten years. Has Holland completely forgot about the Tet Offensive and the cover up of the slaughter of civilians at My Lai? What about Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre? Or the indictments of over sixty employees of his administration, and the convictions of over forty of them? Perhaps he missed the Church Committee’s exposure of the attempts by the CIA to assassinate Patrice Lumumba of the Congo? Or J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO programs to infiltrate, disrupt, and sometimes eliminate leftist groups?

    It was the tremendous impact of these three events that drove down all belief in government. And anyone can see this by looking at the graph in Kevin Phillips’ 1995 book Arrogant Capitol, which first appeared in US News and World Report. But interestingly, on that US News graph, the drop-off in belief begins in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued, three years before Jim Garrison’s inquiry was made public. This would suggest that, from the beginning—and without any outside influence—the American public thought something was awry with the official story of President Kennedy’s assassination.

    As author Larry Sabato noted in his 2013 book The Kennedy Half Century, there is an underlying reason that Kennedy’s life and death is celebrated on so many occasions. Sabato commissioned extensive polling and focus groups for his book. At the end, he revealed that 78% of those polled thought that Kennedy’s presidency had a deep impact on the USA. Which is remarkable since Kennedy only served two years and ten months of his term. Even more remarkably, 91% of the public believes that Kennedy’s murder changed the country a great deal. The last polling result was that 75% of the public did not believe the Warren Report verdict of Kennedy’s assassination, namely that Oswald acted alone.

    The Daily Beast preferred printing this article instead of previewing the upcoming releases of the ARRB in October, or the mock trial of Oswald in November in Houston. Which is somewhat surprising, since those upcoming events are rather singular in more ways than one. Holland’s article is nothing more than a rerun of an essay he started marketing at least 16 years ago. In the Spring 2001 edition of Wilson Quarterly , it was entitled “The Demon in in Jim Garrison”. In 2004, he made a very similar presentation at the Assassination Archives Research Center Conference, which, as mentioned above, was rebutted by Gary Aguilar. In 2007, the piece was printed in the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. Any differences between the versions is marginal. So if The Daily Beast paid Holland, it was like a photographer dusting off photos in his drawer from 15 years ago—easy money. But what makes it worse is that they were all done after 1998—the termination date of the Assassination Records Review Board. As the reader can see, Holland ignored the new information on Clay Shaw and Jim Garrison. Instead, he went with records from an alleged KGB archives which are easily rendered dubious.

    For many, many years now Holland has been ignoring the declassified records of the ARRB. Even when he was supposed to be reporting on those files. The fact that he still does so, even on the eve of their final disbursement, tells us all we need to know about him.

    See also:  Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs Jim Garrison and the ARRB

  • The Deceptions and Disguises of Noam Chomsky

    The Deceptions and Disguises of Noam Chomsky

    One of the most telling moments in John Barbour’s new film, The American Media and the Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy, is his presentation of Noam Chomsky briefly discussing the JFK case. It’s a scene I will return to later. But along with Barbour’s depictions of Dan Rather and Bill O’Reilly, I thought these formed the most potent scenes in his film. I am glad Barbour depicted Chomsky because it reminds us just how bad the so-called American Left was and is on both the Kennedy assassination and his presidency. I once wrote an essay on this general subject based upon the work of Martin Schotz and Ray Marcus. (Click here for that essay) Like the Chomsky scene in the Barbour film, we will later return to Marcus’ revealing work on Chomsky.

    As many of us will recall, at the time of the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Chomsky, along with his deceased cohort Alexander Cockburn, went on a jihad against almost everything depicted in the movie. Their critiques were as bad, in some ways worse, than those of the MSM. Their campaign was two-pronged. The first angle was to promote the idea that the Warren Commission was correct; that is, Oswald alone shot President Kennedy. In this regard, Cockburn obsequiously interviewed Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler in the pages of The Nation. That interview amounted to a pattycake session, as Cockburn served up softball after softball to his performing seal Liebeler. Their second line of argument stemmed from the first: There was no high level plot because President Kennedy was no different than Dwight Eisenhower who preceded him, or Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon who followed him. So, with both polemicists, there was no political difference between, say, Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower, or Kennedy and Johnson. Even back in 1991, this was a difficult dual thesis to uphold. With the releases of the Assassination Records Review Board, it is well-nigh impossible to defend today. And later we will see how new evidence has forced Chomsky to modify his position. (For my discussion of Cockburn click here)

    There were so many crevices—actually Florida-sized sinkholes—in their arguments that it became apparent that both men were arguing from a preconceived position.

    That position, of course, is the approach to history common to the intellectual or academic Left. One might characterize the general tendency of such Marxist-influenced (or Neo-marxist) sociological analysis as ‘structural’ or ‘system-oriented’, in the sense that it views the actions of individuals as having little import or consequence, that the subject is merely an agent of larger cultural forces that impinge upon it. When applied specifically to the realm of politics, it leads to positing that institutions of power seek to protect and perpetuate themselves in a manner which is nearly blind to the choice or consciousness of the participants, that indeed the very status of the acting subject is suspect as a category of analysis. In its most extreme application, this theoretical perspective leaves no room for flexibility, for the notion that biography—personal background and characteristics—can make a difference, or that innovation from within the system can occur that can benefit many rather than a few. This concept differs somewhat from the “deep state” thesis, as advocates of the latter will allow for exceptions. But they will then note that the Deep State will correct the exception. In President Kennedy’s case, it was a correction by assassination. The former view is more rigid and zealous in its ideology insofar as it denies that there can be any political exceptions. As with extreme upholders of all theories, its proponents must work to erase the evidence that there ever were any exceptions. And as with any kind of inductive reasoning based upon dubious premises, this leads to the making of some thunderous—and pretentious—truisms.

    II

    Before we address some of Chomsky’s pronouncements on the Kennedy case, it is important to address some of his intellectual background, because it is very hard to adhere to such a system of thought without it leading to some thorny practical problems with specifics. This is simply because theories sometimes do not explain all that happens in the real world. Therefore their practitioners are forced to bend and mold facts and events in order to shape them to fit their doctrine. In the political field, this practice usually leads to questions of how ideology influences analysis. In other words it brings up questions of bias and balance. Chomsky’s career gives us prior illustrations of these characteristics. It is startling to note how Chomsky’s acolytes ignore them.

    The first is the fact that Chomsky has been known to butcher quotations for political advantage. A famous example being a quote by Harry Truman which Chomsky altered in his early book American Power and the New Mandarins. This was later exposed by Arthur Schlesinger in a letter to Commentary in December of 1969. Another example would be the misconstruing of the words of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington. Chomsky wrote that the professor said that he advocated demolishing in toto North Vietnamese society. Huntington corrected the record in the New York Review of Books (See 2/26/70)

    There are parallels to these kinds of ersatz presentations with Chomsky and the Kennedy case. With Kennedy, Chomsky has tried to insinuate that somehow JFK was involved with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. This wasn’t possible for the simple reason that Kennedy had not been inaugurated at the time Lumumba was killed. But further, as some have noted, Allen Dulles and the CIA most likely hastened their assassination plots against the African leader for the precise reason that Dulles knew Kennedy would not support them. (John M. Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23) In fact, there is a famous picture of President Kennedy getting the news of Lumumba’s death which shows just how pained he was by Lumumba’s passing.

    jfklumumba

    In and of itself, this photograph nullifies the Chomsky thesis that there was no difference between Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon and Kennedy. For we can safely say that none of those other men would have reacted like this upon hearing of Lumumba’s death. According to the Church Committee, Eisenhower and Allen Dulles ordered the murder of Lumumba. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 326) Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s policies in the Congo. He ended up using Cuban exile pilots to wipe out the last followers of Lumumba, helping to destroy the first attempt at a democracy in post-colonial Africa, and allying the USA with the former colonizer Belgium to back Josef Mobutu. Mobutu became a dictator who enriched himself and his backers, and allowed his country to be utilized by outside imperial interests. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 372-73) Nixon was Vice President under Eisenhower, and in National Security Council meetings spoke derisively and patronizingly of African leaders trying to break out of colonialism. He once said these leaders had only been out of the trees for fifty years. (Muehlenbeck, p. 6) Kennedy’s attitude on this subject, and Lumumba, was contrary to all these men. I cannot do better than to refer the reader to Richard Mahoney’s landmark book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, and the equally fine volume Betting on the Africans by Philip Muehlenbeck. (Click here for a review)

    To show just how pernicious Chomsky’s influence on some Left luminaries is on this subject, consider David Talbot’s last appearance on Democracy Now hosted by Amy Goodman. In discussing his book on Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard, he mentioned the differing views of Lumumba by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Incredibly, Goodman challenged him on this point. Talbot referred to the aforementioned picture of Kennedy as evidence of JFK’s feelings on the subject. But further, as Mahoney’s book demonstrates, the first foreign policy reversal of Eisenhower that Kennedy made once in office was on the Congo. And when Dag Hammarksjold was killed (likely murdered) in a plane crash, Kennedy decided to carry on the UN Chairman’s campaign for a free and independent Congo. (Click here) That any informed person could suggest otherwise shows both a massive ignorance and a massive bias on the subject. Yet, Goodman has hosted Chomsky many times. She reportedly vetoed an appearance by Jim Douglass.

    Chomsky has also tried to say that Kennedy approved the action plan to overthrow President Goulart of Brazil. (E-mail communication with Steve Jones, July 20, 2017) Yet, this plan did not occur until over four months after Kennedy was dead. Consider the information in A. J. Langguth’s Hidden Terrors. Although it is true that Kennedy wanted Goulart to broaden the political spectrum of his government, Langguth makes it clear that the actual Brazil overthrow was similar to the action against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. A group of wealthy and powerful businessmen petitioned the White House for help in getting rid of a man they feared would endanger their investments. Langguth describes this group in detail. It was led by David Rockefeller. (p. 104) The author notes that Rockefeller’s coalition had not been accepted at the White House previous to January of 1964. But they were welcomed by President Johnson. And this made the difference. This demarcation is also noted by Kai Bird in his book, The Chairman. For it was John McCloy, the subject of Bird’s book, who was sent by Rockefeller’s group to make a deal with Goulart in February of 1964. When McCloy’s presence in Brazil was detected, it polarized forces of the left and right. (Bird, pp. 550-53) And this triggered the coup operation, codenamed Operation Brother Sam, which McCloy acquiesced in after causing. As Bird notes, Johnson’s willingness to cooperate with Rockefeller and McCloy ended Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress plan: “The Johnson administration had made clear its willingness to use its muscle to support any regime whose anti-communist credentials were in good order.” (ibid, p. 553) Further, anyone who has read Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street would understand the antipathy between President Kennedy and Rockefeller and why such a meeting was unlikely under Kennedy.

    III

    These two examples are good background for even worse gymnastics by Chomsky. And it brings us closer to Vietnam. In June of 1977, Chomsky co-wrote (with Edward Herman) a now infamous article in The Nation. It was titled “Distortions at Fourth Hand.” There is no other way to describe this essay except as an apologia for the staggering crimes of the collectivist Pol Pot regime that took place in Cambodia after the fall of both Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol. At that time a book had been published called Cambodia Year Zero by François Ponchaud. It was the first serious look at the terrors that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had unleashed in Cambodia. Chomsky and Herman criticized this pioneering work by saying that it played “fast and loose with quotes and numbers” and that since it relied largely on refugee reports, it had to be second hand. They then added that the book had an “anti-communist bias and message.” In retrospect, those two comments are startling, and again show a remarkable selectivity in an effort to discredit sources. In this same article, the two authors praised a book by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. They wrote that this book presented “a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources.”

    In other words, not only were the authors attempting to discredit information that turned out to be true; at the same time, they were crediting information that turned out to be—to put it mildly—inaccurate. The net effect of this propaganda was to distort and conceal the efforts of a murderous regime in killing off well over one million of its citizens in an attempt to recreate a Maoist society overnight. Pol Pot’s was one of the greatest genocides per capita in modern history.

    What makes Chomsky’s performance here even worse is that two years later he and Herman were still discounting and distorting the Khmer Rouge in their book After the Cataclysm. They refer to what Pol Pot did as “allegations of genocide” (p. xi, italics added). On the same page they tried to imply that Western media created the mass executions and deaths. They later added that evidence was faked and reporting was unreliable. (pp. 166-77) They again attacked Ponchaud’s book by saying “Ponchaud’s ’s own conclusions, it is by now clear, cannot be taken very seriously because he is simply too careless and untrustworthy.” (p. 274) Later, more credible and responsible authors, like William Shawcross, demonstrated Chomsky’s pronouncements to be astonishingly wrong. They were so bad that Chomsky has never let up trying to minimize what he did. In fact, his whole emphasis on the Indonesian invasion of East Timor has been to try and demonstrate that that slaughter was really worse than what happened in Cambodia! The implication being that if that were true it would then somehow minimize his previous giant faux pas. And even in that he has lowballed the fatalities in Cambodia to do so. (For a complete and thorough expose of this subject, click here)

    Why is this important? Besides demonstrating what a poor scholar and historian Chomsky is, it shows that, contrary to his claim of being an anarchist, he went to near ludicrous extremes to soften the shocking crimes of a Maoist totalitarian regime. In any evaluation of Chomsky, this episode is of prime importance. For the simple reason that it clearly suggests that—as Ted Koppel recently said of Sean Hannity—ideology is more important to him than facts.

    A second notable aspect of Chomsky’s work is his association with the notorious Holocaust denier Professor Robert Faurisson. When Faurisson’s writing on this subject became public, he was suspended from his position at the University of Lyon. Chomsky then signed a petition in support of Faurisson’s reinstatement. He followed that up in 1980 with a brief introduction to a book by Faurisson. Chomsky later tried to say that he was personally unacquainted with Faurisson and was only speaking out for academic freedom. But, unfortunately for Chomsky and his acolytes, this was contradicted by Faurisson himself. For the Frenchman had written a letter to the New Statesman in 1979. It began with: “Noam Chomsky … is aware of the research work I do on what I call the ‘gas chambers and genocide hoax’. He informed me that Gitta Sereny had mentioned my name in an article in your journal. He told me I had been referred to ‘in an extraordinarily unfair way’.” (This unpublished letter was quoted in the October, 1981 issue of the Australian journal Quadrant.)

    Consequently, Chomsky’s later public qualifications about his reasons for signing the petition and writing the introduction ring hollow. He did know Faurisson. He was in contact with him personally, and apparently was encouraging him to defend his work.

    When he found this out, author and professor W. D. Rubinstein had a correspondence with Chomsky, which seemed to certify the worst fears about the noted linguist and Faurisson. Chomsky wrote the following: “Someone might well believe that there were no gas chambers but there was a Holocaust … ” (ibid) In defending Faurisson’s writings Chomsky then wrote that anyone who found them lacking in common sense or accepted the established history, was exhibiting “an interesting reflection of the totalitarian mentality, or more properly in this case, the mentality of the religious fanatic.” (Ibid) Rubinstein replied that to hold that there were no gas chambers but there was a Holocaust was an absurd tenet. Chomsky went ballistic. He wrote back that the respondent was lacking in elementary logical reasoning, and he was falsifying documentary evidence. He then said that the Nazis may have worked these Jews to death and then shoveled their bodies into crematoria without gas chambers. He concluded his blast with this: “If you cannot comprehend this, I suggest that you begin your education again at the kindergarten level.” (Click here for this remarkable article)

    As Werner Cohn has shown, Chomsky has tried to conceal his friendly relations with a Holocaust Denial group in France. This group included Serge Thion, Faurisson and Pierre Guillame. He seems to have gotten in contact with this group through Thion, another leftist critic of the idea of calling what Pol Pot did in Cambodia a genocide. This group ran a publishing house called La Vieille Taupe, which featured prints of Holocaust Denial literature. The petition that Chomsky signed contained the following sentence about Faurisson: “Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive independent historical research into the ‘holocaust’ question.” The framing of the last two words in that statement should jar anyone’s senses. (For an overview of Chomsky’s association with this group click here; for a specific example of his attempt to cover it up, click here.)

    As with his resistance to the Khmer Rouge genocide, Chomsky’s defense and association with Faurisson is startling to any objective person. Which again excludes his acolytes. Today, the low estimate for the fatalities caused by the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is 1.7 million. (see this NYT article from 2017) The idea that there were no mass gassings and crematoria at the Nazi death camps was thoroughly debunked at the trial of David Irving. Irving was a friend and colleague of Faurisson. That court action was instigated by Irving himself. There has been a very good web site constructed from the materials devoted to that trial. I strongly recommend reading the reports given to the court by Robert Jan van Pelt, Christopher Browning, and Richard Evans. They seem to me to be models of what scholarly research should be about.

    IV

    Before centering on the issues of Kennedy’s assassination and his presidency, it is important to discuss briefly the general issue of the Cold War, if only to place those subjects in historical context. As with many leftist polemicists, Chomsky usually does not do this. And when he does, he almost exclusively centers on what western powers did to cause the Cold War and continue it.

    Yet it would seem to most people to be important to review objectively these matters in any historical discussion of American foreign policy from 1945-1991—the obvious reason being that it was the most powerful influence on American foreign policy and world events in that time period. Every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush was strongly influenced by it, to the point that almost every major foreign policy issue was colored by it. Therefore, if one is writing the history of this period, or a part of it, one has to factor this into the discussion. If not, then one can be accused of ignoring, or discounting, the historical backdrop.

    For to deprive these events of their context is to sap them of some of their meaning. Related to this, another problem with Chomsky—as noted above—is imbalance. The policy of aiding foreign countries in their resistance to communism was spelled out way back in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine. This was then endorsed by Congress, and legislation was passed to carry out the policy. One can argue whether or not the Cold War was exaggerated, whether it was too covert, even whether or not it was justified. But one cannot act as if it did not exist. Or that the communist side had no provocations to it, or had no atrocities done in its name. For how else can one explain the Korean War, Hungary in 1956, or the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968? We can continue in this vein with the Chinese usurpation of Tibet or the crimes of Fidel Castro, or those of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, the latter of which are both mind-boggling.

    But as with Pol Pot in Cambodia, these things are minimized, discounted or ignored by people like Chomsky, and the late Alexander Cockburn. Almost all of the critical analysis was and is of the USA. But if things like balance and historical context are left out, then what is this kind of writing really worth?

    Which is another way of saying the following: A theoretical approach is only as good as the person who uses it. If that writer is too biased one way or the other, the result will suffer greatly. To make a point of comparison: Michael Parenti is also an advocate of the aforementioned style of analysis we have called “structural” or “systemic”. Yet he understands that there are men and women who occasionally manage to rise above the system and do some good for a great number of people. And Parenti also understands that political conspiracies do exist, and have been proven to exist. To use just one example, the heist of the 2000 election in Florida by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris.

    Even though this crime was done in broad daylight—what with roadblocks set up to hinder people from voting—no person was even interviewed by any law enforcement arm, let alone indicted. The political result of this was horrendous: George W. Bush created a totally unjustified war in Iraq. A war that Al Gore would not have started. Not only do political conspiracies exist, if not addressed, prosecuted, and stopped, they can have terrible results for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. So to deny they occur is to deny reality. And as Parenti has said, reality is sometimes radical.

    A second problem with using this system-oriented approach is that—as we have seen with Cambodia—it tends to sweep all contrary facts or evidence into an ideological whirlpool. That is, facts get discounted, data gets warped, and key events are sometimes omitted. What is important is keeping the model of that oppressive structure intact. If facts or data collide with that model, it’s the facts or data that get discarded or discounted. The theoretical underpinnings of Chomsky and Edward Herman’s writings on Cambodia were to show that American and western media was distorting a communist revolution. Therefore, they repeatedly used phrases like “the alleged genocide in Cambodia”, or they wrote that “executions have numbered at most in the thousands”. (See this article) This last comment was written in 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime had fallen and some reporters had visited the country to actually see the horrible devastation with their own eyes. At times Chomsky and Herman used Khmer Rouge sources and endorsed books that extensively sourced footnotes to Pol Pot’s government releases. This approach is a serious problem for people who actually care about things like accuracy, fairness, and completeness.

    In the wake of Oliver Stone’s JFK, what was so odd about the Chomsky/Cockburn allegiance to a point of view which privileges the critique of institutions as systems is that it disappeared upon their inquiry into Kennedy’s murder. That is, in both men’s comments on the Warren Commission and its presentation of evidence, you will nowhere find any discussion of the lives and careers of the persons who controlled that investigative body. Men like Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Gerald Ford, and J. Edgar Hoover. Yet, those four men dominated the Commission proceedings. (See Walt Brown’s book, The Warren Omission, especially pp. 84-87).

    This is odd—in two respects. First, it was these men, not Kennedy, who had played large parts in being ‘Present at the Creation’—that is, in forming and then supporting the Eastern Establishment, which was responsible for setting up and maintaining the structure of American government in the 20th century. Any critic of the way institutions of power function would surely be concerned with this detail, because in presenting that particular case, one does not have to juggle, manipulate, and distort the evidence. There are books on these men in which tons of evidence exist to make that demonstration. These four were clearly responsible for some of the worst American crimes of the 20th century. (See James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, second edition, pp. 234-40, 321-40.)

    Secondly, to somehow suppose that those four would not manipulate the evidence in a murder case is simply to ignore the reality of who they were. Yet this is the concept that both Chomsky and Cockburn supported. For instance, as mentioned earlier, Cockburn actually interviewed a junior counsel for the Warren Commission in the pages of The Nation. He never asked him one challenging question. Which is incredible considering the record of that Commission.

    Regarding Chomsky, consider an incident from 1994. Two subscribers to Probe Magazine, Steve Jones and Bob Dean, went to a meeting of the Democratic Socialist Club of Reading, Pennsylvania. Chomsky was the guest speaker. Both Jones and Dean were surprised when Chomsky seemed to veer off topic to go into a tirade against President Kennedy. When Jones and Dean tried to approach and talk to Chomsky about Kennedy afterwards, he became “very defensive and dismissive of us, brushing us off by saying that he’d seen all of the evidence.” Apparently, this meant the declassified record, and therefore there was nothing to address. (e-mail communication with Jones, 6/19/2017)

    Again, this tells us much about Chomsky’s respect—or lack of—for scholarly practice. Because, at that time, the Assassination Records Review Board had just begun declassifying two million pages of records that had previously been kept secret from the public on the JFK case. Hence no one had seen them prior to this time. Including Chomsky. So what was he talking about? The evidence the ARRB declassified concerning the actual circumstances of Kennedy’s murder make the case against Oswald pretty much insupportable. And in just about every way: concerning Oswald, Kennedy’s autopsy, the ballistics evidence, and Oswald’s alibi. (For the last, see Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs.)

    Further, neither Cockburn nor Chomsky seemed to be aware of the transcript of the final executive session of the Warren Commission. Sen. Richard Russell, Representative Hale Boggs, and Senator John Sherman Cooper—who I have previously called the Southern Wing—had planned on expressing their reservations at this meeting about the Single Bullet Theory. The idea that one bullet, CE 399, had gone through both Kennedy and Governor John Connally, smashing two bones, making seven wounds, emerging almost entirely unscathed, and losing almost no volume from its mass. Russell, especially, wanted his objections expressed in the record of this final meeting. Today, we have the record of that meeting. There is no trace of his, or anyone else’s, reservations about the Single Bullet Theory. For the simple reason that there was no stenographic record of that final meeting. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 284) In other words, the Eastern Establishment figures—Dulles, McCloy, and Ford, likely coopted Chief Justice Earl Warren and chief counsel J. Lee Rankin into tricking the other members into believing there would be such a record. In fact, a woman was there masquerading as a stenographer. But the Commission’s contract with the stenographic company had expired three days prior. (ibid, p. 295) As Gerald McKnight writes about this matter, the obvious reason for this charade was to keep the strenuous objections of the Southern Wing out of the transcribed record, and thereby maintain the illusion that the Commission had been unanimous in its verdict on the case. In other words, here was an almost textbook case of the way institutions tend to ensure the survival of belief in the status quo, one made to order for critics on the Left.

    But in an unexplained inconsistency, both Chomsky and Cockburn dropped the structural approach in their analysis of the Commission. Even though it would seem to be perfectly suited for that type of analysis. Why? Because if one did explain who these men were and what they did with the evidence, then one could conclude that they covered up the true circumstances of Kennedy’s death, for the simple reason he was not a member of their club. Which is a direction they do not want to go in.

    Yet, David Talbot demonstrates this at length in his analysis of the conflicts between President Kennedy and Allen Dulles during 1961. These were centered on Kennedy’s Congo policy, Dulles’ backing of the revolt of the Algerian generals against French President Charles DeGaulle, and ultimately how Dulles lied to Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs operation. (Talbot, pp. 382-417) In other words, in just one year, the CIA Director had come into conflict with Kennedy over three important areas and events. Finally, Kennedy felt he had to terminate Dulles, along with both his Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Richard Bissell. The first and only time in 70 years that has been done at the CIA. As Talbot also points out, after Kennedy was killed, Dulles lobbied for a position on the Warren Commission (ibid, pp. 573-74)—something that no one else did. As previously referred to, Walt Brown has shown that Dulles then became the single most active member of the Warren Commission. During a meeting with Commission critic David Lifton at UCLA in 1965, Dulles showed utter disdain for any of the evidence that the Commission had ignored or misrepresented to the public, e.g., the Zapruder film frames. (Talbot, p. 591)

    Let us use just one other example. Robert Kennedy was the first Attorney General who actually exercised some degree of control over FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The enmity between the two has been well chronicled by more than one author. After JFK was killed, Hoover had Bobby Kennedy’s private line to his office removed. (Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 315) The Warren Report itself says that Hoover and the FBI were responsible for the vast majority of the investigation. (See, p. xii) Therefore, why would such men—Dulles and Hoover—who clearly had no love for JFK, bend over backwards to find out the truth about his death? The fact is they did not. For example, the day after the murder, Hoover was so concerned about who killed President Kennedy that he was at the racetrack. (Summers, op. cit.) To leave out things like this, and much more, is not writing history. And it is not honest scholarship. It is depriving the reader of important information.

    V

    Chomsky operates his views of both Kennedy and his murder via inductive, closed-system reasoning. It is both banal and simplistic: since the USA operates in a sick political and economic system, no one can rise above it. Therefore, Kennedy was really no different than Nixon, Johnson, and Eisenhower. The underlying problem—as writers like Donald Gibson and Richard Mahoney have demonstrated—is that when one actually studies the record, Kennedy was not part of the Power Elite, and did not aspire to be part of it. This is why, as Donald Gibson has shown, Kennedy and David Rockefeller—the acknowledged leader of the Eastern Establishment at the time—had no time or sympathy for each other. (See Gibson’s Battling Wall Street throughout, but especially pp. 73-76) The reason Kennedy made his historic 1957 Senate speech on the impending doom of French colonialism in Algeria was because he had been in Vietnam when the French empire there was collapsing. He understood that the Vietnam conflict had not really been about communism, but about nationalism. And he said this many times, and took considerable heat for it. (See Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal In Africa, pp. 14-23)

    When Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, Chomsky made numerous statements questioning Stone’s thesis about Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. He eventually wrote an essay in Z Magazine on the topic. In essence, he denied all the withdrawal evidence as outlined by Fletcher Prouty and John Newman, who advised Stone on that subject. The problem for Chomsky today is that other scholars decided that Prouty and Newman were on to something. After all, Prouty actually worked on Kennedy’s withdrawal plan in September of 1963. John Newman was writing a revolutionary book on the subject entitled JFK and Vietnam, which was published in January of 1992.

    Seriously considering that evidence, these scholars then went to work. And today, a small shelf of books exists on the subject. These authors agree with the Stone/Prouty/Newman withdrawal thesis, e.g., David Kaiser’s American Tragedy, James Blight’s Virtual JFK, Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster. One reason these new books are there is that the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) declassified many pages of documents that support the withdrawal thesis. This declassification process occurred in 1997. Any serious scholar has to consider new evidence when it is declassified. Chomsky did not. In 2000, in a book called Hopes and Prospects, in relation to this issue, he wrote: “On these matters see my Rethinking Camelot … . Much more material has appeared since, but while adding some interesting nuances, it leaves the basic picture intact.” (pp. 123, 295)

    In other words, the scores of pages of new ARRB documents released on the subject, the recorded tapes in the White House, and the new essays and books published, these amount to “nuances.” The “nuances” include President Johnson confessing in February of 1964 that he himself knows he is breaking with Kennedy’s policy. They include the transcripts of the May 1963 Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii where McNamara is actually executing that withdrawal plan—with no reference to a contingency upon victory. (These and other documents are included in this presentation)

    In 1997, that last piece of evidence convinced some MSM outlets, like The New York Times, that Kennedy was planning on withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his assassination. We can go on and on. But the point is made. To any objective person, these are not “nuances”. They are integral.

    To show Chomsky’s bizarreness on this point, let us use two other instances of just how intent he is to disguise the facts and evidence of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. One of his older excuses was to say that Kennedy’s advisors fabricated the withdrawal plan after the Tet offensive. (Z Magazine, September, 1992) Even for Chomsky, this is ridiculous. What is he saying? That Kennedy’s advisors falsified the then classified record while it was in the National Archives? That they also managed to get a voice impressionist to impersonate Johnson, McGeorge Bundy and McNamara discussing this withdrawal plan?

    Chomsky’s latest position is a sort of rear action retreat. He now admits that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara offered up a withdrawal plan. In other words, it was McNamara’s plan, not Kennedy’s. Not so, and let us illustrate why.

    In November of 1961, a two-week long debate took place in the White House. The subject was whether or not to commit combat troops into Vietnam. Advisors Max Taylor and Walt Rostow had returned from Vietnam and made that recommendation. From all the accounts we have, Kennedy was virtually the only person arguing against that proposal. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, pp. 275-83) At its conclusion he signed off on NSAM 111 which sent 15,000 more advisors instead.

    Kennedy was disturbed that he had to carry the argument virtually alone. So he decided to ask someone who he knew agreed with him to write his own report on the subject. This was Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith did visit Saigon, and he did write a report recommending no combat troops in theater and a gradual American distancing. (Cable of November 20, 1961, which was followed by a longer report; Blight, p. 72, see also David Kaiser, American Tragedy, pp. 131-32) Kennedy later had this report forwarded to Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara in April of 1962. This was the beginning of the withdrawal plan. We know this because on his trip to Vietnam in May, McNamara told General Paul Harkins to begin a training program for the army of South Vietnam so America could begin reducing its forces there. Harkins was the supreme military commander in Saigon. (Kaiser, pp. 132-34) Also, McNamara’s deputy Roswell Gilpatric revealed in an oral history that his boss had told him that he had instructions from Kennedy to begin to wind down the war. (Blight, p. 371) This culminated with the aforementioned declassified Sec/Def conference in Hawaii in May of 1963. At this meeting, McNamara requested from all departments—State, Pentagon, CIA—specific schedules beginning a withdrawal in December of 1963 and ending in the early fall of 1965. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126)

    The idea that this plan was McNamara’s is another fanciful Chomsky invention. In addition to the evidence stated above—cables, oral history—there is another undeniable fact. In the November, 1961 debates described above, McNamara was asking for the insertion of combat troops into Vietnam. In fact, his proposal was the largest request of all. He told Kennedy to commit upward of six divisions, or about 205,000 men. And he framed the request in pure Cold War terms. If this was not done, it would lead to communist control over all of Indochina and also Indonesia. (Blight, pp. 276-77) The idea that afterwards McNamara had a personal epiphany and reversed himself on his own is simply not credible. Especially when combined with the above evidence. Plus the fact that it was Kennedy alone who was holding out against combat troops in November. And as with Kennedy, there is no mention by McNamara on any tape or any of the Sec/Def documents, or in NSAM 263, that the withdrawal plan would only be completed as the circumstances on the battlefield improve. Chomsky’s arguments against Kennedy’s withdrawal plan exist in a vacuum created by him and his acolytes.

    VI

    In Barbour’s film, Chomsky is shown at a seminar saying words to the effect that no one should care if Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy. The problem with this statement is that, at the time of Kennedy’s death, it’s the people who Chomsky tries to stand up for—residents of the Third World—that felt a sharp pang of loss at JFK’s passing. And very few of them felt that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. The president of Egypt, Gamel Abdul Nasser, fell into a deep depression and had the films of Kennedy’s funeral shown four times on national television. (Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, p. 228) Ben Bella, the premier of Algeria, phoned the American ambassador in Algiers and said, “I can’t believe it. Believe me, I’d rather it happen to me than him.” He then called in a comment to the state radio station saying that Kennedy had been a victim of “racialist and police-organized machinations”. (ibid, p. 227) When asked about Kennedy’s assassination in 1964, Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia began perspiring. He then said that he loved the man because Kennedy understood him. He ended the reverie by saying, “Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?” (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 374) Nehru of India called Kennedy’s murder a crime against humanity. He then said that Kennedy was “a man of ideals, vision, and courage, who sought to serve his own people as well as the larger causes of the world.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 231) Two weeks after Kennedy’s death, economist Barbara Ward visited the office of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The president had a photo of John and Jackie Kennedy on his desk. With tears in his eyes he said, “I have written her, and I have prayed for them both. Nothing shocked me so deeply as this.” Months later, when the American ambassador presented him with a copy of the Warren Report, Nkrumah turned to the title page. He pointed to the name of Allen Dulles, and returned it to the ambassador with the one word comment, “Whitewash”. (Muehlenbeck, p. 229; Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 235)

    But it wasn’t just the leaders of the Third World who were shaken and saddened by Kennedy’s passing. It was also its citizenry. As an editorial in West Africa magazine stated, “Not even the death of Dag Hammarskjold dismayed Africans as much as did the death of John Kennedy.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 229) In Nairobi, Kenya, six thousand people packed into a cathedral for a memorial service. A Kenyan politician said that never in his career had he seen this kind of grief registered over the death of a foreigner. (Muehlenbeck, p. 226) In the Ivory Coast, the American ambassador woke early the day after the assassination. There was someone waiting for him at his office. The man said he ran a small business about 25 miles away. He said he didn’t really know why he was there. But he tried to explain anyway: “I came here this morning simply to say that I never knew President Kennedy, I never saw President Kennedy, but he was my friend.” (Ibid, p. 228) According to author Thurston Clarke, upon learning of his passing, the peasants of the Yucatan Peninsula immediately started planting a Kennedy Memorial Garden.

    Were all these people wrong?

    But there is one person we can add to this list. His name is Noam Chomsky.

    In the time period following Kennedy’s murder, writer/researcher Ray Marcus tried to enlist several prominent academics to take up the cause of exposing the plot that killed President Kennedy. In 1966 he wrote I. F. Stone on the subject. In 1967, he approached Arthur Schlesinger about it. They both declined to take up the cause. In 1969, he was in the Boston area on an extended business function. He therefore arranged a discussion with Chomsky. Chomsky had initially agreed to a one-hour meeting in his office. Ray brought only 3-4 pieces of evidence, including his work on CE 399, the Magic Bullet, and a series of stills from the Zapruder film. Which had not been shown nationally yet.

    Soon after the discussion began, Chomsky told “his secretary to cancel the remaining appointments for the day. The scheduled one-hour meeting stretched to 3-4 hours. Chomsky showed great interest in the material. We mutually agreed to a follow-up session later in the week. Then I met with Gar Alperovitz. At the end of our one-hour meeting, he said he would take an active part in the effort if Chomsky would lead it.” (Probe, Vol. 4 No. 2, p. 25) Ray did have a second meeting with Chomsky which lasted much of the afternoon. And “the discussion ranged beyond evidentiary items to other aspects of the case. I told Chomsky of Alperovitz’ offer to assist him if he decided to lead an effort to reopen. Chomsky indicated he was very interested, but would not decide before giving the matter much careful consideration.” (ibid) A professional colleague of Chomsky’s, Professor Selwyn Bromberger, was also at the second meeting. He drove Ray home. As he dropped him off he said, “If they are strong enough to kill the president, and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly … if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open totalitarian rule.” (ibid)

    It is important to reflect on Bromberger’s words as Ray related what happened next. He returned to California and again asked Chomsky to take up the cause. In April of 1969, Chomsky wrote back saying he now had to delay his decision until after a trip to England in June. He said he would get in touch with Ray then. Needless to say, he never did. He ended up being a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and this ended up making his name in both leftist and intellectual circles. Reflecting on Bromberger’s words to Marcus, one could conclude that Bromberger and Chomsky decided that the protest against Vietnam, which was becoming both vocal and widespread, and almost mainstream at the time, afforded a path of less resistance than the JFK case did. After all, look at what had happened to Jim Garrison.

    But if this is correct, it would qualify as a politically motivated decision. One not made on the evidence. As Marcus writes, it was with Chomsky, “not the question of whether or not there was a conspiracy—that he had given every indication of having already decided in the affirmative … ” Marcus’ revelations on this subject are informative and relevant in evaluating Chomsky, both then and now. For purposes of our argument, it is important to know what Chomsky actually thought of the evidence when he was first exposed to it. This would seem to be a much more candid and open response than what he wrote decades later, when his writings on the subject were just as categorical, except the other way. In other words, Chomsky did a 180-degree flip on the issue of whether President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. And that first conviction lasted at least until 1976. Because in that year, he signed a petition to form the House Select Committee on Assassinations. That is very likely the reason that, in 1971, as co-editor of the Senator Mike Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, he allowed Peter Scott to write an essay addressing the question of Johnson’s alteration of Kennedy’s de-escalation plan in Vietnam.

    Try and find an interview or essay in which Chomsky admits how close he was to being the chief advocate for a public campaign to find out who really killed Kennedy. Yet, it is a fact. Maybe Chomsky changed his mind. But if that was the case, he has no right to be so smug and snide about others who came to the same conclusion he once did. Or perhaps, as Bromberger let out, he and Alperovitz and Chomsky decided that Vietnam offered an easier path to prominence. Which, undoubtedly, it did. If that was the case, then it was a practical choice, not an intellectual or moral one. And evidently, Chomsky and his friends did not realize that they could have combined the two.

    As we have seen, Chomsky’s recurrent posing as a scholar who has assimilated the entire declassified record on the JFK case, and on the Kennedy/Johnson Vietnam policies, is simply an empty pose. And this is part of a persona that, as we have seen in the case of Faurisson and Cambodia, substitutes an extreme and ingrained bias for what is supposed to be scholarly analysis. If there is any hope of reconstituting this nation around a viable set of values and principles, then the issue of the hijacking of America in the sixties through assassinations will have to be honestly confronted. As we have seen, Noam Chomsky refuses to do that—in fact he deliberately avoids it. He then adopts certain disguises and deceptions to conceal the way he once felt about the subject. Which is, in large part, why he is part of the problem, not the solution.

  • Requiem for Rose Lynn Mangan

    Requiem for Rose Lynn Mangan

    manganWe have been informed by Paul Schrade that Rose Lynn Mangan passed away in late February of this year. Many people probably do not know who she was, for the simple reason that she was a person who worked mostly behind the scenes. Off and on, she had been the chief researcher for Sirhan Sirhan’s defense team for many years. No one had spent as much time looking at the evidence in the RFK case than she did. Mangan lived in Carson City, Nevada, so it was not that far for her to drive to the Sacramento State Archives where much of the surviving evidence in the Robert Kennedy assassination was maintained.

    If one studies the RFK assassination, which unfortunately not very many people do, one can see how Mangan fit into the historical backdrop on that case. At the start, very few people had any inclination or intuition that the Robert Kennedy case was anything but what it appeared. A young man, apparently in a fit of rage, jumps forward out of a crowd in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. He then fires at the person who, most people thought, was going to be the next president. Everyone’s eye is drawn to this young man as Bobby Kennedy sinks to the floor. Sirhan is immediately apprehended and taken to the police station. No one who was alive then can forget the next day’s death announcement by Frank Mankiewicz.

    But as is usually the case in these shattering instances, something was going on that was largely undetected, even though it was happening in plain sight. First of all, a witness named Sandy Serrano was on television late that night and told newsman Sander Vanocur that she saw a girl in a polka dot dress running down the rear stairs of the Ambassador Hotel with a young man. She said, “We shot him! We shot him!” When Sandy asked, “Who did you shoot?” The girl replied, “Senator Kennedy!” She and her companion then disappeared into the night. That same evening on Ray Briem’s LA radio talk show, a professional psychologist named William Bryan called in to the program. He said that, from his experience, the suspect sounded to him like he was acting under the direction of post-hypnotic suggestion, i.e., like a Manchurian Candidate. (The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, by William Turner and Jonn Christian, p. 226) A young high school student named Scott Enyart took photos of the shooting at the Ambassador. He was stopped by the police at gunpoint as he left the hotel. His photos of the crime scene were taken from him—and he never got them back. As many have commented, Enyart’s pictures may have been the Zapruder film of the RFK assassination. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 619-21)

    Then there was William Harper. Harper was a well-respected criminalist who worked for, among other departments, the Pasadena police. He had a serious problem with the RFK case from the start. The reason being that he had a professional dispute with the LAPD’s chief criminalist DeWayne Wolfer. Being familiar with the shoddiness of Wolfer’s work, he had warned Sirhan’s defense lawyer Grant Cooper not to accept any of Wolfer’s findings at face value. (ibid, p. 556) Cooper did not pay heed to this well-founded warning. He actually did the opposite. He agreed to stipulate to Wolfer’s forensic findings concerning the ballistics evidence. To say the least, this had disastrous results for Cooper’s client Sirhan Sirhan. For now the trial of Sirhan became not about the guilt or innocence of the defendant; it was about Sirhan’s mental state at the time of the shooting. Because of Cooper’s blunder, Sirhan was condemned to death. But due to a later California Supreme Court decision, this was altered to life in prison.

    Two things happened after Sirhan’s trial that changed some people’s perceptions about the RFK case. Art Kunkin, the publisher of the LA Free Press, ran a story by one of the very few people who had studied the actual ballistics evidence in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. Lillian Castellano had analyzed the bullet evidence in the case, and she came to the conclusion that Sirhan could not have been responsible for all the projectiles that had been fired that night. Especially in light of the fact that hotel maître-d’, Karl Uecker, said that he went for Sirhan’s gun after he fired the first shot and had it controlled, at the most, after the second shot. Besides Kennedy, there were five other people shot, one of them twice. RFK was shot four times. The maximum number of bullets Sirhan’s gun could hold was eight. Castellano’s article began to cast doubt on LAPD’s honesty in building its case against Sirhan. Inversely, it indicated just how inept his defense had been.

    Harper had read the witness testimony from the pantry, and also the lengthy autopsy report by Dr. Thomas Noguchi. He went even further than Castellano. He concluded that there had to have been two assassins firing from two different directions. Allowed to test the bullet exhibits, he then concluded that they had been fired from two different weapons. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 556)

    When Rose Lynn Mangan became the official investigator for the Sirhan case, she and Harper became friends. He even gave her his files on the case. When his affidavit about the two firing positions went public in 1971, he became a magnet for informants inside the LAPD. One of the things he told her in no uncertain terms is: “They switched the bullets; they switched the guns.” One of the things Mangan always said about Harper was that his information always checked out. (ibid, p. 565)

    Mangan served as Sirhan’s researcher from 1969-74. Then, at Sirhan’s request, she returned in 1992. In 1996 she made a memorable appearance at the civil trial of Scott Enyart vs. LAPD. As mentioned previously, Enyart was a high school photographer who was in the pantry at the Ambassador Hotel when RFK was shot. He kept on snapping photos during the firing sequence. But as he left the scene he was accosted by the police and told to turn over all of his film. Once he did, the police said they would develop the film because they needed it for the upcoming criminal trial. That statement turned out to be false, since they did not use the evidence at Sirhan’s trial. (Ibid, pp. 619-20) But when the trial was over, Enyart asked for his pictures back. He got back less than twenty per cent of them—and no negatives. He was then told that the rest would now remain secret and be archived for twenty years.

    Enyart waited for almost 20 years. In 1988 the LAPD told him that his photos were now in the state archives in Sacramento. But when Scott wrote to Sacramento, the archivist told him they were not there. He concluded that they were gone, part of the many photos incinerated by LAPD in 1968. But since the police had always maintained that the destroyed pictures were duplicates, Scott maintained that his photos must still exist. And he wanted the originals returned to him. Since he was up on a steam table during the shooting, his photos would have significant monetary value.

    Quite naturally, Enyart felt he was being given the runaround. He sued. The city appealed on a technicality. They won the appeal. But Scott won a reversal of that decision. The case was scheduled for trial in 1996. Then something utterly bizarre happened. Miraculously, the LAPD announced that Scott’s pictures had been recovered. Scott disagreed with this pronouncement, since these allegedly recovered photos were on different film stock, and none depicted what went on inside the pantry. (ibid, p. 620) Nevertheless, these photos were sent to Los Angeles from Sacramento via courier for use at the civil trial. They were then stolen out of the back seat of the automobile while it stopped at a gas station. As Scott’s lawyer said, “Somebody, for some reason, is making sure those photos do not reach public view.” (LA Times, 1/18/96)

    At the trial, Mangan exposed another layer of perfidy in the RFK evidentiary record. The police needed to explain why and how the photos suddenly appeared out of the blue, after seemingly being lost for decades. The police tried to explain this all as a mistake in record keeping. The photos had been misfiled under another person’s name on the wrong list. By diligently crosschecking the lists, they were rediscovered. If not for the theft from the courier, all would have been explained satisfactorily.

    Scott needed someone with expansive and intimate knowledge of the files at the state archives. No one was better qualified than Mangan. Clearly, the plaintiffs were unaware of who she was and were unprepared for her testimony. Mangan completely negated this LAPD cover story. Since she was familiar with all the evidence filings across all the categories, she knew that LAPD was playing a shell game. They had played around with their own property list to create a file that was not really in the Sacramento archives, under a name that was not at all related to Scott Enyart’s. (Probe Magazine, January-February 1997, p. 8) No one else could have supplied that crucial information, which helped Enyart win a jury verdict. Her testimony also indicated that the heist of the photos from the car was most likely an elaborate ruse. This is how deeply embedded the RFK cover up is inside the LAPD.

    Shortly after her appearance at the Enyart trial, Lisa Pease visited Mangan at her home in Carson City. This was in preparation for a long two-part article in Probe Magazine. In that essay, it was through Mangan that the significance of Special Exhibit 10, and the dubious markings on the bullets, were explained, the latter for the first time. Mangan had documentation on Special Exhibit 10, the secret microphotograph that was supposed to be the ace in the hole if there was ever a reopening of the Robert Kennedy assassination. In the mid Seventies, there was a legal hearing under Judge Robert Wenke. A firearms panel was appointed to examine some of the ballistics evidence in the case. They examined Special Exhibit Ten. They discovered something that Thomas Noguchi already knew: this exhibit was a fraud. It purported to be a comparison photo of the Kennedy neck bullet with a test bullet fired by Wolfer. But the Wenke Panel deduced that such was not the case. It was actually a comparison between an RFK bullet and another victim bullet, Ira Goldstein’s. As Lisa Pease wrote, “So someone was pulling yet another fraud in this case by concocting evidence in the hopes of convincing a panel of experts that a test bullet from Sirhan’s gun matched a bullet from Kennedy himself.” (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 564)

    But on her visit to Mangan, Pease was shown still another level of deception in the RFK case. Recall what Harper told Mangan: They switched the guns. They switched the bullets. And recall what Mangan said about Harper’s reliability: his information always checked out.

    Patrick Garland was the evidence master for the Wenke Panel proceedings. In that examination, the Kennedy neck bullet, #47, bore the markings ‘DWTN’ on its base. The Goldstein/victim bullet, #52, bore only a ‘6’. But these were not the original markings. Number 47 should have had a ‘TN31’ on its base. Number 52 should have had only an ‘X’. In other words, this evidence clearly indicates that someone switched the bullets, and then made the phony photograph. Besides the inherent fraud in the false comparison, this also clearly implies that Wolfer could not get a match from the gun in evidence.

    mangan lancerAt the time of her passing, Mangan had a book contract with JFK Lancer about her life as Sirhan’s Researcher, to be published in June, 2018. It was to be based upon the extensive files she had accumulated over the decades she had worked on the RFK case and visited the Sacramento Archives. Lancer is going forward with its publication in a revised format.  Debra Conway will also be visiting Carson City to collect the Mangan files; her archives will be preserved, scanned and will be made available online along with the publication. While we await her complete files to be deposited online, anyone interested in the Bobby Kennedy case should visit her web site, which is still being maintained.

    We all owe Rose Lynn Mangan a salute upon her passing. She worked the primary evidence in the RFK case like no one else did.

    ~Jim DiEugenio

    Mangan was a guest with Len Osanic on Black Op Radio a number of times; her last appearance was on:

    Show #769 Original airdate: February 11, 2016 – Listen here

    Also, listen to a tribute by Bill Pepper, Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease:

    • Show #839
    • Original airdate: June 15, 2017
    • Guests: Jim DiEugenio / William Pepper / Lisa Pease / Lynn Mangan
    • Topics: Sirhan’s Researcher, Lynn Mangan (click the logo below and scroll down):

    mangan blackop

  • The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein

    The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein

    Part 1: “Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein”

    Part 3: “Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?” (Probe vol 7 no 1, 1999)

    epstein leader 2On his web site, Edward Epstein preserved his article published in The Atlantic in 1993 on Jim Garrison. To my knowledge, that is the only place one can find it since (thankfully) it does not appear to be available at The Atlantic web site. A few months earlier, in late 1992, he had just published a hit piece on Garrison in the ever-accommodating New Yorker. This was written on the occasion of Garrison’s death. Epstein now used the excuse that Oliver Stone was coming out with a double VHS box set of his film JFK to justify a second hatchet job. This allowed him to widen his focus a bit. Now he could include both Stone and his consultant Fletcher Prouty in his machine-gun strike.

    And make no mistake. That is what these two pieces are, out and out drive-bys. One definition of a hatchet job is that the author ignores the record, distorts the record, or even worse, deliberately misrepresents it. All done in order to disguise what is an act, not of reportage, but of propaganda. As we shall see, there is no evidence that Epstein ever once consulted the original records of Jim Garrison’s investigation for either of these two articles.. These were available to him from three sources at that time. First, there was a collection of them at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) in Washington DC. Second, co-screenwriter of the film JFK Zachary Sklar had many of them. Third, Jim Garrison had what was probably the largest collection of them at his home. I never heard of any attempt by Epstein to consult these records for either of his two articles.

    Because of that, this allows him to say, in the second paragraph of his 1993 Atlantic piece, that the idea that Clay Shaw had participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy was based on nothing but the testimony of Perry Russo. So right out of the gate, Epstein commits a faux pas. For Garrison did not make Shaw a person of interest because of Russo. The way that Garrison came to be interested in Shaw was through the testimony of lawyer Dean Andrews in the Warren Commission volumes. There, Andrews said that he had been called by a person named Clay Bertrand within 24 hours of the assassination. Bertrand wanted him to go to Dallas and volunteer to defend Lee Harvey Oswald. That call was corroborated by at least four sources, including Andrews’ secretary and his investigator. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 51) When Garrison talked to Andrews, he refused to reveal who Bertrand was. Just as he had previously refused to reveal the man’s true name to Mark Lane, and he would later refuse to do so with Anthony Summers. He claimed he would be in physical danger if he did reveal the name. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 181)

    Consequently, Garrison sent out his investigators to find out who Bertrand was. It turned out to be Shaw. Again, there are plentiful references to this in Garrison’s files, which Epstein did not survey. (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88) But beyond that, even the FBI knew that Shaw was Bertrand. And they knew this as far back as 1963, because his name had come up in their original investigation. (Davy, p. 192) Since he is either unaware of, or wants to ignore, this information, Epstein can 1.) Deny this evidence and 2.) Attribute the whole Shaw/Bertrand case to Russo.

    II

    Before we begin to address Epstein’s over-the-top attack on Russo, let us lay down some facts, which Epstein does not do. Without these facts, there is no baseline to form any kind of informed discussion. And informed discussion is what Epstein wishes to avoid.

    Garrison’s assistant Andrew Sciambra first interviewed Russo in Baton Rouge on February 25, 1967. Russo stated that he had attended a gathering at David Ferrie’s apartment in September of 1963. During this gathering, the talk turned to an assassination plot to kill President Kennedy. Some anti-Castro Cubans were on hand as well as Ferrie, a man Russo called Clem Bertrand, and a man he called Leon Oswald. Sciambra gave Russo photos to identify, and he picked out photos of Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald. Sciambra took notes on a legal pad and marked the photos the witness had identified. He concluded by telling Russo he should come down to New Orleans for further discussion.

    In the office on Monday, Sciambra began transcribing his notes. He was in the process of doing this when Russo arrived. Garrison wanted to test his testimony, so he was taken to Mercy Hospital and given Sodium Pentothal (truth serum) and later placed under hypnosis by Dr. Nicolas Chetta. Russo told the same story to Chetta as he did to Sciambra in Baton Rouge. (Davy, p. 121) Chetta told Garrison assistant Alvin Oser that there was no chance one could lie under truth serum; what Russo said had to have happened. (Joe Biles, In History’s Shadow, p. 38) Russo’s story was partly corroborated by his friend Niles Peterson, who had left the gathering early but recalled the presence there of a Leon Oswald. On February 28, Sciambra drove Russo by Shaw’s apartment, where Russo identified Shaw from a parked car. Finally, posing as an insurance salesman, he greeted Shaw at his door. This finalized the identification.

    Sciambra then drafted his first completed memo based on the Chetta sessions. In fact, it is dated February 28, the day after the truth serum was administered. Later on he finished a second memo. This related the things outside the scope of that gathering at Ferrie’s, and was the actual second memo Sciambra composed. (See Biles, p. 44) When Lou Ivon typed up a search warrant for Shaw’s apartment, he referred to what Sciambra told him about the conversation he had with Russo in Baton Rouge, which was reaffirmed by the truth serum session. This information is right in the warrant, before Sciambra even typed up his second memo. Ivon could only have gotten the information from Sciambra. And Sciambra could only have gotten it from Russo. (ibid)

    What Epstein does to confuse matters is to borrow the same scheme that the late James Phelan used back in 1967. After reporter Phelan met with the DA in Las Vegas, Garrison unwisely let him copy the memos. The DA was obviously unaware that Phelan had been a conduit for the Saturday Evening Post to write government-sanctioned stories. And, in fact, Phelan had three meetings with the FBI about Jim Garrison, urging them to intercede with the DA. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 245) Phelan took his copies of the memos and said that, since one mentioned the gathering at Ferrie’s and one did not, this meant that the one that did not came first, and the one that did came second. Therefore all the information about an assassination discussion was induced into Russo by hypnosis. This is rendered false by both the date on the first memo and by Ivon’s search warrant.

    But let us go further with Phelan. Phelan went to visit Russo in Baton Rouge and he took photographer Matt Herron with him. He later said that on this occasion, Russo told Herron and himself that he never mentioned the assassination discussion in Baton Rouge, only in New Orleans. Phelan later told author James Kirkwood that Herron would back him up on this point. When this writer contacted Mr. Herron, this was exposed as a lie. Herron told me that Russo strongly stated that he first mentioned the gathering in Baton Rouge. (ibid, p. 246) Even further, Phelan said he had taped this conversation with Russo. Under cross-examination at the Shaw trial, Phelan admitted this was false also. (Biles, p. 46)

    But there was still another fallback position that Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers then took. They said that once you looked at the two sessions done by Chetta with Russo, the reader could see that Russo was prompted by Chetta to recall Bertrand. It turned out that this was another deliberate misrepresentation. Only when the second session is placed first and the first session placed second is that the case. But in Garrison’s files they are properly labeled as A and B. When they are read in this order, it is plainly seen that Russo recalls Bertrand’s name without any prompting. (DiEugenio, p. 247)

    Now, at the time Epstein wrote this article, in 1993, he could have discovered all this information on his own. He could have spoken to Matt Herron, Andrew Sciambra, and Lou Ivon. If he wanted written evidence, he could have asked Garrison for the memos and the search warrant. Apparently, he did not think that was important. And he also either believed Phelan, or thought that Phelan’s scheme could not be exposed. Well, it was exposed. This proves that 1.) Epstein did not do on the ground research for his article, and 2.) That he had an agenda from the moment he started writing it.

    But further revealing his shabby research methods, Epstein does not even seem to understand that Russo was not supposed to be Garrison’s lead witness. The lead witness was supposed to be a man named Clyde Johnson. Johnson was a preacher turned reactionary politician who told Garrison he had met with Shaw, Leon Oswald, Jack Ruby and a Cuban in a Baton Rouge hotel in 1963. Shaw gave him money for his campaign, two thousand dollars, the equivalent of about $17,000 today. When he went to the bathroom, he heard them talking about “getting someone”, and he became apprehensive. But it turned out they were talking about Kennedy, and using Johnson’s attacks on him to lure him to the south. Johnson had a witness who partly collaborated his story about Shaw’s support. He also had a contemporaneous address book, in which he had made notes about Shaw and Ruby. Johnson did not testify at Shaw’s trial even though Garrison had hid him outside of town. His office was so infiltrated and wired for sound that Johnson’s location was discovered. During the trial he was beaten to a bloody pulp. He was hospitalized and could not testify. (Davy, pp. 72-73) Again, Epstein could have found out about Johnson if he had asked Garrison for documents. He apparently did not think it was important.

    III

    Building on his foundation of sand, Epstein now decides to jump to a scene from the film JFK. This is a scene that focuses on the man who was Garrison’s chief suspect. The film shows us David Ferrie in a panic after Garrison’s investigation had been prematurely exposed in the local press. He calls Lou Ivon at Garrison’s office and says that this is a fatal development for him. Investigator Ivon, Garrison and a third assistant then go to visit him at a hotel room that Ivon has secured for Ferrie. Now, to be fair, let us grant the screenwriters a degree of dramatic license. In reality only Ivon was there (Davy, p. 66), since he was the one person in Garrison’s office that Ferrie trusted. But in terms of the film narrative, one had to have Garrison there since he is the central character. And contrary to what Epstein said at a debate in New York sponsored by The Nation magazine, Garrison did write about this incident in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. (see pp. 138-39) Epstein can scream until the cows come home, but there is very little in this scene that stretches the facts about Ferrie. Let us do something that none of Stone’s critics have done. Let us break it down.

    Ferrie first says he worked for the CIA. This fact was reported to Anthony Summers by CIA officer Victor Marchetti for his book Conspiracy. Ferrie also mentioned it to at least one of his friends. (see Summers, p. 300; also Davy, p. 28) Ferrie then says that Shaw had a high clearance, and this is also true. Shaw had a clearance for the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division codenamed QK/ENCHANT. This was the same clearance Howard Hunt had. (Davy, pp. 195-96) Ferrie then adds that both the Cuban exiles and Oswald were also associated with the CIA. There is no doubt that Sergio Arcacha Smith, Ferrie’s closest Cuban friend, was a CIA operative. He had been sanctioned as such by Howard Hunt for the local leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This was a sort of a government in exile for Cuba that the CIA set up before the Bay of Pigs invasion. (ibid, p. 9) Eladio Del Valle, another Cuban exile, paid Ferrie for flights into Cuba. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 119)

    Ferrie then says that the CIA and Mob had been working together against Castro for years. This is such a commonplace, even back then, that it should not even be noted. But Ferrie was in a good position to know about it since he had a sideline of working for an attorney who represented Carlos Marcello. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 135) And his aforementioned paymaster for flights into Cuba, Eladio del Valle, had ties to Santo Trafficante, who actually was part of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. (Summers, pp. 319, 491)

    “I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that.” ~Jim Garrison

    Concerning Oswald and the CIA, the odds are high that, as Garrison wrote, he was acting as a CIA agent provocateur, especially in light of the revelations in John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA. But even in 1993, with all that was known about Oswald being at Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street through books by Garrison, Philip Melanson, and Anthony Summers, plus Oswald’s visit to the Clinton/Jackson area with Shaw and Ferrie, most objective people would have had to grant this. What else would a “communist” be doing hanging out with so many right-wingers?

    When Ferrie mentions that he knows things about Ruby, there is also evidence for that. This comes from Clyde Johnson, as mentioned above, and also Ferrie associates William Morris and Thomas Beckham. (See Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 79, 124) As far as Ferrie saying that Ruby ran guns to Castro in the early days, there were records that Ruby did do that prior to the Cuban revolution. This was even written about by reporter Earl Golz in the Dallas Morning News. (See August 18, 1978; also John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 177) What this all exposes is not Stone’s flawed writing, but Epstein’s non-existent research.

    We now come to the exchange that drove Epstein up the wall. Garrison asks Ferrie, “Who killed the president?” It is clear that he does not mean that Ferrie was in on it. It is simply an exploratory query. Ferrie says he does not know. He says no one knows, not even the assassins. Because these kinds of things are all wrapped up in a layered cover operation. But the odd thing is this. If Epstein had looked, there was evidence in Garrison’s files that Ferrie at least planned an assassination attempt.

    Most us know from Garrison’s Playboy interview that Ferrie had a rather rare preoccupation. He measured trajectory angles and distances of shells ejecting out of rifles. (DiEugenio, p. 215) One would not need to do that for guerilla fighting or firefights during Operation Mongoose—which Ferrie was a part of. (Davy, p. 28) But you might need it for a covert operation that included assassination.

    Jim Garrison had planted a mole on Ferrie. Actually, two of them. One was named Max Gonzalez and one was Jimmy Johnson. Johnson said that he had gone through some of Ferrie’s documents and come across a folder marked “Files 1963”. In that folder he found a set of papers that looked like a diagram for an assassination plot against Fidel Castro. From the markings on the paper, the plot seemed to have to do with killing Castro from a plane. (DiEugenio, p. 215)

    But a different witness found a different diagram in Ferrie’s desk in attorney G. Wray Gill’s office. Clara Gay was a Gill client who knew Ferrie. After the assassination, she called Gill’s office: the word was that Garrison had questioned Ferrie about the Kennedy case. She heard what sounded like some panicky voices in the background. So she went over to Gill’s office. Walking over to Ferrie’s desk she saw what appeared to be a diagram of Dealey Plaza: it depicted a car from the perspective of a high angle with tall buildings around it. When Clara tried to pick it up, the secretary came over and pulled it back. But during the struggle, Clara noticed the words “Elm Street” written on the diagram. (Ibid, p. 216)

    Epstein’s idea that Ferrie would somehow be alien to crafting assassination plots is not backed up by the evidence. And clearly, Garrison made a mistake by not listening to Ivon and having Ferrie testify before a grand jury after this tense discussion with him. (Garrison, pp. 139-40)

    Once the record is referred to, we can conclude that there really is little or nothing in this scene that cannot be justified by information that the DA had about David Ferrie. Consequently, when the facts are adduced, Epstein’s howls about violations of the record are the equivalent of a stray dog barking in the night. What makes it worse is that there is really no excuse for his journalistic irresponsibility. Because when Stone and co-scenarist Zach Sklar released the volume The Book of the Film in 1992, it included the script’s research notes. On page 88, the text reads that although Garrison’s book refers to this episode in passing, the exchange is actually based on interviews with investigator Lou Ivon. This reviewer called Ivon back in 1993. When Garrison’s investigator was asked if a man named Ed Epstein ever got in contact with him about the Kennedy case, he replied that, back in 1968, yes. I asked him, what about more recently, since Stone’s movie came out? Ivon replied, no, not recently. Epstein thought it was unimportant to consult the primary source.

    IV

    Epstein couples his howls over this scene with similar complaints about one that shortly follows. After a scene showing Garrison discovering that his office has been wired for sound—which it was—Ivon gets a phone call. (For the electronic surveillance see DiEugenio, p. 232, and pp. 264-65) He is alerted that Ferrie has been found dead. Garrison and some of his assistants rush over to his apartment. As Garrison goes through the place, he discovers an empty bottle of Proloid, which is used for low metabolism. As the photographs taken at the time reveal, there are many other empty pill bottles around. When Garrison had the Proloid drug checked out, his expert said that excessive use of it in someone like Ferrie, who had hypertension at the time, could cause death without a trace. (DiEugenio, p. 225)

    What makes this even more suggestive is that two forensic pathologists reviewed the autopsy photos in advance of the film’s release. They both noted contusions on the inside of Ferrie’s mouth. Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Frank Minyard said these could be indicative of someone inserting some kind of tube with the pills in solution down Ferrie’s throat. In fact, one of the cuts is on the inside of the lower lip, where the tube may have been inserted. (DiEugenio, p. 226; Sklar and Stone, p. 102)

    There were other oddities about the scene. According to one of the local newspapers, Ferrie’s body was first found by someone who said he did not know Ferrie. He told the police he just happened to wander in, even though Ferrie lived on the second floor. (New Orleans Times Picayune 2/22/67) Ferrie also left two typed, unsigned suicide notes. (Flammonde, on pp. 34-36, features their text) Also, there was the nearly concurrent death of Eladio Del Valle, who was shot and hacked to death within the same 24-hour period. Unknowingly, Garrison had sent CIA infiltrator Bernardo De Torres to find Del Valle in Miami. The note Garrison got back about his death read as follows: “He was shot in the chest and it appears ‘gangland style’ and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES apartment.” (DiEugenio, p. 227)

    Then there was the time of death. First the coroner said that Ferrie had died late in the evening of the previous day. But then reporter George Lardner came forward and stated that he had been with Ferrie until four AM on the day his body was discovered, which was February 22, 1967. (Davy, p. 66) Because of this, the coroner now revised his estimated time of death—by over four hours. This is a real stretch. Most coroners will say that expanding the estimated time of death by four hours is unusual.

    Then there were the observations of Dr. Martin Palmer, Ferrie’s physician. He criticized the official verdict of a ruptured blood vessel, or beury aneurysm, as the cause of death. Palmer called the autopsy “slipshod”. He went on to say it was incomplete since they did not open the brain case. Further, there was no iodine test done, and Ferrie’s blood samples were not kept. (Mellen, pp. 106-07)

    So why did Coroner Chetta rule as he did, that the cause of death was a natural one, by beury aneurysm? As Minyard told this reviewer, no one could recall a case in which the deceased left a suicide note—in this case two of them—and then died of a seemingly natural cause. (DiEugenio, p. 226) Chetta apparently wanted to play it safe in the face of the tremendous publicity Ferrie’s death had caused. Which included a phone call to him from Robert Kennedy. (Mellen, p. 107))

    What Stone and Sklar do in this scene is to contrast Garrison and his staff going through Ferrie’s apartment while picking up some of the odd artifacts, like the two suicide notes, or the empty pill bottles. Stone then intercuts shots of what Garrison was thinking may have happened: some Cuban exiles forcing the drugs down Ferrie’s mouth. The first time we see this, Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is staring in a mirror; the second time, the coroner literally asks him what he is thinking. These brief cutaways—which include a depiction of the death of Del Valle—are shot in high contrast black and white, as opposed to the actual film, which is in color. In the parlance of film grammar, these are called subjective scenes, since they depict what a character in the film is thinking. Given all the evidence I have presented here, they are completely justified. Epstein ignores it all.

    V

    Then there are Epstein’s transgressions about the character of Willie O’Keefe, played by Kevin Bacon. Epstein calls O’Keefe a fictional character. This is not accurate. He is a composite character. That is, the screenwriters collapsed certain real life characters into one. This is not an uncommon practice, and most film critics accept it as a way of getting information across while saving time. Again, it is very hard to believe that Epstein is not aware of this, because this information is clearly conveyed in The Book of the Film. This includes the shooting script plus the research notes. It was published in 1992, many months before Epstein’s essay appeared. On page 66 of that book, scenarists Stone and Zach Sklar reveal that O’Keefe is made up of four people: David Logan, Perry Russo, Ray Broshears, and William Morris. Logan was interviewed by assistant DA Jim Alcock. Logan is the source for the dinner at Shaw’s luxurious apartment where a homosexual party follows, which includes Ferrie. Logan’s testimony about Shaw’s sex habits was quite explicit and, if anything, is understated in the film. (Mellen, p. 123) William Morris was in prison when Garrison’s assistant DA found him and talked to him. This is why the first time we see O’Keefe he is in jail. Like Logan, he also knew Shaw as Bertrand. Shaw used him for sexual purposes and he was procured for Shaw by a man who appears to have been Shaw’s pimp, Eugene Davis. (ibid, p. 124) Broshears figures in Garrison’s book and also in the work of author Dick Russell. Except he was closer to Ferrie personally and had only been introduced to Shaw. Broshears said that Ferrie had confided in him what he knew about the JFK assassination. Namely, that he had been marginally involved, was supposed to be an escape pilot and that is what he was doing in Houston on the day of the assassination. (Garrison, pp. 120-21) Somehow we are supposed to believe that Epstein was not aware of any of this.

    Epstein ends his hysterical screed with a multiple-page rant against the Mr. X character in the film. This is the former military man who meets with Garrison in Washington. Mr. X, who was originally to be performed by Marlon Brando, is played by Donald Sutherland. This mysterious character is based upon Fletcher Prouty, who was one of the technical advisors on the film. Both Stone and Sklar understood that Prouty did not actually meet with Garrison until after the Shaw trial. But they wanted to convey information to the audience about the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination. And in The Book of the Film, the scenarists actually quote Garrison on this point:

    I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that. (p. 106)

    This is why Prouty is portrayed in the film. Now, in the film, the Mr. X character details his past history in the military. Prouty was the military support officer for intelligence operations and he interfaced with the CIA when they needed arms and munitions they did not have in their supply depots. Therefore he had knowledge of certain of these secret operations, which are briefly described in the film. Since he served until the end of 1963, he had inside knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, and Kennedy’s withdrawal plan for Vietnam. And these are the main points he is meant to discuss.

    Col. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001)

    Incredibly, Epstein pretty much ignores these. Which is kind of shocking, since the climax of the scene is X/Prouty’s participation in Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam in the fall of 1963. Epstein deals with this keystone concept in exactly one sentence. And even that is done tangentially. With Epstein, there is no reference to NSAM 263, the Taylor/McNamara report which was the basis for that Vietnam withdrawal memo, nor does he refer to Lyndon Johnson’s NSAM 273, which, after Kennedy’s death, partly reversed that earlier action memorandum. Nor is there any reference to how the latter memorandum opened the door to direct American involvement in Vietnam, something that Kennedy consciously resisted. (See John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 445-49) To ignore all of this is simply inexplicable.

    As noted in the film, Prouty was directly involved with the Vietnam plans, along with his friend and colleague, Marine officer Victor Krulak. They were so intimately involved that they understood that the whole McNamara/Taylor report was not written in Saigon, which is where Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor had been sent in the fall of 1963. It was written in Washington by Krulak and Prouty, under the supervision of Robert Kennedy, upon the orders of the president. (p. 401) President Kennedy was not leaving anything to chance about his withdrawal plan. In October of 1963, he was taking control of it himself, even if he had to write it and ramrod it through some reluctant advisors. That ghost-written report, secretly written by Kennedy, would be the basis for NSAM 263. And that memo would begin a withdrawal of American troops that December, to be completed in 1965. This information is in John Newman’s landmark book on the subject, JFK and Vietnam. Again, since that book was published in 1992, Epstein could have found it in those pages. Or he could have called Victor Krulak, who was alive at that time. Apparently, Epstein had no intention of doing either. Because that would have meant the film was correct and Prouty’s information was accurate: Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam, as Garrison had figured out decades previously.

    Since he cannot launch a frontal assault, Epstein decides to discredit the information by doing a smear of Prouty. To call it a smear is actually being gentle. Prouty’s career is pretty much well described in more than one source. (Click here) He was a well-rounded, intelligent, candid, curious man. He dealt in banking, military affairs, and education. He wrote both articles and books about his past military experience. And he served as a consultant to several media projects, including JFK. For Epstein to deny some of these things is silly.
    Documents pertaining to Colonel Prouty’s service record

    But Epstein has to contest what Mr. X says about the Secret Service regulations in place at that time. Or else, what the film implies—that a huge Secret Service failure took place in Dallas—would be accurate. Which, as we know today, is the case. So Epstein says that, contrary to what Mr. X says, the Secret Service manual did not demand that all windows on the motorcade route be sealed, or that teams should monitor rooftops, or there should be a constant speed during motorcades. No one knows more about this aspect than author Vince Palamara. He has written two books on the subject and has a third coming out soon. In an email communication to this reviewer, Vince had the following to say about these topics. After consulting with two top-level Secret Service officers, one who authored the manual, he wrote: windows along a motorcade route were to be, at the least, monitored. Building rooftops were to be guarded. And the motorcade route was to be regulated at a top speed of 35 miles per hour. (Palamara email of April 6, 2017) Obviously, these strictures were all disobeyed in Dallas.

    Contrary to what Epstein writes, Len Osanic—who knew Prouty for over ten years—related to me that Prouty was not an editorial advisor to the Church of Scientology. They asked him to look at some documents about L. Ron Hubbard. He did and rendered his opinion. There was discussion of a book, but that never materialized. His association with the Liberty Lobby was that they republished his book The Secret Team. He delivered one of his standard addresses at a seminar of theirs, concerning the Kennedy case and the secret team. But Osanic does not recognize the quotes Epstein attributes to Prouty in his article. By including them, Epstein can now inject the rather standard smear of anti-Semitism. (For Prouty’s actual statements concerning the Arabs, Israelis and the price of oil, see chapter 3 of Understanding Special Operations; after clicking here, scroll down to “The Changing Nature of Warfare: From a Military to an Economic Basis”.) Further, contrary to what Epstein implies, Prouty’s meeting with General Edward Lansdale about sending him to the South Pole was not worked out months or even weeks in advance. As depicted in the film, it was a November, 1963 surprise to him. (Phone communication with Osanic, April 7, 2017) Probably no one alive knows more about Prouty than Osanic, and I refer anyone who is interested in the man to his web site, prouty.org.

    Epstein concludes his wild rant against Prouty by saying that the colonel thought that Leonard Lewin’s 1967 book Report from Iron Mountain was a work of non-fiction. This is supposed to show that Stone should never have trusted Prouty. He couldn’t figure out fiction from non-fction. But what it demonstrates is how abstract the reality of Epstein’s warped world is. For if one goes to Prouty’s web site, as posthumously managed by Osanic, one can click on the “more articles” tab and scroll down to the bottom. There you will see a link to a 1972 NY Times report of Lewin saying that the book is not a work of non-fiction. It is a satiric novel. Osanic told me that when he was setting up the site, Prouty insisted on this link. If one goes to the Black Op Radio site, and clicks Archived Shows, and scrolls down to Program 825, one will be able to listen to an interview Prouty did with Sean Mackenzie. If one goes to the 49:00 mark, one will hear a discussion of Lewin’s book. Prouty, no less than four times, calls it a novel. But he appreciated the satiric edge of the novel, since many people he knew in the Pentagon talked as Lewin depicted: we cannot abandon the warfare state.

    Anyone familiar with propaganda techniques can see what Epstein has done. To distract from the solid information about Vietnam in the film JFK, he has abstracted certain aspects from Prouty’s life to present them under the worst possible light. That The Atlantic printed this hatchet job says a lot about their editorial standards.

    But there is a larger issue here. And it relates not to just how bad the media is in America, but also to certain elements of the JFK critical community. Jim Garrison had his secret JFK murder probe exposed by the local media in New Orleans. From there on in, it was crippled, because the larger media decided to zero in on it, just as they would later target Richard Sprague when he took command of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Reporter/agents like Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth and Walter Sheridan created a barrage of smears and phony stories that the MSM ran with, and much of the public swallowed. This now became the paradigm about the Garrison inquiry—even in the research community! There, the largest proponents of this paradigm were Peter Scott, Paul Hoch, and Josiah Thompson. It was not until the ARRB collected and declassified Garrison’s files that we had an opportunity to look at what his real evidence was. That release, combined with memoranda from other sources, has allowed a different paradigm to now circulate. As I have written elsewhere, we will never really know the complete extent of Garrison’s files, because so many of them were lost, stolen or incinerated by his successor, the disastrous Harry Connick. But what did survive reduces Epstein’s weird world to rubble.

  • Carmine Savastano, Two Princes and a King

    Carmine Savastano, Two Princes and a King

    savastano leaderWay back in 2003, Lisa Pease and myself co-authored and co-edited an anthology volume entitled The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. The title is a bit misleading, because not all the essays in the book came from Probe. Four essays and the Afterword were new and were written for that volume. I was quite pleased with the book, for two reasons. First, it was unique in the sense that it covered all four assassinations. Second, the work was distinguished in both its quality, and its originality, since much of the book was based on new information.

    But third, as I wrote in the Afterword, we hoped that the book provided a new prism to look at those cases. Because Lisa and I thought it was wrong to survey them only as individual incidents. They were related to each other. Especially in their cumulative impact. First, the fact that the perpetrators got away with the JFK case made it easier to contemplate the other murders. Secondly, when the slaughter was complete, what constituted the liberal left in this country was pretty much politically finished. In fact, I would argue that it has not recovered since, even though Bernie Sanders managed to stir some of the embers in 2016.

    As I hoped, the book seemed to influence some in the research community. Larry Hancock began writing on both the Robert Kennedy and the Martin Luther King cases. In 2008, Cyril Wecht’s 45th symposium at Duquesne was about JFK, MLK and Bobby Kennedy. The late John Judge began to sponsor conferences in both LA and Memphis under the COPA banner for, respectively, the Bobby Kennedy case and the King case. He even sponsored one for Malcolm X. (Click here to view it) I am gratified this happened. And I hope that ripple grows and prospers. Because I believe that is one way this polarized, and psychologically crippled nation can understand why it has ended up as it has.

    Carmine Savastano is the latest person who has tried to ramp up that ripple into a wave. His memorably titled book, Two Princes and a King, surveys the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations. Quite naturally, he takes the murders up in chronological order. He tries to deal with them in a systematic way, fitting them into a formalistic analysis of which forces were involved in each. The broad outlines of these forces he groups under four rubrics. These are, an Underworld Arm, i.e., organized crime elements; an Officials Arm, that is, elected officials who suppressed evidence; a military intelligence arm, which is self-explanatory; and finally, The Conspirators, that is, the actual operatives involved in the murders. As we shall see, this framework does not work out that well for him.

    II

    Quite naturally, he begins the book with a discussion of the JFK case. He first examines what he terms the underworld aspects of the crime. Like others before him, he notes the increase in prosecutions against organized crime during the Kennedy administration. In certain categories the percentage increase was simply spectacular. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had gathered all the resources in his office to battle the Mob as no one had previously.

    But he then makes a curious statement. He says that the Warren Commission failed to discover plausible connections between Oswald and Mafia Don Carlos Marcello. (See p. 26: all references are to the E-book edition.) To my knowledge, the Warren Commission never even investigated this aspect, so of course they would not discover them. He then makes another curious statement. He says that both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations used the Mob to attempt to kill Castro. (ibid) As I, and many others, have stated, this is simply not backed up by any credible evidence. In fact, the two most lengthy and authoritative examinations of the matter both concluded that the CIA started the actions and continued them. The two examinations I refer to are the Senate’s Church Committee inquiry, and the CIA’s Inspector General report. (See The Assassinations, pp. 327-30)

    The author continues in this vein by noting that two of the three Mob leaders the CIA cooperated with on the plots to kill Castro—Sam Giancana and John Roselli—ended up murdered on the eve of the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He then spends some time on the figure of Richard Cain, Giancana’s undercover agent in the Chicago Police Department. Cain was eventually fired from the department and moved to Mexico. He turned informant for the FBI and CIA, but neither thought his information was high quality, especially the latter. For example, according to Larry Hancock, Cain tried to say Oswald was in Chicago plotting to kill Kennedy in April of 1963, and that the alleged assassin actually bought a rifle there at the time. (Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 2006 edition, p. 13) Rumors about Cain’s involvement in the JFK assassination are undermined by his son’s research in his 2008 book entitled The Tangled Web. That book uses a credible eyewitness to place Cain at the Cook County Court House on the day of Kennedy’s murder. (Click here for a brief biography of Cain)

    From here, the author goes into a concise version of how Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Santo Trafficante originally schemed to open up casinos and brothels in Cuba under the dictator Fulgencio Batista. He also notes how Lansky, Luciano and Bugsy Siegel first originated an assassination enforcement arm, which later turned into Murder, Incorporated. (Savastano, pp. 29-30)

    This background becomes the author’s way to introduce the character of Jack Ruby. Like Cain, Ruby was a virtual insider with the Dallas Police (although Savastano understates how many cops Ruby actually knew.) Like Cain, he was also an FBI informant. Ruby idolized the gambler and Trafficante colleague Lewis McWillie. And there was also the relationship between Ruby and the local Campisi brothers in Dallas. The Campisis reportedly took command of Mob operations in Dallas after Joe Civello died in 1970. Civello attended the famous Apalachin national Mafia meeting in New York in 1957. Ruby had dinner at the Campisi restaurant the night before the assassination. And Joe Campisi was one of the first to visit Ruby in jail after he killed Oswald. (ibid, p. 33)

    From his overview of the Mob, the author segues to some of the failures of the Secret service in the JFK case. He briefly mentions the Chicago plot and Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, and he couples this with the destruction of the 1963 Secret Service files before the Assassination Records Review Board could see them. (ibid, pp. 36-37) He also specifically mentions the incident of several Secret Service agents drinking and partying until 3 AM at The Cellar nightclub in Dallas the evening before Kennedy was killed. These and other failures he notes made it easier for the plotters to succeed.

    Jumping to the performance of the FBI, Savastano states that the Warren Commission relied upon the honesty and efficacy of the FBI for its inquiry. That trust was misplaced, and this seriously compromised the Commission’s work. (p. 41) He elaborates on this by adding that the reason for this may have been due to a relationship between the Bureau and Oswald. And here he does a brief summary of that relationship and the paper record that exists concerning Oswald and the FBI. This extends at least as far back as Oswald’s defection to the USSR. He also notes that there were no reports filed with the Warren Commission on Oswald from FBI agents Regis Kennedy or Warren DeBrueys. Which, if accurate, is odd since those two men were on the anti-Castro beat in New Orleans in 1963. (ibid, p. 45)

    In his discussion of the LBJ angle, his most interesting comment is a quote from Johnson assistant Marvin Watson. He quotes Watson as saying, “…the President had told him in an off moment that he was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. The president felt the CIA had had something to do with that plot.” (ibid, p. 50) He then discusses the Billy Sol Estes/Mac Wallace angle and concludes that both men were too close to Johnson for him to contemplate employing them to kill Kennedy.

    In his discussion of the Warren Commission, Savastano makes a couple of dubious statements. He first says that CIA Director Allen Dulles was not actually fired by Kennedy. He resigned. This many be a matter of semantics on the author’s part. In every discussion I have read about this issue, including Howard Hunt’s in his book Give Us this Day, after two reports on the Bay of Pigs were submitted to the White House, Kennedy requested that Dulles resign. In other words Dulles was forced out. (See Hunt, p. 215) In James Srodes’ rather sympathetic biography of Dulles, he quotes the spymaster himself as saying he learned he had been fired through national security assistant Walt Rostow. (p. 547)

    The other dubious statement Savastano makes here is that somehow Robert Kennedy was responsible for appointing Dulles to the Warren Commission. This is something that Philip Shenon was pushing over a year ago. And that Robert Caro also advocated in his disappointing book about Johnson and Kennedy, The Passage of Power. As I wrote in my review of that book, it was Bobby Kennedy who was most responsible for getting Dulles removed in the first place. Because he was his brother’s personal representative in the White House review of the Bay of Pigs debacle. And, in fact, RFK was so upset with what he learned about Dulles’ duplicity during the Bay of Pigs that he then requested of Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he also fire his sister Eleanor who worked at State. The reason being that RFK did not want any of the Dulles family around anymore. (Leonard Mosley, Dulles, p. 473) Further, as David Talbot writes in his book The Devil’s Chessboard, it was Dulles who lobbied the White House to get on the Commission. (Talbot, pp. 573-74)

    To argue the contrary, Shenon had used a memo from November 29, 1963 written by LBJ crony Walter Jenkins. The memo said that Abe Fortas had talked to Nicolas Katzenbach at Justice and he had talked to RFK about Dulles. The problem with this memo is that it bears a time stamp saying it was entered into the system in April of 1965! Which is 18 months past the date it should have been entered. Way past the issuance of the Warren Report and past LBJ’s discussions with Warren Commissioner Richard Russell explaining how neither man believed the Single Bullet Theory. As lawyers like Dan Hardway have stated, this document could never be entered into a legal hearing. (Click here for a full review of the issue )

    By saying Dulles resigned of his own volition and that Bobby Kennedy actually proffered the idea of putting him on the Warren Commission, Savastano minimizes the facts that Dulles wanted to be on the Commission, he then became the single most active member of the investigative body, that he was very much involved in its many blunders that led to its mistaken conclusions. And then after its errors were exposed, he, along with Gerald Ford, became its two most stalwart defenders. (Talbot, op. cit., pp. 588-92) One cannot say all these things about any other member of that ill-fated body.

    III

    The author sidelights briefly into Nixon and Watergate in an effort to show how the JFK case managed to spill over into other presidencies. He states that Nixon wanted all files on the JFK case from the CIA. (Savastano, p. 64) This may be based on the famous anecdote by H. R. Haldeman in his book The Ends of Power. There, Haldeman was trying to get Director Dick Helms to aid the White House by taking  part in the  Watergate cover-up.  When Helms hesitated, Haldeman was instructed to allude that this may trace back to the Bay of Pigs invasion.  When Helms came unglued, Haldeman took his reaction to mean that Nixon was using the Bay of Pigs as code for the Kennedy assassination.

    Yet, because of further, and belated, declassification of the Nixon tapes, it appears that it was Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick’s report on the Bay of Pigs operation that Nixon wanted. In Stanley Kutler’s book, Abuse of Power, he features a transcription of a tape of July 1, 1971. There, Nixon states that he wanted papers on the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs. But he then adds, “these are the things that will embarrass the creeps.” Charles Colson then chimes in by saying that maybe Nixon should hire Howard Hunt, his fellow alumnus from Brown University. Because Hunt told Colson that if the truth about the Bay of Pigs were ever known it would destroy Kennedy. So the implication of the conversation is that this is an extension of Nixon’s ever enduring obsession for, and envy of, Kennedy. President Nixon was trying to dig up faults in JFK’s stewardship of Operation Zapata.

    But what actually appears to be the case here is that Helms knew something that neither Hunt nor Nixon knew. Namely that Kirkpatrick’s report does not make Kennedy look bad. It makes the CIA look bad—in several different ways. Even on the issue of the so-called cancellation of the D-Day air strikes. In fact, Kirkpatrick’s report was so coruscating toward the Agency that the CIA resisted declassification for decades. And they did not release it until the nineties. (Today it is available in book form, edited by Peter Kornbluh under the title of Bay of Pigs, Declassified.)

    Savastano’s other comments about Helms seem cogent and accurate. Nixon did ask Helms to pay hush money to Hunt, which the Director refused to do. Therefore, the White House did so through Nixon lawyer Herbert Kalmbach. And Nixon did request that Helms provide a false cover for illegal money going through Nixon’s campaign and to the Watergate burglars. Helms agreed to do this, but about ten days later changed his mind on it. From this, the author then postulates that maybe Hunt was actually a CIA asset who guaranteed the Watergate burglary would fail and then blow up in Nixon’s face. (Savastano, p. 64) Which is a view that more than one noted author has advocated for, e.g., Jim Hougan in his classic book Secret Agenda. In fact, the minority counsel for the Senate Watergate committee, Fred Thompson, also believed this to be the case. (See Thompson’s 1975 book entitled At That Point in Time.)

    Savastano mentions the famous memo where the CIA admitted they had pulled 37 documents from Oswald’s file before the HSCA reviewed it. (p. 88) And from this and other points, he concludes that he CIA has lied repeatedly about what was in the Oswald file and what is missing from it. Which relates to Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City. The author mentions the fact that the Mystery Man photos sent to CIA HQ and given to the Warren Commission are clearly not of Oswald. And that the voice sent up by the CIA Mexico City station, allegedly of Oswald’s phone calls, are not of Oswald. He also properly scores the deception that the tapes disappeared within days of the assassination. Simply not true. He even notes that there is evidence in the Lopez Report that CIA station chief Winston Scott did not think the voice on the tapes was Oswald’s. (Savastano, p. 94) He then concludes that ultimately there is no credible evidence that Oswald was at either the Cuban or Russian consulate. (ibid, p. 95) And further, Scott likely knew who the Mystery Man really was, one Yuri Moskalev, a KGB agent under diplomatic cover. (ibid, p. 97) The author concludes that the reason there is so much confusion and misunderstanding about Mexico City is not due the researchers, but because of the CIA.

    The next major section of the book deals with the more obvious indications of a conspiracy. Here, the author leads off with the impersonations of Oswald in the fall of 1963, a prominent example being the Homer and Sterling Wood alleged sighting at the Sports Drome Gun Range in Fort Worth. On November 17th, a man began firing at the target next to the Woods in a very accurate manner. When Oswald’s picture showed up on TV on the 22nd, both men thought he was the man shooting at the rifle range. (p. 101) The author then notes the HSCA report stating that the box arrangement changed in the sixth floor window within minutes after the assassination. This could not have been done by Oswald, of course, since, according to the Warren Commission, he was tearing down the stairs after the shooting. Then there are the problems with the fingerprints, which even the Warren Commission had problems with. There was no indication of prints found on the rifle before it was sent to the FBI on the night of the assassination. And Sebastian Latona found none of value at FBI headquarters. A palm print turned up after the rifle was returned to Dallas. (p. 108)

    From here the author goes to the autopsy evidence. He quotes photographer John Stringer as telling Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB that photos were missing from the inventory. The author then adds that Stringer said the photos of the brain are not accurate. (p. 122) Which actually understates what the witness said. Stringer actually denied he took those photos. He based this on the fact that he never used the film they were shot with, nor the technique that was used to take them. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 164) This, and a myriad of other evidence—some of which the author mentions—strongly indicates that the brain photographs at the National Archives are not a representation of Kennedy’s brain.

    There are a couple of faults in this section that I should mention. The author writes that the covered-up scandal during the HSCA about a CIA liaison tinkering with the autopsy photos was done independently of the Agency. The liaison’s name was Regis Blahut. It was discovered that the safe holding the photo was open, some of the pictures were removed, and one was actually taken out of its sleeve. A guard discovered the missing notebook on a windowsill. Blahut was interviewed three times and it was evident to even HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey that he was lying. The CIA refused to give the HSCA Blahut’s Office of Security file, which may have revealed if he was part of an operation. Blakey, when given four options, then picked the CIA to do its own investigation of the affair. Blahut still flunked three polygraph examinations. But this aspect was kept hushed up by Blakey. Even members of the HSCA, like Richardson Preyer, were not aware of it. Predictably, even amid all of Blahut’s deceptions, the CIA acquitted itself of any broad design against the committee. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp.85-87)

    That secret verdict survived for about a year, until it was leaked to George Lardner of the Washington Post. His story created such a furor that the House intelligence committee decided to open a reinvestigation. They found out, among other things, that the Inspector General did not do the CIA inquiry, the Office of Security did. They also found out that Blahut left the room with the photos. And that when Blahut was called in for his first questioning, he was waiting for a call from the CIA. That committee found that Blahut was part of an undercover program codenamed MH/Child. (Washington Post, June 28, 1979, p. A6)

    In referencing people who he considers as unreliable sources, the author groups James Files and Judy Baker with Gordon Novel. I agree that the first two are not reliable. But such is not the case with the late Gordon Novel.

    There are major differences between him and the other two. First, as Paris Flammonde showed in his book The Kennedy Conspiracy, Novel really did work for the CIA during the preparations for the Bay of Pigs. As Lisa Pease then demonstrated in a three part series for Probe Magazine, his knowledge about that ill-fated project was informed by his experiences through the offices of Guy Banister. The infamous Houma heist, where Novel raided an arms bunker on a Schlumberger lot north of New Orleans and transported the Interarmco munitions back to, among other places, Banister’s office, is corroborated by the other participants in the raid. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 106) When Novel attempted to infiltrate Garrison’s office and was later found out, his odyssey afterwards was sanctioned by the CIA. There are several indications of this. One is the fact that his four attorneys were being, as he said, “clandestinely remunerated”. They had to be since Novel was not working at the time. To take another aspect, this reviewer has it from an on-the-scene witness that Novel was ultimately safe-housed in Columbus, Ohio. And that house was being electronically surveilled. (ibid, pp. 262-63) Finally, Novel was handsomely reimbursed for his efforts against Garrison. (ibid, p. 311) The startling aspect of Novel’s information is that the things he was writing about in 1977 were still being borne out by declassified documents well into the nineties. For example, about the CIA concealing Clay Shaw’s true Agency status from the public and JFK investigative bodies. (See Joan Mellen, Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54-55)

    I should add that in this section, the author makes another questionable statement. He writes that there is no proof of Oswald being an FBI informant. In the purest sense, this might be accurate, since evidence does not equal proof. But consider the following. In early August of 1963, Oswald was temporarily jailed after his altercation with Cuban exile Carlos Bringuier in New Orleans. While he was imprisoned, he asked to be interviewed by an FBI agent. When the call from the police station came into the local FBI office, the employee who answered the phone was young William Walter. At the responding agent’s request, when Walter checked the index for any corresponding files he found that Oswald had a file as an informant. And that file had agent Warren DeBrueys’ name on it, one of the two agents on the Cuban exile beat. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 287) Secondly, former FBI agent Carver Gayton told the Church Committee that FBI Dallas agent Jim Hosty told him that Oswald was an FBI informant. (Interview of 1/17/76) Finally, one has to ask: what was Oswald doing requesting an FBI interview after his arrest for disorderly conduct? And why did it last for over an hour?

    Before going to the MLK section of the book, I have to ask why the author designated a military intelligence arm when what he mentions there is very minimal. But most of the information he provided in this category is actually related to the CIA.

    IV

    In his discussion of the King case, the author again maps out categories of involvement. The first he calls the criminal aspect; the second is what he calls the Officials Hand, the third is Military Intelligence and finally the last is the actual conspirators. But he begins his review of the case by saying that the Mob—which fits into his first grouping—likely did not participate in the MLK hit. Their involvement is mostly speculation. (Savastano, pp. 160, 163) William Pepper would probably disagree with him since he presented evidence in court that suggested they did have some involvement. To the point that a local Mob agent, one Frank Liberto, supplied money to Memphis tavern owner Loyd Jowers to go along with the plot. Pepper produced three witnesses who said they heard Liberto state words to the effect that he was involved. (Op. cit. The Assassinations, p. 493) But the author dismisses Liberto by saying he had no motive. Which might be true about Liberto, but would not apply if the orders to him came from above.

    The author does a nice job describing how Ray used three different aliases, all of them real people who dwelled within a five-mile radius of each other in Toronto. It is hard to think that such was a coincidence. But this seemed to help him escape the FBI manhunt for at least an extra month. As the late Philip Melanson concluded, the access to these names suggests that either Ray, or his handler Raoul, was in contact with an identity specialist. Savastano properly notes that there is no adduced evidence that Ray ever practiced with either the rifle in question, a Remington Gamemaster, or a similar rifle, in the month leading up the King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. (Savastano, pp. 161-62)

    Savastano briefly mentions that the identity of Raoul was not known. (p. 161) But at the 1999 civil trial of Loyd Jowers in Memphis, William Pepper presented six witnesses on this issue. They all identified a passport photo that private investigator John Billings had procured as being Raoul. Both Pepper and British TV producer Jack Saltman—who was filming a mock trial presentation of the King case—both arrived at the same home in the northeastern United States to try and talk to the person in the photo. A reporter from Lisbon who spoke Portuguese also arrived at the home—since the ID passport photo depicted a man entering America from Portugal. She talked in Portuguese to the lady of the house. The woman told her that government agents had communicated with them three times in three years, and agents were monitoring their phone lines. Needless to say, the man suspected of being Raoul would not submit to a deposition or appear in court. (Op. cit. The Assassinations, p. 502) Again, I wish Savastano had made the distinction between “evidence for” and “proof of”.

    The author does a creditable job in setting the background for and run up to King’s murder. He lists the major achievements that King was a major part of, e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He then notes how King spread out from civil rights and into broader issues like poverty and the Vietnam War. (Savastano, p. 170) He gets more specific as to time and place when he mentions the sanitation workers strike in Memphis and how King made an appearance for this cause that ended quite badly with looting and rioting. Which may have been provoked by Marrell McCullough, an undercover agent in one of the youth gangs called the Invaders. And that gang was a part of the provocations that resulted in looting. Therefore, King was intent on returning to Memphis to redeem that earlier incident. Further, a newspaper article criticized King for not staying at a black-owned hotel while he was in Memphis. This played a part in directing him toward the Lorraine. (ibid, p. 181) But upon his return, his usual black security escort was not guarding him; that detail was withdrawn. And to this day, no one knows for sure how and why this was done. (ibid, p. 172) In any case, it is clear that this made it much easier to kill King on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel.

    An odd thing about his section on King is that his murder really does entail a military intelligence aspect. Yet I could find scant mention of it by the author. Savastano gives much more play to the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation against King. This largely stemmed from J. Edgar Hoover’s personal animus toward King and his innate racism. As most of us know, it included planting informants in his camp, like Ernest Withers, who was a photographer. The FBI also sent a letter and tape to Coretta Scott King in November of 1964. The tape was allegedly of King cheating on his wife, although, to people who heard it, there was no way to know if it was King. The letter branded him a hypocrite and a hoaxer. The threat was that unless he took his own life, these secrets about his sex life would be exposed.

    The military intelligence aspect in the King case seems to me to be significant. In May of 1963, the Pentagon started a program that used military spies in plainclothes to monitor domestic disturbances. (John Avery Emison, The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover Up, p. 115) This program ended up with 1500 men in the field and 300 mangers at Fort Holabrid in Baltimore. The program had many leftist targets. One of them was King. They had files on King, surveillance reports on his activities, and they had wired his office at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. (Emison, p. 122) This is quite interesting since, at the Jowers trial, Pepper introduced evidence that the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept 24-hour surveillance on King. This included his last days in Memphis. On the day King was killed, two US Army officers approached firehouse captain Carthel Weeden. They asked to be allowed to go to the top of the station. The reason being they needed a lookout point for the Lorraine Motel. (Op. Cit. The Assassinations, p. 502)

    One thing I thought was lacking from this part of the presentation was a thorough exposure of how Percy Foreman essentially abandoned his client James Earl Ray by not giving him a defense and copping a plea. Something Ray’s first lawyer, Arthur Hanes, never even thought of doing. Hanes was determined to go to trial and strongly advised Ray against accepting any plea offer. This is a central part of the King case.

    V

    One of the most interesting parts of this section of the book is what Savastano writes about Jessie Jackson and Reverend Billy Kyles. According to one source it was Kyles who relayed a message to the police that King would not need his regular security in Memphis. Also, although Kyles claimed to have been in King’s room along with Ralph Abernathy prior to the assassination, the police surveillance logs—there is a difference between surveillance and security—place him outside. (Savastano, p. 190)

    But to explain why Kyles aroused suspicion, I can do no better than to link to this video clip and urge the reader to watch it.

    Recall, Jessie Jackson at that time was not a national figure in the civil rights movement. He was King’s administrator for the Chicago office of the SCLC and headed that branch’s Operation Breadbasket, which was designed to find jobs for unemployed black Americans. Jackson was in Memphis when King was killed. At the time of the shooting he was in the parking lot below. Yet Jackson later said that he was the last person to speak to King, and that King had died in his arms. To say the least, other witnesses hotly dispute those claims. But further, Jackson urged the rest of the entourage to accompany King to the hospital. This gave him the opportunity to address the media, which he did. (ibid, p. 191) In fact, he became the main TV talking head speaking about King’s death as an insider. To the point that he had the SCLC public relations director booking his appearances.

    He also added that he had placed his hands in Dr. King’s blood and then smeared it on his sweater. He then appeared on TV in Chicago wearing the bloody sweater. And he used that mark to convince Mayor Richard Daley that he should speak at a King Memorial. Because of this newly acquired visibility, during a talk he had with SCLC member Don Rose at the time, he clearly implied he would now take King’s place, when in fact King had never ever said anything like that to anyone. (p. 193) Ralph Abernathy became the new leader of the SCLC. Jackson later resigned and formed his own group in Chicago, Operation Push. Finally, Jackson has never been in the front ranks promoting a reopening of the King case. During the entire nearly three year ordeal in Memphis where the King family backed the attempts by Bill Pepper and Judge Joe Brown to give Ray the criminal trial he never had, Jackson was notable by his absence.

    As the author concludes, one can make the case that Jackson actually took advantage of King’s death to launch his own career. If that was his aim, he succeeded.

    VI

    Savastano concludes with the Robert Kennedy assassination. He begins with the familiar critique of Sirhan’s original trial lawyer Grant Cooper. Today there can be little doubt that Cooper was simply either incompetent, or he sold out his client. Because not only did Cooper not mount any kind of defense for the charges against his client, he actually stipulated to the evidence, even though the prosecution admitted to him that the bullets and ballistics evidence had a weak foundation. (The Assassinations, p. 577) Thus the trial became about Sirhan’s mental state at the time of the shooting. (Savastano, p. 205) The author properly notes that Cooper was under investigation at the time for paying a court bailiff to steal grand jury transcripts in the famous Friar’s Club case. One of the defendants in that card-cheating scandal was John Roselli, a mobster who the CIA reached out to in their plots to kill Castro. Cooper could have been disbarred for this bribery. He ended up with essentially a slap on the wrist: a thousand dollar fine. There are many, including Lisa Pease who believe that his pitiful performance on Sirhan’s behalf enabled the leniency he was shown in his own case. (p. 206)

    The author reminds us that Sirhan was not a Moslem. He was a Greek Orthodox Christian. Christian missionaries brought him to America from Jordan. He did not attend a mosque and there was no library of pro-Palestinian literature at his home. Therefore, the assumed motive for the crime is dubious.

    But further, there are real evidentiary problems with this case. Most of which the public has no knowledge of. The author begins his exposition of those problems with a discussion of the Stanislaw Pruszynski audio tape recording made as he followed Bobby Kennedy from the podium in the ballroom to the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. (This link provides a tutorial on this tape) The sum total of this new evidence proves that there were more shots fired than Sirhan’s gun could carry; that the shot sounds came too rapidly to be fired by one gunman; and the sound frequency betrays two different guns being fired. When one adds in the fact that Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy showed that all the shots that hit Bobby Kennedy came from behind, and Sirhan was always in front of the senator, then clearly if Cooper had mounted a real defense, Sirhan would have been acquitted.

    But it’s actually worse than that. Because all of the shots that entered RFK came from an upward angle, and the fatal shot to the head was fired at point blank range, which Noguchi specified was a distance of 1-3 inches. Sirhan was six inches shorter than Kennedy and the witnesses said that his arm was stretched straight outward. And not one witness could say that they saw the gun jammed into the back of Kennedy’s head. (The Assassinations, pp. 617-18)

    The author briefly mentions the famous Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. This was the girl who was seen with Sirhan by over a dozen witnesses in the pantry. She seemed to signal him before he started shooting. Sirhan’s last memory is of her pouring a cup of coffee for him before she led him back to the pantry. She later ran down the stairs of the hotel shouting, “We shot him! We shot him!” (Savastano, p. 211) In this reviewer’s opinion, the author did not make enough of this angle to the RFK case. Because when this is coupled with Sirhan being under post hypnotic suggestion, the case for Sirhan being manipulated becomes quite strong. (Please click to this video for a demonstration)

    Very appropriately, Savastano spends page after page dealing with the almost mind-boggling shortcomings of the LAPD. This includes their seemingly willful destruction of evidence before all of Sirhan’s appeals were exhausted. He also scores the manifold failures of criminalist DeWayne Wolfer who shockingly linked the recovered bullets to a different handgun! (Savastano, p. 226) Suitably, he quotes the official Krantz Report done by Deputy District Attorney Thomas Krantz to bring home Wolfer’s incredible sloppiness and, there is no other word to apply here, his negligence. As Krantz wrote, “The apparent lack of reports, both written and photographic, either made by Wolfer or destroyed, or never in existence, raised serious doubts as to the substance and credibility of the ballistic evidence presented in the Sirhan trial.” (ibid, p. 227)

    The subtitle of the book is “A Concise Review of Three Political Assassinations.” In other words, the author has designed the book as something of a primer on the three cases. A way of getting the lay person interested in all three of these momentous murders rather than just the headlining JFK case. They were all clearly and demonstrably conspiracies and they all shared certain traits, which the author tries to point out. Most importantly, they resulted in a tremendous shift in power. Therefore let me end this review with the memorable quote of Congressman Allard Lowenstein:

    Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President’s, was mourned as an extension of the evils of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths … brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random …. What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America.

  • Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein

    Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein

    epstein leaderEdward Epstein began his career with a graduate thesis that he then sold as a book. It was called Inquest. He then wrote a book called Counterplot. The first was about the inner workings of the Warren Commission. The second was about the Jim Garrison investigation. These two books are discussed at length in the ProbeMagazine article we have excerpted.

    The important thing to remember about the books is that in the first one, Epstein takes the stance of an outsider trying to understand how a governmental body worked and came to some rather unusual conclusions. In the second book, which was originally a long magazine article, the outsider stance was abandoned. Epstein was no longer a graduate student. He became an insider, a working member of the club. And The New Yorker became a longtime haven for him.

    His career largely centered on two areas: the intelligence community, and the JFK case. He wrote three books on the latter. He wrote four books on the former. In addition to his books, he has published many articles in magazines like The Atlantic and The New Republic. Incredibly, he has managed to convince some people, like Ron Rosenbaum, that he actually knows something about the world of national security and intelligence. After all, he once tried to argue that James Angleton was not really duped by Kim Philby, but that Angleton was playing Philby. For these kinds of errands, he was well compensated by business entities like Reader’s Digest, which excerpted his useless book about Oswald entitled Legend.

    His latest book about Edward Snowden is equally pitiful. (Please click here for a good review) As the reader can see, Epstein is up to his old tricks. What is hard to believe is that anyone still believes him or pays for his work. In reading these two pieces one will see that the last thing Epstein is is an investigative journalist. Spending hours on the phone with the late James Angleton does not constitute investigation. Most people would call it visiting a victim of early senility. But that is what Epstein did for his books Legend and Deception. Finally, in 1991 and 1992, Tom Mangold in Cold Warrior and David Wise in Mole Hunt exposed Angleton for what he was: a truly imbalanced and actually a dangerous man. A man whose paranoia wrecked several lives and paralyzed the Agency. A man who should never had been the CIA’s counterintelligence chief in the first place.

    Epstein didn’t learn from his previous error. And maybe it really wasn’t an error. But if more people had understood who he was, then he would not be allowed to keep on his giant misinformation campaign. In its latest incarnation, Edward Snowden is really a Soviet spy. Just like Oswald. Oh, my aching back.

    The following is a letter written by Jim DiEugenio to the editors of The New Yorker. It was a reply to a nearly 8,500 word essay by Edward J. Epstein entitled “Shots in the Dark.” Epstein’s article was published in the November 30, 1992 issue. DiEugenio wrote this letter on December 10, 1992. The editors refused to print it. It was published in the January/February issue of Gary Rowell’s The Investigator. It appears here in a slightly edited and expanded form.

    Jim Garrison died on October 21, 1992. On November 30th, The New Yorker carried a nearly 8,500 word article about the New Orleans DA and his investigation into the death of President Kennedy. Allowing for editing, lead time, press run and distribution schedule, Edward Epstein’s piece must have been submitted at least 8 to 10 days in advance. Considering its length, the question inevitably arises: was the article being prepared before Garrison died? The fact of his long and serious illness had been popularly known in wide circles. If this is so, why did The New Yorker rush the hit piece onto its pages so quickly and rather tastelessly?

    Epstein states that his motive was to counteract the impact of Oliver Stone’s acclaimed and popular 1991 film JFK. The film starred Kevin Costner as Garrison in a recreation of the only conspiracy inquiry and trial into the murder of President Kennedy. Epstein calls the film a fiction event, even though it is based on two non-fiction books, Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins, and Jim Marrs’ Crossfire. Epstein, a former Warren Commission critic, has seemed to have had an astringent reaction to the film. He debated Stone, among others, in New York in a symposium arranged by The Nation magazine about the merits of the film. In the new compilation of his books on the subject, he added an Epilogue attacking the picture. He is now preparing another attack on the film and Stone to appear in the Atlantic Monthly, apparently timed for the video release of the longer version of JFK in January. It should be added that Epstein complained to Stone at that New York symposium that a scene depicted in his film was not depicted in Garrison’s book. If Garrison had written about everything in his files, his book would have been several volumes long. Which shows how familiar Epstein was with this raw data. (This author was shown these files by Lyon Garrison and can vouch for their volume.)

    To dispense with the specious argument over the historical accuracy of Stone’s film. Any historical film will, of necessity, rearrange events, settings, circumstances, and also often collapse characters to convey a dramatic whole. Stone’s film does this, but much less than other popular films dealing with historic subjects: e.g., Mississippi Burning, The Untouchables, Bugsy. Often, Stone prefaces speculative scenes by having Costner say, “Let’s speculate”, or shooting a sequence in sepia. But to anyone familiar with the actual facts, when all is said and done, Stone’s picture actually ranks with films like Lawrence of Arabia in its relative allegiance to the adduced record. As we shall see, it is Epstein’s unfamiliarity with that record that seems to be the basis for his specious article.

    It is strange that Epstein should be so flummoxed by this film which during its climax, tears to pieces the Warren Report, just as Garrison’s assistant DA’s did in New Orleans in February of 1969 at the trial of Clay Shaw. What makes it even more ironic is that Epstein’s article contains more “fiction” or distortion in relative terms than JFK. This begins with his portrayal of Garrison as a flamboyant, egomaniacal publicity hound who pursued the Kennedy case for his private purposes. This does not correspond to anyone who observed Garrison in his last years or watched his last two interviews when he was still healthy. The former DA was a reserved, intellectual, literary man who carried the painful scars of his two-year battle against the Washington-New York power center in his prosecution of Clay Shaw. He ended up with a tarnished reputation, a pile of bills, $5,000 in the bank—he financed some of the expenses himself—and many leftover death threats. The Kennedy case was the reason he was voted out of office. In fact, it ruined a promising political career where many said he could have been the governor of the state. Garrison later stated that if he had it all to do over, he probably would not have done it because of the personal and emotional toll.

    Epstein writes that Garrison, “artfully managed to stretch out the interval between the charge and the trial … while he engaged in a wide range of diversionary actions.” Precisely the opposite is true and documented. It takes author Paris Flammonde almost 13 pages to chronicle the delay tactics of Shaw’s lawyers, who were consorting with both media allies and friends in Washington in order to torpedo Garrison. Epstein actually scores Garrison for bringing charges against the likes of “media “ people like Walter Sheridan, even though affidavits reveal that Sheridan threatened and bribed important witness in the case. I guess this is OK with Epstein. After all, it’s only the murder of the president.

    The photos Epstein describes Garrison showing on The Tonight Show were furnished by researcher Richard Sprague. Epstein sometimes wears glasses. Perhaps this is the reason he feels the object being picked up in Dealey Plaza is a pebble. Most people I have talked to think it is a large caliber bullet. Epstein also has not kept up with research in the field, since he derides Garrison for saying the man retrieving the object was a federal agent. It turns out he was just that, an FBI agent to be exact. And if Epstein really thinks that both J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson were dedicated to uncovering the facts in this case, he has not read the Church Committee report or interviewed any former FBI agents, like, for example, William Turner. This may be the single most ludicrous declaration in the entire article, which is saying something.

    Epstein relies on the House Select Committee X-rays and photos as his sine qua non that only three shots were fired, and all came from the rear. What he does not say is that the HSCA altered the Warren Commission findings on the autopsy. They moved up the entry wound in Kennedy’s skull from the bottom of the heard to the top, and they moved down the back wound. Further, the pathologists never dissected the track of either wound in Kennedy’s body. Therefore, the directionality and the trajectory of the wounds is not known. At any murder trial, these materials would be mercilessly attacked. And it is questionable if they would have been admitted into court, since some of the exhibits do not correspond to what the witnesses at the autopsy saw.

    Epstein implies that Jim Garrison failed to reveal any “hidden associates” of Oswald’s in New Orleans. This is simply balderdash. As depicted in the Warren Report, Oswald was supposed to be a Marxist oriented, pro-Castro sympathizer. Yet, as Garrison showed, here was a communist who had no communist friends. On the contrary, he associated almost exclusively with anti-communist extremists, intelligence operatives, and/or anti-Castro Cuban exiles in both New Orleans and Dallas: George DeMohresnchildt, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Richard Case Nagell, Orest Pena. Which is an odd group for a communist to be hanging out with. You will not see most of their names in the Warren Report. But you will see them in Garrison’s files. In fact, if not for him, you likely would not have heard of them at all.

    Epstein tries to trivialize Garrison’s complaints about the extreme secrecy involved in the JFK case. He writes that this was essentially grandstanding and it was not really important to the facts of the case. Garrison disagreed and stated that it undermined public confidence in their government. The Warren Commission had the equivalent of one day of public hearings. (And that was because witness Mark Lane insisted on his hearing being open to fellow citizens.) The House Select Committee on Assassinations had about three weeks of open hearings. The combined lifespan of both investigative bodies was a bit over three years. The former locked up over 365 cubic feet of materials. The second inquiry left almost 800 boxes of files. Today, the federal government has over 2 million pages of material classified on this case. Even though the murder is three decades old and the official story is that Oswald alone killed Kennedy. Is Epstein correct in saying that most of it is unimportant? How can he possibly deduce such a conclusion before the files are declassified? We know from previous declassifications that such was not the case at all. For instance, the declassification of the FBI report on the JFK case revealed that Director J. Edgar Hoover did not agree with the Single Bullet Theory. He believed that a separate shot hit Governor John Connally. To use another example: the government is today holding a 300-page report about Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City. The problem, as the authors of that report have stated, is that the CIA could not produce a photo of Oswald being there, and the voice on the audiotapes the CIA made of Oswald is not his. You will not find any of that information in the Warren Report. Which never questions any of his activities in Mexico.

    Epstein writes that many documents that were originally classified have since been released. Yes, and many have been released only in response to public revulsion with the classification process. Many others have been released through the efforts of private citizens who have had to sue the government to get them. Further, many of these released documents have not been released in full. That is, they contain what is termed “redactions”, that is, much of the wording has been blacked out. Plus, the fact that the information was released later dilutes the impact and effect the information has on the case and the public. In fact, this contributes to the whole “too-late-to-solve-it” syndrome that afflicts the Kennedy case. One has to wonder: was this the intent from the start? If so, it succeeded.

    Epstein is familiar with these problems, since they impact on the mystery surrounding the man he wrote about extensively in his last book on the JFK case, Legend. This was George DeMohrenschildt, sometimes termed “The Baron” due to his upper class White Russian standing. Epstein was reportedly the last person to interview DeMohrenschildt in Florida before he died of a shotgun blast. Although the official verdict in the case was that The Baron took his own life, others who have investigated his death still have questions about it. Mr. Epstein, whose early attack on Garrison in The New Yorker was circulated by the CIA to worldwide station chiefs, was in Florida at the time to interview DeMohrenschildt for Legend. Epstein received a large half million dollar advance for the book, the highest ever in the JFK field. The book’s backers also furnished him with a research staff. Epstein offered DeMohrenschildt large sums of money for interview sessions. Epstein himself was quoted as saying he was involved in a “very big project, which involves a lot money.”

    Previously, Epstein had been involved in a campaign to clear the FBI of charges that it had used clandestine and conspiratorial methods to destroy the Black Panthers. In regards to my previous point, later declassified documents revealed that the FBI had done just that. Epstein’s book Legend had an odd—some would say perverse—spin to it. The thesis was that the KGB had recruited Oswald while he was in Russia and he was acting as their agent when he killed Kennedy. Epstein tried to fog this framework, but the book’s last section—dealing with Oswald’s return to America—is titled “The Mission”. And the last chapter is called “Day of the Assassin”. In an appendix entitled “The Status of the Evidence”, Epstein backs every dubious claim of the Warren Commission. He deals with complex issues, like the dubious capability of Oswald’s rifle, in a less than cursory manner: in this case, all of two sentences. Epstein’s interview subjects, like Jim Botelho, a service buddy of Oswald, insist that he distorted their responses on his way to his offbeat conclusion, namely that the Russians, through the KGB, killed Kennedy.

    DeMohrenschildt was important to this scheme. For the simple reason that he and his family came from the Soviet Union. So, in the upside down world of Legend, one could argue that somehow The Baron was acting as Oswald’s handler in the USA, as some kind of deep cover KGB agent.

    But Epstein’s most questionable decision was the liberal use of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton as a major source. This is the same Angleton whose Cold War paranoia paralyzed the CIA to the point that Director Bill Colby backed a press leak campaign to force him to step down. The same Angleton who, once retired, started a defense fund for agents caught in “black bag” operations, or robberies. The same Angleton who actively encouraged destabilizing governments, not in Guatemala or Iran, but in allied countries like Australia and England.

    Understandably, many have read Legend as Angleton’s outlet for the defense of his—and the CIA’s—conduct in relation to both Oswald and the assassination. More cynical observers see it as a detour away from both Oswald’s and DeMohrenschildt’s secret status as American intelligence agents.

    Epstein’s activities with The Baron toward the end are notable. As stated, an inquest ruled that DeMohrenschildt took his own life. But Mark Lane talked to the state attorney who interviewed Epstein about the day of DeMohrenschildt’s passing. Epstein told David Bloodworth that he had paid his subject three thousand dollars and let him go after a rather short session. Lane’s report, published in Gallery of November 1977, went on to say that Epstein told Bloodworth that even though he spent all this money, he kept no notes and had no tape recordings. Bloodworth told Lane that he did not believe that statement, not after Epstein spent that much money. Bloodworth then added that Epstein showed The Baron a document that indicated he might be taken back to Parkland Hospital in Dallas for some electroshock treatments. (DeMohrenschildt had been suffering from depression.) Bloodworth then looked at Lane and said, “You know, DeMohrenschildt was deathly afraid of those treatments … DeMohrenschildt was terrified of being sent back there. One hour later he was dead.”

    This is the man who now writes in reflection of Jim Garrison and his investigation of Kennedy’s murder. Is it too much to suggest that Epstein is jumping into a “spin control” mode? People like Howard Hunt and J. Edgar Hoover also did this in relation to the life and death of John Kennedy. But they had the sense to wait a while so their efforts would not be seen as transparently self-serving. Epstein exercised no such self-control. Which makes his work not just inaccurate but offensive. And The New Yorker acted as his accomplice in this defamatory exercise.

    Part 2: “The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein”

    Part 3: “Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?” (Probe vol 7 no 1, 1999)

  • Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs. Jim Garrison and the ARRB

    Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs. Jim Garrison and the ARRB

    The first time I recall hearing of Max Holland on the JFK case was through the Wilson Quarterly. This was back in 1994, when he reviewed three books on the JFK case. It was quite clear from that article where Holland stood on the issue. But what was puzzling about Holland was this: What were his credentials on the Kennedy case? I could not figure out what his prior work on the case was. Or how long ago it originated.

    As time went on, it became clear that Holland had very few credentials on the JFK case. What he had was a position on the case. He would therefore pick and choose bits of information to back that position, ignoring other information that vitiated it. What was surprising about Holland’s dubious scholarship is that somehow it did not hinder him from expanding outward from Wilson Quarterly. For instance, for a time he actually was a reporter for The Nation. His ostensible beat was the progress of the Assassination Records Review Board and later developments in the JFK case. The predictable problem was that , to the best of my memory, Holland never reported on any of the bombshell information that the Board released. For example, the Lopez Report contained some fascinating information about whether or not Oswald was in Mexico City. The investigation by Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn revealed some utterly bracing facts about what happened, or did not happen, at President Kennedy’s autopsy. Yet, I don’t recall Holland ever explaining the import of these discoveries to his readers. Just like I don’t recall other volumes he was supposed to be writing which never materialized, e.g., a biography of John McCloy.

    Holland also found a home for a while at the Miller Research Center in Virginia. At the time Holland subscribed to Probe Magazine. When I saw what he was up to, I wrote him a note and told him not to renew his subscription since I could not in good conscience keep him on our list. He wrote back saying that if I did that, he would have to subscribe under a false name. That is how desperate he was for us to do his research for him. (I later found out that Holland’s cohort, Patricia Lambert, subscribed under her husband’s name.)

    Holland spoke at the 2004 AARC conference in Washington entitled “The Warren Report and its Legacy”. At that conference Holland talked about a previously published paper of his concerning Jim Garrison and his knowledge about the mysterious Permindex operation in Italy and Clay Shaw’s connection to it. The implication of Holland’s presentation was that Garrison had been a dupe of KGB disinformation. At that conference, Gary Aguilar rebutted Holland’s talk and his paper. Through him and other sources it turned out that all the overtones of Holland’s thesis were wrong. Garrison’s ideas about the CIA role in the JFK plot did not come through a series of articles planted by the KGB in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera; the story about Clay Shaw and Permindex was not planted by the KGB; Shaw was arrested before the articles appeared, but the six part series was commissioned six months prior to that event; Shaw did serve on the board of that organization, as he himself admitted prior to the assassination; and there were indications in its financing that Permindex was CIA related. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 385-86)

    Shortly after a coruscating letter to The Nation about Holland’s shortcomings by Zachary Sklar and Oliver Stone, Holland either left or was forced out of the journal’s pages. He then started up his own online magazine called Washington Decoded. In 2012 he wrote Leak, a book about Mark Felt’s role in Watergate. Of the three books written in that time period about Watergate—the other two being James Rosen’s The Strong Man, and Ed Gray’s In Nixon’s Web—Holland’s was the least distinguished. And it wasn’t really close. The major topic of Holland’s book was the motive that Felt/Deep Throat had for leaking damaging information to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward about the nefarious activities of the Nixon White House. But with archival research, the Gray book showed that—contrary to what Bob Woodward was still saying—Deep Throat was a composite. And to this day, we don’t know who the other sources were. (To anyone interested in Watergate, this reviewer strongly recommends reading In Nixon’s Web.)

    Of course, Holland is still on the JFK case. In 2011, he produced a documentary for National Geographic Channel on the JFK case. This sorry pastiche was called The Lost Bullet, and Holland used some of the usual suspects to help him salvage the Single Bullet Fantasy. Among them were Larry Sturdivan and Robert Stone, who had previously done their best to shore up the fraud of the Warren Report (which Sturdivan actually worked on). This program was so poor that not only did this site pan it—as did fellow critic Pat Speer—but even Commission advocates like Dale Myers attacked it. (Read our review on this site)

    But Holland still persists. He was seen attending the Cyril Wecht Conference in 2013. And he still hosts his web site with articles from those who agree with him. Which brings us to the topic of this essay.

    II

    Jim Garrison was the first public official to denounce the Warren Report in no uncertain terms. Because of that the New Orleans District Attorney has always been a stone in the shoe of supporters of the official story. Today, over five decades after the fact, he remains the only DA in America to investigate the Kennedy assassination after Oswald was murdered. He made the first serious inquiry into who Oswald’s supporters and friends were, for the Warren Commission said he had none. In public, he called Oswald first a decoy, then a patsy, then a victim. (See his Playboy interview from 1967) He was the first and only DA to actually unearth evidence that convincingly contradicted the theses of the Warren Report about the actual role of the alleged assassin. For example, it was Jim Garrison who first investigated the strange life and death of Rose Cheramie. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 181-82) It was Jim Garrison who first discovered that Oswald had been associated with David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol. And, after the assassination, Ferrie was calling CAP members to be sure that there was no evidence they had which would reveal that association. (ibid, p. 177) It was Jim Garrison who first investigated the Clinton/Jackson incident, the odd journey that Oswald, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie took to Feliciana Parish about 90 miles northwest of New Orleans in the late summer of 1963. (ibid, pp. 88-93) It was Jim Garrison who uncovered the mystery of the 544 Camp Street address, which was printed on some of the literature Oswald passed out on Canal Street in New Orleans during that summer—and which the FBI tried to eradicate from the record. (See John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 310) Garrison was also the first person who interviewed the man who he would later call, “The most important witness there is.” This was CIA/KGB insider Richard Case Nagell, who was in prison at the time. (op. cit. DiEugenio, pp. 183-84) As revealed in his book, The Echo from Dealey Plaza, Garrison was the first person to send an investigator to interview Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden. I could go on and on, but in sum let us refer to an interview Joan Didion did with James Atlas for Vanity Fair: “It goes back to … the Garrison case. Remember, he had this elaborate conspiracy theory. The stones that were turned over! Fantastic characters kept emerging … this whole revealed world … .”

    My only dispute with Didion’s quote is that none of the items I refer to above is theoretical. It was all genuine evidence that clearly indicated that Oswald was being manipulated in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. It also showed who the people doing the manipulating were. And the Warren Commission—actually FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—deliberately kept this information out of their 1964 official story. It is true that Garrison did formulate a theory from this, and the reams of other evidence he garnered. But I would argue that, as Didion implies, his evidence was much more credible, and his ideas much more logical, than the Warren Report. Which Garrison, on The Tonight Show, termed a fairy tale. (Listen to that show here)

    Garrison was challenging the Warren Commission, and by extension the FBI, and he ended up accusing certain aspects of the operational arm of the CIA for being closely involved in the Kennedy murder. For this, he was viciously attacked by certain power centers of the American establishment. The media, which had clearly sided with the Warren Commission, was glad to go along with it. Today, there can be no doubt about how this assault was organized, who was involved in it, and how it was executed. For the declassifications of the ARRB have been quite strong on this issue. So much so that I devoted no less than sixty pages to exposing several aspects of how it all worked in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed. (See especially pages 226-85) This belated exposure—which was lied about at the time—is all backed up with scores of footnotes. Therefore, actions that were previously assumed are now out in the open, names are mentioned, operations can now be described. Can we detail it all completely? No. But that is only because certain documents seem to have been elided from the record or, as yet, not declassified in full. But what we do have is copious enough. And it indicates that the reason for all of this obstruction—and the eventual destruction—of Jim Garrison was rather simple. In the fall of 1967, at the request of Director Richard Helms, the CIA convened the first meeting of what the Agency termed The Garrison Group. The meeting opened with counter intelligence chief James Angleton’s assistant Ray Rocca issuing a dire warning. After studying Garrison’s case for months, Rocca said that he felt “that Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.” (op. cit., DiEugenio, p. 270)

    Make no mistake: the creation of this Agency body is what Shaw’s lawyers, and Shaw himself, wanted. In fact, his lawyers went to Washington and pleaded their case for extralegal intervention. This is a point that Shaw’s lead lawyer, Irvin Dymond, lied about to this author and William Davy during a 1994 interview in his New Orleans office. Contrary to Dymond’s prevarications, there can be no question today that they got such aid. And in abundance. For example, in January of 1968, a CIA cable was sent out. It read in part, “[Garrison] case is of interest to several Agency components covering aspects which relate to Agency … office heavily committed to this endeavor.” A later memo states that certain offices will be “tasked”, as part of an ongoing review. (ibid, p. 277) One of these tasks was to provide any Garrison suspect or witness who switched sides with a lawyer. And since men like Walter Sheridan had bribed and intimidated several witnesses to defect from Garrison, these lawyers came in handy. In fact, after certain witnesses were talked into changing their stories, they were told to call Dymond. Dymond would then tell them that if Garrison should try and charge them with anything that he would get them an attorney and bond would be posted for them. (ibid, p. 241) When Gordon Novel, a CIA infiltrator in Garrison’s office, was called by Garrison before the grand jury, he fled from New Orleans before his appearance. He eventually employed four attorneys. Since he did not have a job at the time, he was asked how he paid for these four lawyers. During a legal deposition he stated that they were being “clandestinely remunerated”. (ibid, p. 263) As they should have been, since electronics expert Novel had been originally recruited to wire Garrison’s office by Allen Dulles. (ibid, pp. 232-33)

    The above is only a short précis of what we know today about what happened in New Orleans through both ARRB declassifications and by field investigation from people like William Davy and Joan Mellen. Suffice it to say, the literally tens of thousands of pages of new documents about the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department and Jim Garrison, have led to three major reevaluations of Garrison’s inquiry by Davy, Mellen, and this author. Those three volumes amount to over a thousand pages of mostly new information. It is all quite fascinating in both its actions and overtones. Because, for example, Helms ordered the Garrison Group to consider what Garrison would do before, during, and even after the trial of Clay Shaw. As has been demonstrated in these volumes, the interference with Garrison went on both before and during Shaw’s trial. Robert Tanenbaum, House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Deputy Counsel, actually saw some of these documents. He said they came out of Richard Helms’ office which, of course, would be the highest level of the CIA. (ibid, p. 294) But, in addition to the CIA, the Justice Department was monitoring Shaw’s trial in real time. (ibid, pp. 299-306)

    III

    In light of the above, the question then becomes, how does one write a book today about Jim Garrison and/or Clay Shaw which sides with the official position of 1964? Namely that there was no conspiracy and Oswald was a lonely sociopath without friends and colleagues, let alone confederates. Well, leave it to Max Holland to try and do so. Currently up at his site is an article by one Donald Carpenter. Carpenter was a CPA for 25 years. He then turned to writing novels. In 2013 he wrote a biography of Clay Shaw entitled Man of a Million Fragments.

    I started reading the book at the time of its publication. I did not get very far. Because early on it became apparent to me that Carpenter’s writing was, shall we say, not very candid. For example, when I read what the author wrote about General Charles Thrasher, who Shaw served under as his aide de camp during World War II, I blanched. I deduced two things from this part of Carpenter’s work: 1.) He was determined to minimize or eliminate any ties Shaw had to intelligence work, especially covert actions, and 2.) He was going to color over the very real accusations against Thrasher of participating in war crimes against German POW’s. These charges had been covered up at the end of World War II. But through some extraordinary archival research, author James Bacque had uncovered them and assembled a startling expose of these crimes in his 1989 book Other Losses. From Carpenter’s maneuvering on this issue, I deduced that if the author was going to do something like that with Thrasher, then there would be no holds barred with Clay Shaw.

    After reading Carpenter’s current article at Holland’s web site, it appears I was correct. What Carpenter and Holland want to do is sort of like what H. G. Wells once wrote a novel about: place the reader in a time machine and transport us back to 1969. That way, the censorious duo can make believe that everything described above does not exist. Unfortunately for them, we live in the dimensions of time and space, therefore it does exist. One can make believe it does not exist, but then that means that what you are writing is make-believe history. This is something like attending the Paul Hoch College of Historical Studies. Let me explain what I mean by that.

    In Chicago in 1994, I sat in the audience at Doug Carlson’s fine Midwest Symposium on John F. Kennedy. Hoch spoke at this event. He assumed the role of grizzled veteran giving advice to the newbies who were about to go through the declassified ARRB files. One of his pieces of advice was to ignore anything in there on Clay Shaw. I never forgot that since it went against everything I had learned in graduate school. Namely that scholars are supposed to seek out as much new and relevant information as they can find. That is the way historians fill in gaps in the past. What Hoch was proposing was the historical version of prior restraint on free speech. To me, this was the opposite of what real scholarship was supposed to be about. All I can say is that Carpenter has written both a book and essay that satisfies Hoch’s See no Evil, Hear no Evil, and Say no Evil (Orwellian) dictum.

    IV

    Right at the beginning of the article, Carpenter shows just how much he is in disregard of the archival records of the ARRB. He pegs the beginning of Garrison’s inquiry to the famous conversation the DA had with Senator Russell Long on a plane ride to New York City. He then adds that the actual date of the November plane trip is not known, and that this marked the beginning of Garrison’s inquiry. Both assertions are wrong. William Davy tracked down the origins of the trip to NYC and the date. (Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 57)

    But more importantly, this does not mark the beginning of Garrison’s inquiry. As almost everyone knows, except perhaps Mr. Carpenter, Garrison had inquired into the JFK case back in 1963. Then he did a brief investigation into the event because Oswald had lived in New Orleans for several months in 1963. He ended up by calling David Ferrie into his office for an informal interview. Garrison was curious about a seemingly inexplicable journey Ferrie made with two friends to Houston and Galveston on the day of the assassination. Ferrie said he took the car ride to go ice-skating and goose hunting. Except as Garrison had figured out: 1.) Ferrie did not go ice-skating once he got to Houston; 2.) He drove 400 miles through a pounding rainstorm not to skate; and 3.) His second excuse, to go goose hunting was vitiated by the fact that he did not take shotguns with him. (ibid, pp. 45-47) This ridiculous story seemed utterly strained and patently ersatz to the DA. So he turned over Ferrie to the FBI.

    The Bureau interviewed Ferrie. He lied to them as he had to the DA. For instance, he said he never knew Oswald, which was provably false. But even more ridiculous he said he had never used a telescopic rifle and would not even know how to use one. He also said he had associated with no Cuban exile group members since 1961. (DiEugenio, p. 177) Which was preposterous, since Ferrie had been involved in Operation Mongoose in 1962. (ibid, p. 115) As most people understand, lying to an FBI agent is a crime. Evidently, Ferrie understood that it did not matter. Someone in the FBI hierarchy would protect him. As they did. There is not even a hint of any of this FBI cooperation in Carpenter’s article.

    But returning to my main point about Carpenter’s inaccuracy about Garrison: it’s not really true that Garrison’s original inquiry was relaunched by the talk with Long. As Joan Mellen notes in her book A Farewell to Justice, Garrison was collecting various critiques of the Warren Report as they were published. And he urged his assistants to read them also. (Mellen, p. 4) But, beyond that, in the Garrison files donated to the ARRB by Lyon Garrison, one will see that there are some memos in the time period of 1965-66. When this author interviewed chief investigator Lou Ivon, he affirmed that Garrison would get interested in a certain assassination issue and send someone out to do an inquiry. (DiEugenio, 177-78) Therefore, right at the outset, Carpenter’s essay is marked by incompleteness and inaccuracy. And Max Holland had no interest in correcting any of it.

    Carpenter continues his march of folly by writing that, in 1966, Garrison picked up “three already spent leads.” One will understand how ridiculous that phrase is when Carpenter lists the first ‘spent lead” as Ferrie. Apparently, Carpenter is fine with Ferrie lying to both the DA and the FBI. Unlike our intrepid essayist, most curious and objective readers would have liked to know the following:

    1. Why did Ferrie lie about the purpose of his trip to Houston and Galveston?
    2. What purpose was served by denying he knew Oswald when it could so easily be shown that this was false?
    3. How on earth could he deny that he was not familiar with a telescopic rifle, or even known how to use one, when he participated in training for both the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose?

    As any professional investigator comprehends, when a person of interest lies under penalty of perjury, it usually indicates that there are higher stakes involved. Today, there can be little doubt that this was the case with David Ferrie. Any real investigation of Ferrie would have uncovered a welter of incriminating evidence. Not just about him. But about Sergio Arcacha Smith, Clay Shaw, and Guy Banister. There are also links between Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith and David Phillips.

    For instance, during a legal deposition for his lawsuit against Garrison, Gordon Novel described a meeting at Banister’s office. At the meeting were Novel, Banister, Arcacha Smith and a man who clearly fits the description of Phillips. (Davy, pp. 22-24) Secondly, in preparation for the Bay of Pigs, Ferrie trained Cuban exiles in underwater demolition at the abandoned Belle Chasse Naval Ammunition Depot, just south of New Orleans. Ferrie revealed that Sergio Arcacha Smith was the conduit for the arms coming into the camp. In an after action report, the CIA officer who summarized the types and dates of training, noted that the Belle Chasse base had now been sterilized; meaning no trace of CIA affiliation remained. That memo was written by David Phillips. (ibid, p. 31) Third, an INS agent named Wendell Roache told the Church Committee that they were tracking Ferrie because of his close associations with Cuban exiles illegally in the country. They had traced him to 544 Camp Street, and also found out he took films of a training camp. This may be the film that HSCA Deputy Counsel Bob Tanenbaum said he saw in the early days of the HSCA inquiry. If so, it featured Oswald, Banister and Phillips. (DiEugenio, p. 116)

    So much for Ferrie being a “spent lead”.

    Another so-called “spent lead” the author refers to is attorney Dean Andrews. As many authors have pointed out, someone put the fear of God into Andrews about revealing the true identity of the mysterious Clay Bertrand he referred to in his Warren Commission testimony. On at least three occasions—with Mark Lane, Anthony Summers and Garrison—he refused to reveal who Bertrand was. (ibid, p. 181) This was an important point because Andrews told his assistants that while he was in hospital, Bertrand had called him and asked him to go to Dallas to defend the accused assassin of JFK, Lee Oswald. Who Andrews knew previously, since Oswald had been in his office more than once that summer. (Davy, p. 49) Not only was Andrews threatened not to reveal Bertrand’s true identity, but his office was rifled after he got out of the hospital. (DiEugenio, p. 181)

    Further, the FBI visited him in the hospital and did all they could to intimidate him into retracting his statements about Clay Bertrand. (Davy, p. 50) Clearly, there were forces way above Andrews that did not want him to reveal the true identity of Bertrand. In fact, the FBI wanted him to say that he had dreamed the whole episode up while under hospital sedation. As William Davy has demonstrated with hospital records, on November 23rd, Andrews made a call to his secretary about going to Dallas to defend Oswald before he was medicated. And it was not even close. He made the call to his secretary at 4 PM. He was given a sedative four hours later. (Davy, p. 52)

    But further, there are multiple paths of corroboration for Andrews being called by the mysterious Bertrand. Andrews had talked about the call with his friend Monk Zelden, president of the New Orleans BAR association. He had called his secretary Eva Springer on the 23rd and reported it. He told his investigator, former Sgt. R. M. Davis, and he told his wife. (ibid, p. 51) In light of all this, it simply was not credible that Andrews could not recall the true identity of Bertrand. This selective amnesia was clearly caused by the threats of people Andrews said were from Washington and threatened to inflict serious bodily harm if he revealed who Bertrand was. (DiEugenio, p. 181)

    V

    Which leads to who Bertrand really was. In his obsolete article, Carpenter writes that Garrison figured that Shaw was Bertrand through a process of descriptive evaluation. In other words, through Andrews, he had information that Bertrand was close to some Hispanics, was a homosexual, and spoke some Spanish. All this was based on the fact that Andrews stated that Bertrand had sent him clients who were, as he termed it “gay Mexicanos”. Therefore, from this information, Garrison deduced that these traits fit the description of Clay Shaw. And, according to Carpenter, this is how Garrison fixed on Shaw as a suspect.

    There is a rather familiar problem with this statement by Carpenter. Namely, it is wrong. As anyone can see by going through Garrison’s extant files, the DA spent many hours sending his investigators out pounding the pavement trying to find out who Bertrand was. The process literally extended over a period of months. The reason being that many denizens of the French Quarter did not want to talk to Garrison or his agents. The reason for that being Garrison’s previous crackdown against B-girl drinking in the Quarter. That legal action closed several bars permanently, and many others temporarily, thereby putting many people out of work. But when Garrison stopped going on these inquiries himself, slowly, over time, his staff began to get results. Today, with the release of Garrison’s files, there is really no question that Shaw was Bertrand. The number of witnesses that attest to this is in the low double digits. (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88) And the information has nothing to do with “gay Mexicanos”. It was such common knowledge that the FBI knew it. The Bureau wrote three separate memos about this issue from 1963 to 1967. These memoranda say that Shaw was of interest to the FBI in December of 1963 in relation to the JFK case, and that they had at least three witnesses saying that Shaw was Bertrand. (ibid, p. 388)

    But the best source on this would be Dean Andrews. Who, unfortunately, was frightened out of his wits. Yet, thanks to the efforts of estimable researcher Martin Hay, we have now found out that Andrews did reveal the fact that Shaw was Bertrand to one source. That source was Harold Weisberg. While working with Garrison, Weisberg met with Andrews several times. Harold developed a rapport and trust with the lawyer. Andrews eventually told him that Shaw was Bertrand. But he told him so under the restriction that he tell no one else. Weisberg kept his word. It was not until many years later, in the manuscript for an unpublished book, that Weisberg wrote about this secret revelation. Hay found it by sifting through the late Weisberg’s investigative files at Hood College. (ibid)

    The obvious question that Garrison never got to ask Shaw was this: Why did you call Andrews and tell him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald? To put it mildly, the implications of that query are thunderous. By not consulting the declassified record, Carpenter avoids posing it.

    What Carpenter does with the trial of Clay Shaw is SOP for him. Carpenter admits that Shaw’s lawyers were the main cause of the long delay in getting the case to trial. What he does not say is that this was done in order for Shaw’s secret allies to infiltrate, clandestinely record, and intimidate and bribe Garrison’s witnesses. There are too many examples of this illicit behavior to even begin to describe them in this essay. I will describe just four.

    Bernardo DeTorres was a high level CIA agent who ended up working with weapons expert Mitch Werbell. He reportedly had photos of the Kennedy assassination stashed in a safe. He was one of the first infiltrators into Garrison’s office in late 1966. The unsuspecting DA sent him to investigate Cuban exile Eladio Del Valle, David Ferrie’s paymaster for flights into Cuba. Garrison never saw Bernardo after this assignment. But the report that Garrison got about the subsequent murder of Del Valle reads as follows: “He was shot in the chest, and it appears gangland style, and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES apartment.” (DiEugenio, p. 227) Would you show up for work after your boss got such a report? Needless to say, Del Valle would have been a very important witness for Garrison.

    William Wood aka Bill Boxley, was a former CIA agent who volunteered for Garrison’s staff. Boxley wanted Garrison to do some very bizarre things. Like, on the fifth anniversary of JFK ‘s death, indict a man named Robert Perrin. Perrin had some visibility due to the fact that he had been the husband of Warren Commission witness Nancy Perrin Rich. The only problem with this idea was that Perrin had died a few years previously. Boxley then said, well, he wasn’t really dead, the authorities had mixed up his body with another. Boxley—along with the late William Turner—was also the main culprit in inducing the whole Eugene Bradley debacle. Where Garrison had to withdraw an arrest warrant when he discovered that Boxley had made some very dubious claims about Bradley that were not accurate. It later turned out that Boxley was, of course, a CIA agent who knew about the Garrison Group and how that desk operated. (ibid, pp. 278-81)

    I will briefly mention two other cases. From Garrison’s files, it appears that James Angleton had a whole book written simply to mislead Garrison. This, of course refers to the whole, elaborate Farewell America hoax. The uncovering of which, is also due to Harold Weisberg. From his extensive field inquiry he discovered that the book was actually supervised by a French double agent named Philippe De Vosjoli. De Vosjoli clandestinely worked for Angleton. (ibid, pp. 281-83) Finally, in his discussion of the Clay Shaw trial, Carpenter doesn’t mention the name of Clyde Johnson. Johnson was supposed to be Garrison’s lead witness. Since many of his witnesses were being terrorized—e.g., Richard Case Nagell had a grenade thrown at him, Aloysius Habighorst was almost run over by a truck—Garrison hid Johnson. This was at an out of town location. But to show just how infiltrated his office was, this location was discovered. Johnson was beaten to a bloody pulp, was hospitalized and could not testify. (ibid, p. 294)

    The point of all this is to show that the constant delays were strategic in intent. It gave the CIA, the FBI, and others a longer time frame in order to weaken Garrison’s case. Carpenter also brings up the old chestnut of Garrison not trying the case himself. Again, this shows his ignorance of Garrison’s files. Decades ago, Garrison explained to a correspondent that he was stricken by a painful back injury and also the Hong Kong flu during the trial. (ibid, pp. 292-93)

    As the reader can see, the entire prosecution of Clay Shaw was more or less sabotaged by several covert operations. But even at that, Shaw had to lie his head off on the stand to escape. In sum, Shaw deceived the jury on every material subject there was. He denied knowing Ferrie or Oswald, denied being in the Clinton/Jackson area with those two men, and he denied being associated with the CIA. He even denied using an alias. (ibid, p. 310) With what we know today, these denials under oath reduce his testimony to the level of grotesque black comedy.

    The deceit about his association with the CIA actually goes beyond his lies, because the CIA actually lied to itself on this issue. This is how ingrained the cover up was about Shaw at Langley. In many of their memos at the time, the Agency denied any connection to Clay Shaw. Which, of course, was false. Afterwards, they admitted he was only a business contact. Which was also false. It later turned out that Shaw had a covert security clearance for a project code named QK ENCHANT. As former CIA officer Victor Marchetti later said, this appears to have been a part of the Domestic Operations Division run by Tracy Barnes, and which also employed Howard Hunt. (ibid, p. 385)

    But actually it’s even worse than that. As Joan Mellen later discovered, the CIA had hidden away documents that proved that Shaw was a highly paid, valuable contract agent from early in the fifties. This document was not declassified until a historical review program did so in the nineties. (Joan Mellen, Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54-55) This information corresponds with what Gordon Novel revealed in a written communication made back in the seventies. There he wrote that, back in 1964, the CIA had sent out an order through Director of Security Howard Osborn to conceal Shaw’s true Agency status from inquiries into the JFK murder. To say this tactic was successful does not really do it justice. But it shows the price the public must pay for the almost maniacal secrecy the national security state demands.

    The most inadvertently humorous part of Carpenter’s pathetic essay comes at the end. There he praises Oliver Stone for helping create the declassification process of the ARRB. Why is that funny? It’s funny because this essay does not use any of those ARRB declassified documents it credits Stone for releasing.

  • Robert Kennedy, Jr., Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He didn’t Commit

    Robert Kennedy, Jr., Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He didn’t Commit

    framed leader

    Was Michael Skakel Framed?

    When the trial of Michael Skakel for the murder of Martha Moxley took place in the summer of 2002, I deliberately tuned out. I noticed a few of the rather unusual circumstances going on around the proceedings, and I decided that something really weird was going on. For instance, the prosecutor used a one-man grand jury, he pushed to try Skakel as an adult when he said that the defendant had committed the crime as a juvenile, the state rewrote its statute of limitations rules since Skakel had been indicted 23 years after the crime. I concluded that there were sinister subterranean forces at work that I, back then, did not have the time or energy to explore.

    Then, about a year or so after Skakel was convicted, I picked up a magazine at a local convenience store and read a reply by Dominick Dunne to a long essay on the case that Robert Kennedy Jr. had written for The Atlantic. I found Dunne’s reply rather weak and strained. Especially since Dunne was supposed to be the media’s authority on that case, and had been given free reign at Vanity Fair to write about it. After reading Dunne’s tepid reply, I thought, “If this is all he can come up with, maybe I should read that essay by Kennedy.”

    Entitled, “A Miscarriage of Justice”, the Atlantic piece was a long, compelling critique of both the events and the legal techniques used to convict Michael Skakel. Kennedy was angry with not just Dunne, who had a prime role in the affair, but also the MSM. He felt that they had sat on the sidelines through the whole decade-long effort by Dunne and Mark Fuhrman to indict and convict his cousin Mike Skakel. Kennedy brought out many things that had been blurred and/or buried by the rather uninspired, lackadaisical, lemming-like reporting on the subject. Dunne was outraged by that essay, thus began a feud between the two men.

    Kennedy has now decided to expand his essay into a book. It is titled Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He didn’t Commit. The book seems to me as good or better than his award-winning essay. And the volume shows just how much of the story about the Skakel case went unreported. And consequently, how misinformed the public was about it.

    Some readers of kennedysandking.com may ask: How is the Skakel case related to what this web site is supposed to be about? Which is the assassinations of four great leaders of the Sixties. That is a fair question. Let me explain. Way back in late 1997, this reviewer wrote a two-part essay entitled, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” It appeared in the September/October and November/December issues of Probe Magazine. It is available in that format on the Probe CD, but it was also included in the anthology of Probe, entitled The Assassinations; it is also available on this site. It became one of the most famous articles Probe ever published—which is saying something. In it I attempted to lay bare the mythology that had arisen from the posthumous character assassination of President Kennedy. The essay was occasioned by the release of Sy Hersh’s hatchet job of a book The Dark Side of Camelot. In leading up to that book’s release, it was revealed that Hersh had fallen for some of the legerdemain that had been created to fulfill that circus sideshow business. In his case it was the Lex Cusack hoax about Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. In my article I went through literally thousands of pages of this material. It was a major ordeal. But I came to two conclusions. First, most of it was pernicious junk, politically motivated. Second, I also concluded that there was no end in sight to the phenomenon, since it now appeared to be a (well-paying) part of our culture. The tabloids had led the way, and then the MSM, due to pressures from cable TV and the web, jumped into the mud-wrestling pit that has become modern media.

    At the end of my article I warned that this tabloidization of the media about the Kennedys posed a real threat to our history, because it reflected a genuine danger to journalistic standards. This danger was typified by the late David Heymann, who has now been exposed as a serial confabulator on the Kennedys.

    Yet even in my darkest hour writing that essay, I never thought that what I was describing could lead to putting an innocent man in jail. But it did.

    II

    Martha Moxley was a 15-year-old high school student who was killed in 1975 in the small, exclusive town of Greenwich, Connecticut. Due to some serious mishandling of key evidence —some of which was actually lost—and a small police force that was not equipped to handle a homicide case, no charges were filed as a result of the initial investigation. Moxley was killed at around 10:00 PM on Halloween eve, which is sometimes called Mischief Night or Hell Night in Greenwich. (Kennedy, p. 7) Many children and adolescents go out on the streets to party and drink and, at times, smoke pot. Therefore, there is an influx of young men and women roaming around the streets and alleyways and backyards. Martha’s body was not discovered until late the next morning. It was under a pine tree in the wooded area of the Moxley estate. She had been clubbed with a six iron golf club with such force that the club head broke off. She was then stabbed with the handle, which was protruding from her neck. (p. 12) Her body had then been dragged about 80 feet in a zigzag manner. Forensic pathologist Henry Lee said the torque of the blows projected the club head over 70 feet in the air. The zigzag pattern seemed to indicate that the person(s) who committed the crime did not know their way around the property.

    Right here, there is a serious problem in the case against Skakel. At the time, Michael was about 5’ 5” and 120 lbs. And the author enters pictures into his book that certify this. He had not entered puberty at the time, and actually looks effeminate. The idea that a boy of that size could drag the body that far by himself is hard to believe. But the idea that he could strike such terrific blows that he could break the shaft of the club, sending it flying over 70 feet in the air—that is even harder to buy into. As criminal attorney Linda Kenney Baden noted, this phenomenon is just about unheard of, even with professional killers. The Mob advises its hit men to use golf clubs rather than baseball bats because golf clubs don’t break, while baseball bats do. In one case, the victim’s head was literally broken open with the club, and the cement underneath the body was cracked—but the club stayed intact. (Kennedy, pp. 216-17) She advised the defense to do stress tests on a duplicate club. These were not done. Yet, as we shall see, Baden quickly left the defense team. This ended up being a grave error. And the prosecution got around the strength problem by presenting to the jury a photo of Michael that was taken four years later, into puberty, and after hard physical training at a boot-camp type boarding school. (ibid, p. 217) As we shall see, this is one of the many instances of professional misbehavior that the defense attorney, Mickey Sherman, allowed the prosecutor to get away with.

    What makes this even worse, the handle disappeared. This allowed the prosecutor to say that Skakel took it with him as a trophy. But, as Kennedy writes, three witnesses saw it: two policemen and a doctor. (p. 12)

    At the time of the Moxley killing, 15-year-old Michael Skakel was at a cousin’s house watching TV. This was certified by more than one witness, and also by a police report summary. In other words, he had an alibi. (ibid, pp. 25, 122) How did the prosecutor get around this? He said that Michael’s family conveniently supplied the alibi, and then he kept the police report conclusion from the defense. Further, there was still another witness who was at the cousin’s home watching TV with Michael at the time. He was not a member of the Skakel family. His name was Dennis Osorio and he even talked to Skakel while watching TV. Unfortunately, he was not produced at the Moxley murder trial. (pp. 230-31)

    In sum, there was no hard evidence in the case to convict Skakel, or anyone else. There were no matching blood samples, no DNA, no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses, no shoeprints. This, plus the mishandling of the evidence, and the failure of the local police to turn the case over to higher authorities, made it a case that was eventually going to go cold. The previous prosecutor, Donald Browne, never filed any charges. But he did allow his investigators to build investigatory cases. Their two main suspects were Ken Littleton (the Skakel family tutor), and Michael’s older brother Tom Skakel. The latter was the last person to see Martha alive and was having a sexual affair with her. (ibid, p. 19) But in Browne’s eyes, there simply was not enough of a factual case against either of them with which to file a murder charge. In other words, as Kennedy describes it, Browne was exercising prosecutorial discretion. The job of the prosecutor is not to go after someone in a high profile case because it is expedient. This typifies the win-at-any-cost standard that was exposed, for example, in Tarrant County under the supervision of DA Henry Wade and homicide chief Will Fritz.

    As Kennedy described it, the win-at-all-costs mentality eventually became so dominant that the new prosecutor, Jonathan Benedict, did a cut-and-paste job on audiotapes that Michael had made when he was thinking of writing a book about his ordeal. The Benedict tape mixed words from those writing efforts and cut them out of context to make it appear Skakel was confessing to the murder. Benedict then paid a computer company $67,000 to prepare a skillful PowerPoint presentation built around the cut-and-paste. In court, he played the tapes, and put words on the screen, enlarging the most potent phrases and coloring them in red. If you can believe it, even though Michael implored his attorney to object by saying, “This is bullshit!”, he did not. (ibid, p. 33)

    How did such a curious event happen? What could have caused such a failure of the legal system? How did all the checks and balances go awry? It was largely due to actors involving themselves from outside the system. How and why this occurred tells us a lot about the tabloidization of our present culture, and how that tabloidization has become weaponized.

    III

    Dominick Dunne began his career as a stage manager for television. He then became a TV producer. He later moved to Hollywood and became a movie producer. The films he produced are considered today to be fairly nondescript: Ash Wednesday with Liz Taylor, Play It as it Lays with Tuesday Weld, The Panic In Needle Park with Al Pacino, and William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band. His marriage failed and he became a narcotics abuser. He moved to Oregon to live a quiet life and rehabilitate. Two things happened that made him a nationally known celebrity reporter. First, in 1983, Tina Brown was asked to take over the editorship of Vanity Fair magazine. One of the first things she did was to get in contact with Dominick Dunne. She was going to change the tone and attitude of the magazine. To do that, she wanted him to write about the upcoming trial of the murder of his actress daughter, Dominique.

    Dominique’s estranged boyfriend, John Sweeney, had strangled the young actress. She went into a coma, and five days later was taken off life support. At the trial, due to a couple of controversial rulings by judge Burton Katz, Sweeney was not convicted of murder, but of manslaughter. He ended up serving only three and a half years in prison. Quite understandably, Dunne was outraged. This all made suitable material for what Brown was doing with Vanity Fair: she was going Hollywood celebrity. This story featured a former Hollywood producer, the father of a murdered young Hollywood actress, and a verdict that was simply unjust. Brown hired Dunne as a regular contributor for her magazine. And he now specialized in crimes among the rich and famous.

    The problem with Dunne’s writing on the subject was that he was much better in describing the hauteur and accoutrements of the milieu than he was as a crime detective. In his book, Kennedy describes a couple of the more notable faux pas Dunne committed: in the Edmond Safra case, and in the Chandra Levy case. In the latter, Dunne reduced himself to a court jester in public. He said that congressman Gary Condit had killed Levy. And he had done it in one of two ways: either via assassins from Dubai, or a redneck motorcycle gang. (ibid, p. 157) He actually said this on Laura Ingraham’s radio show. Condit promptly filed an eleven million dollar libel action. During the proceedings it was discovered that Dunne had based his charges on the words of a proven con artist. He was forced to settle with Condit in 2005, and this more or less ruined his reputation. But, as the author notes, this all came too late for Michael Skakel.

    As his appearance on the Ingraham show demonstrates, Dunne became an insider with the conservative broadcast network. After he met Dorthy Moxley he decided to take a look at her daughter’s case. He was then allowed to write more than one article in Vanity Fair about it. In 1991, when Dunne covered the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in Florida, he dropped a note that Smith had been in Greenwich the night Martha was killed and prosecutor Browne wanted some forensic tests done on him. (ibid, p. 159) This was utterly and completely false. And it is hard to believe that Dunne did not understand that when he wrote it. But it indicated three things: 1.) Dunne had designs to enter the Moxley case; 2.) once he did, fitting with his rich and famous bailiwick, he was going to after a Kennedy relative; and 3.) he was catering in this endeavor to his newfound friends on the right.

    Dunne decided to center his appeal on this point: if the Moxley case was not solved, it was because either the police were incompetent or they were knuckling under to power and influence. Either way, it made the Greenwich authorities look pretty bad. In 1993, Dunne published a thinly disguised novel called A Season In Purgatory. Based on the Moxley case, it depicted a cover-up by the police due to a powerful family’s influence. In that book, if one can believe it, the murderer is a camouflaged John F. Kennedy, Jr. This is how much Dunne was catering to the Ingraham crowd. But because he was a high-profile reporter, he actually got a book tour to push the novel. In the TV and radio interviews he did at this time, he said he really thought the perpetrator was Tommy Skakel. (ibid) The novel was then made into a 1996 mini-series for TV. This got Dunne and the Moxley case even more exposure. But the mini-series had a catapulting effect, because it was that show, plus an unseen event by Dunne, that brought him into contact with a young man named Jamie Bryan. And there lies a huge turning point in the Moxley case. It was a calamity for Michael Skakel. One brought on by his father’s attorney.

    IV

    Michael’s father, Rushton “Rucky” Skakel, was an odd person. He was a very conservative Republican who did not at all care for the Kennedys or their philosophy. He supported Richard Nixon in 1960. (ibid, p. 43) In 1964, he gave money to Republican Kenneth Keating, Bobby Kennedy’s Senate opponent in New York. (ibid) In fact, as the author shows pictorially, Rucky received a crude portrait caricature of Bobby Kennedy from Ronald Reagan at a meeting held at the Bohemian Grove. Both men were smiling during the transaction. (ibid, p. 44) At one point, he forbade the name Kennedy to be uttered in his home. Ethel Skakel, Bobby’s wife, was made the black sheep of the family.

    A constant theme of Dunne’s was to depict the Skakel family as enormously wealthy, even more wealthy than the Kennedys. This was not really true at the time of Martha’s murder and beyond. George Skakel, the founder of the family business Great Lakes Carbon, had died in a plane crash in 1955. His son George Jr. then ran the business. But he died in another plane crash in 1966. Rushton then guided the company, but he did not have the talent or aptitude to keep it at its previous stature. In 1972, when his wife passed away at age 42, Rushton turned to alcohol and drugs to ease the pain. The company suffered progressively and was sold in the early nineties for pennies on the dollar. (Stamford Advocate, 1/4/2003) By this time, the family fortune had declined so much that Rucky had to sell his house and ski lodge to pay for Michael’s defense. (Kennedy, p. 149)

    After Moxley’s body was discovered across the street from his home, he did something that, again, contradicts the Dunne meme of influencing the police investigation. He gave them the run of his house for about two months. Quite literally. He gave them the keys. To attain a search warrant the police usually have to go before a judge and plead their case for the search. Rushton saved the police that trouble. He signed a document giving them entry to his house. He then went beyond that and signed another document giving them access to his ski lodge. He gave them the keys for that place also. (Kennedy, p. 87) When the police interrogated Tommy Skakel at the station for hours, not only was there no lawyer there; there was no adult there. (ibid)

    In 1991, Rushton’s corporate attorney Tom Sheridan offered up a truly horrendous idea to his client. (ibid, p. 96) He proposed that Rushton pay for a private detective company to run deep and lengthy inquiries on his family to see if any of them had anything to do with the Moxley murder. (As we shall see, Sheridan turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.) Sheridan hired a couple of friends of his, and from the start in 1993, he personally ran the investigation out of his Manhattan office. He rented the third floor of his brownstone to the investigating company, Sutton Associates. This made no sense, since Sutton was located in Long Island, and most of the investigative work was done in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Sheridan was making money off of doing no legwork, but he was also the keeper of the files. (p. 144) Michael Skakel had never been a suspect before this time. But, through Sheridan, he now became one. As Kennedy demonstrates, it is clear that Sheridan’s editing put spin on the Sutton reports to impute suspicion onto Michael. (ibid pp. 145-46) And again, contrary to what Dunne wrote, Rucky had agreed in advance that if anyone turned out to be undeniably guilty, the information would be forwarded to Dorthy Moxley. (p. 97)

    To understand why Sheridan made this bizarre proposal, we must go back to another horrendous decision by Sheridan. In 1978, Michael was arrested for a DUI and driving without a license. He ended up crashing his car into a telephone pole. Sheridan used this incident to recommend to Rushton and the authorities that Michael be admitted to a kind of private reform school in Maine called Élan. As it turned out, Élan was really an unregulated boot camp in which the worst of the worst students ran amok and terrorized others. Michael was beaten up many times and psychologically terrorized. (For a shocking chronicle of what went on at Élan, see pp. 138-143) Michael tried to escape from that house of horrors three times. He was caught and returned each time. And each time he was physically bludgeoned. A psychologist stated that he suffers from PTSD because of this experience. On top of this, Sheridan charged Rushton $60,000 as his fee for getting Michael into this place. As Kennedy points out, it would have only cost two thousand dollars to pay the ticket. (ibid, p. 137) Élan was such an atrocity that finally, in 2011, students who had survived the ordeal got together and closed it down. (ibid, p. 138)

    If the reader can believe it, the prosecution tried to say that Michael was sent there to keep him away from Connecticut authorities for suspicion in the Moxley case. In point of fact, Michael was never under suspicion at that time, or even years later. Second, the local police knew where he was and wrote reports on what was happening to him there. (ibid, p. 137)

    But as far as the Moxley case goes, the important thing was that Élan was now in the Sutton investigative files. And Sheridan had instructed the company to outline worst-case scenarios—he called them “purposefully prejudicial”— for both Tommy and Michael, and two other suspects, one of them being Littleton. If those files were somehow to land in the hands of someone like Dunne, or an ambitious state investigator, it could prove a huge liability for the Skakel family.

    That is what happened.

    V

    In early 1995, on the advice of Tommy’s attorney Manny Margolis, Rushton aborted Sheridan’s Sutton investigation. No one knows what the Sutton inquiry cost for sure, but Kennedy quotes a price of a million dollars. This, at a time when the Skakel fortune was declining precipitously. A few months later, local author Len Levitt got the Sutton Associates reports on Tommy and Michael Skakel from an unnamed source. The author makes a good circumstantial case that the source was Sheridan. (See Chapter 11.) What made this even worse was that Tom and Michael added things in this new inquiry that were not in police files. Since they were very young back then and their father was puritanical, the information in both cases had to do with sex. Tom said that, after he said goodnight to Martha, the couple retreated to a quiet spot and then made out. (ibid, p. 98) This brought him to being with Martha very close to the time when the forensic pathologists pegged Martha’s time of death.

    In Michael’s case, he told the Sutton team about a conversation he had in 1991 with an old friend of his named Andrew Pugh. He said that after he returned that night from watching TV at his cousin’s house, he could not sleep. He then went outside and walked over to a home where he had previously seen a woman undressing through a window. She was fully clothed this night, consequently there was no opportunity to be a Peeping Tom. So he went over to the Moxley home, threw some pebbles up to a window, then climbed a tree and started calling for Martha—not realizing she was dead. Or that he had the wrong window. He then started, in his words, “spanking the monkey” or masturbating. He stopped before ejaculating, went home and crawled into bed at about 12:30. (Kennedy, p. 10)

    This tree is nowhere near the tree where Martha’s body ended up. In fact, it is almost 300 feet away. And unlike what Nancy Grace insinuated, there was no DNA trace from Skakel found at the crime scene. Skakel filed suit for this false claim and won a monetary settlement and an apology from the TV hostess. (Kennedy, p. 11)

    This new information surfaced when the Sutton investigative files got out. As noted above, Levitt most likely got them from Sheridan. Dominick Dunne got them from a young man named Jamie Bryan. Bryan was brought in as a final editor in the process and paid $75.00 per hour. Once the project was aborted on orders of Margolis, Bryan was gravely disappointed. In a staggering misjudgment, Bryan was never asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement before he took the job. Apparently thinking he was going to get a gig writing an article for Vanity Fair, he gave them to Dunne. Dunne then wrote the article himself . He then gave them to investigator Frank Garr. When Dunne felt he was not utilizing them enough, he turned the Sutton files over to Mark Fuhrman. (ibid, pp. 148-49)

    We now enter a stage of the story where the irony warps into a dimension that is worthy of Henry James. Dunne had covered the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995. Like most observers, he was very disappointed in the result. In 1997, he wrote a novel about that case. For some reason, he became almost obsessed with the plight of Fuhrman. He decided to help the former LA detective rehabilitate himself. He and rightwing literary agent Lucianne Goldberg decided to have Fuhrman write another book on the Moxley case. Except this one would not be a novel, but allegedly a non-fiction detective story. Thus the man perceived as helping blow the Simpson case would now revive himself by solving the Moxley case. And armed with the contraband of the Sutton files, he would now go after Michael Skakel. In sum, Michael’s father paid for the investigative files Fuhrman would use in his book. How much more Jamesian can one get?

    Fuhrman visited Élan and talked to several people there. This was the beginning of the so-called Skakel “confessions”. During the preliminary hearing and at the trial, two of the very worst denizens of the Élan horror show testified that Michael had told them he had killed Martha and he would get away with it since he was a Kennedy. The two who actually testified at the trial were Greg Coleman and John Higgins. To explain why neither man should have ever been called to testify in the first place, and then to explain why they had no credibility, would take about ten pages of text. Kennedy does a nice job destroying them in about 13. (pp. 188-200) The cofounder of the place, Frank Ricci, said this about the matter: “The notion of Michael’s confession is just preposterous. I was there and I would know.” He continued by saying that everyone on the faculty would have talked about it. He then would have called the lawyers and asked them for advice on how to proceed. Neither of those things happened. (ibid, p. 193) Coleman named a student, Cliff Grubin, as a corroborating witness. He was not interviewed by the defense until 2005, after the conviction. When he heard Coleman’s testimony, he said the whole thing was invented. Grubin was never in the position Coleman put him in to hear that “confession”. He labeled both Coleman and Higgins as liars. (Ibid, pp. 199-200)

    As bad as these two were, there was another so-called “confession” witness who was probably even worse. But the prosecution didn’t care since their agenda with her was diabolical. Geranne Ridge was a gossipy sometime-model who told a friend that Michael Skakel had been at her home once. She claimed that he supposedly said, “Ask me why I killed my neighbor.” (ibid, p. 181) The idea that he would say this to a perfect stranger at their one and only meeting defies logic and reason. But Geranne told a friend, who told the authorities. Garr now hounded her to testify, which she did not want to do. She tried to back out of it by saying that it was likely all in jest, or that she was in and out of the conversation. She then said she was not in the room when the exchange occurred. And then she told Garr she really didn’t hear anything about the murder. (ibid, p. 183) The woman alternatively subtracted and added to her story. On the stand, she said, “I did make stuff up, trying to appear to be knowledgeable, from things I heard from [her friend] Marissa and from magazines.” (p. 185)

    In reality, Skakel was never at her home. At the time she says he was, Michael was actually out of the country. (ibid) Neither the prosecutor nor Ridge could produce one corroborating witness, even though she claimed eight people were there. It became clear that the story was simply not credible. But as the examination went on, it turned out that was not the point.

    I had to read what I am about to summarize twice. And even now I have a hard time comprehending how it happened in an American court of law. I also do not fully understand it in all of its bizarre nuances. But I will try and convey it as succinctly as I can. In court, the prosecutor Benedict had played a tape in which Ridge had talked about the fictional confession. On the tape, she said she revealed that she picked up a lot of her info from magazines, some of them supermarket tabloids—scandal sheets like Star, Globe and National Enquirer. These had printed every piece of wild theorizing that Dunne, Fuhrman and the prosecutor’s office had peddled. When Michael’s attorney mentioned these by name in his cross-examination, he walked into a trap set by Benedict. Because his staff had brought a copy of each to the court that day. He then asked that they be admitted into evidence, since his witness said she had read them! (ibid, p. 186) But it was even worse than that. Because the stories that Benedict wanted to enter were not directly related to what was being discussed. They were simply compendia of other Kennedy family travails, e.g., Chappaquiddick.

    Surprisingly, the judge did not immediately overrule the motion. As the author writes, the Simpson case has intimidated judges in high profile cases from unilaterally ruling on admissible evidence. Instead, he asked the defense lawyer if he objected. Mickey Sherman did not jump to his feet with a specific objection and shout out, “Hearsay!” or “Potential for prejudice outweighs probative value!” He just said he objected but could not think of any grounds. It simply bothered him that such stuff would go into evidence. He sat down and the judge overruled him.

    When I read this episode I realized that all the things I wrote about 20 years ago had come to fruition: namely, the tabloidization of our culture, the maniacal drive to fill the public’s collective consciousness with the worst anti-Kennedy drivel possible, and the deliberate lowering of any kind of standard of judgment in order to do so. Except now, the hidden agenda was not political. Courtesy of Dunne and Fuhrman, these forces had now been assembled into a judicial setting to enact a kind of black magic ritual for the purposes of sending a man to prison. It sent a shudder through my spine.

    VI

    As I have clearly denoted throughout this review, the prosecution—both Garr and Benedict—were allowed to get away with several highly unethical and dubious practices because of the failures of Skakel’s attorney. For example, one of the ways the prosecution attacked Michael’s alibi was through Andrea Shakespeare. She was a family friend who said she was unsure whether Michael actually went to his cousin’s house the night of the murders to watch television. When she was first interviewed back in 1991, she just said she was not sure about this and Michael may not have been in the car that drove up there. (Kennedy, p. 207) Over time, after the work of Dunne began to circulate, Garr began to drill Shakespeare on this point, until her impression became a certainty: Michael Skakel had not left to watch TV. This, of course, was ridiculous, since there were several witnesses who all recalled he had. And Dennis Osorio actually watched TV with him, eleven miles from the scene of the crime.

    Kennedy uses this episode for two purposes. First, to show how the prosecution seemed intent on planting the seeds of a false memory, which, as Kennedy describes, was done by Garr and by the witness reading Fuhrman’s book. Because by the time of the trial, her impression back in 1991 that Michael might not have gone to his cousin’s had now turned into a certainty. She said there was no doubt in her mind that Michael had not gone and that she had been certain about this since the night of the murder back in 1991. This, as the author shows, is simply not accurate. (Kennedy, p. 209)

    The second reason is to show the procedural failures of the defense.  The testimony was allowed to stand because the defense did not call Osorio to contradict it, or Elizabeth Loftus, the resident authority on the imputation of false memories. Michael’s lawyer Mickey Sherman later said he had reached out to Loftus about this issue, but eventually decided against it. This contradicts records kept by Loftus. She told Kennedy that her callbook does include a communication by Sherman, but it was way past the Skakel trial and about another case. (Kennedy, p. 210) As we have seen, Sherman did not find Osorio. He was found much later during the appeals process under a different lawyer.

    Which brings us to one of the most withering chapters in the book: the author’s critique of Sherman’s defense. To understand how bad it was, we must first note that it ended up costing well over 2.5 million dollars. (ibid, p. 215) This was necessary because the combined efforts of Dunne and Fuhrman ended up infesting the prosecutor’s office. As we have noted, the previous prosecutor Donald Browne refused to file any charges in the Moxley case. In other words, he withstood Dunne’s multi-platform assault for seven years. But two months after Fuhrman published his book, Browne resigned his post. Benedict and Garr then took over the case. A month later, Benedict called for the rarely used one-man grand jury to begin hearing evidence against Fuhrman’s target, Michael Skakel. Skakel was therefore fighting a powerful array of both public and private forces.

    To say the least, Sherman was not up to the job. Manny Margolis had recommended Sherman to the Skakels. He later wrote to Michael in prison, sadly admitting that the Sherman recommendation was the biggest mistake of his life. (p. 222) When Sherman was first appointed, he held a press conference at his office that announced a veritable all-star roster of distinguished east-coast defense attorneys, including Linda Kenny Baden. In just a few weeks, that roster had been depleted of all except the lower level ingénus just out of law school. According to Kennedy, Sherman saw this case as his ticket to stardom. He wanted to run the show and he wanted the primetime exposure. For those media appearances, he charged Rushton Skakel $200,000. (ibid)

    Sherman did not even hire a jury selection expert. This has become of late a very important part of the process, and a good advisor in this phase is worth the cost. As a result, Sherman allowed, of all people, a local policeman to sit on the jury. But further, the policeman had been assaulted by a Sherman client! Beyond that, he was a friend of one of the original investigators of the Moxley case. (ibid, p. 218)

    The litany of incompetence and sloth that Kennedy catalogues against Sherman goes on for over 20 pages. It is simply devastating. In the interest of length, I will describe just two instances.

    First, Sherman did not prepare his witnesses. In a case like this, the defense calls in all witnesses and shows them the previous statements they have made to authorities. You don’t want any witness to be blindsided. And, in a case that extends over decades, you want to refresh their memories, since testimony given closer to the time of the incident is usually more reliable. If there are any discrepancies, you hash them out in the office, before the witness takes the stand. That fundamental process did not happen here. (Ibid, p. 229) Several witnesses for the defense said that Sherman never called them in to review the past record. This is startling, because it is one of the easiest things there is to do. And, as Kennedy points out, the prosecution took advantage of this failing.

    Let me close with what I perceive as probably the worst failure of the defense. In doing so, I relate another episode that I can hardly believe happened in an American court of law. Again, I had to read this twice in order to fully comprehend it. Prosecutor Benedict knew that he had a problem with the time of death in this case. If Martha was dead by 10:00 PM, and Michael was watching television eleven miles away, then how could a jury convict him? Furthermore, the authorities had brought in an outside consultant, one of the most illustrious forensic pathologists in America, Joseph Jachimczyk of Houston, to certify that time. And he said this was the far end of the time frame, which began at 9:30. (ibid, p. 27) In addition, there were other pieces of evidence that corroborated this time frame. (ibid, p. 28)

    To counteract all this, Benedict did something that I have never heard of before. He called the autopsist in this case, Elliot Gross; but he did not put him on the stand. The fact that he did not take the stand indicates that he would not give Benedict the information he wanted to hear. Instead, he put Wayne Carver on the stand, the current medical examiner. Carver said that, looking over the notes, the time of death could be as late as 1:30 AM. The problem was that Carver had never worked on the case. This juggling would seem to present a made-to-order opportunity for a real takedown of Benedict. One could imagine a pointed, detailed, rigorous cross-examination that would expose this as nothing but a ploy. Sherman asked one question in rebuttal: “Could the murder have occurred at 9:30 PM?” Carver replied yes. Sherman sat down. Which should have been the last thing he did. As Kennedy then writes, the obvious next question should have been: “How can you say that the time of death could happen at both 9:30 PM and 1:30 AM?” And that should have been just the beginning. (ibid, p. 28)

    Michael Skakel’s lawyers appealed his case on just this basis— that Sherman had robbed his client of a proper defense. And the failings of that defense caused the resultant verdict. A very courageous judge agreed with that appeal. And he set aside the verdict. But the authorities decided to contest that decision; they did not want to give Michael a new trial, probably because with proper lawyers and the previous shenanigans out in the open, they knew they had no chance of winning. In late December, the Connecticut Supreme Court voted 4-3 to reinstate the conviction. In these post-Simpson days, it is amazing that the vote was that close. Michael’s lawyers intend to submit a motion to reconsider. But since the judge who wrote the decision has since resigned, they will only do so with a full bench intact.

    In my opinion, this book had something to do with the closeness of that vote. Robert Kennedy, Jr. tried to get more than one journalist to either write an article or a book on this case. In the end, he ended up having to do both. That tells us a lot about the state of the media in this country. But this book tells us more. The vast majority of readers who read this review will likely be surprised at the facts and events described herein. That is because the MSM, led lemming like by Dunne and Fuhrman and their multitude of cable TV appearances, dominated the airwaves and polluted the information pool. This book does much to correct that imbalance. Near the end, Kennedy even offers up his view of what really did happen. And it had nothing to do with Michael Skakel. Both Sherman and Benedict ignored it. But he explored this avenue and puts it together as well as a private citizen can.

    In the end, this is a troubling, disturbing, but enlightening book. It tells us much about the shallow tinsel of the culture we live in today, and how destructive to the individual that tinsel can be.

  • Was Dorothy Kilgallen Murdered over the JFK Case?

    Was Dorothy Kilgallen Murdered over the JFK Case?

    leaderThe above question is posed by author Mark Shaw in his new book, The Reporter Who Knew too Much. But for anyone interested in the JFK case, the questions about Kilgallen’s death are not new. Investigators like Penn Jones and Mark Lane first surfaced them in fragmentary form decades ago. And according to more than one report, Lane was actually communicating with Kilgallen when the latter was doing her inquiry into the JFK case from 1963 to 1965. This reviewer briefly wrote about her death in a footnote to the first edition of Destiny Betrayed. (See page 365, note 15) With the rise of the Internet, various posters, like John Simkin, kept the Kilgallen questions popping up on Kennedy assassination forums.

    Dorothy Kilgallen’s
    posthumous book

    Prior to Shaw’s book, there had been three major sources about Kilgallen’s life and (quite) puzzling death. The first was Lee Israel’s biography titled Kilgallen. Published in hardcover in 1979, it went on to be a New York Times bestseller in paperback. As we shall later see, although Israel raised some questions about Kilgallen’s death in regards to the JFK case, she held back on some important details she discovered. In 2007, Sara Jordan wrote a long, fascinating essay for the publication Midwest Today Magazine. Entitled “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?”, Jordan built upon some of Israel’s work, but was much more explicit about certain sources, and much more descriptive about the very odd crime scene. For instance, the autopsy report on Kilgallen says she died of acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication. But it also says that the circumstances of that intoxication were “undetermined”. Jordan appropriately adds, “for some reason the police never bothered to determine them. They closed the case without talking to crucial witnesses.” (Jordan, p. 22) A year later, in the fall of 2008, prolific author and journalist Paul Alexander had his book on the subject optioned for film rights. The manuscript was entitled Good Night, Dorothy Kilgallen. Reportedly, one focus of Alexander’s volume was how the JFK details Kilgallen wrote about in her upcoming book, Murder One, were cut from the version posthumously published by Random House. Neither Alexander’s book, nor the film, has yet to be produced. Which is a shame, since the available facts would produce an intriguing film.

    I

    Dorothy Kilgallen was born in Chicago in 1913. She graduated from Erasmus High School in 1930. At Erasmus she had been the associate editor of her high school newspaper. (Shaw, p. 3) Her father, James Kilgallen, was a newspaperman who worked for the Hearst syndicate in Illinois and Indiana. She spent a year in college in New York City. While there, her father got her a reporter tryout with the New York Evening Journal. She dropped out of college, and this became her lifelong career and position.

    While at the Evening Journal, she carved out a place for herself on the criminal courts beat. She especially liked reporting on murder trials, the more sensational the better. For example, one case involved a wife killing her husband by placing arsenic in his chocolate pudding. (ibid, p. 6) Another trial she covered was the notorious Anna Antonio murder for hire case, where the wife hired hit men to kill her husband for insurance money. (ibid, p. 7) In 1935, at the age of 22, she covered the most sensational case of the era: the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. (ibid) Shortly after this, Kilgallen entered a Race Around the World contest. That race generated tremendous publicity since it involved three reporters for major newspapers. In 24 days, she finished second to Bud Ekins. But, more importantly, she wrote a book about this experience that was then made into a movie. (Jordan, p. 17)

    The Original “What’s My Line?” Panel (1952)

    O. O. Corrigan passed away in 1938. For years, he had maintained a very successful column called The Voice of Broadway. Shortly after his death, Kilgallen was given his position. (Lee Israel, Kilgallen, p. 104) In that column she covered politics, crime and the theater scene in New York. In 1940 she married actor/singer and future Broadway producer Richard Kollmar. They had three children, Richard, Kerry and Jill. She became, in 1950, one of the regulars on the game show What’s My Line? The other regular panelists were actress Arlene Francis, and publisher Bennett Cerf; the host was John Daly.

    In 1954, Kilgallen covered another sensational legal proceeding. This was the murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. In July of 1954, the doctor and his wife were entertaining guests at their lakefront home in suburban Cleveland. While watching a movie on TV, Sheppard fell asleep. His wife Marilyn escorted the guests out a bit after midnight. (Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 238) Just before dawn, Sheppard called the mayor of the town of Bay Village, the Cleveland suburb where he lived. The mayor and his wife came over. Sheppard was slumped over in the den with a medical kit open on the floor. He appeared to be in shock. He mumbled: “They killed Marilyn.” The couple went up the stairs and saw her bloodied body in the bedroom. (ibid, p. 239) Sheppard said he had been awakened by Marilyn’s screams. He ran upstairs to the bedroom and saw an intruder in the shadows. The assailant knocked him out with a blunt object. When he came to, he heard the intruder downstairs on the porch. He ran down, chased him off the property, and he struggled with him on the lakeshore—where he was bludgeoned unconscious again. (ibid, pp. 239-40)

    When she arrived in Cleveland, Kilgallen was struck by both the weakness of the prosecution’s case, and by the powerful bias of the media against Sheppard. But in the face of the latter, the judge failed to sequester the jury. In December, after four days of deliberations, the jury convicted Sheppard of murder. Kilgallen was shocked. In her view, the prosecution had not proven Shepard guilty any more than they had “proved there were pin-headed men on Mars.” (ibid, p. 300)

    Sam Sheppard & F. Lee Bailey

    Years later, after Sheppard’s original lawyer, William Corrigan, had passed away, F. Lee Bailey took on his appeal. At a book signing in New York, he had heard Kilgallen speak about her in-chambers interview with the judge in the Sheppard case. He contacted her about this and she gave Bailey a deposition. In that deposition, she revealed that, before the trial began, she was granted an interview with the judge. He asked her what she was doing in Cleveland. She said that she was there to report on the mystery and intrigue of the Sheppard case. The judge replied, “Mystery? It’s an open and shut case.” Kilgallen said she was taken aback by this remark. She told Bailey, “I have talked to many judges in their chambers—they don‘t give me an opinion on a case before it is over.” She continued that the judge then said Sheppard was “guilty as hell. There’s no question about it.” (ibid, pp. 301-02) This deposition was quoted in the final decision of the U. S. Supreme Court which, in 1966, granted Sheppard a new trial.

    At the 1966 trial, Sheppard was acquitted. Bailey’s criminologist, Dr. Paul L. Kirk, presented evidence that there was a third type of blood in Marilyn’s bedroom, not the doctor’s or the victim’s. Further, Kirk concluded the blows that killed Marilyn came from a left-handed person. Sheppard was right handed. (ibid, p. 304)

    The Sheppard case dragged on for so long, creating so much controversy, making so many headlines, that it reportedly became the basis for the TV series The Fugitive, starring David Janssen. For our purposes, the important thing to recall about it, and the reason I have spent some time on it, is that Kilgallen was correct about the verdict. And further, her role in the case helped set free an innocent man. Although that last act did not occur until after her own death in November of 1965.

    II

    The first real inquiry into Dorothy Kilgallen’s death was by the late author Lee Israel. This was done for her best-selling biography, titled Kilgallen, a book still worth reading today. Since that book was not published until 1979, this means that neither the NYPD, nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations did any kind of serious review of the case. This is odd since the circumstances surrounding Kilgallen’s demise clearly merited an inquest. But beyond that, and as we will see, there appears to have been an attempt to cover up the true circumstances of her death.

    Kilgallen, with Jack Ruby defense attorneys
    Joe Tonahill (center) & Melvin Belli (right),
    at the Ruby trial (February 19, 1964)

    Lee Israel did a good job in her book in describing just how much Kilgallen wrote about the failings of the Warren Commission. She also described some of Kilgallen’s extensive contacts with early researcher Mark Lane. It is safe to say that no other widely distributed columnist in America wrote as often, or as pointedly, about the JFK case as Kilgallen did. She flew to Dallas to cover the trial of Jack Ruby in early 1964. While there, she secured two private interviews with the accused. She never divulged what was revealed to her in those interviews. Instead, the notes from these meetings went into her ever expanding JFK assassination file—which more than one person saw since, at times, she actually would carry it around with her. (Israel, p. 401)

    From the contacts she attained in covering the Ruby trial, Kilgallen broke two significant JFK stories. First, someone smuggled her the testimony of Jack Ruby before the Commission. After convincing her editors to print the purloined hearing, her paper ran the story over three consecutive days. And they allowed her to append comments and questions to the colloquy. (Israel, p. 389) Her Dallas sources also secured her an early copy of the DPD radio log. With this she pointed out that Police Chief Jesse Curry had misrepresented to the public his real opinion as to what the origin point of the shots were. He had told the public he thought they came from the Texas School Book Depository, but on the log he said they came from the rail yards, behind the picket fence, atop the grassy knoll. (Israel, p. 390)

    When documents on Oswald were denied to Ruby’s defense team, again Kilgallen chimed in pungently:

    It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect. . . Lee Harvey Oswald has passed on not only to his shuddery reward, but to the mysterious realm of “classified” persons whose whole story is known only to a few government agents.

    Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, while the defense tries to rescue his alleged killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway? (Israel, p. 366)

    She also ran a story suggesting that there were witnesses who saw Oswald inside Ruby’s Carousel Club. (Shaw, pp. 66, 67) Based upon that, she once said, “I don’t see why Dallas should feel guilty for what one man, or even 3 or 5 in a conspiracy have done.” (Shaw, p. 68)

    When the Ruby case was decided and he was found the sole guilty party—a verdict that would later be reconsidered—Kilgallen, again, wrote about it quite resonantly:

    The point to be remembered in this historic case in that the whole truth has not been told. Neither the state of Texas nor the defense put all of its evidence before the jury. Perhaps it was not necessary, but it would have been desirable from the viewpoint of all the American people. (Israel, p. 372)

    In fact, as Israel wrote, Kilgallen actually became a funnel for men like Lane and Dallas reporter Thayer Waldo to run information through, in order for it to garner a wider audience. (Israel, p. 373)

    She went even further. Kilgallen ran experiments with her husband holding a broomstick to replicate the alleged sighting by Warren Commission witness Howard Brennan. Brennan was the Commission’s chief witness as to a description of Oswald as the sixth floor assassin. She stood approximately where Brennan stood in front of her five-story townhouse. And she told her husband to go ahead and kneel, as the Warren Commission said Oswald was behind a box. She came to the conclusion that there was “no way in the world that such a description could have been accurately determined by Brennan.” (p. 391) She further came to the conclusion that there was a real question as to the type of weapon that was found in the building, a Mannlicher-Carcano or a Mauser. She was also tipped off as to the ignored testimony of witness Acquila Clemmons. Contrary to the Warren Report, Clemmons claimed to have seen two men involved in the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, not one, and neither resembled Oswald. These stories were mentioned in her newspaper column in September of 1964. (Israel, p. 395)

    The FBI visited her to find out how she got Ruby’s testimony before the Warren Commission. She made them tea but told the two agents that she could never reveal how she got that exhibit or who gave it to her. And when the Warren Report was released in September of 1964, Kilgallen made it fairly evident how she felt about it:

    I would be inclined to believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them …. At any rate, the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It’s a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances. (Israel, p. 396)

    What she said and did in private on the JFK case was even more extreme than her public actions. After her experience with the FBI she concluded that Hoover had tapped her home phone line. She told Lane that, “Intelligence agencies will be watching us. We’ll have to be very careful.” She decided to communicate with Lane via pay phones and even then by using code names. She then added, “They’ve killed the president, the government is not prepared to tell us the truth, and I’m going to do everything in my power to find out what really happened.” (Israel, pp. 392-93) She told her friend Marlin Swing, a CBS TV producer and colleague of Walter Cronkite, “This has to be a conspiracy.” (ibid, p. 396) To attorney and talent manager Morton Farber, she characterized the Warren Commission Report as “laughable.” She then added, “I’m going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century.” (Israel, p. 397) She made similar statements to another TV producer Bob Bach, and another talent manager, Bill Franklin. (Israel, p. 396) All this, of course, was contra what almost all of her professional colleagues were involved with at the time: namely praising and venerating the fraud of the Warren Report. For instance, in June of 1965, Kilgallen was invited to do an ABC news show called Nightlife with Les Crane. Since Bach had helped arrange the appearance she thought she would be speaking about the Warren Report, so she brought parts of her JFK file with her. But she was informed by one of the show’s producers, Nick Vanoff, that they did no want her to address that subject. He told her it was “too controversial”. (Israel, p. 401)

    Between the time of the release of the Warren Report—September of 1964—and her passing—November of 1965—she was in the process of taking and planning flights to both Dallas and New Orleans. (For the former, see Israel, p. 402; for the latter, see Jordan, p. 20) These do not appear to be job related. They appear to be for the purpose of advancing her own inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination. For instance, she told What’s My Line? makeup artist Carmen Gebbia that she was excited about an upcoming trip to New Orleans to meet a source she did not know. She said it was all cloak and daggerish. And she concluded that, “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to break this case.” (Jordan, p. 20)

    Marc Sinclaire

    Marc Sinclaire worked for Kilgallen as her major hairdresser. Many years after her death he revealed that he went to New Orleans with her in October of 1965. Sinclaire went down on a separate plane and stayed in a different hotel. They had dinner together the night he arrived. The next morning he was preparing to go to her place to work on her hair. She called him and said that was cancelled: she had purchased a ticket for him and he was to return to New York. Further, he was not to tell anyone he had been there with her. Her second hairdresser, Charles Simpson, said she used to tell him things about her work, but now things were different. She proclaimed “I used to share things with you … but after I have found out now what I know, if the wrong people knew what I know, it would cost me my life.” (ibid)

    III

    Two of the problems with the circumstances of Kilgallen’s death are that first, the cause was misreported by her own newspaper, and second, no one can pinpoint exactly when her body was first discovered. Using her father as a source, the Journal American reported that Dorothy Kilgallen had died of an apparent heart attack. (Israel, p. 410) As we shall see, that was not the case. But even more puzzling, there is a real mystery as to when the corpse was first discovered.

    The official police record states that the body was found between noon and 1 PM by Marie Eichler, Kilgallen’s personal maid. (Israel, p. 416) But Israel talked to an anonymous source who was a tutor to the Kilgallen children and was there on the morning of November 8, 1965. That source told Israel that the body was found much earlier, before ten o’clock. Sara Jordan later revealed the tutor was Ibne Hassan. Hassan’s information turned out to be correct. From the information on hand today, the first known person to discover Kilgallen’s body was Sinclaire. And his (unofficial) testimony has powerful relevance. He said that he was stunned when he found Kilgallen sleeping on the third floor. Because she always slept on the fifth floor. He found her sitting up in bed with the covers pulled up. He walked over to her, touched her, and knew she was dead. In addition to being on the wrong floor, she was wearing clothes that she simply did not wear when she went to bed. Further, she still had on her make up, false eyelashes, earrings, and her hairpiece. (Jordan, p. 21)

    A book was laid out on the bed. It was Robert Ruark’s recent volume The Honey Badger. Yet, according to more than one witness, Kilgallen had finished reading this book several weeks—perhaps months—prior. Also, she needed glasses to read; Sinclaire said there were none present. The room air conditioner was running, yet it was cold outside. Plus the reading lamp was still on. Sinclaire added, her body was neatly positioned in the middle of the bed, beyond the reach of the nightstand. (ibid)

    The questions raised by Sinclaire’s description are both obvious and myriad. The setting suggests that Kilgallen’s body was positioned both on a floor she did not sleep on and in a way that was completely artificial. In other words, it was posed. If this was done, it was performed by someone not familiar with her living routine and in a hurry to leave, probably for fear of awakening someone. But this is not all there is to it. Sinclaire said there was also a drink on the nightstand. (As we shall see, there more likely were two glasses there.) When Sinclaire called for the butler, he came running up the stairs, very flustered. Sinclaire then left through the front door. He said that there was a police car there, with two officers inside. They made no attempt to detain him. That morning, a movie magazine editor named Mary Branum received a phone call. The voice said, “Dorothy Kilgallen has been murdered”, and hung up. (ibid)

    Charles Simpson

    When Sinclaire got home he called his friend and colleague Charles Simpson. He told him that their client was dead. He then added, “And when I tell you the bed she was in and how I found her, you’re going to know she was murdered.” Simpson later said in an interview, “And I knew. The whole thing was just abnormal. The woman didn’t sleep in that bed, much less the room. It wasn’t her bed.” (ibid. These video taped interviews were done by researcher Kathryn Fauble. The Jordan article owed much to her research, and so does Shaw. See Shaw, p. 113)

    From Sinclaire’s description, there seems to have been a prior awareness of Kilgallen’s passing: e.g., the police car in front of the door. But as of today, Sinclaire is the best testimony as to when the body was actually found. About three hours later, two doctors arrived at the townhouse: James Luke and Saul Heller. The latter pronounced her dead. But the former did the medical examination, which as we shall see, was incomplete.

    About a week after her death, Luke determined that she was killed by “acute barbiturate and alcohol intoxication, circumstances undetermined.” (ibid, p. 22) Roughly speaking, this means she died of an overdose, but the examiners could not determine how the drugs were delivered. Usually, the examiner will write if the victim was killed by accident, suicide or homicide. That was not done in this case. The main reason it was not done is because there was no investigation of the crime scene, or of any witnesses who saw and had talked to her in the previous 24-48 hours. For example, phone calls were not traced, her home was not searched for drug containers, and there was no investigation as to how she arrived home that evening or if anyone was with her.

    Lee Israel was shocked when she discovered this fact. She was looking through the Kilgallen police file for reports labeled DD 5 and DD 15. The former is a supplementary complaint report that records activities pursuant to a complaint. The latter is a request to the Medical Examiner for a Cause of Death notice. Israel said that, although the investigating detective said he saw this, it was missing from the file. (p. 428) Therefore, there appears to have been no investigation done to determine how the drugs were administered. This was so bewildering to Israel that she wrote that there may have been another, unofficial channel, of communication between the police department and the medical examiner’s office on the Kilgallen case.

    There does seem to be cause for such speculation. In her book, Israel mentioned another anonymous source from the toxicology department of the medical examiner’s office. (Israel, pp. 440-41) This man was a chemist under Charles Umbarger, director of toxicology at the NYC Medical Examiner’s Office. This source met with Israel personally and told her that Umbarger believed that Kilgallen had been murdered. Umbarger had evidence that would indicate this was the case but he kept it from the pathology department as part of the factionalism in the office. The idea was to retain this secret evidence in reserve over chief Medical Examiner Milton Halpern and Luke. Jordan discovered this secret source was a man named John Broich. (Jordan, p. 22) Broich told Jordan, as he told Israel, that he did new tests on the glasses, and tissue samples, both of which Umbarger had retained. He found traces of Nembutal on one of the glasses. The new tests discovered traces of Seconal, Nembutal and Tuilan in her brain.

    This was an important discovery, for more than one reason. First, the police could not find any evidence of prescriptions for the last two drugs by Kilgallen. Her doctor only prescribed Seconal. Second, no doctor would prescribe all three to one patient at one time since the mix could very well be lethal. (Shaw, p. 116) Third, the prescription Kilgallen had for Seconal had run its course at the time of her death. Umbarger, of course, knew this. When Broich reported back to him about his new chemical discoveries, Umbarger had an unforgettable reaction. He grinned at his assistant, and then said the following: “Keep it under your hat. It was big.” (Jordan, p. 22)

    IV

    As we have seen, neither the New York Police Department nor the medical examiner’s office was forthcoming or professional in the Kilgallen case. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) only performed a very cursory look at her death. But it appears it was the HSCA that got her autopsy report into the National Archives. (Shaw, p. 277) That cursory look seems odd for the simple reason that the HSCA’s chief pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, was working in the Medical Examiner’s office at the time of Kilgallen’s passing. In fact, Baden’s name is listed as an observer for Luke’s autopsy report. (Shaw p. 102) Baden was also a source for Israel’s book. In 1978, while the HSCA was ongoing, he told Israel that, from what he could see, the evidence would indicate that Kilgallen had fifteen or twenty 100 mg capsules of Seconal in her system. (Israel, p. 413) Why Mark Shaw did not make more of this point in his book eludes this reviewer.  Because Baden’s opinion would seem to be incorrect, for the simple reason that, as stated above, Kilgallen likely would not have had that many Seconals left in her prescription at the time of her death. But a fewer number of Seconals, mixed with the two other drugs, would very likely have produced the fatal result.

    Because of the (screamingly) suspicious circumstances of her death, it does not at all seem logical to consider either of the other alternatives—that it was accidental, or she took her own life. How could she accidentally end up in the wrong bed on the wrong floor with the covers pulled up? As per the second option, as stated above, there seems to not have been enough left of her Seconal prescription for her to take her own life. According to her doctor, Kilgallen was prescribed 50 pills per month. There are two reports, one from the police, one from her doctor, but the estimates are that she took between 2-4 pills per night. (Israel, p. 425) Since the prescription was last filled on October 8th, how could there possibly be enough pills available for her to plan her death? The indications seem to suggest this was a homicide.

    Kilgallen, Richard Kollmar
    & their son, Kerry (1964)

    If that were the case—and Israel, Jordan, and Shaw certainly seem to agree it is the strongest alternative—then who was responsible? One possible suspect is her husband Richard Kollmar. As Israel and Shaw outline, neither spouse was faithful to the other at this stage of the marriage. Richard was involved in several one-night stands, and Dorothy had a love affair with singer Johnny Ray, which had concluded at around the time of Kennedy’s assassination.

    Further, Richard was not doing nearly as well financially as Dorothy was. Israel had direct access to their accountant, Anne Hamilton. And from that interview, it appears that Shaw overstates their wealth significantly. (See Israel, especially p. 356) But there can be little or no doubt that at the time of her death, Kilgallen was the major breadwinner in the family. Therefore, in case of her death, Richard would be in position to inherit a significant amount of money in cash and property, well over a million dollars today. Further, and another point I could not find in Shaw’s book, Richard had his own access to Tuinal. (Israel, p. 438)

    But still, there are serious problems with holding Richard as the prime suspect. First, if such were the case, then why would there be such an almost appallingly negligent investigation? Cases of spouses killing their partners must have appeared every week in a city as large as New York. And, if so, how would Richard have the influence to cause such a large system failure—one that took place in the police department, the DA’s chambers, and in the office of the medical examiner? Secondly, no one who knew Kollmar thought he was capable of doing such a thing. Both Israel and Shaw agree on this point. But third, if Kollmar had planned the whole thing, how could he possibly have left as many holes in his plot as he did— many of them wide enough to drive the proverbial tractor through? Could he really have not known where his own wife slept? What she wore when she retired? What book she was reading? That when she read, she wore glasses? And so on and so forth. The case does not appear to be an inside job. Because if Marc Sinclaire had not left that morning, he could have detonated it in about two minutes.

    Ron Pataky & Kilgallen

    Both Israel and Jordan seemed to center their suspicions on a man that the former referred to as the Out of Towner. Israel referred to him by that rubric because he lived and worked in Columbus, Ohio. His real name is Ron Pataky. In her Midwest Review essay, Sara Jordan was explicit about his name and printed a photo of him standing next to Kilgallen. There are several reasons why Ron Pataky’s presence creates suspicion in this case. One has to do with the closeness of his relationship with Kilgallen at the time. After she and Johnnie Ray decided to break up, it appears that Pataky became Kilgallen’s romantic interest. They called each other frequently, saw each other on occasion, and wrote letters and notes to each other. A very odd thing happened in late October on the set of What’s My Line? Before the show began taping, an announcement came on the public intercom. The voice said, “The keys to Ron Pataky’s room are waiting at the front desk of the Regency Hotel.” Quite naturally, this shook Dorothy up. Why didn’t someone just bring her a note? Pataky denied being in New York at that time. If so, was someone trying to tell the reporter that they knew something about her private life? (Jordan, p. 20) On the weekend of her death, Kilgallen had an hour-long call with Sinclaire. During this call, she said her life had been threatened (she later said she might have to purchase a gun). Sinclaire told her that the only new person in her life was Pataky. And she had shared her interest in, and information about, the JFK case with him. He suggested that she confront him with those facts. Two days later, Kilgallen was dead. (Shaw, p. 242)

    Both Israel and Shaw discuss interviews they had with Pataky. In more than one place it appears that the subject is being less than candid. For instance, he says that he was never at Kilgallen’s townhouse. But he says that he knew Kilgallen drank and popped pills. When asked how he knew that, he says he saw the pills in a medicine cabinet. Unless Dorothy carried a medicine cabinet with her, how did he know about it if he was never in her home? Pataky also said in 2014 that the New York police talked to him about Dorothy’s death based upon a note they discovered at the home. Yet there is no evidence of any such interview or note in any police file. (Shaw, pp. 239-40) Another example would be one of his alibi witnesses. Pataky has always maintained that he was in Columbus when he got the news of Dorothy Kilgallen’s death. He said fashion editor Jane Horrocks read the notice off the news wire to him. But researcher Kathryn Fauble later talked to Horrocks. She remembered Pataky vividly since they shared an office at the Columbus Citizen-Journal. She also recalled him getting calls from Kilgallen there. But she added on the day the news broke about Kilgallen’s death she wasn’t in the office, she was on assignment in California. (Shaw, p. 237)

    Perhaps the most interesting aspect of any interview with Pataky was the one Israel did with him about Kilgallen’s final hours. Sara Jordan, Israel and Shaw have attempted to reconstruct what Kilgallen did the evening before she was discovered dead by Sinclaire. After taping What’s My Line?, she and producer Bob Bach went to the restaurant/bar P. J. Clarke’s for a drink. (Jordan, p. 21) Both Bach and Sinclaire have stated that Kilgallen separately told them she was to meet with someone at the Regency Hotel later that evening. Therefore, after she left P. J. Clarke’s, she arrived at the Regency, which is about six blocks from her home. In a videotaped interview with an associate of Kathryn Fauble, it was revealed that Kilgallen was seen in the corner of the cocktail lounge by a woman named Katherine Stone. Stone had been a contestant on the show that night. (ibid) Press agent Harvey Daniels also recalled seeing Kilgallen with a man at the Regency that night. So did piano player Kurt Maier. (ibid) She left the Regency at about 2 AM. According to Israel, when the news of her death broke, several people working at the Regency discussed her presence there the night before. (Israel, p. 432)

    Pataky has always denied he was with her that evening. He has always denied he was in New York that night. The most he would say is that she called him that evening. But Pataky firmly declared that he was in Columbus that evening, not in New York. Israel had taped her call with him. She turned it over to former CIA officer George O’toole. O’toole was one of the leading Agency analysts for the Psychological Stress Evaluator, commonly known as the PSE. This device measures stress in the voice in response to questioning. That measurement may reveal the subject is lying about a sensitive point. O’toole wrote an interesting book on the subject in relation to the JFK case, The Assassination Tapes. In that book he explains in detail how the device works and its reputation for accuracy. An absence of stress in the voice would indicate that the subject is telling the truth. If the stress is high, it may reveal tension due to deception. When O’toole analyzed the part of the conversation in which Pataky denied being in New York that night, he wrote that the PSE hit level F and G gradients. These are the highest levels of stress the machine will measure. When Pataky discusses how he actually found out about Kilgallen’s death, again the machine hit the F level. (Israel, p. 435)

    Pataky had designs to be a songwriter. He had confided in Kilgallen about this. The verses of a song are, in many ways, like a poem. So years later, Pataky posted some of his poems online. Both Shaw and Jordan found them interesting. First there is one called “Never Trust a Stiff at a Typewriter”. It reads as follows:

     

    There’s a way to quench a gossip’s stench

    That never fails

    One cannot write if zippered “tight”

    Somebody who’s dead could “tell no tales.”

     

    As to its suggestiveness to the topic, this needs no comment. The second Pataky poem is called “Vodka Roulette Seen As Relief Possibility”.

     

    While I’m spilling my guts

    She’s driving me nuts

    Please fetch us two drinks

    On the run.

     

    Just skip all the nois’n

    Make one of them poison

    And don’t even tell me

    Which one!

     

    Shaw goes on for four paragraphs on this poem. But again, its suggestiveness needs little explication in relation to the subject at hand.

    Let us close the discussion of Pataky with another piece of information allegedly supplied by Israel, but which today is in dispute. John Simkin used to own and operate the JFK Assassination Debate forum at Spartacus Educational web site. He had an abiding interest in the Kilgallen case. In a discussion at Simkin’s site in 2005, he enlisted Israel to participate. During this discussion it was revealed that in 1993 a college student in Virginia did what Israel did not do in her book. He actually revealed Pataky’s name. And he further wrote that the management of the Regency Hotel had forbidden its employees to discuss Kilgallen’s presence there that night. But even more interesting, Israel said that she found out that Pataky dropped out of Stanford in 1951 and later enrolled in the School of the Americas in Panama. This, of course, is the infamous CIA training ground for many Central American security forces who were later involved in various kidnappings and assassinations in the fifties and sixties. In the Midwest Today article by Sara Jordan, Israel denied she made this statement. (But Jordan found out that Pataky did drop out of Stanford after one year. Jordan, p. 23) Yet to this day, that statement exists in black and white on that site. It’s kind of a reach to say Simkin invented it. And we know that Israel was sensitive about what she wrote about Pataky, or else she would have named him in her book.

    V

    After writing all the above I would like to say that Mark Shaw wrote an admirable and definitive volume about Kilgallen and her death. Unfortunately, I cannot do so. One reason is obvious from my references. A lot of the information in Shaw’s book can be found in either Israel’s tome or the Sara Jordan essay in Midwest Today. The interviews with Sinclaire and Simpson were done by the indefatigable Kathryn Fauble. Shaw does a nice job in reporting on the autopsy. And his interviews with Pataky are informative. But some of the book seems padded, consisting of chapters about four pages long. (See Chapter 34) Sometimes, the author repeats information, as with Sinclaire finding the body. And like writers who partake in biography, Shaw tends to exaggerate the achievements of his subject.

    This last is done in two ways. He tends to exaggerate Kilgallen’s stature as a journalist. For example, he calls her the first true female media icon. (p. 294) Did the author forget about Dorothy Thompson? Or Adela Rogers St. Johns? They certainly ranked with Kilgallen in popularity and as role models. And Thompson left behind a body of work at least equal in stature to Kilgallen’s and, by any rational measure, exceeding it. Shaw also quotes Ernest Hemingway as calling Kilgallen, “One of the greatest women writers in the world”. I could not find a source for this quote. But on what grounds would such an expansive judgment hold water? And why would Shaw want to use it? Kilgallen wrote two books. She actually co-wrote them. The first was about her trip around the world, which she wrote with Herb Shapiro in 1936. Murder One was published posthumously by an editor based on her notes. This plus her voluminous columns are the sum total of her literary output. Does that compare with the achievements of say Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter or Rebecca West?

    The second way Shaw inflates his subject is by discussing what her impact would have been on the JFK case. This is completely unwarranted and amounts to nothing but pure speculation. For the simple reason that no one is ever going to know what Kilgallen discovered, or what her talks with Ruby were about. Therefore, the database from which to measure her achievement is simply non-existent. But, to put it mildly, this does not hinder Shaw. In a perverse sort of way, it enables him. Near the end of the book he writes that, “If Kilgallen had lived … the course of history would have been altered.” (Shaw, p. 288) Since, as stated above, there is no database to support that statement with, this reviewer is puzzled as to how Shaw arrived at this outsized conclusion.

    Which leads to two other related problems with Shaw’s book. First, the author’s footnotes would not pass muster in a sophomore English class. Time after time he refers to newspapers without adding a date to them. Time after time, he refers to books without supplying a page number. This, of course, makes it difficult to crosscheck his work. Secondly, he repeatedly refers to the mystery of how Dorothy’s JFK file disappeared after her death. Yet in Sara Jordan’s essay, she quotes a conversation between the Bachs and Richard Kollmar after Dorothy’s death. They asked him, “Dick, what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination?” Richard replied, “Robert, I’m afraid that will have to go to the grave with me.” (Jordan, p. 22) What this means is anyone’s guess. But it could mean that he somehow recovered it and destroyed it.

    One of the worst aspects of The Reporter who Knew Too Much is how Shaw’s inflation is somewhat self-serving. For instance, when I saw the author speak at last year’s JFK Lancer conference he made a couple of rather odd statements. He said that since Kilgallen had gone to New Orleans with Sinclaire, this meant that she was investigating Carlos Marcello for the JFK case. Again, for reasons stated above, there is no factual way that Shaw could know such a thing. But further, how does New Orleans automatically deduce Marcello? New Orleans is honeycombed with a multitude of leads on the JFK case. Lee Oswald spent about six months there from the spring to the fall of 1963, less than two months before he was killed. To say that what he did there would automatically lead to Marcello betrays an agenda that is not really dealing with Kilgallen.

    That agenda traces back to a book Shaw wrote in 2013. It was called The Poison Patriarch. This reviewer did not critique it since it was simply not worth discussing. But Shaw synopsizes it here in order to attribute what Kilgallen was going to do if she had lived. Shaw’s previous work is a feat of Procrustean carpentry that ranks with the likes of Peter Janney and Philip Nelson. And like those authors, Shaw used an array of dubious witnesses to achieve his feat of alchemy. In short, he said that JFK was killed because Joseph Kennedy insisted on Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General. The father had underworld ties, should have known that RFK was going to do battle with the Mafia, and this caused a revenge tragedy to be performed. To scaffold this utterly bizarre thesis, Shaw trotted out a virtual menagerie of dubious witnesses like Tina Sinatra, Frank Ragano, Toni Giancana, Sy Hersh and Chuck Giancana. The book was a recycling and revision of Chuck Giancana’s science fiction fable Double Cross. (See pages 179-180 of the present book.)

    Well, in The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, Shaw pens his imaginary conclusion to Kilgallen’s investigation. He writes that after she made her second trip to New Orleans, the reporter produced a series of articles connecting Oswald, Ruby and Marcello. This series triggered a grand jury inquiry. This culminated in indictments of Marcello for the murders of both Kennedy and Oswald. But Kilgallen’s evidence went further. It also managed to indict J. Edgar Hoover for obstruction of justice, and he resigned his position. As a result, Kilgallen’s disclosures changed the way that the JFK case was discussed in history books.

    I wish I could say that what I just described is an exaggeration or parody of what Shaw wrote in his book. Unfortunately it is not any such thing. If the reader turns to page 289, he can read it for himself. To say that such writing is a fantasy really does not do it justice. The idea that Kilgallen was going to take on the entire power structure of the USA and overturn it with a series of newspaper columns is almost too ridiculous to consider. As many authors have proven, the JFK cover-up was interwoven throughout the entire structure of the American government at that time: the White House, the Justice Department, the Secret Service, the CIA, and the FBI. The Power Elite was involved in it through organs like the New York Times, CBS, and Life magazine. The idea that Kilgallen was going to upend this whole colossal structure is a bit ludicrous. As mentioned, she could not even discus the JFK case on Les Crane’s talk show. Which was a harbinger of what was going to happen to Jim Garrison in 1968 on The Tonight Show. I hate to inform Mark Shaw, but the Sam Sheppard murder case is not the Kennedy assassination.

    If Shaw would have restrained himself, or if he had an editor who would have pointed out the problems with his design, then this would have been a good and valuable book. It would have been really about Dorothy Kilgallen: who she really was, what we know and do not know about her death. But as shown above, such was not the case. Thus I would actually recommend to the interested party Sara Jordan’s informative and objective essay instead.

    The recommended essay can be found here:

    Sara Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” (2007)

  • Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

    Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

    Before opening Larry Tye’s biography of Robert Kennedy, I had some qualms about it. Why? Because when I turned to the back cover I saw that none other than Henry Kissinger had given the book his endorsement. The man many commentators think should be tried as a war criminal, who, for instance, supervised Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, was praising a book about Robert Kennedy. I then noted another blurb by journalist Marvin Kalb. In 1974, Kalb, along with his brother Bernard, wrote one of the first biographies of Kissinger. (Historian Theodore Draper called it a hagiography.) The Kalbs compared the validity of Kissinger’s diplomacy to George Washington’s likeness on a dollar bill. A judgment which, to say the least, does not hold up today. These endorsements, quite naturally, gave me pause.

    After reading the book, that pause was justified. Approximately the last 75 pages of Tye’s work are adequate and, in one or two places, actually moving. The problem with that observation is simple arithmetic: the book contains 447 pages of text. Therefore, those last 75 pages comprise about 1/6 of the volume. The rest of the book is not just below average; in many places it is worse than that, and in more ways than one.

    Tye tips us off to his agenda quite early. In his preface, he calls Robert F. Kennedy a commie baiter who was egged on by his father and Joe McCarthy. He adds that Kennedy practiced Machiavellian tactics to win his brother the presidency. He then says that he was also part of the plots to eliminate Fidel Castro. He tops this off by writing that “an assassin halted his campaign of conciliation.” (p. xi) I wrote in my notes: “Tye is off to a bad start.” I was correct.

    I

    Tye titles his first chapter “Cold Warrior”. In order to make this stick, he employs what military experts would call a pincers movement. He wants to envelop young Robert within the grasp of his father Joseph Kennedy, and his first legislative boss, Senator Joseph McCarthy. How anyone today could compare RFK with his father is really kind of inexplicable. But this is one of Tye’s unrepentant and recurrent proclamations. (Tye, p. 5) In this reviewer’s experience and knowledge there can be no better witness to this issue than Jackie Kennedy, since she was close to Joe Kennedy, and was even more familiar with his three surviving sons. She told Arthur Schlesinger that RFK was the son who was least like his father. (See Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 102) For instance, RFK did not have any interest in or aptitude for business. In fact, by 1957, he was a pro-labor advocate. Also, unlike his father, he was a devoted family man. Again, unlike his father, and more like President Kennedy, he was not an isolationist in his foreign policy outlook. Another point: RFK was quite aware of and sensitive to the plight of both the poor and minority groups. So where Tye gets this comparison is rather puzzling. After reading and taking notes on his book, in my view he does not come close to proving it. Jackie Kennedy appears correct on this point.

    It is interesting to note how Tye shoehorns RFK into this Cold Warrior box. One way he does so is by leaving out the name of Edmund Gullion. In 1951, in preparing for his run for the Senate a year later, congressman John Kennedy took a trip to the Far East. One of the places he visited was Saigon, South Vietnam. He was determined to find out the true status of the colonial war there between the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh on one side, and the colonial government of France on the other. After all, the USA was bankrolling a large part of the French war effort. One of the men that John Kennedy consulted with was a man he had formed a glancing relationship with in Washington a few years before. Gullion met with the 34-year-old John Kennedy at a rooftop restaurant. He told him that France would never win the war. Ho Chi Minh had fired up the young Viet Minh to such a degree that they would rather die than go back under French colonialism. France could not win a war of attrition. The home front would not support it.

    In 1983, when it was first reported at length in Richard Mahoney’s book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, this meeting had a jarring effect on the reader, for the simple reason that about 99% of President Kennedy biographers had left it out. But since that time, several other authors—like this reviewer—have not just mentioned it, but detailed it. So it is hard to imagine that Tye is not aware of it. The reason that it should be important to him is simple: Robert Kennedy was there. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second edition, p. 21) RFK later said that Gullion’s words had had a profound impact. As Arthur Schlesinger writes, when JFK opposed American intervention at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, RFK agreed. (ibid, p. 125) And on the issue of anti-communism and its relationship with anti-colonialism, RFK pretty much mirrored his brother: You could not consider anti-communism in the Third World without considering the impact of colonialism. (ibid, p. 133) RFK wrote in the pages of New York Times Magazine “… because we think that the uppermost thought in all people’s minds is Communism …. We are still too often doing too little too late to recognize and assist the irresistible movements for independence that are sweeping one dependent territory after another.” In his visit to Russia in 1955 with Justice William O. Douglas, which Tye mentions, RFK saw a different side of Russian life and became rather sympathetic with its citizens. He even wrote down some of the good things about the USSR. (Schlesinger, p. 134)

    But the main way Tye tries to turn Robert Kennedy into a Cold Warrior is through his service as assistant counsel under McCarthy on his Senate investigative committee. He partly does this by using some rather questionable and controversial sources, like M. Stanton Evans and Ralph de Toledano. The former was present at William F. Buckley’s estate when Buckley founded the Young Americans For Freedom. Evans actually wrote the charter for that right-wing group. He then went on to work for Buckley’s National Review for 13 years. Just a few years before Evans died in 2015, he wrote an apologia for Joe McCarthy. De Toledano was so anti-communist that OSS chief Bill Donovan would not include him in covert operations in Europe during World War II. He then became a close friend of Richard Nixon during the Alger Hiss trials, and later was a co-founder of National Review. He wrote a quite negative book about Robert Kennedy in 1967, in anticipation of his run for the presidency. (In this regard it is important to note that Tye also uses two other dubious sources in this section: conservative hit-man Victor Lasky’s Robert F. Kennedy: The Myth and the Man and Burton Hersh’s absolutely atrocious Bobby and J. Edgar.)

    Robert Kennedy served as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s committee for about six months. According to most observers, he composed one of the very few reports that had any value to it. This was a documented study of how some American allies—like Greece and England—extensively traded with China during the Korean War, consequently being part of the effort against the USA in that conflict. Even McCarthy’s liberal critics described the report as being factually accurate and soberly written. (Schlesinger, p. 108) Unlike most of Chief Counsel Roy Cohn’s work, it did not accuse people of being traitors. And Robert did not take part in the hunting down of alleged subversives in the State Department. (ibid, p. 106)

    In fact, RFK and Cohn bumped heads at this time over the way the chief counsel was conducting the committee. Bobby also complained to McCarthy that although Cohn’s recklessness was attracting a lot of press, it would eventually collapse the committee. He likened what Cohn was doing to a toboggan ride down a slope ending with a crash into a tree. (ibid, p. 110) But McCarthy decided to stick with Cohn. So, in the summer of 1953, RFK resigned.

    About six months later, he returned. He wrote a letter to a friend at this time, saying, “I think I will enjoy my new job.” (ibid, p. 115) This time he was chief counsel to the Democratic minority. He spent about three times longer in this role as he did as assistant counsel to Cohn. Therefore, some dramatizations of this episode use his role as minority chief counsel and discount his prior work. (See the HBO film Citizen Cohn) He went head to head with Cohn, and more often than not, he came out in front. In fact, the two became such bitter rivals that, on one occasion, they almost came to blows. (ibid, pp. 117-18) Even a local newspaper, The Boston Post, went after RFK for his determined and public opposition to Cohn.

    As RFK predicted, McCarthy imploded. One cause was Cohn’s close friendship with David Schine, a draftee who Cohn tried to get special privileges for in the army. Bobby Kennedy wrote the questions for each Democratic senator on this issue. (ibid) The second cause was McCarthy’s fatal showdown with attorney Joseph Welch, who had been hired to specifically defend the army against the McCarthy/Cohn assault. Welch’s famous “Have you no decency sir” riposte punctured McCarthy in front of 20 million spectators.

    When the Army-McCarthy hearings ended in June of 1954, Bobby Kennedy wrote the minority report. It was highly critical of McCarthy’s leadership. Parts of it were so extreme that the committee would not sign off on the whole report. RFK wrote that there was no excuse for McCarthy’s failure to rein in Cohn. Or how irresponsible many of Cohn’s charges turned out to be. He then concluded with: “The Senate should take action to correct this situation.” (ibid, p. 118) For all intents and purposes, this was the beginning of the movement to censure McCarthy. That motion arose on the Senate floor a month later. It was passed on December 2, 1954.

    Under the new leadership of Sen. Karl Mundt, Robert Kennedy had even more power. He used it mainly to wrap up what was left of Cohn’s charges: the Irving Peress, and Annie Lee Moss cases and the accusation of communist infiltration of defense plants. No charges were ever filed.

    From the above synopsis it’s fairly easy to deduce that RFK was stuck in a bad situation and he tried to make the best of it. When he could not, he resigned. Given the opportunity to return under more propitious circumstances, he atoned for his earlier errors. Based upon that, it’s not justified to call Bobby a Cold Warrior, or to have the episode cast a shadow over his entire career.

    II

    The next major section of the book deals with RFK’s confrontation with Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa. In 1956, the Democrats took control of the Senate and with that, the leadership of the sub-committee on investigations passed to Senator John McClellan. Because he appeared to be eminently fair in wrapping up the McCarthy/Cohn fracas, a few journalists got in contact with Robert Kennedy, trying to interest him to use his chief counsel’s office to go after a real danger: organized crime influence on labor unions. Kennedy and McClellan went in that direction and this resulted in RFK’s four-year long pursuit of Hoffa. Tye seems to have no serious problems with this episode in young Kennedy’s career. The worst he can say about it is that it was used to boost Senator John Kennedy’s profile in his attempt to attain the White House.

    JFK & RFK on the McClellan committee

    Which is kind of ridiculous. The reason JFK ended up on the committee was because of complaints by Teamster leaders Dave Beck and Hoffa. They protested that McClellan’s committee was the wrong place for these hearings; they should be held before the Labor Committee. McClellan resisted this since he thought that committee was too friendly with labor and would not pursue the complaints vigorously. Because they did have a valid point, the solution was to form a special committee, half from McClellan’s committee and half from the Labor Committee. Since JFK was on the latter, that is how he got on the special committee. Is Tye saying that Beck and Hoffa brought up this objection at the request of RFK to get his brother on the committee?

    What is odd about this section is that the reviewer could find few, if any, questions or comments by Tye about some of the techniques used by RFK to finally imprison Hoffa. Some distinguished authors, e.g., Victor Navasky and especially Fred Cook, have raised some serious questions about the methods used by Kennedy’s office to enlist witnesses to testify against Hoffa. Many of these methods were employed by Kennedy’s investigator Walter Sheridan, who remains pretty much untouched by Tye. (For a look at these charges, see Cook’s multi-part series in The Nation which culminated in his article “The Hoffa Trial” on 4/27/64.)

    Another oddity about this section is that much of the political background of the issue goes unexplored. The Republicans on the special committee, for instance archconservative Barry Goldwater, wanted RFK to delve into the Teamsters so they could use that issue to tar labor unions in general. But once they saw how RFK was bringing in organized crime as an influence on Hoffa, they actually began to side with Hoffa, since this would detract from their real aim. (See review of James Neff’s Vendetta, by Alex Lichtenstein, Washington Post July 17, 2015.) When John Kennedy tried to pass legislation aimed at this particular influence in order to sanitize union elections, the Republicans hijacked his legislation and turned it into the union weakening Landrum-Griffin bill. That act was such a twisting of JFK’s original intent that he took his name off of it. (Schlesinger, pp. 188-92)

    Walter Reuther & RFK

    Another fascinating aspect of RFK’s service on this committee was the Kohler company investigation. And again, Tye pretty much discounts the episode. The Republicans on the committee, especially Goldwater, wanted RFK to inquire into this long running UAW strike against Kohler plumbing in order to investigate UAW leader Walter Reuther. Goldwater did not foresee the consequences. First, Reuther turned out to be a forceful witness for the rights of labor and abuses by corporations. Secondly, Bobby Kennedy actually visited the home of Kohler in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was appalled at some of the working conditions there, and at what the company called a “lunch break”, which lasted about five minutes. (ibid, pp. 183-87) This had two effects. First, it resulted in a strong personal and professional relationship between RFK and Reuther. For example, Kennedy later called on Reuther to bus in as much of his membership as possible to attend Martin Luther King’s 1963 March On Washington. Second, it ended in the largest fine ever awarded over a strike. Kohler was ordered to pay three million dollars in back wages to the strikers and to give their pension fund another 1.5 million.

    RFK’s focus on Hoffa’s ties with organized crime caused his interest to spread into a general inquiry into the workings of what had become known as the Cosa Nostra in America. As a result, in 1959, the McClellan Committee was nicknamed the Rackets Committee. For the first time the American public was exposed to organized crime figures like Anthony Provenzano and Sam Giancana. Many authors have concluded that it was this part of RFK’s congressional service, his exposure of Mob influence in labor unions and on the national scene, which really made him into a national figure.

    III

    From here, Tye segues into the 1960 presidential election and RFK’s role as his brother’s campaign manager. At the beginning of the chapter he writes that what Bobby did in this campaign would later embolden the likes of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. (Tye, p. 87) That theme is repeated later on. (see pp. 106, 121) One has to wonder: What in God’s name is Tye up to with those comparisons? Does he really think that no one remembers what Richard Nixon and his political hatchet man Murray Chotiner did to, first Jerry Voorhis in the 1946 congressional race, and then Helen Douglas in the 1950 senatorial race? These have become famous today because of the new low they hit in creating red baiting campaign tactics. Tye also seems to trust the reader not being aware of revelations about how Allen Dulles helped finance Nixon’s run against Voorhis, a man who was opposed to both big banking and big oil, which Dulles represented at his law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, pp.162-63) Or how Nixon was on the take from private companies in 1946 because he would not run for office at a financial sacrifice to himself. (ibid, p. 165) Chotiner portrayed the anti-communist Voorhis as a tool and fellow traveler of the Kremlin. This included voters getting anonymous phone calls during the last week saying that they should know Voorhis was a communist before they voted for him. (ibid, p. 166)

    What made it all the worse was that Nixon knew it was all a fabrication. When a Voorhis backer later confronted him with those last minute phone calls Nixon took the opportunity to give him an education in realpolitik. He coolly replied, “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a communist. I had to win. That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win. You’re just being naïve.” (ibid) I could continue on with Nixon’s run against Douglas which was, in some ways, even worse than the Voorhis campaign. But the point is obvious: What could someone as corrupt and feckless as Nixon learn from Robert Kennedy?

    The comparison with Johnson is just as bad. Maybe worse. One just has to conjure up the lawlessness of Texas politics in the thirties and forties, which is when LBJ got his start. Through the efforts of several Johnson biographers, we know about the associations of LBJ with such unsavory characters as Herman and George Brown of Brown and Root, the giant construction firm that eventually evolved into Halliburton. In return for steering contracts their way, the brothers financed Johnson’s congressional and senatorial campaigns. (Joan Mellen, Faustian Bargains, pp. 7-9) When a government accountant tried to expose the illicit relations between LBJ and Brown and Root, he was framed for soliciting contributions from his staff. He was acquitted, but decided to leave government service. Johnson also used extortion tactics to gain newspaper endorsements. (ibid, p. 9) There is also circumstantial evidence that the Brown and Root connection helped finance Johnson’s purchase of KTBC radio in Austin, which was the beginning of Johnson’s personal fortune in media.

    But this is all prelude to Johnson’s infamous 1948 race for the senate against Coke Stevenson. The results of that race shifted back and forth for a solid week after the election was over. Johnson actually wiretapped Stevenson’s phone lines. Johnson had made a deal with south Texas political boss George Parr to rig the vote. This culminated in the notorious Box 13. This was a late arriving vote tally—five days after the polls closed—in which 203 ballots were “discovered”. Those results tilted the election to Johnson. Of the 203, a miraculous 202 were votes for Johnson. Which was even worse than the Parr controlled Duval county results, which were 94% for Johnson. Curiously, those 203 names were assembled in alphabetical order. When eleven of the 203 voters in Box 13 were interviewed, they said they had not even voted. Journalist Ronnie Dugger later found precinct official Luis Salas, who admitted he had performed the fraud for Parr and Johnson. Salas had a picture of the smiling officials who held the ballot box in their hands. The capper to all this is that when Dugger interviewed LBJ for his biography, Johnson had the very same picture. (Click here for Jason Matteson’s essay on this subject)

    Are we really to believe that Tye is not aware of this whole tawdry affair? It has been written about extensively since at least 1982, when Dugger’s book on Johnson, The Politician, was first published. Are we also to think that Tye is not aware of Johnson’s later associations with the likes of Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker and his bribery actions with Don Reynolds? (For the last, see Mellen, pp. 160-64)

    But in practical terms, in his book, does Tye excavate anything like the above to make his bombastic comparison stick? He mentions some dirty tricks in the primary campaign against Hubert Humphrey, but he admits he cannot trace these through to Bobby Kennedy. And his prime attempt at doing the same in the general election smacks of desperation. In 2011, over a half-century after the election, the Washington Post published an article by Mark Feldstein. (1/14/2011) This was yet another reworking of a story that was published in 1962. Since then it has been reported several times, for instance in the book Empire, a long biography of Howard Hughes by Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele. Somehow, Tye ignores all the previous reporting and accepts this one at face value (Tye, p. 123), even though in serious ways it contradicts the others.

    Back in 1956, Howard Hughes made a loan of $205,000 to Donald Nixon, Richard Nixon’s brother. Donald’s business enterprise, named Nixon burgers, was a kind of fast food place mixed in with a grocery store. It was about to go under unless it got a fast infusion of cash. Hughes was always attuned to these situations since he was all too intent on compromising politicians or their next of kin. After Nixon and Eisenhower won re-election in November, Hughes supplied the loan in December of 1956. Up until that time, the IRS was resisting granting Hughes a large tax exemption for Hughes Medical Center. They recognized it as a scam that was simply a way for Hughes to dodge taxes on profits from his other divisions. But, lo and behold, one month after Hughes notified the Vice-President that all was in place with the loan, the IRS reversed itself. Hughes got the phony exemption, which allowed him to save millions. The loan was supposed to be mortgaged by a plot of land in Whittier—except the land value was estimated at only 50,000 dollars. By most measures one would have to conclude that Hughes was buying influence, not making a business transaction. (Bartlett and Steele, p. 204)

    Through Drew Pearson, the story got out in a fragmentary way in the waning days of the 1960 election. Very few newspapers picked it up and Nixon dismissed it as a last-minute smear unworthy of comment. In 1962, Nixon lied about the loan in his book Six Crises, saying that the Whittier property more than covered the amount of the loan. That year, Nixon decided to return to politics by running for governor of California. This time, the Hughes loan would be a much larger story since now editors were ready for it. The Long Beach Press Telegram decided to run a long story on the loan since they had editorialized about it back in 1960. That story was published in that newspaper and in the magazine The Reporter in April of 1962. James Phelan, who many people in the JFK field have qualms about—including me— wrote it. But in this instance, Phelan did not seem to have a dog in the fight. And there were adequate records to back up what he wrote. And later reporting by, for example, Hughes manager Noah Dietrich, has also borne out the basic facts as he presented them.

    Hughes tried to cover up the loan by using two layers of disguise. The first was a lobbyist by the name of John Waters. But since Waters had done some work for Hughes, the trustee of the mortgage was changed to an accountant named Philip Reiner. Complicating the matter was that, after Donald Nixon eventually went bankrupt, a gas station was built over the Whittier lot. Reiner was sent the rent checks by the station, which amounted to $800 per month. When Reiner surrendered the check to Nadine Henley at Hughes headquarters in Hollywood, it was returned to him. Hughes wanted no paper trail linking him to the lot. So Reiner spent the money. But later, an accountant at Hughes Tool Company in Houston began raising a ruckus about what had happened to the loan for $205,000, well over a million dollars today. Reiner’s cut-out, a lawyer named Frank Arditto, now asked him what happened to the payments, knowing full well that he had given Reiner permission to cash the checks. Realizing he was being made the fall guy, Reiner hired an attorney. With an election coming up, the consul realized that his client would make a good asset for the Democrats, who would protect him. He got in contact with Robert Kennedy, who turned him over to an assistant named Jim McInerney. McInerney decided to subsidize Reiner for the money Arditto was demanding, sixteen thousand dollars. McInerney then put together a package of documents, affidavits, trust deeds, and receipts. He gave them to three outlets: St Louis Post Dispatch, Time magazine, and Drew Pearson. No one would run with it since it was so late in the campaign.

    But Nixon then made a mistake. Hearing about McInerney’s report, he launched a preemptive cover story to conceal the actual circumstances of the loan and the role of Hughes. These lies infuriated Pearson. He now decided to publish the story. (These details are in Phelan’s 1982 book, Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels. Reiner later sued Hughes and won a $150,000 out of court settlement. See The Desert Sun, 2/22/72)

    When one compares this with the Post version, as adapted by Tye, it is unsettling. That version opens with Nixon complaining that the 1960 election had been stolen from him. It then says that the document package was picked up at McInerney’s office, not sent out. In a completely unprecedented twist—with no evidence advanced—it states that the Hughes cash was given to Dick Nixon to purchase a home in the Washington area. The wildest part then states that RFK acquired the story for money, and then a burglary was arranged at Reiner’s office to get the documents. In his text, Tye never mentions the earlier version of this story; therefore, he does not point out the differences between the two, which means he does not have to attempt to reconcile them. In his footnotes he does not even alert the reader to the other version. But the worst part of the improbable tale, and its innate spin, is that all culpability by Nixon is now gone. That poor Red-baiter Nixon is reduced to a helpless victim pondering what happened to him at the hands of Kennedy power. In this new version, there is not even a note of irony about how Voorhis and Douglas must have felt. Talk about (multi-leveled) historical revisionism.

    IV

    In this review, I will not divert much from the main topic in order to critique at any length or detail some of the comments that Tye makes about John F. Kennedy. If I did, the review would be about 50% longer. I will simply note that some of the things the author says about John Kennedy are rather obtuse, and not supported by the record. For instance, at the beginning of Chapter Four, dealing with JFK ‘s entry to the White House, the author writes that neither Eisenhower nor Wilson had been as brazen as Jack in running for President as an untested leader. I don’t understand what this means. The only elected political office Woodrow Wilson held prior to winning the presidency was a two-year stint as governor of New Jersey. Which is two years longer in office than Eisenhower. In comparison, John Kennedy had served in Congress and the Senate in Washington for 14 years prior to the 1960 election. About the 1960 race, Tye also writes that the politics of Nixon and Kennedy did not differ much. (p. 121) This is a Chris Mathews style blurring of the record. To use just two examples which occurred while JFK was in the Senate and Nixon was vice-president: 1) Kennedy opposed 1954’s Operation Vulture, the White House plan to use atomic weapons to aid the French at Dien Bien Phu; (op. cit Talbot, p. 361) 2) Kennedy’s monumental 1957 speech about why the USA should not support the doomed French colonial war in Algeria provoked barbed and snide remarks from Nixon in the White House. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 29)

    Tye’s depiction of Robert Kennedy running the Justice Department is, to be kind, equally myopic. The author is adequate in describing the new Attorney General’s war against organized crime. (Tye, pp. 142-45) He describes Kennedy’s attempts at fairness in going after Democratic politicians who had broken the law. (ibid, pp. 145-47) He also briefly describes RFK’s final neutering of the Smith Act by having the sentence of CPUSA member Junius Scales commuted. (p. 157) Again, when it comes to the complexities of the Hoffa case, he seems to have little problem accepting the prosecution’s dubious witness Ed Partin. In fact, he actually adds on to Partin’s sensational charges of Hoffa’s intent to kill RFK by adding the late arriving and dubious Frank Ragano story about Hoffa trying to choke Bobby to death at the Justice Department. (Tye, p. 152) To be fair, he does say that RFK’s pursuit of Hoffa was so unrelenting, so single-minded, that it created sympathy for the Teamster leader.

    JFK responds to U.S. Steel’s defiance
    (click image for YouTube video)

    Tye deals with the 1962 steel crisis in about one page (pp. 163-64). His account is so skeletal, so skimpy, that one would think all the commotion was about whether or not FBI agents should phone business executives late at night. To get my bearings back on this momentous event, I reviewed what is perhaps the best account: Donald Gibson’s chapter-long treatment in Battling Wall Street. Gibson begins his discussion by quoting the late, illustrious economist John Blair, who called the episode, “The most dramatic confrontation in history between a President and a corporate management.” (Gibson, p. 9) The only other instance that rivals it was Harry Truman’s intervention in a steel strike ten years before, but that was during a full-blown war in Korea. President Kennedy had worked on an industry-wide labor agreement for a year, mainly through Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg. In late March, he thought he had one. But it was broken via a personal visit to the White House by US Steel chairman Roger Blough. He told JFK he would announce a price increase in 30 minutes, which is what the President and Goldberg had been promised would not occur. The President then uttered his famous quote, “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it until now.” (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 143) Within 24 hours JFK went on national television to condemn the steel companies. He said that Americans would find it hard to accept that “a tiny handful of steel executives … can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185,000,000 Americans.” (Gibson, p. 13)

    One day later, RFK announced formation of a grand jury and the delivery of subpoenas. Records, both personal and corporate, were seized. The aim was to establish if criminal conspiracy laws had been violated. The Attorney General also had the FBI march into executive offices for interviews. (Schlesinger, p. 421) Within 72 hours the crisis was over and the price increase rescinded. There can be little doubt that the Attorney General’s actions hurried the settlement. Especially in light of the fact that, in 1961, as a continuation of an investigation under the Eisenhower administration of price-fixing by electric companies, RFK had actually placed seven business executives in prison. Five were from General Electric and Westinghouse. (See The Great Price Conspiracy by John Herling.) And contrary to popular belief, and what Tye implies, based on information from the 1962 steel inquiry, RFK began new actions against US Steel in late 1963. (Gibson, p. 13)

    V

    This same pattern, shrinking a large achievement, is followed with respect to the Attorney General’s actions in the civil rights arena.  In this instance, however, Tye’s writing is even more problematic, since RFK’s achievements there are clearly epochal, no prior Attorney General coming even close to them.

    Harris Wofford & JFK

    Tye does something with the subject that I don’t recall seeing before. He begins his discussion of the Kennedy program in 1963, at a meeting RFK had with some militant black leaders like James Baldwin. Most accounts of the Kennedy civil rights program begin with a review of what had been done by the Eisenhower-Nixon administration and then segues into the memo written by Harris Wofford. After campaigning for Kennedy, Wofford was appointed JFK’s special assistant on civil rights. In late December of 1960, before the inauguration, Wofford wrote a memo that outlined a program for achieving equal rights for black Americans. He then recommended his friend and colleague, attorney Burke Marshall, to be the Justice Department lawyer in charge of the issue. (Bernstein pp. 42-43)

    Just the information above counters two observations Tye makes. First, that the Kennedy administration had no plan to attain civil rights, and second, that RFK took on issues willy-nilly. (Tye, p. 205) Wofford, a central figure by anyone’s estimation, is discounted by Tye. Surprisingly, he is only mentioned once in his chapter on the subject. Yet his memo was both acute and realistic, and it was more or less followed by the administration. He wrote that the only branch of government that had achieved anything so far was the judiciary. He then wrote that the administration would have to press the issue through executive actions in order to put pressure on Congress to pass legislation, something that, for political reasons, Congress would not be ready to do in the first year or two. Wofford also mapped out the country geographically and recommended what actions needed to be taken and where. For example, he recommended legal assaults on states that restricted voting rights, and strictures in contracting to open up corporations to black employment. (Bernstein, pp. 47-48) As historian Irving Bernstein notes in his book, once Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, he followed this program. (See Promises Kept, Chapter 2)

    When the Kennedy administration took office, it was evident that the Brown vs. Board decision, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were not having any kind of real impact. One reason for this was the Eisenhower administration’s lack of rigor in enforcing them. Senator John Kennedy, during the debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, said he championed Title 3 of that proposed act because it allowed the Attorney General to enter into individual states to attack cases of voting discrimination and school segregation. And this is what Robert Kennedy was doing once he became Attorney General. On May 6, 1961, at the University of Georgia’s Law Day, RFK announced that, unlike his predecessor, he would strongly enforce the Brown vs. Board decision. And RFK also began filing lawsuits in southern states based upon the low rates of voter turnout there. In his first year in office, RFK filed more than twice as many cases than Eisenhower had in his entire second administration. As writers like Harry Golden have pointed out, this plan was not just recommended by Wofford’s memo. Candidate Kennedy had approved it in no uncertain terms during the campaign in a meeting with his civil rights advisory board. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, pp. 105, 139)

    In the face of all this, how does the author actually begin his chronicle of the administration’s civil rights campaign? He ignores much of what I have noted above. He begins his actual chronicle with the Freedom Riders campaign, which started in May of 1961. He uses this for two reasons. He wants to show that 1) RFK was behind the curve, and 2) He uses the incident to call the AG a liar. He achieves the first in part by ignoring the comment that Senator James Eastland made to RFK after his confirmation. He told Kennedy that his predecessor had never filed a voting rights case against his home state of Mississippi. The next day President Kennedy wrote a note to his brother telling him to begin filing cases. (Golden, p. 100) This, of course, preceded the Freedom Riders campaign.

    The second objective is achieved by saying that RFK was alerted to the incident in advance. Yet the AG said he was not aware of the demonstration. To use one example, as an FBI informant later revealed, J. Edgar Hoover was well aware of the planned violence against the Freedom Riders. That information was not passed to Hoover’s boss, the Attorney General. (Schlesinger, p. 307) A letter that the demonstration organizer had sent to the Attorney General was routed to Burke Marshall instead. He either never got it or he did not inform Kennedy about it. (Bernstein, p. 63)

    But beyond that, is Tye implying what I think he is implying? That somehow, even if he had known about it, RFK would not have anticipated the violence the Freedom Riders would encounter? That is: vicious racists attacking the buses with baseball bats, lead pipes and bicycle chains. With people being pulled off the buses, thrown to the ground and then beaten and bloodied. All this while both the police and FBI did nothing. In this regard, I should note the following. At his meeting with President Kennedy about taking the job, both men understood there were going to be battles in the civil rights area right off the bat. (Ronald Goldfarb, Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes, p. 10) But also, I could find no mention by the author of the protest RFK made as a member of the Harvard football team when a southern opponent refused to let a black member of the team stay in the same hotel. That was in 1947. (Schlesinger, p. 71) Secondly, Tye seriously underplays the actions Kennedy took as leader of the Legal Forum at the University of Virginia in 1951. RFK invited black diplomat Ralph Bunche to speak there. He knew it would raise a ruckus, since UV was the team that did not want to play Harvard back in 1947. What made it more problematic was that Bunche wrote Kennedy a letter saying that he did not wish to appear before an audience that featured segregated seating. Yet, state law required this. More or less on his own, Kennedy took the case through four levels of campus government saying that he would not give up, since he thought disallowing Bunche would be morally indefensible. (Schlesinger, p. 90) Bunche ended up speaking to an integrated audience that was about 1/3 black. But beyond those personal experiences, the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins had taken place in North Carolina during the presidential campaign of 1960. And further, RFK was already supervising the New Orleans school desegregation crisis against the likes of Leander Perez in early 1961. (Robert Kennedy in His own Words, edited by Edwin Guthman and Jeffery Schulman, p.81)

    What really happened with the revolution in civil rights that took place under Bobby Kennedy is fairly simple to understand. First, the failure of the Eisenhower administration to use any of the judicial and legislative achievements attained in the fifties built up large amounts of pent up frustration. For example, from 1955 to 1960, the courts had made a series of rulings that segregation in busing was not constitutional. If those rulings had been enforced, there would have been no need for the Freedom Riders. (Bernstein, pp. 62-63) But John F. Kennedy’s candidacy represented something different to black Americans. From his speeches on European colonialism in Africa back in 1957, to his speech in Jackson, Mississippi that year, telling southerners they must abide by Brown vs. Board, to his comments in New York during the 1960 primary that he would risk losing the south since this was a moral issue to him, and his later call during the general election to Coretta King while her husband was in jail, all these and more, caused that frustration to unleash itself once Kennedy won the election. Finally, someone was in the White House who was ready to do something about civil rights. For instance, it was John Kennedy’s election that inspired James Meredith to apply to the University of Mississippi. (Bernstein, p. 76)

    And they were correct. By the summer of 1963, in less than three years, that synergy had turned the tide. With John Kennedy’s landmark speech in June of 1963 on the issue, and Robert Kennedy’s stewardship of King’s March on Washington, the battle was essentially won. Kennedy’s civil rights act was going to pass. As Wofford predicted, it could not have passed earlier. But I must note, even with this—the reversal of a century of Jim Crow and segregation in less than three years—Tye is still not satisfied. About President Kennedy’s nationally televised speech he writes that Kennedy had wanted to redefine America’s place in the world, but he had not come close before. (Tye, p. 229) To say the least, many would disagree. For example, President Kennedy reversed the Eisenhower agenda in Third World nations like Congo, Indonesia, and Laos in 1961. Tye also states that Robert Kennedy’s confrontation with Governor George Wallace at the University of Alabama was “scripted”. If one watches the classic documentary about this showdown at Tuscaloosa, Crisis, the viewer will see that all the way through, the AG did not know what Wallace was going to do. Wallace had deliberately decided not to talk to RFK to settle the matter in advance. So at the White House, the AG suggested that the students might have to be forced through one of the furthest doors Wallace was standing in front of. If the episode had been scripted, RFK would never have suggested such a dangerous alternative. After all, Wallace had 900 state troopers there, and Bobby Kennedy had brought in 3000 guardsmen.

    But in the long run Wallace and his henchman, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, had won. By creating these dramatic confrontations at Tuscaloosa and Oxford, they had made it appear that Bobby Kennedy was invading the state. Which conjured up images of President Lincoln and General Grant marching on Richmond in 1865. So even though Wallace lost on integration, he won the larger political stake: the South was lost to the Democrats after 1964. And this followed from the fact that, unlike Hoover, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower and Nixon, Bobby Kennedy viewed this as something that had to be done. Indeed, at times RFK sounded like Malcolm X on the issue: “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” And what made it even worse is that RFK was fully aware of what was happening in the political arena. He was writing off state after state for his brother’s re-election in 1964. (Guthman and Shulman, pp. 76, 82) This whole tragic dimension—the moral plane losing out to the political factors—is lost on Tye.

    But it wasn’t lost on Martin Luther King. In 1967, it was Bobby Kennedy who suggested King lead his Poor People’s March to Washington. (Schlesinger, p. 911) And for the 1968 primary election, King made it clear to his advisors that he was backing Kennedy over Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, and there was no real question about it. (Martin Luther King: The FBI File, p. 572)

    VI

    I began to lose a lot of faith in the author when, about halfway through the book, he began to insert the work of the late David Heymann. (pp. 191-92) And while we are at it, Tye also sources writers like Kitty Kelley, Chuck Giancana, and Ron Kessler. To be clear, towards the end, he doesn’t actually endorse Heymann; he throws his work out there for discussion. The problem is that Heymann has been discredited about as far as an author can be discredited. And since that discreditation has been well publicized, it is hard to believe that Tye doesn’t know about it. He even gives play to Heymann’s book, saying that RFK and Jackie Kennedy had an affair after JFK was killed. That book, and Heymann’s reputation, was thoroughly savaged by Lisa Pease. And today, it has been shown beyond any doubt that Heymann was a professional confabulator, one who not only made up interviews he did not do, but even created interview subjects who did not exist. Beyond that, he even manufactured a fictional police department so he could refer to their reports. (See this Newsweek story) Tye uses a story about RFK making out with Candy Bergen that was vehemently denied by a furious Bergen in 2014 in an article for Newsweek. That Newsweek story was published two years before the author’s book. Can he really have missed it? Meanwhile, Tye does not quote what the late FBI officer in charge of domestic intelligence for Hoover said about Kennedy’s party life. In his book The Bureau, William Sullivan wrote that Hoover would send agents out to follow Kennedy around at night. They could never find him in any compromising situations. He would nurse one drink all night and then leave the party.

    This is all apropos of Tye’s chapter on RFK and Cuba, and also other foreign affairs. That chapter is surely one of the worst in the book. In order to discuss it, we must briefly mention President Kennedy’s policy, since Tye does so. Near the beginning of the chapter, Tye writes, in relation to Operation Zapata, the code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion, that “The new president was determined to act.” (Tye, p. 242) This is contrary to just about everything that has been written about Zapata. Even Allen Dulles, the progenitor of the operation, has stated that the project was a kind of orphan child that Kennedy had adopted, but he had no real love or affection for. (Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure, p. 103) When Arthur Schlesinger asked him what he thought about the concept, JFK replied he thought about it as little as possible. (ibid, p. 102) Contrary to what Tye states, the CIA had to entice the new president into going along with it. They did this in a variety of ways. This included presenting him with false estimates of the resistance to Castro on the island, having Dulles wildly overstate the possibilities of the project’s success, and actually predicting that once the invasion landed, much of the Cuban militia would defect. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 294-95) But beyond that, Tye persists in the idea that President Kennedy cancelled D-Day air strikes. (Tye, p. 242) Thanks to the declassification of Lyman Kirkpatrick’s Inspector General report, and the availability of General Maxwell Taylor’s White House report, this has been exposed as a myth propagated by the CIA.

    Now, what did Robert Kennedy have to do with Zapata? Just about nothing. He was briefed on the operation four days before the invasion force was launched from Central America. (ibid, p. 301) The importance of RFK in regards to Zapata is his role afterwards in serving as President Kennedy’s watchdog on the Taylor review board. This was a panel set up by President Kennedy to delve into the CIA’s creation and launching of the invasion. Tye seriously underplays RFK’s role on Maxwell Taylor’s board. For instance, he does not mention RFK’s cross-examination of Allen Dulles; or Joseph Kennedy’s aid in helping uncover the Bruce-Lovett report, which had previously been critical of Dulles; nor does he mention the termination of director Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, or operations supervisor Dick Bissell. (Tye, p. 245) JFK did this because he came to the conclusion he had been lied to about every aspect of the operation. Why? Because Dulles knew the plan would not succeed. The director had banked on Kennedy sending in American forces when he saw it failing. Kennedy did not. With the declassification process on Zapata, several respected authors, including Jim Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable, have demonstrated this was the case. It is questionable whether the president could have understood all this without his brother’s role on the Taylor panel. As far as I can see, this is all left out by Tye.

    As Tye recognizes, it was largely RFK’s part on the Taylor board that convinced the president not to trust the CIA or the Pentagon. Thus Robert Kennedy assumed a larger presence in foreign policy matters. When Operation Mongoose—the secret war against Cuba—was formulated, RFK served as a kind of ombudsman over that project. As David Corn wrote in Blonde Ghost—his biography of the project’s administrator Ted Shackley—the CIA greatly resented this. For now they had to present detailed plans to RFK for every raid into Cuba.

    This gives Tye the opportunity to do what I thought he would. He tries to say that Mongoose included the elimination of Fidel Castro and since RFK knew all about the project, he had to have known about the plots to kill Fidel. (p. 253) This is wrong on two scores. First, it is clear from the declassified record on Mongoose that assassination plots were not a part of the program. The CIA had arranged plans to liquidate Castro, but these were apart from official plans. Secondly, the CIA Inspector General report on the plots specifically states that they were kept from the Kennedys. This includes the phase of the plots that CIA officer William Harvey was supervising with mobster John Roselli during Mongoose. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 327) When RFK found out about them he called in Director John McCone and Director of Operations Richard Helms and he made it clear that this kind of thing was disgraceful and had to be stopped. (Goldfarb, p. 273) But the CIA deliberately deceived RFK and continued in them. In fact, when JFK was assassinated, they had a representative meeting with a Cuban national codenamed AM/LASH, delivering him murder weapons. Again, the CIA lied about this and said it had been authorized by Robert Kennedy. It was not. (David Talbot, Brothers, pp. 229-30)

    After all this rather flawed history—about Zapata, about Mongoose, about the CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro—Tye concludes with a remarkable reverie. (p. 254) I actually had to read it twice. He says that the clandestine operations against Cuba were the inspiration for things like Ronald Reagan’s war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and Richard Nixon’s CIA overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. Somehow, Tye leaves out the fact that the CIA had been doing this kind of thing long before the Kennedys came to power. Can Tye really not be aware of the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953? The Agency overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala the year after? Or their attempt to militarily overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958? Or the backing by Eisenhower and Allen Dulles of the murder plots against Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960? The idea that this kind of thing was all new in 1961 is a little ludicrous. And as more than one author—for example, Jim Douglass—has shown, the Kennedys were attempting to both halt and reverse these regressive actions in the Third World.

    But the main focus of this dubious chapter is the 1962 Missile Crisis. As is his consistent tendency, Tye’s goal seems twofold: 1) He wants to label Robert Kennedy a liar, and 2) He wants to blame RFK for the crisis in the first place. He does this by saying that the reason for the Russian placement of the atomic armada in Cuba was because of Mongoose, and the possibility of a second invasion. Therefore, he concludes that RFK was not forthcoming about the real cause of the crisis in his book on the subject, Thirteen Days. (Tye, p. 239)

    Again, to say this is flawed history is understating it. One way Tye achieves this is by not revealing the full expanse of the nuclear arsenal the USSR had secretly moved into Cuba. That arsenal included 40 missile launchers and 60 medium- and long-range nuclear tipped rockets. The former could fly 1,200 miles; the latter 2,400 miles. Consequently, the long-range missiles could reach almost any major city in the USA, excepting the Pacific Northwest. There were 140 surface to air missile defense launchers to protect the launching sites. Those batteries would be accompanied by a wing of the latest Soviet jet fighter, the MIG-21, plus a detachment of 45,000 Soviet combat troops. That troop detachment included four motorized rifle regiments and over 250 units of armor. To finish off the nuclear launch triad, the Russians had sent in 40 IL-28s, an armed nuclear bomber which had a speed of 560 MPH and a range of 4,500 miles. Finally, they had constructed a submarine pen with 11 subs, 7 of them with 1-megaton nuclear weapons. That explosive power is about 80 times the torque of the Hiroshima blast. (Probe Magazine, May-June 1998, p. 17)

    That array made it possible to hit every major city in America. One would use the bombers and subs for the southeast quadrant, targeting cities like Houston, New Orleans and Miami. The missiles could be used for targets in the northeast, Mideast, Midwest and southern California. With that revealed, here is my question: How was this designed to thwart a Cuban exile boat raid into say Varadero on the Cuban north coast? Do you incinerate 200,000 people in Atlanta in response to an eight-man raid that sabotaged an electricity plant? As many commentators have noted, it would be like killing a fly with a cannon—you would blow up your house in the process. To stop another invasion, all one would have needed to do was to give Castro tactical nuclear weapons, which the Russians did, and/or the SAM missiles and MIG jets. But such was not the case, not by a long shot.

    As scholars who have studied the crisis for decades have concluded, what Nikita Khrushchev was assembling in Cuba was a first strike capability. Something that the USSR did not have at the time, and would not attain for about four more years. In the nuclear planning policy of deterrence, this capability was considered necessary to stop your opponent from executing their first strike. In fact, in a meeting in July of 1961, Allen Dulles had asked President Kennedy to do just that: to launch a first strike against Russia. Kennedy not only refused, he walked out of the meeting. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 235)

    The most respected scholar in the field, Harvard’s Graham Allison, has concluded that with this first strike capability, Khrushchev was going to maneuver Kennedy into surrendering West Berlin. (Essence of Decision, p. 105) In their Vienna Summit in the summer of 1961, Khrushchev had made the question of Berlin a real bone of contention with Kennedy: since West Berlin was within East Germany, it should be a part of that Russian dominated country. Kennedy did not see it that way. He felt that if he surrendered Berlin, it could unravel the whole American/European alliance. Something he was not willing to do. In fact, during the meetings in the White House on this subject, Kennedy repeatedly referred to Berlin as the reason for the crisis. (op. cit. Probe, p. 18)

    Another point that Tye scores his subject on is that RFK pondered whether an air strike would be enough to get the missiles out, or if there needed to be an invasion. At this first meeting President Kennedy had just listed four options his advisors had mapped out for him. Robert Kennedy then chimes in:

    We have the fifth one really, which is the invasion [which was already raised by Maxwell Taylor]. I would say that you’re dropping bombs all over Cuba if you do the second, air and the airports, knocking out their planes, dropping it on all their missiles. You’re covering most of Cuba. You’re going to kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on this. And then—you know the heat. You’re going to announce the reason that you’re doing it is because they’re sending in these kinds of missiles.

    Well, I would think it’s almost incumbent upon the Russians then, to say, Well we’re going to send them in again. And if you do it again, we’re going to do the same thing in Turkey” or “we’re going to so the same thing to Iran.” (The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, p. 66)

    Does this sound like RFK is pushing for an invasion? He is making an overall air strike, which is what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had described, sound very unappealing. As Steven Schneider writes, Bobby Kennedy was against even the air strike option, comparing it to what the Japanese did to America at Pearl Harbor. So how could he have been for an invasion? (Robert F. Kennedy, pp. 56-57) In fact, after an unsettling meeting with congressional leaders who thought the agreed upon blockade of Cuba was too weak, the brothers were shaken by the sabre rattling. They both agreed that the blockade was the least JFK could do without being impeached. (op. cit. Probe, p. 16)

    The crisis was resolved by the blockade, meetings between newsman John Scali and KGB agent Alex Feklisov, Khrushchev’s annoyance with Castro’s recklessness, and a meeting between Robert Kennedy and Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The arrangement was that the Russians would remove the atomic arsenal from Cuba, in return for a no invasion pledge on Cuba from Kennedy, and the later removal of American missiles from Turkey. Kennedy wanted the last to be kept under wraps since he thought it would hurt American standing in Europe. But Robert Kennedy had assured Dobrynin that this would be part of the deal at his meeting with him. Needless to day, Tye scores both RFK and Ted Sorenson—who edited Thirteen Days after Kennedy’s death—for not making the deal more explicit in the final version of the book. This is really kind of penny ante even for this book. Bobby Kennedy’s diaries made the deal explicit. Sorenson edited them to make it less so, since that is the way his boss, John Kennedy—for reasons stated above—wished it to be. (See “Anatomy of a Controversy”, by Jim Hershberg at the online National Security Archive.)

    This is largely what Tye uses to call RFK a liar and accuse him of being a hawk during the Missile Crisis. But then he goes beyond that. He actually writes that the stance taken in Thirteen Days is what influenced Lyndon Johnson to do what he did in Vietnam! (p. 273) This is wild even for Tye. First, LBJ was at most of the meetings during the Missile Crisis. When you read those transcripts you will see that he was more hawkish than the Kennedys. (See especially the meeting of 10/27/62, Probe, op. cit. p. 23) Secondly, Johnson was against Kennedy’s policy of no American combat troops in Vietnam from 1961! Against Kennedy’s wishes, on his trip there in May of 1961, he suggested that Premier Diem of South Vietnam request combat troops from Washington. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 72) Later, after John Kennedy was killed, Johnson told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara how he had been against withdrawing from Vietnam, as Kennedy was planning to do; but he kept his mouth shut since he was only Vice-President. (Virtual JFK, by James Blight, p. 310) Does it get any clearer than that? But in the end the claim is actually nonsensical, for what reasonable person could even compare the two situations? In one you had a superpower secretly moving a first strike nuclear capability 90 miles from Florida, thereby upsetting the balance of power; in the other, you had a years-long, anti-colonial, peasant rebellion 9,000 miles away—one that had no direct impact on America’s national security. Not even Johnson could possibly equate the two. If I didn’t know better, I would say that Tye is trying to blame Johnson’s epochal disaster in Indochina—which was expanded and completed by Nixon and Kissinger—on Bobby Kennedy’s book. Which, in view of the record, is absurd.

    As the reader can see, most of the book is like this. Is it worth reading? No, because of all the textual problems mentioned above. Is it worth buying? No, since I can see no real value for it as a reference work. Which leaves the final question: Why did the author write the book? Only Larry Tye can answer that question.