Kennedys and King Test host626

Author: James DiEugenio

  • Dr. Michael Marcades, with Norma J. Kirkpatrick, Rose Cherami: Gathering Fallen Petals

    Dr. Michael Marcades, with Norma J. Kirkpatrick, Rose Cherami: Gathering Fallen Petals

    Melba Christina Youngblood was born in Texas in 1923.  Her only son, Michael Marcades, has now written a book about his mother, who was posthumously made famous by film director Oliver Stone in his 1991 film JFK.  If one recalls, that film opens with Dwight Eisenhower making his epochal Farewell Address warning of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex. The film proper then opens with a long credit sequence. Near the end of the credits, the film crosscuts between Kennedy arriving in Dallas and a woman being thrown out of a car on a lonely highway.  We then see her in a hospital.  She seems hysterical with fear warning that the men who threw her out of the car are going to kill Kennedy in Dallas.  The doctor mumbles that she seems high as a kite on something, therefore implying that her warning will be ignored. Which it was—until after the assassination. 

    The woman was named Rose Cherami in Stone’s film.  This was accurate since this is the final alias that she used in her life.  And that was the name through which New Orleans DA Jim Garrison discovered her. Her Cassandra-like warning had been ignored by the Dallas Police, even though they were fully aware of it.  It had then laid dormant for the FBI and the Warren Commission. In the seventies, it had been pursued by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In fact, one of their most famous reports, written by researcher Patricia Orr, incorporated some of Garrison’s information with some new work that committee had done.  In the annotated screen play of JFK entitled The Book of the Film, it was revealed that the script relied on Orr’s report for their information.

    It was not until the Assassination Records Review Board declassified the HSCA files that we finally got many of the records that the committee used in order to compose that report.  In a handy appendix to Rose Cherami: Gathering Fallen Petals, the authors supply several of these helpful documents.  But the book goes much further than that.  Because Marcades was so interested in finding out more about a mother he barely knew, but had read about in several sources, he decided to spend many years doing research in order to write the first full scale biography of Melba Youngblood, who only lived to be a bit over forty years old. 

    For a multiplicity of reasons, this was not an easy task.  First, from a forensic viewpoint, many of the important personages had passed from this world. Also, as this reviewer has mentioned previously, many of the files of the late Jim Garrison have been lost, stolen or incinerated.  Third, since Youngblood led such an offbeat, itinerant, peripatetic life, there was not a lot of paper data or tangible leads to follow.  But Marcades stuck it out. And with the help of two others, including journalist Norma Kirkpatrick, he has put it together in book form.

    Melba Youngblood grew up on a farm in a small town called Fairfield in east Texas.  Her father was named Tom Youngblood; her mother was Minnie Bell Stroud. She was the eldest of three sisters, the other two being named Mozelle and Grace. Melba’s nickname growing up was Crit.  The father was a stern disciplinarian and the girls were expected to do farm chores in addition to attending school and going to church on Sunday.

    From the rather young age of fourteen, Crit was unsatisfied with the simple, dirt farming rural life. At that time, she actually ran away after hitching a ride with the milkman.  Her parents managed to find her in a nearby small town.  The street waif had been taken in by a kindly old couple.

    A couple of years later, the family moved to Aldine, which was near Houston.  There, Tom managed a tenant farm for the owner.  They lived in a home that was much larger and modern. The father worked a second job on construction.  But even with the improved circumstances, Melba was unsatisfied. She ran away for the second time at age 16.  This time, she ended up in Houston.  She found work as a waitress at first.  But it is at this point that she fell into a life of hard partying in both Houston and Galveston.  And with the wrong people.

    She met a man named Al who gave her a job in his restaurant.  It was in this time period, 1941-42, that she fell into a serious heroin habit.   But, even worse, she met a bartender named Johnny who now began to hire her to do illegal errands for him.  This included delivering drugs, liquor and cigarettes to soldiers on military bases.  Sick of this kind of life, she decided to split by stealing his car. She did not think he would call the police because of his illicit black market dealing.  But he did.  And what made it all the worse was that she did not contact her parents to help her once she got apprehended.

    She was extradited to Shreveport, Louisiana since that is where Johnny actually lived.  Since she had no independent legal counsel, she did not know how to deal with the court. For example, she could have made a deal with the prosecutor for immunity and a pardon by turning state’s witness against Johnny.  She did not.  And she did not contact her parents until after she was incarcerated. Since she was in northern Louisiana, she was sent to infamous Angola.  There, because she was shapely and attractive she found out about being on the “cordiality detail”.   This meant going up to the big house on the hill and attending parties with guests of the state.  She was released after two years in 1944.

    Once she was out, she visited her parents.  She got a job as a switchboard operator, and was married for the first time.  She stayed clean and led a normal life for two years.  But she left her husband and went, first to Dallas, and then to New Orleans.  She became a stripper at a club called the Blue Angel.  It was here where she met a man named Edward Joseph Marcades.  Eddie ended up being her second husband and the father of Michael, who was born in 1953. But again, this marriage did not last very long.  Melba left her husband and took Michael to New Orleans.  After not hearing from her for awhile, her parents went looking for her.  She was living in such dilapidated standards that they decided to take Michael home with them.  A point that his mother did not strongly dispute.

    It was around this time, the late fifties, that Melba began to work as a stripper for Jack Ruby at a place called the Pink Door.  As Vincent Bugliosi states in his book Reclaiming History, there is no official record of Ruby ever owning a club by this name. He ignores the possibility that Ruby could either have been a silent partner, or owned a minority share of it. Bugliosi also does not inform his readers of Ruby’s activities at this same time, the late fifties. Maybe it’s because they provide a reason for a disguised ownership.  And they also match the kinds of things that Melba Christine was described as doing in this phase of her life. Ruby’s activities include the smuggling of narcotics across state lines, a call girl ring, and the transfer of pornographic films.  Ruby was very serious about this and he did research on how it could be done. He went into business with a man named Jim Breen. In fact, some of the call girls actually talked to the FBI to inform them of this activity.  (See Warren Commission exhibits 1761-62 in Volume 23)  Ruby’s activities in this regard later evolved to include gun running.  There are several FBI reports from different witnesses—for example, Blaney Mack Johnson and Ed Browder—that describe this in Volume 26 of the Commission exhibits.  (See especially exhibits 3055-3066) These exhibits also include reports of businesses—hotels and bars—that Ruby had an interest in but for which there is no record of him formally owning, at least not in the Warren Commission volumes.

    It was around this time period—late fifties, early sixties—that Melba Christine began to use the alias of Rose Cherami.  And it was under this name, and as part of drug, guns and prostitution runs from Dallas to Miami that Cherami became involved in the incident that Stone depicted in his film, that Orr wrote a report on, and that numerous writers—including this reviewer—have exhaustively described.  I won’t detail the incident at any length, since most readers are already familiar with it.  I will just summarize it.  At a sleazy bar called the Silver Slipper Lounge, Cherami’s two Latin cohorts began a vociferous argument with her.  She was thrown out by the bartender, Mac Manual, and began hitchhiking on route 190.  She was hit by a car and the driver transported her to a hospital.  On two occasions, with two different witnesses, she said the two men with her had talked about killing Kennedy.  Both of these declarations occurred prior to November 22nd. But no one took it seriously; they chalked it up to the ravings of a junkie in need of a fix.  After the assassination, it was a different story.  Louisiana State Trooper Francis Fruge, who had accompanied her to a state hospital, got permission from his superiors to turn her over to the Dallas Police.  But the police did not want to hear from her.  The doctor who talked to her in the hospital, while on a hunting trip revealed to a friend what she said.  And it was through this friend that Jim Garrison found out about her case.  But by then she had passed away.

    The authors are firmly in the camp that Cherami was murdered.  They believe that she was shot on one of these drug runs in 1965.  That the killer then ran her over to try and disguise her death as a matter of hit and run.  That the man who eventually found her body on the road, Jerry Don Moore, did not actually strike her.  (The investigating police officer did not think he did either.) Further, they show that there was apparently something wrong with the hospital report on her death, i.e., the report says she was DOA, yet this is provably false.  She was worked on in the ER room and then transferred to a private room and survived for about eight hours in critical condition.

    Michael Marcades put together the book by interviewing several surviving family members.  He also found a grocery bag full of letters that Rose wrote. And he has also read much of the source material on her case, though I was surprised he did not include Todd Elliot’s prior brief book on the subject, A Rose by Many other Names (actually a  pamphlet). Elliot discovered two other witnesses who heard his mother mention the Kennedy assassination prior to it happening.  This was at Moosa Hospital in Eunice prior to Fruge arriving.  But Elliot’s work was not anywhere near a full-scale biography as this book is.

    I would be remiss if I did not make a formal criticism of the book, as I did with Fernando Faura’s volume, The Polka Dot File.  Marcades and Kirkpatrick decided to use a lot of reconstructed dialogue in the scenes they drew.  Some of this is acceptable since they probably got it from family members who interacted with Rose.  But some of it is hard to fathom since it’s done without any surviving witnesses, at least that I know of.  Also, sometimes this extends into a stream of consciousness, where we actually read the thoughts of a character.  If I had been editing the book I would have advised the authors to be less liberal with this aspect of narrative license.

    The photos in the volume are extraordinary.  Almost all of them have never been seen before.  And the document annex, mostly made up from the ARRB declassification process is valuable.  Michael Marcades wanted to find his mother, whom he had met only three times before she died.  The last meeting was at a picnic at a lake. It was a time-consuming and courageous undertaking.  I should also add the word honesty to that voyage.  For he gives us a picture of this unfortunate woman warts and all.

  • Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing

    Fernando Faura, The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing

    I think all of us who are interested in the assassinations of the sixties carry around certain archetypal, indelible images in our heads that symbolize those moments of horror and tragedy.  Some of those images actually exist and are embedded in film or photos, e.g.,  Zapruder frame 313. Some of them were not actually captured on any kind of film. But they are so well described and documented that they have become real for us.

    The image I carry around from the 1968 Los Angeles murder of Robert Kennedy is one that many readers of this site are familiar with.  But many, many more who are not readers, and who have not done even a modicum of research on that case, have never contemplated. My image is of a young, excited, attractive girl fleeing the murder scene—the pantry—to escape out the back door of the Ambassador Hotel.  She is wearing a white dress with dark polka dots. As she and a companion run down the stairs, they met an even younger RFK worker named Sandy Serrano. When Sandy asked what happened, the girl shouted, “We shot him! We shot him!” Serrano asked, “Who did you shoot?”  The girl in the polka dot dress said, “We shot Senator Kennedy”. Sandy then went up the stairs to see if this was so. It was.  (Faura, p. 99)

    That strange, almost surreal meeting is so vivid, so compelling, that once one reads about it, it becomes almost unforgettable.  It is an image that truly is, to apply that overused word, cinematic: what with its kinetic planes of motion, its vivid colors, its almost palpably dark overtones. But beyond that, and for our purposes, Serrano’s testimony is prima facie evidence of conspiracy. For the girl used the first person plural pronoun, “We.”  And as many authors have noted, what made Serrano’s experience even more incriminating is that she told NBC newsman Sander Vanocur about it on national television.  Albeit back east it was the wee hours of the morning when she was on, lo and behold, there it was, smack dab in the middle of the MSM. (Faura, pp. 10, 99)

    At the time of the RFK assassination, Fernando Faura was employed by a newspaper called the Hollywood Citizen News. It is safe to say that no other reporter did as much work in tracking down the girl in the polka dot dress than he did.  In fact, it is also safe to say that no one even came close.  His work became a standard for other authors on the RFK case when they wrote about her. For example, when I interviewed the late William Turner, he had much respect for the work that Faura did on this crucial issue.  And his files contained some of the stories that the local reporter penned about the RFK case.

    II

    Faura has now, somewhat belatedly, written a book about his experience on the RFK case.  His work elucidates just how important his pursuit of the girl was.  No other author has ever written at this length and depth about her.

    The irony about Faura latching onto the RFK case was that Bobby Kennedy was not even his beat at the time.  He was actually covering a California assembly race in June of 1968.  He heard about the RFK shooting on his car radio. By the next morning he learned two important things about the case.  First, that prior to being at the Kennedy celebration the night of the shooting, Sirhan had reportedly been at the headquarters of Senate candidate Max Rafferty, located upstairs at the Ambassador Hotel.  (p. 13) But more importantly, the first reports about the accused assailant being accompanied by a girl shouting “We shot him!” began to circulate. (ibid, p. 16)  As Faura writes, when he heard this, he immediately began to contemplate there had been a conspiracy.  Even though his contacts in the LAPD—plus Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief Tom Reddin— were already battening down the hatches and proclaiming Sirhan as the lone assassin.  The other evidentiary point that made him suspicious was that, through his reporting contacts, he learned that the police had a file on Sirhan before the RFK murder.  Even though, as far as he could discern, Sirhan had no criminal record before this time. (p. 20)

    Because of his interest in the case, Faura met with Sirhan’s family lawyer Dave Marcus. Marcus handled immigration problems for Sirhan’s brothers, Munir and Saidallah. Through Marcus, he also met Jordan Bonfante and Robert Kaiser from Life magazine.  Bonfante was an editor, Kaiser a contributor.  Marcus offered Faura the opportunity to write a book about Sirhan.  Faura declined.  Kaiser then accepted. (p. 28) In retrospect, one really has to wonder about the wisdom of that decision.  Kaiser’s book was the first one out of the chute after Sirhan’s trial.  For all of his musing about Sirhan perhaps being a Manchurian Candidate, it is still an official story book.  If Faura had been first, his book would have been much more in line with what, say, Harold Weisberg did on the JFK case. It would have been a book doubting the official story.  Instead we had to wait several years for the first volume questioning what LAPD had done, i.e., The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, by William Turner and Jonn Christian, released in 1978.

    After Faura published a story based on a witness at the Rafferty gathering who saw Sirhan there, two things happened that changed the trajectory of his inquiry.  Bonfante got in contact and offered to work with him on the case under the sponsorship of Life.  Secondly, a man named John Fahey read the story and came to visit him at work.

    Relatively little has been written about Fahey in the RFK literature.  For instance, he is not mentioned in the aforementioned Turner/Christian book. Over a decade later, Philip Melanson did not mention him in his estimable The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination.  What makes this odd is that both books do reference Faura. And both books do discuss the girl in the polka dot dress. In reading Faura’s book it is hard not to conclude that Fahey was his most important discovery, because it is equally hard not to conclude that Fahey spent a good part of  June 4, 1968 with the girl.  He then dropped her off at the Ambassador.  A few hours later, she escorted Sirhan into the pantry.  She then ran out and told Sandy Serrano what they had done.

    Before we get into a full discussion of Fahey and his dealings with the FBI, LAPD and Faura, we should set the stage a bit more fully. For many different reasons, the RFK murder does not get the exposure it should, so even readers of this site may not be fully familiar with that case, or the importance of two related points: 1.) The issue of post-hypnotic suggestion, and 2.) The interactions between Sirhan and the girl that evening.  We should concisely deal with both of these points in order to understand how important the testimony of Fahey actually is.

    III

    Author Fernando Faura

    The first psychiatrist who analyzed Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was Bernard Diamond, a professor of forensic psychiatry at UC Berkeley.   He is often quoted as saying that it became obvious to him rather early that Sirhan had been previously programmed. Further, that his reaction to hypnosis was exceptionally keen, in the sense that he could easily be put under, fulfill a command given to him while hypnotized, and afterwards deny he had done it or acted under post hypnotic suggestion.  For instance, as authors like Melanson have detailed, once he went under, Diamond would suggest that Sirhan later climb the bars of his cell like a monkey.  Diamond would then snap him out of the trance. Sirhan would then climb on cue, e.g., Diamond would say a certain word, or make a certain facial expression.  After he did it, Diamond would ask him why. Invariably, Sirhan would deny he did so.

    After reviewing this record, the late Dr. Herbert Spiegel—perhaps the nation’s leading expert on hypnosis—came to the conclusion that, on a rating scale of susceptibility, Sirhan was a 5, meaning he was in a class of persons that amounted to less than 10% of the population—those who could be hypnotized very simply and easily. He also said that Sirhan’s background as a Palestinian refugee, with a childhood plagued with political violence, could be used as a hook for the programming.  Spiegel added the following: these painful memories could be conjured up and then utilized as direction for the intended goal of the programmer.

    Perhaps the most interesting observations on this crucial subject were those stated in a legal declaration by Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas. Simson was the chief psychologist in Sirhan’s prison testing program.  He ended up spending over 35 hours with Sirhan.  Agreeing with Spiegel, he stated that Sirhan was easily hypnotized.  Agreeing further, he said that the Arab-Israeli conflict could have been used as a motivation.
    In one aspect, Simson went even further than Diamond and Spiegel. After spending so much time with the subject, he did not think Sirhan was sufficiently devious or unbalanced to act on his own in the murder of RFK.  He stated that Sirhan had to have been prepared in advance.  As he said so simply: “He was hypnotized by someone.”  (These and further clinical observations were stated in Simson’s’ 33-point declaration this reviewer read out of Turner’s files.)

    Simson developed a degree of trust and rapport with his subject.  Sirhan seemed to want to know what happened that night at the Ambassador.  So Simson was in the process of attempting to deprogram him when his superiors told him to stop the procedure.  Simson was so disappointed in this that he resigned and went into private practice.

    Simson had harsh words for Sirhan’s defense team.  Sirhan’s lawyers tried to plead diminished capacity at his trial.  Diamond then stated that Sirhan had hypnotized himself.  Simson could not disagree more.  He wrote that it is just not possible to render oneself into such a deep state of hypnosis and then to set up blocks of amnesia so one cannot recall it.  He then stated that it was a mistake by the defense—he called it the psychiatric blunder of the century—to admit guilt and then proclaim Sirhan as temporarily deranged.  Since Sirhan resisted the derangement syndrome, he was not cooperative with the defense and they could not unlock his mind to find out who had planted the post hypnotic suggestions.

    Phil Melanson

    How does this all intersect with the girl in the polka dot dress?  When Diamond put Sirhan under, he would often ask him to perform something called automatic writing. This is a technique that, through a slow and repetitive process of writing with a pen to paper, attempts to release the subject’s deeper thoughts and feelings. Once, Diamond asked Sirhan if anyone was with him when he shot at Kennedy in the pantry of the hotel.  Sirhan began to write out very slowly: “The girl…the girl…the girl.”  Secondly, during his discussions with Simson—while in a normal state—the doctor asked him the last thing he recalled about that night.  Sirhan replied that he recalled sitting at a small table with the girl.  They were drinking coffee.  She wanted lots of cream and sugar.  They were then asked to leave that area. She then led him into the pantry. (Faura, pp. 210-211)

    At this point, Faura begins to use excerpts from Professor Dan Brown’s interviews with Sirhan.  Brown is a professor of psychology at Harvard. At the time, he was employed by attorney William Pepper, who was making an attempt to reopen the Bobby Kennedy case.  Brown ended up spending even more time with Sirhan than Simson-Kallas did.  Brown writes that, after Sirhan followed the girl into the pantry, he recalled getting something like a tap on the shoulder. He then went into his “weapons stance”, like he was at a target range, the visual cue being the polka dots. After firing once or twice, Sirhan snapped out of it and realized he was not at a range; then people started grabbing him and he asked himself “What is going on?”

    This makes four forensic psychiatrists who have all come to the conclusion that Sirhan had been programmed. Brown states that “Sirhan has a rare combination of personality characteristics that make him highly vulnerable to … mind control methods.” He further wrote that “Mr. Sirhan’s memory report is consistent with hypnotic programming hypothesis.”  

    The forensic psychiatrist concluded that Sirhan’s act of firing at Kennedy that night was not the result of his conscious behavior.  He wrote that it is “likely the product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control. … further, that the system of mind control which was imposed upon him has also made it impossible for him to recall under hypnosis, or consciously, many critical details of actions and events leading to and at the time of the shooting … .” (ibid, p. 213)  In other words, agreeing with Simson-Kallas, someone planted mental blocks in Sirhan’s mind to conceal certain keys to his programming. 

    To close out this aspect of the case, with all this in the record, it is now necessary to mention two other crucial evidentiary points.  Serrano did not just witness the girl and one companion fleeing down the stairs after the assassination.  She saw the girl also enter the hotel from that same entrance prior to the shooting. (ibid, p. 101) Except at that time, there was a second male companion with the girl, a man who she later said resembled Sirhan. Secondly, in the pantry, after the shooting, almost everyone was absolutely hysterical—shouting, screaming, weeping, attacking Sirhan.  People were panic-stricken, trying to figure out what happened. People were trying to get in the room to see what had happened.

    RFK signs poster for bystander Michael Wayne minutes before he is assassinated.

    Yet, as Faura details, there were three people who were not acting like this at all.  They were not panic-stricken or overcome with grief.  They were intent on escaping from the room.  These were the girl, her original companion, and a man named Michael Wayne—who we shall discuss later.

    As the reader can see from this brief précis, ample evidence exists that Sirhan was being manipulated.  More than ample evidence exists that the girl was a key part of that manipulation.  John Fahey spent the day of the assassination with the girl. He then dropped her off at the Ambassador Hotel.

    IV

    Robert Parry

    As noted, Fahey came to see Faura after he read his first story on the RFK case, which had made the front page of the Citizen-News. Faura would find Fahey’s story so fascinating, so compelling, so potentially important to solving the case, that he recorded it on tape. He then had it transcribed. (Faura, p. 33)

    Fahey worked at a chemical company.  He arrived at the Ambassador that morning on a business matter. While waiting in the coffee shop he met up with an attractive young girl.   She would eventually give Fahey a few names, but the first one she gave him was Alice.  This is one way, Fahey felt, that she was communicating to him she was doing something secretive.  In fact, when he asked her directly what she was doing there, she put him off with words to the effect: I would not want you involved. (ibid, p. 36)  She then walked him over to the RFK headquarters part of the hotel.  She said that Kennedy would be taken care of that night, after his reception. She then said that they were being watched.  Since Fahey mentioned that he needed to travel out to Oxnard later, she asked if she could join him. Fahey accepted and they drove off.  But shortly after they hit the road, it became evident that they were being tailed.  This seemed to genuinely upset her. When Fahey asked why they were being followed, she said it had to do with what was going to happen to RFK after his reception.

    Once the pair got to Oxnard, Fahey decided to go on further to Ventura.  But he noticed that there was now a different tail behind them. (p. 41) Fahey told Faura that she said some strange things that, at the time, he did not really comprehend.  She mentioned getting a false passport to leave the country as soon as she could. She mentioned departing LA on a plane from Flying Tigers Airlines.  She also said she had come to Los Angeles from New York City, where she had met a woman named Anna Chennault.  Fahey thought she might be delusional, or inebriated.

    When they arrived back at the Ambassador it was around 7 PM.  She said she was staying at Olympic and Kenmore, which was nearby.  Fahey commented that it was pretty clear that she knew her way about every nook and cranny of the hotel. When they got back, she went to the back of the hotel.  Spooked, he did not want to be associated with her anymore. (p. 52)

    After the assassination, Fahey understood what had happened.  He went to the FBI, who interviewed him and said they would recall him. Fahey and Faura went over the route Fahey said he had driven with the girl. Fahey was very specific about where they stopped for lunch and where he got a flat tire.  Faura then took him to the police.  The reporter gave them a copy of the transcript. They also asked for the original tape to duplicate.  Which, of course, Faura did not get back until 20 years later, when it was declassified at the California Archives in Sacramento. After the LAPD interviewed Fahey they told him not to discuss his story, and for Faura not to write about it. They based the latter on a gag order placed over the upcoming Sirhan trial. Faura thought it was nonsense to apply this to the press.  But clearly LAPD was fearful that Fahey would give credibility to Serrano’s story.

    By this time, Faura was getting suspicious about what the LAPD and FBI were actually doing.  Reportedly, the Bureau had four hundred agents working the RFK case.  LAPD had set up a select unit inside the force called Special Unit Senator to investigate the case.  Yet both seemed to want to ignore the most credible leads. In fact, as Faura would later learn, LAPD wanted to discredit them—as they would attempt to do with both Serrano and Fahey.  They actually wanted to make the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress disappear, since she epitomized a sophisticated plot to kill Kennedy.

    Herbert Spiegel

    Therefore, Faura decided to go ahead and commission a drawing of the girl from Fahey’s memory.  He then got the sketch illustrated into a portrait.  This would serve as an identification instrument for other witnesses. (p. 80)

    On June 19th, Fahey called Faura and told him he was going to the Ambassador Hotel.  The FBI told him they had found the girl.  Faura found out they were actually going to pick her up and have Fahey identify her at the Kenmore Hotel, which was behind the Ambassador. Faura called Bonfante. He brought down a photographer to memorialize the moment.  The Bureau had been tipped off by Ty Hammond, manager of the Kenmore.  But it turned out that the Bureau had arrived too late and the girl was gone.  Disappointed and frustrated, Faura  decided to give Hammond the portrait of the girl.  Hammond said that yes, it looked like her. (p. 96)  He also said the girl had Arab friends and she always entered the Ambassador from his hotel.  She was not actually staying there, but lived in the nearby neighborhood.  But he was not sure she was still there.

    Just as the chase for the girl was beginning to bear some fruit, the police now called it off.   On June 21st, according to the authorities—most notably DA Evelle Younger—Serrano had taken back her story.  As the public later learned, this was not actually true, and it was done under duress. It was part of the attempt by local authorities to make the girl disappear.  By hook or by crook. (ibid, pp. 107-08)  But it actually went further than that.  Because now, his sources of information began to dry up.  When he went to see Hammond, he would not cooperate any further.  When he called Fahey, he told the reporter the FBI had seen them together and wanted him to cut off this association.

    But Faura continued to investigate.  He found two other witnesses who said they saw Sirhan with the girl.  Jose Carvajal who worked at the Ambassador saw the two talking with Sirhan on a terrace in front of the rear door of the hotel.  Vincent DiPierro saw the two seconds before the shooting.  He said that the girl smiled at Sirhan right before he began firing.  When DiPierro looked at the portrait, he had only slight modifications to the illustration.  (Pp. 117-20)

    But as the author notes, what was so odd about this was that Faura learned that the FBI was also still looking for the girl. And so was the LAPD.  But if Serrano had been discredited, and the girl did not exist, then why were they still crossing paths?  And why had Fahey been fired from his job?  (p. 136)

    An example of the continuing search for the girl was that both Faura and the FBI interviewed a woman named Pam Russo.  She said she had seen the girl with Sirhan at Rafferty’s gathering prior to the shooting.  But further, she also said that someone at Rafferty’s actually tackled a man trying to escape the pantry after Kennedy had been shot.  (p. 140)

    Which leads us to Gregory Clayton and Michael Wayne.  Clayton was the bystander who Russo was referring to who tackled a man running out of the pantry—Michael Wayne.

    V

    When Faura found out about Clayton, he tracked down his house and visited him in person. The witness told the reporter that he had seen Sirhan at Rafferty’s that night with the girl.  (p. 151)  He said that, at the Ambassador later, after he heard the first shot, he ran to the entrance of the kitchen pantry. He tackled a man running away from the murder scene.  He said there were actually two men who seemed to be fleeing together. One had an object in his hand, which appeared to “flash”.  The other man was in such haste that he was knocking a news photographer onto a table and into some chairs.  When Clayton yelled for a nearby security guard, the man with the flashing object in his hand ran the other way, into the hallway.  Clayton tripped the other man, who was then subdued by the guard.  According to the witness, the man they subdued had a “look of madness in his eyes, as if he had rabies.” (p. 153)  He then kept saying, “Let me go. Gotta get out of here. Let me go.”  As Faura later notes, these were not the words of an innocent bystander.  Clayton picked up a paper that Wayne had been carrying. It was a rather bizarre bumper sticker that read, “Kennedy Assassination a Death Hoax.”

    As anyone reading the above would understand, the Clayton story suggests there was more than one gun involved in the RFK murder.  As does the Brown/Sirhan transcript.  Because in one of these sessions Sirhan said that, during the shooting, he saw the flash of another gun firing.  (p. 212)  Finally, as almost everyone who has seen a photo of Wayne knows, the running man, who said he had to get out of here, all with a look of madness in his eyes, resembled Sirhan.

    Faura managed to temporarily make amends with Fahey.  Like a good reporter, he did two things to try and certify his story.  First, he gave him a polygraph test, which he passed.  (p. 181)  He then found the waitress who served Fahey and the girl at a restaurant in Oxnard.  Her name was Janis Page.  (p. 173) The LAPD did their best to negate both of these achievements.  They got Page to keep her mouth shut after she talked to Faura, and they gave Fahey their own version of the polygraph.  This was through their old reliable Hank Hernandez.  (p. 185) As many authors have shown, when LAPD wanted to discredit a witness, they turned him over to Hernandez.

    After this, Faura’s efforts became comparable to Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus: rolling a rock up a hill, only to see it roll back down.  Fahey cut off relations with him for good.  Bonfante let him know that his supervisors at Life had told him that they would not finance any further inquiry into the RFK case.  The author tells us that this change came after a call from Washington.  (p. 191)

    Faura equates the last with the subtitle of the book, the “Paris Peace Talks Connection.”  Some background will be required for this aspect of the book.  As previously noted,  the girl told Fahey that prior to her coming to Los Angeles she had met a woman named Anna Chennault.  She also mentioned that she might be able to fly out of town on CAT or Flying Tiger Airlines. (p. 61)

    William Turner

    Anna Chennault was the Chinese wife of former military pilot Claire Chennault. Claire became famous as an aviation pilot aiding the Chinese struggle against Japan during World War II.  His initial volunteer squad was called the Flying Tigers.  This was replaced when the USAF formally entered the war and operated in the China-Burma-India air theater.

    After the war, Chennault, a big backer of the nationalist Taiwan government, created something called Civil Air Transport (CAT).  This supplied freight into Taiwan, aided the French struggle to keep their Indochina empire, and aided the Kuomintang’s occupation of Burma in the mid and late fifties.  It also helped in the early years of the American occupation of South Vietnam.

    Faura used the later dropping of these names by the girl—Fahey recalled them later, after his recorded interview—to perform two rather large functions.  He connects the girl and Chennault to the deliberate sandbagging of President Johnson’s peace talks, and he then suggests that people like candidate Richard Nixon, future Vice-President Spiro Agnew, future Attorney General John Mitchell and Senator John Tower were in on the RFK assassination.  (p. 207)

    As regards the former, Faura is referring to the rather recently discovered files by journalist par excellence Robert Parry.  Parry discovered  a file put together by National Security Advisor Walt Rostow at the Johnson Library.  That file contained information garnered by the FBI and the National Security Agency about Nixon’s efforts to subvert Johnson’s attempt to get a peace conference with the North Vietnamese prior to the fall election of 1968.  Perceiving this to be a boon for the Democrats, Nixon set out to deep-six that diplomatic effort.  Nixon did use Republican lobbyist and fundraiser Anna Chennault to communicate with the South Vietnamese government, advising them to stall Johnson, promising Nixon would give them a better deal once he was elected.

    The problem with Faura’s theory here is that, as author Ken Hughes has shown, those efforts did not begin until over a month after Robert Kennedy was killed. It was not until July 12 that Nixon alerted Chennault that she would be his go-between for these efforts to obstruct Johnson.  So if she was not aware of that function until then, how and why could she have been used prior to June 5th in the RFK plot?

    Also, although Faura mentions John Tower as a possible co-conspirator, in rereading some of the literature on Parry’s fine site, Consortium News, I could not detect his name in any of the declassified files on the illicit episode.  So, as far as I can see, the top-level players involved were Nixon, Agnew and Mitchell. Mitchell had been at the meeting in July of 1968 where Nixon appointed Chennault as his emissary. (In an interview with journalist Jules Witcover in 1994, Chennault did say that Tower did have knowledge of her mission.  See Baltimore Sun, 8/18/2014) And FBI wiretaps seem to indicate that Chennault was getting instructions from Agnew in late October of the campaign. But all of these efforts and communications are to thwart Johnson.  Just because The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress had met Chennault in New York, what is the evidence that the men mentioned above were part of the plot to kill RFK?  And if they had been, the girl would not be musing about getting a passport and flight on CAT.  She would have had her passport and been on a plane the next day.

    From what I have learned about the RFK case from writers like Turner, Melanson, and Lisa Pease, most of the evidence inherent in the crime—the MK/Ultra aspect, the associations of the leaders of SUS Hernandez and Manny Pena, the presence of former Iranian intelligence officer Khaiber Khan at RFK headquarters—seems to indicate a CIA modus operandi.

    I also have some formal criticisms of the book.  Faura was, for all intents and purposes, a participant in the RFK investigation as it unfolded. He was not an academic or a historian looking back at a past event he did not have a hand in.  Therefore, his book could have and should have been written from a first person point of view—but it is not.  At times, the author refers to himself as ‘Faura’.  Before Jim Garrison started his memoir on his inquiry into the JFK assassination, his editor Zach Sklar insisted he write it in the first person. He did this since he thought it would create personal drama and invite reader empathy, since they would be watching a real life protagonist progress through unchanneled and dangerous waters.  Sklar was correct and Garrison was grateful for that advice.  Well, someone at Trine Day publishing should have insisted on the same thing in Faura’s case.

    Also, I would have advised Faura not to use the very short chapter approach he does, some of them being literally less than two pages.  This is not the way to build and cap sustained interest.  Finally, in this vein, Faura excerpts into the book long sections of taped interrogations he did.  Again, not all that scintillating to read.  I wish he had summarized the less important parts of the interviews and only given us the key parts in the Q an A format.

    In his discussion of the Scott Enyart trial over the photos Enyart took in the pantry of the actual assassination, the (wrong) photos did not show up during the trial, but just prior to it.  (p. 219)  Finally, the author seems unkind about RFK researcher Ted Charach.  Faura does score him for some personal shortcomings.  And I agree with them. But to say that the last he heard of Charach he was still trying to sell a vinyl record—that seems really unkind and uncareful.  Charach’s 1973 film, The Second Gun, was nothing less than a breakthrough in the Bobby Kennedy case.  In fact, that film is still worth seeing today. Also, as reporter David Manning noted in an article on the Enyart trial for Probe Magazine, Charach was one of the key witnesses that turned the case in Enyart’s favor.

    All in all, we finally have a record of one of the very, very few mainstream reporters who actually delved into one of the assassinations of the sixties. Who tried to do an honest job and who actually tried to follow the evidence wherever it was headed.  He found out the hard way that the local authorities—the police, the DA’s office, Mayor Sam Yorty—did not want to do that in the least.  In fact, they were determined to not only avoid that path, but to discredit those who tried.  Including the author. This book is his testament to that process.

  • Joan Mellen, Faustian Bargains

    Joan Mellen, Faustian Bargains

    In 1998,  the late JFK researcher Jay Harrison had a brainstorm. It was simple in concept.  He would secure a fingerprint impression left unidentified by the Warren Commission from one of the boxes on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He would then secure the fingerprints of Malcolm Wallace, the man accused by ex-con Billy Sol Estes of being a hit man for Lyndon Johnson.  Estes had accused Wallace of killing John Kennedy.

    Once Harrison had these two fingerprint samples, he would then enlist a fingerprint analyst to examine them.  If it was Wallace’s print on the box, then one could safely assume that he was on the sixth floor either during, or immediately after, the Kennedy assassination.  This would indicate that somehow Johnson was involved with the JFK hit; or else why would Wallace be there?

    As many have noted, it was really Estes who had drawn the crime in this manner, i.e., with Johnson as the prime mover and Malcolm Wallace as the assassin, or chief of the hit team. He had done the first part—LBJ as the prime force behind the JFK hit—in an aside to a man named Clint Peoples, a Texas lawman who had escorted him off to jail.  (Joan Mellen, Faustian Bargains, p. 230) The second part—Wallace as assassin—was done years later, when Estes got out of jail and testified before a grand jury.  That grand jury had been called to reopen the 1961 murder of another Texas law man, Henry Marshall.  Marshall was investigating some of Billy Sol’s crimes in Texas.  Right before the case was about to explode, Marshall was murdered by rifle fire.  He had been shot multiple times.  Incredibly, the local sheriff ruled the death a suicide.  In 1984, Estes got out of prison, after his second stay there.  He appeared before the Marshall grand jury.  He implicated Malcolm Wallace as the killer of Henry Marshall. Wallace had done this at the behest of Vice President Lyndon Johnson. For whom he had also killed President Kennedy.

    If Harrison’s concept turned out to be true, then it would give new credibility to the accusations of Billy Sol Estes, who many observers had severe doubts about. Estes had promised things like tape recordings and phone records to bolster his case, but he had never produced these exhibits, even when he was asked for them by Stephen Trott of the Justice Department. 

    Harrison enlisted two fingerprint analysts to confirm or deny that the prints matched.  One was Nathan Darby; the other was Harold Hoffmeister.  Darby went first.  After examining the prints he decided they matched at 14 points of identification.  Which would be good enough for a criminal legal action.  Hoffmeister then said he agreed.  But a day later, he recanted.  He said that after doing a re-examination, he felt that since both men worked with photocopies, the identification points were not adduced in a reliable manner.  (Mellen, Faustian Bargains,  p. 256)  As we shall see, Hoffmeister’s complaint was a legitimate one. But Harrison felt that he had recanted out of fear, since he had now found out who the print examination involved.

    So Harrison went ahead.  A press conference was called.  Darby’s work was submitted to the homicide division of the Dallas Police Department and to the FBI. (ibid)  The Bureau ended up disagreeing with Darby, but they did not submit any specific critique of his work. Harrison and his coterie therefore continued along in their mini campaign about Johnson and Wallace killing Kennedy.

    And it caught on.  In fact, it caught fire in 2003 for the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  In that year, a man named Barr McClellan wrote a book—this reviewer would call it a novel—about the same topic. Blood, Money and Power said Johnson had organized the JFK assassination and Malcolm Wallace was the chief of the hit team.  McClellan claimed inside knowledge from his work for a law firm that handled some of Johnson’s affairs in Texas.  McClellan’s book sold well, and it featured an appendix with the alleged Harrison/Darby fingerprint match.  In fact, Harrison had helped McClellan on his book—although, to be fair to Jay, he did not at all approve of the final draft of the volume.  (ibid, p. 265)

    During the fortieth anniversary media extravaganza, McClellan got more television and radio time than any other conspiracy advocate.  This was topped off by the ever-gullible documentary producer Nigel Turner. The laughably uncritical Turner made McClellan the main talking head on his pretentiously entitled program The Guilty Men. Needless to say, the Austin conspiracy demagogue Alex Jones also bought into McClellan.

    But that was not all. The Harrison/Darby cooperation now seemed to spawn a bevy of books that, retroactively, endorsed the Billy Sol Estes paradigm of Johnson/Wallace. Among others, these included later editions of The Men on the Sixth Floor by Glenn Sample and Mark Collom, LBJ: Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination by Philip Nelson,  and Roger Stone’s The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ. These books all endorsed, to various degrees, the Harrison/Darby print analysis.

    But  the longer the parade marched on, the odder a certain aspect of this acceptance began to appear. First, no one had done an independent analysis of the print match.  After all, Hoffmeister had recanted based upon the quality of the materials he and Darby had to work with.  Apparently this did not mean much to the leaping exegetes ready to board the ”LBJ did it” train.  Second, no one worked on a real biography of Malcolm Wallace.  Was he known as a professional killer?  Did he have a close association with the people Estes said he did:  like LBJ’s factotum in Texas Cliff Carter, Estes himself, and Johnson? Was he politically committed to everything JFK was against?  If not, was there any way to see if he had monetarily profited from all the murders that Estes said he had performed for LBJ? And perhaps the most important evidentiary point of all: Was there any evidence that Wallace was elsewhere on the days that both Marshall and Kennedy were murdered?

    Incredibly, no one seriously posed these questions for well over a decade.  Innocent outsiders who listened to the LBJ cacophony were, understandably, impressed:  with all that noise emanating from so many bongo drums, there had to be a real signal in there somewhere; it couldn’t all be much ado about nothing. Could it?

    II

    This reviewer, among several others, always had some reservations about the Harrison/Darby identification. One being: Why would Johnson use someone who was—however tenuously—associated with him in the assassination? Another was:  If Johnson and Wallace decided to go ahead and kill Kennedy anyway, would not a professional hit man use gloves to make sure he left no fingerprints behind?

    Joan Mellen decided to take the issue the proverbial whole nine yards.  In 2013 I heard her speaking about the subject of the LBJ/Wallace nexus at the Cyril Wecht conference in Pittsburgh.  To her, there was something suspicious about the entire enterprise.  Why had so many people mindlessly enlisted in the ranks without asking any of the skeptical questions mentioned above, or making any serious attempt to cross check the Harrison/Darby work?  Since it appeared no one else was going to do it, she did.

    The result of her years of work is a book called Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas. The book has several notable achievements. First, the portrait of Lyndon Johnson she draws is, quite simply, indelible.  It is so unremitting that, by the end of the book, it had me saying to myself: enough already. For, as I will explain, I think she might have overdone it.  Secondly, for the first time, we actually get a biography of Malcolm Wallace.  He is not a cipher anymore.  Third, in the supporting cast, we get a full look at the character of wheeler-dealer Billy Sol Estes—and to a lesser extent Bobby Baker.  And finally, Mellen has enlisted a professional reassessment of the Harrison/Darby fingerprint identification.  It is unfortunate that it took nearly 20 years for this to occur.  But that says something about the JFK critical field, does it not?

    This reviewer has read several biographies of Lyndon Johnson.  But few, if any, go as far in their indictment of his character and crimes as Mellen does.  Mellen begins at a familiar point: Johnson going to Washington in 1931 as secretary to congressman Dick Kleberg. (Mellen, p. 5) Kleberg was part of the King Ranch clan, so Johnson was not exactly siding with the little guy during the Great Depression.  But once Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, Johnson enlisted in the ranks of the New Deal.  And he insisted that Kleberg vote for the New Deal programs he was personally  against.

    In 1935, Johnson left Kleberg’s office to take a position he had been offered in Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration. (ibid, p. 6)  Then in 1937, Johnson ran for Congress in an open seat election.  He won and maneuvered to be appointed to the House Naval Affairs Committee. It is at this point that the young Johnson began his close association with the infamous construction company Brown and Root.

    Founded in Texas in 1919 by Herman Brown and Daniel Root, when the latter died, it came under the control of the Brown brothers, Herman and George.  Once Johnson was in Congress, he began a quid pro quo program with the brothers.  He would steer lucrative federal contracts their way, and benefit in turn from large cash contributions made to his political campaigns.  By the end of World War II, Brown and Root had done over 300 million dollars worth of work for the Navy. (p. 9)  In return, the brothers contributed over 100,000 dollars to Johnson’s 1941 Senate campaign, which he narrowly lost, even though he spent $750, 000 total, the equivalent of over $12 million today. And the population of the state at that time was slightly more than six million.

    In 1941, Johnson purchased KTBC radio in Austin for seventeen thousand dollars, or well over a quarter of a million today. (Mellen, pp. 11-12) This was done in his wife Lady Bird’s name, and allegedly with her money.  But Mellen unearthed a long buried report by Life magazine reporter Holland McCombs. His work was done during the Johnson/Goldwater campaign of 1964.  McCombs went to Texas and did some on-the-ground sleuthing.  According to his reports, Lady Bird did not have that kind of money back then either.  The implication being that the Brown brothers facilitated the purchase as a payoff to their man LBJ. After an appeal to the FCC, the station was allowed to raise its wattage, alter its frequency, and broadcast 24 hours.  This greatly increased its profit margins and it later became a CBS affiliate.  That purchase was the beginning of the Johnson media kingdom.

    This is all a prelude to the infamous Senate election of 1948, one which Johnson and his backers were determined not to lose.  Johnson had previously helped George Parr, a Texas political chief from the southern end of the state, gain a pardon on a tax evasion charge. (ibid, p. 47)  He also helped Parr gain revenge on Dick Kleberg who had resisted the pardon. LBJ recruited a candidate to run against Kleberg, and Johnson’s candidate won.  Along with his continued illicit favors for Brown and Root, this put him in a good position for the 1948  senatorial race.  When it was all over, Herman Brown had invested a half million to get Johnson elected to the Senate. (ibid, p. 53)

    The problem was that his opponent, Governor Coke Stevenson, was quite formidable.  Stevenson had been a long term Speaker of the Texas Assembly, then Lt. Governor, and then a two-term governor. In fact, Parr had helped Stevenson in previous elections steal hundreds, if not thousands, of votes in his tri-county area. (ibid, p. 51) But Parr was quite appreciative to LBJ about his pardon.  He agreed to do all he could to help him win this election. (ibid, p. 50)  Did he ever.

    A lot was at stake.  Whoever won the Democratic primary was pretty much guaranteed to win the seat in Washington since, at that time, the Republican party was pretty weak in Texas.  When the first tallies came in, Stevenson was winning by about 20,000 votes.  But when San Antonio came in, Stevenson’ s lead was cut in half.  And as the Parr-controlled counties in the south came in, Stevenson’s lead was eroded further.  As Mellen notes, Duval County, under Parr control, cast well over four thousand votes. Surprisingly, only forty were for Stevenson.  (p. 51)  LBJ went on the radio and declared himself the victor, even though, officially, Stevenson was still in the lead by over a hundred votes.

    Then came Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County, also under Parr control.  Officially only six hundred votes were cast.  Yet in the first tally, Johnson got over seven hundred votes.  Later, in an amended tally, Johnson got over nine hundred votes, wiping out Stevenson who got less than a hundred. (Mellen, p. 51)  Johnson won the state primary by 87 votes.

    It turned out, of course, that Parr had stacked the vote with people who had not voted.  Stevenson tried to fight back. But at a later meeting of the executive committee of the Democratic Party, he narrowly—by one vote—lost a motion to file an official protest. A federal district judge then ordered Johnson’s name off the ballot pending an inquiry.  But Johnson’s legal crony, Abe Fortas, got Hugo Black of the Supreme Court to void the order.  (ibid, p. 55)

    In the general election, Johnson crushed his GOP opponent by a margin of 2-1.  In rather short order, LBJ rose to become one of the most powerful Senate majority leaders in history. It was from that position that he became a player on the national political stage.

    III

    Malcolm Everett Wallace was born in 1921 in Mt. Pleasant, Texas.  He had five siblings.  The family moved to Dallas in 1924.  Wallace was  a participant in many extracurricular activities in high school.  He was the vice-president of his class and played quarterback on the football team. (ibid, p. 15)

    In 1939, he joined the Marines.  But he was forced to leave after ten months due to a serious back injury. (p. 17)  When he tried to reenlist, he was turned down.  He ended up at the University of Texas in 1941.  To say he was active in college life does not do him justice. Among a few other groups, he joined the debate club and worked on the yearbook.  He also was a member of the student assembly.  (p. 18)

    It was in Austin where he met his first, and most long lasting, romantic interest.  Her name was Nora Ann Carroll.  They exchanged Christmas gifts and letters.  He even wrote her poems.  This was the beginning of a relationship that would last, on and off, for about twenty years. (p. 23)

    Wallace ended up being president of his class at Texas.  He seems to have been quite liberal in his orientation.  He wanted the voting age lowered to 18—many years before the Vietnam War.  And he was all for using the power of the government to economically ease the lives of those in poverty.  He was also friendly with Black Americans.  (On his mother’s side, Wallace was one fourth Cherokee Indian.)

    Wallace was a strong president.  He insisted on meeting with the university administrators about matters that concerned him and his constituents. (p. 26)  And he was also interested in liberal candidates in national politics.  For instance, he was quite agitated when Henry Wallace was dropped from the Democratic national ticket in 1944. But Malcolm voted for him in 1948 for president. (p. 76)

    The problem Wallace had at Texas was that the controlling board of the university , the regents, was McCarthyite before the rise of Senator Joe McCarthy. They asked the university president, Homer Rainey, to remove three economics professors because they were too pro-labor.  Rainey refused.  They were removed anyway. (See pp. 29-30)  Rainey wanted to start a school of social work. This was turned down.  After two more confrontations, Rainey was asked to resign.  Rainey refused. Both the faculty and class president Malcolm Wallace backed him.  Wallace hitchhiked to Houston to appear before the Board of Regents.  He spoke for 45 minutes. Rainey was removed anyway.  Wallace then organized a mass demonstration. He led a march of 4000 students to the state capitol building.  Governor Stevenson met with him while the crowd waited outside. (p. 33)  But the regents refused to meet with him. Wallace then led an even larger demonstration, this time with 8,000 students—which was over 90% of the student body.  This failed also.  So Wallace grabbed the microphone at halftime of a Texas/SMU football game to promote his cause.

    Wallace’s extraordinary efforts in the Rainey case actually got him some national exposure in the Chicago Sun. (p. 38) It also earned him an FBI investigation.  But it was all for naught.  Rainey did not return.

    Wallace temporarily left Texas after the Rainey affair.  He went to New York City and attended Columbia and the New School for Social Research.  He earned a degree in economics from the latter.  (Mellen, p. 71)  Wallace returned to Texas to work in Rainey’s unsuccessful bid for governor.  In 1947, Wallace gained a second degree from UT in business.  That same year, Wallace married a woman named Mary Andre Dubose Barton.  (Who will be called Andre from here on.)  Nora had warned him against marrying.  She felt he had done so simply because she had married someone else.  (ibid, p. 74)  Nora turned out to be right.  To say the least, Andre caused Malcolm Wallace a lot of problems.

    It turned out that Andre had an alcohol problem, and was bisexual. When Wallace went to Columbia to pursue an instructor’s position, Andre was rumored to have had a lesbian affair.  So he returned to Texas and the couple had a child, named Michael.  This was unfortunate for Malcolm Wallace since, by all reports, he was quite a good instructor.  (p. 75)

    In 1948, Wallace met Cliff Carter.  In return for working in Johnson’s campaign, Carter got him a job in the Agriculture Department.  Wallace moved to Arlington, Virginia where his wife joined him.  Wallace published three academic papers in the early fifties. Andre decided to return to Austin.  It was at this time that she took up with a former actor and nine hole golf course owner named John Kinser.  (p. 87)

    Wallace returned to Texas and heard about the Kinser/Andre association.  This was further complicated by both men’s relationship with Josefa Johnson, the sister of Senator Johnson.  Wallace had been invited to a gathering at the Johnson residence while he lived in Arlington.  He briefly met the Johnsons—and presumably Josefa—but he always told his children and friends that he actually talked more with Lady Bird than he did with the senator. (See p. 237)

    Horace Busby, a Johnson lackey, told several writers that Wallace had some kind of dalliance with Josefa.  But as Mellen points out, Busby seems to have had it in for Wallace.  During the FBI inquiry for his Agriculture Department job, Busby was the only source that gave him a negative evaluation. (p. 77)  Kinser, a playboy type, was indeed having some kind of an affair with Josefa.  He was trying to charm her so he could get a government loan to expand his golf course.  (p. 83) 

    Wallace felt that Kinser had ruined his wife’s chances for her recovery from her alcohol problem. On October 22, 1951 he went to Kinser’s golf course and shot him.  Witnesses identified his license plate and he was pulled over. The paraffin test determined he had fired a gun. (p. 88)  Nora’s brother, Bill Carroll, recruited one Polk Shelton to defend her sister’s former boyfriend.  Shelton brought in his friend and colleague John Cofer. (p. 96) 

    One of the most interesting parts of the book is Mellen’s explication of how Malcolm Wallace ended up walking away from the resultant murder charge. It was not through any court room pyrotechnics by Johnson’s pal Cofer.  It was through the maneuvering of Shelton with a jury ringer by the name of Deckerd Johnson. To start the trial, Cofer moved for a dismissal on technical and procedural grounds.   This was declined by the judge.  But then Shelton moved for a suspended sentence based on the fact that Wallace had no prior criminal record.  This was also declined, but it was in the record.  (p. 99)

    Johnson was from a small Texas town which contained a few of Mac Wallace’s relatives.   During jury selection, Wallace phoned his uncle who lived in that town.  The uncle called a man named Gus Lanier.  Lanier was an attorney who also was Johnson’s first cousin.   Lanier then went down to the court and sat at the defense table for a few days. He made sure that Johnson saw him shaking hands with Wallace. (ibid)  Johnson did well for his friends and relatives.  He told his fellow jurors that if it was not a unanimous verdict, Wallace would not be retried.  As jury foreman this carried some weight. But it was a false statement that the jurors mistakenly believed. With the first part of his secret agenda achieved, Johnson now went along with the guilty verdict phase of determinations.  But then Johnson, in agreement with Polk Shelton, demanded a suspended sentence.  The others disagreed and wished to send Wallace to prison for a 10-20 year term.  But Johnson threatened them by saying if they did not come back with the suspended sentence, he would change his previous vote, letting Wallace walk without a guilty verdict or any sentence at all.  Johnson’s maneuverings worked.  And this is why the Kinser jury did what it did.  (pp. 103-04)

    IV

    When Lyndon Johnson got to the Senate he continued his old vices.  He developed a close working relationship with the secretary  to the majority leader, Bobby Baker.  Baker was, by his own admission, a professional wheeler-dealer. He had no problem manipulating votes in the Senate for future payoffs, outright bribes, and using his position to advance his private business interests.  Baker and Johnson were close for several years.  But when Baker’s illicit activities caught up with him, Johnson denied any such relationship.

    Baker’s career began its collapse with a lawsuit by one Ralph Hill.  Hill was a business partner of Baker in a vending machine enterprise. Baker demanded high kickbacks with the promise of future defense contracts. When the contracts did not appear, Hill threatened to file a lawsuit.  Baker then made some ominous remarks about Hill’s future health.  In the fall of 1963, Hill filed the action anyway.  (p. 158) This opened up the flood gates.  Shortly thereafter, in early November, Life magazine published a cover story exploring Baker’s activities.  This led Don Reynolds, an insurance salesman, to come forward.  He said that through Baker, he sold LBJ and his wife two large insurance policies.  But then Johnson had requested a gift of an expensive stereo system as a reward for the sale.  This now brought Johnson into the Baker scandals.  (p. 161)  But, by this time, Baker had already stepped down from his position.  This took some steam out of the Senate inquiry, which was not really zealous to begin with, since many senators were associated with Baker’s rackets.

    Then there was Billy Sol Estes.  Estes was a large contributor to Johnson’s Texas campaigns and the 1960 Kennedy/Johnson ticket.  To say that Estes was a con man and fraudster does not really describe the nature and scope of the man’s swindles.  He first specialized in cotton allotments.  He convinced farmers who had their land taken away by eminent domain to purchase land for cotton from him.  He would then lease it back.  Once, a year later, when the first payment was due, by pre-arrangement, the farmer would default.  In other words, Estes had purchased the allotment through lease fees.  But since the transaction was not a genuine sale, the deal was illegal.  He took the money from this fraud to build another fraud. This was in the anhydrous ammonia business—fertilizer.  He sold mortgages on nonexistent fertilizer tanks by convincing farmers to buy them sight unseen. He would then lease them from the buyer for the same amount as the mortgage payment.  He used these phony mortgages to get large bank loans.  The aim was to corner the anhydrous ammonia business.  As many have said, approximately 80% of the fertilizer warehouses were empty.

    The problem with the schemes was that, in his attempt to corner the fertilizer market, Estes was underselling the product so low that he was losing millions in the process.  Not even his cotton allotment scam could bail him out.  (Mellen, p. 140)  The lending companies grew suspicious. They began to suspect the fertilizer warehouses were non-existent.  On top of that, in 1961, even though he said he was worth millions, Estes had paid no income tax in four years. (ibid, p. 141)  As with Baker, an unhappy business partner, Harold Orr, was the first to expose Estes.  He declared that there was no fertilizer in those warehouses.

    A local agriculture official, Henry Marshall, also grew suspicious of Estes’s scams, especially the cotton allotment swindles.  He theorized that Estes was paying farmers a pittance for cotton allotments he could then use to grow abundant amounts of cotton. Which tripled the value of the land. He had been persuaded by Cliff Carter to go along with over a hundred of these deals.  But he now announced that he would not do it again, unless both the buyer and seller appeared before him with all the papers in place.  (p. 141)  Estes had bribed other Agriculture officials. But Marshall was determined. Appreciating Estes’ campaign contributions, Carter and Johnson tried to influence Marshall with a promotion. It did not take.  In early June of 1961, Marshall arranged a meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1961.  He would present his evidence, and Kennedy would now indict Estes and end his scams. (p. 143)  The meeting never took place as Marshall was murdered on Saturday June 3rd.  Although there were indications of attempted carbon monoxide poisoning, the victim died of six gunshot wounds from his own bolt action rifle. The local sheriff, Howard Stegall, proclaimed the case a suicide.  Even more surprising, he got the local coroner to go along with it.

    But the stench was too strong.  Estes was ready to fall anyway. In 1962, a local biweekly newspaper, the Pecos Independent, now began a series of reports on Estes. These exposed both the cotton allotment and fertilizer scandals.  Johnson was upset since he understood that Bobby Kennedy could use this and the Baker scandal to have his brother remove him from the ticket in 1964. (p.  147)  LBJ had J. Edgar Hoover intervene to have the author of the articles removed from the story.  But the owner of the newspaper persisted in his efforts.  He forwarded this information about the fertilizer scam to the FBI through the Justice Department.  Bobby Kennedy now descended on Estes with 75 agents, including 16 auditors and IRS agents.  It was the beginning of the end for Billy Sol. (ibid)

    Estes was convicted in both state and federal courts. He exhausted his appeals in 1965. He then went to prison and was paroled in 1971.  In  1979, he was convicted of tax fraud and went to prison for four more years.  As many authors have noted, including Mellen, Estes always blamed Johnson for his legal problems.  He somehow expected LBJ to help save him, though it is difficult to see how that could have happened after the newspaper series was published and then sent to Washington. To put it mildly, Johnson had very little, if any, influence with Bobby Kennedy.  Once the publisher sent the article to Washington, Estes was doomed—and LBJ could not save him.  Yet, irrationally, Estes seemed to think that he could.  He became obsessed with this idea, and as Mellen shows in an interview, Estes became quite embittered toward Johnson.  It was a bitterness that never left him. (See pp. 242-43)

    V

    And this is how the lives of Mac Wallace and Estes intersected—posthumously.   After the Kinser trial, Wallace sued for divorce from Andre, specifically citing her alcoholism.  (p. 107)  The judge must have believed him since he got custody of the two children, Michael and Meredithe.  He then went to work as a personnel manager in 1952 for Jonco Aircraft in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Evidently, Wallace did not want his kids to grow up without a mother. He and Andre remarried and lived together in Oklahoma.

    Two years later, the family moved back to Texas and Wallace went to work for another defense plant called TEMCO.  This company was founded by D. H Byrd, a longtime friend and backer of Johnson. Mellen notes that there is no direct evidence that Johnson intervened to get Wallace his position there.  But there is circumstantial evidence, since Johnson appears to have secured his secretary’s father a job with TEMCO.

    In 1960, Andre filed for divorce again.  This time, she accused her husband of molesting their daughter. (p. 132 . ONI, which did Wallace’s security clearances, never bought into this; see p. 171)  Wallace now decided to leave TEMCO and Texas for a job in California with an acquisition of TEMCO called Ling Electronics.  He left his two children with Andre and moved to Orange County.

    Wallace spent most of the rest of his life in California working as a control supervisor for Ling.  He married a young woman named Virginia  Ledgerwood.  (p. 169).

    Later on, ONI lowered his clearance from SECRET to CONFIDENTIAL.  This may have been due to a DUI charge Wallace had gotten. It resulted in a demotion at work. Wallace reacted poorly to this.  He got depressed and began drinking even more.  In 1969 he and Virginia divorced and sold their house.  (p. 218)  He used the money to take out insurance policies on his three children—he had a third child with Virginia.  He decided to return to Texas.

    Wallace was dealing with severe health problems at this time. On the ride back to Texas, he passed out in a diabetic coma and sustained a concussion.  A hitchhiker he picked up saved him from even worse injuries. (p. 219)  Because of this, Wallace made out a will in April of 1970.  In the last months of his life, he taught part-time at Texas A&M, and worked part-time at his brother’s insurance office.

    On the evening of January 7, 1971 Wallace died in a single car accident.  He had driven off the road and into a concrete bridge abutment. The policeman who wrote out the accident report felt that Wallace was dead at the scene.  And, in fact, he was pronounced DOA at the hospital. (p. 221) Jay Harrison  questioned whether or not Wallace died that night. But Mellen documents the fact that several of his family members saw the body at the funeral parlor in an open casket.  It was Malcolm Wallace.  To further this idea, Harrison had also stated that Wallace visited his first wife in 1980. Also not true. This was their son Michael, who resembled his father.  (p. 251)

    VI

    In 1979, as he was being carted off to prison the second time, Billy Sol Estes began to carve out the foundation for the LBJ/Wallace murder of Henry Marshall construct.  Estes told his escort, former Texas Ranger Clint Peoples, that Marshall had not killed himself.  The authorities  should be looking in another direction. Peoples assumed this to mean Washington DC.  When Estes got out of jail, he appeared before a grand jury called on the Marshall murder.  Estes would now be represented by attorney Douglas Caddy.  Caddy had been trying to get Estes’s story out even while he was in prison—through the auspices of Galveston rightwing millionaire Shearn Moody. (p. 232)  Estes now told Peoples that Mac Wallace killed Henry Marshall.   Peoples contacted  John Paschall, DA of Roberson County, where Marshall had been killed.  Peoples convinced Paschall to reopen the Marshall case by calling a grand jury.

    On March 20, 1984, over 20 years after Marshall’s murder, Estes testified that Johnson had ordered the murder of Henry Marshall at a meeting in Washington with Carter, Estes and Wallace.  Caddy then brought these charges to the attention of the Justice Department.  But later, in addition to Marshall, Estes and Caddy now listed eight other people who had been killed by Wallace at the behest of LBJ.  This included Josefa Johnson, Kinser, and John Kennedy.  Like Joe McCarthy and communists in the State Department, the Caddy/Estes number was later raised up to 17.  (Ibid, p. 236)

    Just on the material we have gone over already, let us raise some questions about the Estes’ allegations about Marshall, and JFK.

    1. Why would Estes be so angry with Johnson if LBJ had ordered the death of Marshall? How much more could LBJ do than kill someone for Estes?
    2. There is no evidence that Wallace was a sharpshooter.  So why would Johnson and Carter use him to kill JFK?
    3. If Wallace pulled off all of these murders, why did he die with such a tiny estate?  Did Wallace commit all these killings, repeatedly putting his life and family at risk, for nothing?
    4. If these were not performed for money, then what was the political angle?  Wallace was more liberal than Johnson.

    But Mellen goes beyond these points. For instance, she establishes a solid alibi for Wallace for the dates on and about the murder of Marshall.  Marshall was killed on Saturday June 3, 1961.  On that Friday, Wallace had filled out and signed a security clearance form at work. On that weekend, his brother had brought both his children, and Wallace’s son Michael, out to see Malcolm.  The party arrived Friday evening.  That weekend they went to the beach and then Disneyland. (pp. 235-36)  There are two other points to be made in this regard.  The inquiry into Henry Marshall’s death concluded that he was killed somewhere in the middle of his farm, meaning that the person or persons who killed him knew how to get to him after they came in the gate.  There is no evidence that Wallace knew Marshall. (ibid) Finally, when Estes began to broadcast his story, he described the scene where Johnson and his co-conspirators had made the decision to kill Marshall.  Unfortunately, Johnson had not moved into that home, called The Elms, at that time. (ibid)

    Concerning the death of Josefa Johnson, she was married to a man named James Moss at the time of her death in 1961.  The evening before, she had been at a Christmas Eve gathering at Johnson’s ranch.  The only other guests were John and Nellie Connally.  The cause of death was first announced as a heart attack, but was changed to a cerebral hemorrhage, or stroke. (pp. 144-45)  Again, Wallace was living in California at the time.  And further, are we to assume that he took a quickie course in inducing cerebral hemorrhages and making them look like natural deaths?

    As per the assassination of John F. Kennedy, again Wallace was in California at the time, working for Ling Electronics.  And in 1963, his son Michael had moved in with him.  Michael recalls his father being home for dinner and trying to console him about Kennedy’s murder, which occurred in his home state of Texas. (p. 257)

    Then there is Billy Sol’s and Caddy’s relationship with the Justice Department.  Caddy tried to get an interview with Stephen Trott, a prosecutor in the Justice Department, after Estes had testified before the grand jury in 1984. (p. 238)  According to Caddy, Estes now said that Wallace recruited Jack Ruby, and Ruby then recruited Oswald.  During the actual assassination, Wallace was on the grassy knoll.  Recall, even though the list kept on growing, Estes and Caddy could produce no real evidence for any of the killings.  And Caddy had never seemed to seek out what the exculpatory evidence was.  As New York City prosecutor Bob Tanenbaum said to this author, as a DA, this is something you always allow for since you do not want to be blindsided at trial.

    Taking all this into account, its remarkable what Estes and Caddy wanted in return for a deposition.  Estes demanded a pardon for his past crimes, immunity from prosecution, relief from his parole restrictions, and his tax liens removed. (p. 240)  Very sensibly, Trott countered that he would agree to immunity if Estes would forward any evidence he had in advance, name his sources, and agree to a polygraph.  Trott actually sent three FBI agents to Texas for a preliminary interview.  When Estes saw them arrive in the lobby of the hotel, he walked out. (ibid)

    But there was the Darby/Harrison fingerprint, which both men swore by, but which no one had ever cross checked.  Mellen got a copy of Harrison’s fingerprint file from author Walt Brown, who maintained Harrison’s collection.  She then got Wallace’s Navy prints from the days he was in the Marines. She secured the services of one Robert Garrett as her analyst.  She approached Garrett in the summer of 2013. He had been the supervisor of the Middlesex County prosecutor’s office crime scene unit.  He had been trained in fingerprint analysis by the FBI headquarters in Washington and then at their lab in Quantico, Virginia.  In 2013 he was in charge of the certification programs for the International Association for Identification (IAI), which still certifies fingerprint examiners and is the one accrediting agency. (p. 258)

    An important matter that Garrett discovered was that neither Darby nor Hoffmeister was accredited by the IAI at the time they did their work for Jay Harrison in 1998.  One must renew one’s license every five years.  This is done by taking education credits, continued work experience, and by passing a test.  According to Garrett, who had been in charge of the IAI certification programs, Darby’s certification had expired in 1984, fourteen years before Harrison recruited him.  Hoffmeister’s expired in 1996.  (p. 261) Why Harrison did not check on this issue in advance is extremely puzzling, especially since Harrison had been a policeman for a number of years, and had to have known what the IAI was, and how its trademark—or lack of—impacted the credibility of the work done by Darby and Hoffmeister.

    Another problem that Garrett had with the Harrison/Darby file was the same issue that Hoffmeister raised: the quality of the reproductions that Darby had worked with.  Garrett actually told Mellen that he would not have proceeded if this is what he had had to base his judgment on. (p. 258)  First, the quality of the copy of the unidentified box print from the Warren Commission was simply inferior, to the point that it was unreliable.  So Mellen got an actual first generation photograph of this print from the National Archives. And in her book she shows the difference between the two, which is quite considerable. (See the last photo in photo section.)

    But further, Garrett did not want to utilize the Wallace print from the Kinser case, which Harrison had secured from the Texas authorities. These had been smudged since “the roller used to make the inked print had not been thoroughly cleaned off after its use with the previous subject.” (p. 259)  So Mellen attained Wallace’s Navy fingerprints.

    Using high technology, including a 256 shade gray scale that Darby did not have, Garrett now went to work.  He concluded that the unidentified box print was not a match with the Wallace print.  First he noted eight points of discrepancy between the two—that is, specific mismatches.  And he described these in detail. (p. 259)  Beyond that, he brought up problems with all fourteen of the alleged matches that Darby had made.  Some of these were due to the poor copies he had to work with.  But also part of it was the black and white methodology employed.  Garrett indicated where the “plotting” was off due to incorrect alignments. (p. 260) Garrett therefore concluded that there was no doubt that the unidentified Warren Commission box print did not belong to Wallace.

    It’s discouraging that we had to wait 15 years to correct this historic misjudgment.  Meanwhile, people like Roger Stone, Barr McClellan, Philip Nelson and Nigel Turner used this evidence in their books and films.  But due to the better original quality, the higher technology, and Garrett’s certification, the Darby/Harrison identification must stand corrected.

    The remarkable part of Mellen’s book is this: I have not touched on everything yet.  I have rarely read a book of less than three hundred pages that contains so much interesting content.  The last instance I can recall is with Larry Hancock’s Nexus back in 2011. Most of what I have left out deals with other aspects of Johnson’s career and life.  But I should add, as others have pointed out, what Johnson did in Texas in 1948 was not at all unprecedented.  As some have argued, Johnson and Parr stole the 1948 election because LBJ felt he had his previous run for Senate stolen from him.  And, as mentioned, Parr had stolen votes for Coke Stevenson’s races. Further, as she notes, Billy Sol Estes was also backed by the liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough.  And finally, although she notes instances of Johnson using the word “nigger”, this was all too common in the South at the time Johnson was growing up. It should not impact Johnson’s work on the issue of civil rights, which, in my opinion, he deserves credit for.  But on the plus side, the book includes a quite informative chapter on the USS Liberty and Johnson’s part in that horrific tragedy.

    To this reviewer Faustian Bargains seems to me a unique, almost singular book in the field.  And although I have noted some reservations about parts of the volume, most of it seems exceptional to me, and I would recommend the book to the reader.

    Addendum:  Note from the Author

    Joan Mellen informs us that she attained Wallace’s Navy fingerprints through his NARA military file, not through the Navy.

  • John McAdams and Marquette Go to Court

    John McAdams and Marquette Go to Court

    John McAdams strikes a pose during his glory days at Marquette University

    Readers of this web site will recall that the last time we addressed the case of John McAdams vs. Cheryl Abbate and Marquette, it was early last year.  At that time, CTKA attached a link to the decision letter that the dean had made in that case.  That 17-page letter was written by Richard Holz, dean of the college of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University, McAdams’ former employer.  Dean Holz indicated two violations of the Faculty Statutes that the professor had violated as part of the explanation as to why he had made this decision.  (Click here for the letter http://d28htnjz2elwuj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-01-30-Holz-to-McAdams.pdf)

    That letter began with the statement that the university was commencing the process of revoking Professor McAdams’ tenure in order to dismiss him from the faculty.   At the end of the letter, Holz added that if the professor filed a timely objection, he would be provided with more due process, which included a faculty hearing of his peers. McAdams filed the timely objection, and he was given a faculty hearing.

    One year later, in January of 2016, that committee filed a long, over 100-page report to Michael Lovell, the president of the college. They decided to revise Dean Holz’s decision.  They felt that McAdams should not be terminated but rather suspended without pay for a period of nine months, from April to December of this year.  He would then be allowed to file for reinstatement.  Lovell called the report one of the most thorough and well written faculty committee reports he had ever read.  The main reason they gave for not moving for dismissal was that McAdams had not been formally reprimanded for his perceived offenses prior to this one.

    In a letter to McAdams dated March 24, 2016, Lovell alerted the former instructor that he was going to abide by the report’s recommendations.  Which included the judgment that McAdams be allowed to return after his suspension was served in January of 2017.  This was contingent upon three conditions.  First, that he accept the unanimous decision of the faulty committee.  That he pledges his future behavior will abide by the faculty handbook and mission statement.  And third, his expression of regret for the harm suffered by the former graduate instructor Cheryl Abbate.  Upon those conditions, and after serving out the suspension, McAdams would be allowed to resume his position. Lovell ended his letter with the clear warning that if anything like this happened again, he would move to dismiss the instructor. Because this was also the recommendation of the faculty report.

    Before getting to the reaction of McAdams and his legal representative, let us remind our readership of what happened that caused this, and who Cheryl Abbate was.  On November 9, 2014 McAdams posted on his blog Marquette Warrior information about a conversation that Abbate had with a student in her philosophy class.  According to McAdams, Abbate had limited the right to open debate in her class over the issue of homosexual marriage.  The student then left the class and said he was going to file a complaint.  Which he did. 

    There were three important issues that were distorted, ignored, or discounted by McAdams:  1.) the student lied to Abbate about taping their conversation 2.) McAdams himself was the student’s faculty advisor, and perhaps most importantly, 3.) the student was failing the class. 

    I must add one more key point that the faculty committee discovered, and to my knowledge has not been written about previously.  In their report, at the bottom of page 43, they reveal that the student “had a leadership role in the student chapter of a national organization that encourages…confronting professors in the classroom to expose liberal bias.”  The report states they did not discover this fact until after their four day hearing was concluded, and they decided not to reopen the proceedings, because there was no indication McAdams was aware of this.  The report gives no evidence as to how they made that conclusion. But I should add, the report does state that the student switched to McAdams as his advisor prior to the semester in question.  Which, to me, suggests the issue merited further inquiry. Because, in conjunction with this, McAdams told the committee that he was not aware that the student was failing the class.  Yet, he was the young man’s faculty advisor!  And further, the student told the committee that he never told McAdams that he was dropping the class for any other reason than his failing grade.  (See report p. 84)

    Marquette University dean Richard Holz

    There are two other points in this voluminous report which are made much more clear than they had been.  First, the record of McAdams’ prior attacks on students and teachers from his blog is detailed at length.  The report lists at least 12 prior incidents McAdams was involved in where he attempted to intimidate both students and teachers.  And he did so by naming names and reporting e-mail addresses.  He even went after administrators, like deans and provosts.  He actually told them that if he was reprimanded, he would do the same to them in his blog—that is name them and expose a contact email. (See report, p. 91)   And during Dean Holz’ inquiry, McAdams told Holz that he had a law firm lined up and ready to sue Marquette if they disciplined him.

    Note here, that no action had been taken against McAdams at this point in time. Yet he already had a legal firm set to defend him.  And, as the report shows, McAdams had used this tactic against others for a number of years, one that can only be described as intimidation by threat of retaliation.  This may explain why he had not been disciplined previously. If that is true, then this reveals a failing of the hierarchy at Marquette.  This author was involved in the education system for well over thirty years. After reading the record, I was surprised that McAdams had not been suspended or reprimanded previously.  This shows a real weakness on Marquette’s part.  The report mentions this, but does not fully explore the issue.  (See report, p. 100)

    A second issue that the report elucidates pertains to the defense utilized by McAdams in his appearances on television, and also by his media allies, most notably Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic Monthly.  That defense is most notably demonstrated by the title of Friedersdorf’s essay of February 9, 2015.  It was called “Stripping a Professor of Tenure Over a Blog Post.”

    First let us establish that, as the report shows, McAdams’ blog report of November 9, 2014 was unfair and one-sided.  But yet it included graduate student Abbate’s name, a link to her web site, and her contact information. Holding her up for ridicule and providing people direct access to her was not enough for McAdams.  For contrary to what McAdams and Friedersdorf said and wrote, McAdams then actively promoted his rendition of the story.  He distributed copies of the audio recording to bloggers and selected journalists; the recording  the student had lied about making—but had given to him.  (Which is another indication of collusion between student and advisor.) McAdams then posted several follow up stories to the original one on his blog.  He also arranged personal appearances on radio and television to promote the story to a national level.   (See p. 56 of the report.)

    What is even more fascinating about this part of the story is that two of the three journalists that McAdams provided copies of the recording to were from Fox News.  One was to Todd Starnes of the Fox national network, and the other was Krystle Kacner on the local Fox affiliate TV station. (ibid)  He also now began to e-mail out links to his original November 9th story to other bloggers and commentators.  He even relayed requests for interviews to the student!

    So, far from being a debate over academic freedom for the student, McAdams saw this as a way to make a name for himself on the national airwaves over the longstanding conservative flashpoint of “political correctness”. Like Dinesh D’Souza before him, McAdams was out to create a nationwide conflagration that went beyond the boundaries of Abbate’s classroom, or Marquette’s campus, or the readership of his blog.  And it was at this point that he began to put the mental and physical health of Abbate into jeopardy.  For now, because of the exposure of her identity and her contact information, Abbate began to get not just insulting messages, but also physical threats (click here to read them) to the point that Marquette had to provide her a security guard.   She eventually succumbed to the ordeal and transferred to the University of Colorado.  This carried a dual price.  For she now had to change her dissertation project, and she had to repeat three semesters of earned credits.

    Because of this, Dean Holz decided to suspend McAdams– with pay and benefits–as he investigated the matter. And he later offered McAdams an office on campus and library privileges. (See report, p. 64)  The authors criticized Holz for this since there was no faculty involvement with this decision.  Holz made it unilaterally.  Although the authors admit that, according to the Marquette by laws, Holz was within his rights to do so.

    As the report notes, at no time has McAdams ever expressed any remorse or regret over what happened to Abbate.  In fact, he actually explicitly told the local Fox affiliate in February just that.

    McAdams at a press conference announcing his lawsuit against Marquette University

    And it is this aspect of the whole sorry episode that the faculty committee deemed most heinous and culpable.  They found that McAdams had used  “improperly obtained information in a way that he should have known could lead to harm, harm that could easily have been avoided.” (See report, p. 74)  As the authors continue,  “his use of a surreptitious recording, along with Ms. Abbate’s name and contact information, to hold Ms. Abbate up for public contempt on his blog, recklessly exposed her to the foreseeable harm that she suffered …”  (ibid, p. 75) This behavior is governed by an instructor’s code of conduct which states that comments should be avoided that would cause “grave doubts concerning the teacher’s fitness for his or her position”. (ibid)  As a further part of that code, instructors are to “respect the dignity of others” and “to acknowledge their right to express differing opinions.”  (ibid, p. 76)  This means that colleagues should not expect others to “search for unguarded moments with which to humiliate them.” (ibid)  The committee also concluded that the damage done to Abbate “was substantial, foreseeable easily avoidable, and not justifiable.” (ibid, p. 82)

    And the report shows that the intensity and the frequency of the attacks escalated as McAdams spread his report to other outlets especially Fox. (See report, p. 88)  The amount of emails forced Abbate to close down her email account and she requested the Philosophy Department close down her email address from the Grad Student web page.  In addition, the attack caused her rating on the site RateMyProfessors to be sabotaged. (ibid)  This caused Abbate acute mental distress, which the report notes in detail.   And, fearful for her health, she left her position at Marquette.  The report notes that not only has McAdams not shown any regret, he has actually stated that Abbate benefited by becoming a martyr. (Ibid p. 58)  The results of McAdams’ jihad are that other professors on campus are fearful they may be next.

    The report concludes that McAdams must have known what the consequences of his campaign against Abbate were, since he had done this in the past so often. He had been quick to use his Marquette Warrior blog as a bludgeon.  For instance, a student complained about McAdams’s treatment of her for promoting a production of The Vagina Monologues on campus.  She went to an administrator to formally protest this.  McAdams actually told the administrator that if she continued in her action, he would blog about her even more.  She did, and he did.  (ibid. p. 92)

    The report also notes that McAdams has stated that it was necessary to name Abbate “because the norms of journalism require such identification.”  (ibid, p. 94)  The problem with this is that it would be a good argument if McAdams were employed by Marquette as a journalist. He is not.  He is an instructor. Therefore, between the two, it’s his responsibilities as an instructor that must take precedence. (ibid)  And further, even at that, the report notes his journalistic practices are highly selective.

    The report ends with what I believe to be the so-called “elephant in the room” factor.  It states that McAdams does not seem to be bound by norms of behavior at a university, or of academia, or any other applicable body of behavioral code.    It then states, “He has instead assembled his own moral code cobbled together from various sources, to be applied as he sees fit.”  (ibid, p. 104)  It is this basic conflict that seems to make McAdams’ case incorrigible.   McAdams and his allies try to say his case was about a single blog post. Not so.  It was about a nearly 20-year pattern of behavior and a seemingly politically motivated media campaign of calumny.  (The entire report can be read here http://marquette.edu/leadership/documents/20160118-MUFHC-Final-Report-Contested-Dismissal-Dr-John-C-McAdams.pdf)

    McAdams and his legal team have refused to cooperate with the faculty committee.  Or with President Lovell.  He will make no written expression of either respecting the committee report, pledge to respect the faculty rulebook in the future, or any regrets about his behavior toward Abbate.  Instead he has decided to file a lawsuit against Marquette.  This was announced on May 2 of this year.  In other words, McAdams would rather lose his job than make any kind of expression of regret over forcing Abbate to flee the campus or placing her well being in danger.

    McAdams is being represented by a law firm called the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.  General counsel Rick Eisenberg stated that McAdams is being suspended for blogging and standing up for an undergraduate student.  And that, like in a Moscow show trial he must repent to return to his position.  (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 2, 2016) 

    No surprise, this firm is backed by a million dollar grant from the Bradley Foundation.  And it is part of the State Policy Network. An attempt by the New Right to create a large, serpentine network of state and local mini- Heritage Foundations. As of 2011, there was 83 million dollars behind the effort.  It has close ties to the Koch brothers. (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/State_Policy_Network)

    This, of course fits in with McAdams wider profile which the authors of the report, quite naturally, did not go into.  But others, like myself have in the past.  (“John McAdams and the Siege of Chicago, Part 2”)  Hopefully, if there is a trial, this odd and peculiar background will emerge to place McAdams in a much more complete context which will more fully explain why he did what he did in this case.  And also why he favored Fox News, and why he has this Bradley Foundation/Koch Brothers law firm at his disposal.

    ~ Jim DiEugenio

     

  • Warren Hinckle and the Glory that was Ramparts

    Warren Hinckle and the Glory that was Ramparts

    Warren Hinckle passed away on August 25th,  at age 77. Hundreds at the Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach, San Francisco, attended his funeral service. He was buried on Tuesday the 30th. Some of the luminaries who attended his funeral were historian Kevin Starr, the founder of Salon David Talbot, and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

    CTKA carried a notice upon his passing, one from the online version of the Chronicle, the paper he used to write for. Among several others, there were notices in the New York Times, The Nation, and the online magazine Politico. This author read most of them. Not one even came close to recalling or measuring the journalistic brilliance of the man, or the eternal glory of his most significant creation, the last great American magazine, Ramparts.  Considering the standard set by that glossy monthly periodical, I understand the reluctance to remind us of Hinckle’s achievement.

    For those too young to recall it, Ramparts is hard to describe.  For the simple reason that there is nothing today that even resembles it. Which says a lot. Because today we live in the era of online publication; which means journals are much cheaper to produce and maintain, and therefore there is much more freedom  to create. The fact that, to this day, no one has equaled Hinckle’s 1964-69 editorial achievement at Ramparts is what makes what he did the stuff of legend.  After all, it was nearly half a century ago.

    Edward Keating

    Before trying to detail the pure excitement that Ramparts represented,  it is necessary to tell the reader a bit about Hinckle’s background. He was born in San Francisco in 1938.  His father was a shipyard worker.  He attended parochial schools before studying philosophy at the University of San Francisco. There he edited the student newspaper, The Foghorn. Under his editorship it became quite an unusual student newspaper. For instance, it was one of only 14 college newspapers classified as a daily. As editor of a daily, Hinckle went to Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe for two weeks to cover the 1960 Winter Olympics.  From Tahoe, he ran The Foghorn via telephone and telegraph. As he later noted, its readers read little about their college in the college newspaper. For Hinckle featured Herblock cartoons, and headlines like “Dorothy Day Asks: Who Baptized Capitalism?”  (USF was a Jesuit college) He once stole the entire press run of the rival San Francisco State newspaper.  Needless to say, because of disputes with the college administration, he left USF without graduating.

    From there he took a job at the San Francisco Chronicle.  His first outpost was in Oakland, which Hinckle called the Siberia of the Chronicle stations.  Working the police beat, he discovered an unwritten rule about the paper’s Oakland coverage.  The coverage of a homicide  largely depended upon where the victim lived.  To quote from his memoir: “Ghetto murders, being regarded as natural black events, were rarely considered newsworthy.  White trash murders stood a poor to even chance of getting in the paper…..”   There was also a rule of thumb similar to this in the area of fatal car accidents: “No niggers after 11 PM on weekdays, 9 PM on Saturdays (as the Sunday paper went to press early).”  To this rule there was one exception, in the area of quantity: “If two black persons died in a late evening auto crash, that event had a fair chance of making the news columns.” (Hinckle,, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade,  pgs. 31-. 32)

    Eventually, he made it back to San Francisco, where he was given a bit of leeway.  One of his favorite stories was about a former slave from Alabama who emigrated to California.  He got rich in the pinball machine business and  legally adopted the children of his former master.  Then, in the fall of 1961, Hinckle took a temporary leave of absence to help invigorate an ambitious and intellectual Catholic quarterly.

    Hinckle had been moonlighting in the public relations business.  A friend of his, Harry Stiehl, decided to introduce him to a man named Ed Keating.  Keating was a converted Catholic who wanted to start a quarterly periodical that was meant to begin a dialogue between laity and the clergy of the Catholic Church.  He also wanted to begin to spawn a new generation of Catholic intellectuals who had a gift for writing and communicating.  With his PR connections, Stiehl thought Hinckle could help promote Keating’s new journal. It was called Ramparts.

    Howard Gossage

    Keating had a wealthy wife and some famous contributors, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and John Griffin, who wrote the bestseller Black Like Me.  In 1964, Keating tried to raise his journal’s profile by defending the highly controversial play The Deputy which had just opened on Broadway. Hinckle arranged a huge press conference in Keating’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.  Keating and his magazine got exposure;  the play opened successfully and ran for a year.  As Hinckle wrote in his book, this episode became the model for what he later termed activist journalism.

    It also increased the circulation of the magazine.  Keating liked that and he appreciated what Hinckle had done.  So Hinckle did it again. But this time he channeled all the PR into an issue that very much interested him—the murders of three civil rights workers in  Neshoba County, Mississippi in June of 1964. Hinckle promoted a man named Louis Lomax as the Ramparts author of this sensational article.  Lomax did not come through. But like the British at Dunkirk,  Hinckle turned an expected disaster into a triumph by promising the details of the Lomax piece in a future issue.  (Although Hinckle does not deal with this episode in his book, Peter Richardson does in his chronicle of the magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue.)

    There were two factors that allowed Hinckle to gain control of the magazine from Keating.  First, because of the success Hinckle had in promoting Ramparts, Keating made him executive editor.  Second, Keating was becoming financially overextended.  Or as he told Hinckle, “I do have one shopping center left.”  (Hinckle, p. 95)  Therefore Hinckle now had to find alternative sources of funding himself.  Which he did.  Thus began Hinckle’s five year reign.  He was greatly aided by the PR skills and connections of one Howard Gossage.  Gossage was an advertising executive in the Bay Area who was generally described as an innovator and iconoclast in the field.  At age 36, he founded his own agency called Wiener and Gossage.   He would often have salons at his office headquarters, inviting many of the cutting edge thinkers in the San Francisco area, including Hinckle.  (Click here for more on Gossage http://www.howardluckgossage.com/)  

    To describe in detail the contents of what Hinckle produced in those five years would take a medium sized book. And I don’t mean the machinations that went on at the magazine headquarters, or just naming some of the big stories Ramparts produced.  But to detail the contents of what the magazine exposed about America, who Hinckle decided to take on, the methods he employed and the price he was willing to pay, all these—and more—were, to my knowledge, unprecedented before him, and unmatched afterwards. Ramparts was so effective and influential that it became a regular target of the MSM, especially Time magazine and the New York Times, which obviously did not like being exposed as the poseurs they were. Beyond that, the CIA launched operations against Ramparts.  These were commissioned by Desmond Fitzgerald, supervised by Richard Ober, and executed by Edgar Applewhite. As detailed in his book Secrets, the late Angus McKenzie showed how this program grew into MHCHAOS, the massive CIA spying on and infiltration of leftist protest groups in that decade.

    Madame Nhu as depicted on cover of Ramparts

    What got the CIA so angry?  For starters, Ramparts exposed a program the Agency was running out of Michigan State University. (Click here http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357L/357LMSUinVietnam.pdf) It taught CIA interns how to train interrogators in South Vietnam to torture dissidents in Saigon. This created an uproar. Not just for the story, but also because of the hilariously outrageous Ramparts cover, which featured the immortal image of Madame Nhu in an MSU  cheerleaders’ outfit waving an MSU flag.  The image suggesting the Vietnam War was now controlling the agenda of American colleges. (Click here for a time capsule reaction http://msupaper.org/issues/The_Paper_1966-04-21.pdf)

    Then there was Donald Duncan.  Duncan was a Special Forces Sergeant who served in Vietnam and taught at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  He resigned his commission and returned to Berkeley, California. There, in February of 1966, Duncan graced another memorable Ramparts cover. He was pictured in a long sleeved uniform, topped with a Green Beret cap. Above him were the words, “I quit”. Above that was the quote: “The whole thing was a lie.”  In this emblematic story, Duncan described his ten years in the military, capped by a nearly two year tour in Vietnam.  He said he went to Vietnam to fight communism.  But what he learned there about the American effort forced him to retire from the service forever.  Duncan first focused on the fact that there really was no government of South Vietnam—it was simply constructed and propped up by the USA.  And it was in no way a democracy. Secondly, he wrote that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was wildly overrated as a source of supplies for the Viet Cong. Most of the material came over the border or from the sea. Thirdly, he said that the US military was involved in atrocities that violated the rules of warfare, and this extended to the civilian population.  Duncan was really the first former GI to open up the path for Mark Lane’s book Conversations with Americans, the Winter Soldier Hearings, and the exposure of the My Lai Massacre.  (http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1966-02-Donald-W.-Duncan-The-Whole-Thing-Was-A-Lie-Ramparts.pdf)

    In the March 1967 issue Hinckle exposed another instance of the CIA operating domestically. Ramparts now revealed that the Agency was secretly funding the National Students Association.  (http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967mar-00029) In other words the largest college student association in America–featuring a large annual convention picturing a celebration of youthful democracy–was secretly funded, infiltrated and channeled by the Agency. Many of the top officers knew about it and were briefed on that association.  Further, several of them had case officers, code names, and reporting requirements.  Incredibly, some of their overseas representatives were actually career CIA agents from Langley.  The aim of the program was multi-leveled.  First, the Agency would moderate any radical or leftist tendencies in the largest student organization in the world. Second, they would use the overseas voyages of the students to collect information and try and moderate any radical leaders abroad. And third, the propaganda  goal was to portray  our young representatives as independent citizens, while many of the people they met abroad were communist stooges programmed from Moscow. (Hinckle, p. 185)

    Eldridge Cleaver

    NSA officer Michael Wood had a pang of conscience about it and was talking to Hinckle. Unlike other top officers, Wood had not signed a non-disclosure agreement.  Further, Wood had records, not just about the NSA, but other related fronts that the CIA had established.  For example, Stephen Spender’s Anglo-American journal Encounter. Wood also showed how the CIA very often used large legal firms in big cities to channel their clandestine funding.  Usually these firms had a former OSS officer as a founding member.  (One is reminded here of the firm Monroe and Leeman in New Orleans, which helped fund Walter Sheridan’s hit piece on Jim Garrison.  See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition by James DiEugenio, p. 238)

    MHCHAOS operations officer Richard Ober heard about Wood’s talks with Hinckle.  He tried to find a way to stop publication.  But he couldn’t find a legal pretext.  So he then arranged a press conference in New York.  At this conference the officers would pretend that this was all a thing of the past, and they were now reformed. Therefore, the Ramparts story was old hat.  Hinkle got wind of this plan.  He memorably said, “ I was damned if I was going to let the CIA scoop me.”  (Hinckle, p.  190) Ramparts then bought two full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post to expose the illegal association (the CIA is forbidden by its charter to operate domestically) and what the Agency had done to cover it up.  When word of the ads leaked, Ober’s press conference collapsed. 

    The New York Times now started a couple of weeks of reporting on other CIA fronts here and abroad that was influencing cultural affairs. This was one of the many triumphs of Ramparts. In many ways, at many times, it  actually led the news cycle.  By repeatedly scooping the MSM, it became a model of what they were not doing. At the same time that—out of pure humiliation—the magazine became an object of attack. Ramparts did what the MSM was supposed to be doing but did not—actual investigative reporting.  It was showing what the real world around the reader was composed of and what it was all about. But the fact that it was camouflaged made it hard for the average person to detect. So Ramparts did it for them.  Which is why as Jeff Cohen, a student at Michigan, told Peter Richardson, Ramparts was passed around the dorm there to the point it was wrinkled and dog eared by the time he got it. “It really was a radicalizing tool of its own.  It ripped your head off. “ He added that it had turned his cousin’s fraternity into an SDS chapter.

    Ramparts cover November 1966

    At its pinnacle, Ramparts had a circulation of about 250,000.  One can imagine how the CIA felt when Hinckle started featuring stories about the conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy, and then putting such things on the cover. For this topic, there was another cover for the ages.  The November 1966 issue featured the face of JFK made up like a jigsaw puzzle, with several pieces missing.  That was followed  two months later by “The Case for Three Assassins” written by David Welsh and David Lifton. (Click here to view).

    The Welsh/Lifton article began with the following words: “No less than three gunmen fired on the Presidential motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963…” It was a long, illustrated, annotated examination of the ballistics, medical, and eyewitness testimony. It all indicated a triangulation of gunfire in Dealey Plaza.  To my knowledge, it was the first time such an intricate discussion reached a mass audience. That issue was then followed by two long pieces on the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans. (Click here for the first one).

    These were  both penned by former FBI agent William Turner, who was actually working with Garrison. Therefore, Turner had access to the DA and some of his files.  Ramparts  was one of the very few media outlets that actually treated Garrison and his evidence with respect. Until Jim Garrison published On the Trail of the Assassins, Turner’s articles were–along with Paris Flammonde’s book, The Kennedy Conspiracy—prime reference works for anyone interested in the non-MSM view of Garrison.

    Hinckle met resistance inside his office on this issue.  Reporters like Bob Scheer did not want to cover the assassinations of the sixties at all.  As he once told Turner, such writing amounted to “mental masturbation”.  Hinckle disagreed.  For the simple reason that he had read the official report and most of the accompanying volumes of evidence.  He concluded the Warren Report was impossible to believe:  “Anyone who has read those 26 volumes…knows that the function of the Warren Commission was not to ferret out the truth, but to put the citizens at ease that there was no conspiracy.” (Hinckle, p. 217)  About Jim Garrison, Hinckle wrote, “… no man I have known had more legitimate reasons to become paranoid than Garrison; there actually were people constantly plotting against him.”  (Hinckle, p, 209) With the declassified files of the Assassination Records Review Board, we know that to be, not just true, but an understatement.  (See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, Chapters 11 and 12)

    The Ramparts “I Quit” cover

    To chronicle the endless triumphs of Hinckle’s editorship could go on and on, taking scores of pages. But to mention just two other exceptional aspects of Hinckle’s stewardship: Ramparts was the first and only widely read publication to champion the Black Panthers.  And again, there was an iconic cover design by art director Durgald Stermer to signify it:  Huey Newton in a wicker chair with a spear in one hand and a loaded carbine in the other.  Eldridge Cleaver actually became a contributing editor, and Ramparts released his book Soul on Ice through its publishing imprint.

    There was also a photo essay “The Children of Vietnam” put together by William Pepper.  (http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967jan-00045) That 1967 visual article showed just how extensive, indiscriminate and destructive the massive  American firepower unleashed in Indochina was. It was laying waste to the civilian population, including tens of thousands of women and children. Martin Luther King picked that issue up off a newsstand before taking a working vacation in Jamaica.  When he returned he began making his first speeches against President Johnson and his conduct of the war.  Again, Ramparts was leading the news cycle.

    The power and the glory all came to an end in early 1969.  For three reasons.  First, if Ramparts had one failing it was Hinckle’s lack of interest in the arts and the so called counter culture in San Francisco. For instance, there was no Dwight MacDonald or Robert Christgau at Ramparts to review movies or music. And many people wanted to read both.  Therefore, young Jann Wenner left Ramparts to start up something called Rolling Stone.  Which then became a competitor.  There was also an internal coup against Hinckle by new staff members who were tired of his profligate spending.  For instance, he had sent a team of 15 correspondents to cover the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968.  And he had put up ten of them at the four star Ambassador Hotel.  Finally, when Hinckle found someone who was interested in bailing him out, Scheer got into a stupid and senseless argument with the man and his entourage.  (Hinckle, pgs. 371-78)  Hinckle was now out. The magazine declared bankruptcy and reorganized around new leadership.

    The new principals were Robert Scheer and David Horowitz.  This, of course, meant that Hinckle’s daring, “nothing sacred” approach would be abandoned.  Because those two men represented a much more doctrinaire, New Left approach. Therefore instead of writers like William Turner and Bill Pepper, we now got people who really were not all that unusual  or new e.g. Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Kozol. The subjects now also became those of the doctrinaire left: Earth Day and the environment, food safety, oil spills in Santa Barbara, and the plight of Native Americans. Without Hinckle, Ramparts had lost its singular, contemporary jazz riff.

    Huey Newton as he appeared in Ramparts

    Later, Scheer was moved out by Horowitz and replaced by a new second in command: Peter Collier.  The irony being that it was Scheer who brought both men to Ramparts in the first place.  But, predictably, the magazine now began to lose its  large circulation.  Seeing the writing on the wall, Horowitz and Collier decided to transition their way out.  In 1973 they met with Abby and Marion Rockefeller, part of the Rockefeller clan who were outsiders because of their contrary political beliefs—which is why they backed Ramparts.  The two men now contracted to do a history of the clan.  They got a sizeable advance, and then signed on a new management team for Ramparts.  Their book, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty,  sold quite well.  It was published in 1976, the year after Ramparts went under for good.

    Ramparts was so unusual, so blindingly meteoric, so politically potent, that, when it fell, it actually dropped the seeds of its own reaction.  By 1975, the Sixties were pretty much killed off.  And Ramparts, in its new form, did not do a lot to preserve it.  Richard Nixon was now president, with the likes of Spiro Agnew as his VP.

    Men like Pat Buchanan and William Safire were writing his speeches.  And from 1969-75, Henry Kissinger was doing the final reversals of whatever was left of John Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy, specifically in Africa, the Middle East and the continuation and expansion of the Indochina war.

    It was within this new political milieu that men like Horowitz, Collier, Sol Stern and Martin Peretz began their  migration to what would become the New Right, neoconservative movement.  Financial backer Peretz did not like the evenhanded approach Scheer wanted to take in the Middle East.  So he pulled out of Ramparts.  He now purchased the liberal New Republic from Gilbert Harrison.  In a remarkably short time period, Peretz pretty much reversed the trajectory of that journal’s foreign policy pages. By about the mid-eighties, many were calling the New Republic a neoconservative bastion.  Which, for all intents and purposes, it was; most notably on the Middle East and Central America.

    Sol Stern, who actually wrote the Ramparts article on the NSA scandal, eventually found a home at the Manhattan Institute.  This is a New Right think tank that was actually co-founded by the deceased CIA chief Bill Casey. Manhattan Institute has sponsored books by Charles Murray, who was actually a fellow there when he wrote his anti-welfare polemic  Losing Ground.  Stern’s specialty today is to promote voucher system education, which would almost surely undermine the public school system.

    Peter Collier

    After their tome on the Rockefellers, Horowitz and Collier then wrote books on other wealthy families:  the Kennedys, the Fords, and the Roosevelts.  Their book on the Kennedys is so bad that this author included it in his review of the anti-Kennedy literature in the essay “The Posthumous Assassination of JFK.” Predictably, that book provided the occasion for the pair to proclaim their conversion to Reagan Republicanism.  This was announced in the Washington Post under the banner “Lefties for Reagan”.  (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 357).  They then went on and became beneficiaries of the largesse of the wealthy conservative class.  They founded organizations like Encounter Books, FrontPageMagazine.com, the David Horowitz Freedom center, and Discover the Networks. All of these are meant to undermine the things that Ramparts represented: the liberal ideals of an open and more egalitarian society.  And with the collapse of the Sixties, and the killing off of its leaders—JFK, Malcolm X, RFK and King, plus the FBI sponsored extermination of the Panthers—that was not really difficult to do.

    Hinckle never did anything of the kind.  He tried to start up another monthly magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly.  But I have it on two sources that the Nixon administration used the IRS and the USPS to obstruct its  distribution and circulation. Consequently it closed down in less than a year.  He next edited Francis Coppola’s City magazine, which lasted until 1976.  He then did something that no one thought possible: he revived The Argonaut, which had closed down in 1956.  He did this in 1991, and that publication is still around in both print and online versions.

    Besides that, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Francisco in 1987.  He also wrote about ten non-fiction books.  There are two that are mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Sixties and the assassinations. In 1974, on the eve of the final dissolution of Ramparts, Hinckle wrote a memoir about his editorship of that magazine.  It was called If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade.  To me, there is nothing at all like it in the literature.  It is, at once, funny, pungent, candid, and nostalgic without being sentimental. A definite must read. Then, in 1981, he co-wrote, with Bill Turner, The Fish is Red.  That book was later reissued as Deadly Secrets in 1992.  Up until that time, and until this day, it is one of the best JFK assassination books written from the point of view of the Cuban exiles’ association with the CIA.

    In the late nineties, this author considered reviving Ramparts. I won’t go extensively into why I decided against it. But one of the reasons I didn’t was because I thought that, with the surge of online journalism, surely someone, maybe more than one, would now use the opportunity to emulate Ramparts, or Art Kunkin’s LA Free Press.  The latter was an extraordinary newsweekly that complemented Ramparts. Together, they formed the last pinnacle of American journalism.  To say the least, those online expectations were not fulfilled by the likes of Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, and Josh Marshall.  In fact, this so called internet revolution was so stillborn that it made Ramparts and the LA Free Press look like even greater achievements.  (See here for my particular disputes)  In fact, that online result recalls Hinckle’s answer as to why Ramparts was so exceptional, he replied, “Because the rest of the media was so shitty.”  I would add: But it took Ramparts to show us how shitty they were.

    Today, to do anything like what Ramparts did, a single publishing journal would have to been the first to:

    1. Shown in detail how George W. Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections in Florida and Ohio
    2. Demonstrated how the FBI and CIA left us unprotected on 9-11
    3. Revealed the secrets of NSA illegal spying
    4. Exposed Colin Powell’s phony UN speech justifying the war with Iraq
    5. Visited Iraq with a camera crew to show us the terrible civilian toll Bush’s phony war took on the populace.

    And they  would have to have achieved the above in just five years, from about 2001-2005 I think the reader will agree that any such comparison suggests science fiction today.  But Hinckle did it.

    Therefore, Ramparts stands alone in the history of contemporary American journalism; much as Citizen Kane towers in the history of  the American sound film.  It is often written that, in that picture, Orson Welles took the art of  film direction to a point that no other American has since matched or surpassed. With the death of Warren Hinckle we can say  that no other American has produced or edited a magazine, or online journal, that has matched or surpassed what he did at Ramparts.  And, from my point of view, it looks like no one else will do so for a long time.  For that, among other things, he deserves to be properly saluted upon his passing.  He set a standard for us all by reminding us what real journalism can and should be.

    ~ Jim DiEugenio

  • An Introduction to the Book Excerpt: The Incubus of Intervention

    An Introduction to the Book Excerpt: The Incubus of Intervention

    CTKA is proud to excerpt a chapter from Greg Poulgrain’s new book about the Indonesia coup of 1965.  The full title of the volume is The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles.  Poulgrain is a professor of History at University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. In 1998, Poulgrain wrote The Genesis of Konfrontasi.  That book was about the conflict between President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia and the proposed union of Malaysia in 1963. There, Poulgrain unfolded a new thesis about that conflict: namely, that it was not motivated by Sukarno’s desire to dominate the Southeast Asian archipelago area. Rather, it was a conscious provocation, created largely by the British to both strengthen their brainchild of Malaysia, and weaken Sukarno. By doing so, they expected to benefit financially.  They succeeded spectacularly in both aims.

    Poulgrain has now published an even more important book. It deals directly with the epochal, yet underreported, Indonesia coup of 1965. That overthrow is commonly referred to as the bloodiest CIA coup in history. To this day, no one knows how many people perished as a result of it. Various estimates range from 350,000 to 500,000.  It was not until 1996 when Lisa Pease wrote her milestone articles about Freeport Sulphur (today called Freeport McMoRan) that anyone focused attention on how the murder of President Kennedy paved the way for this horrendous operation. (Click here for that memorable essay: http://www.thesecrettruth.com/freeport-indonesia.htm)

    What Lisa did was to examine American foreign policy towards Indonesia and its leader Sukarno through three presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.  Through that examination, it was obvious that a familiar pattern manifested itself:  the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower were hostile to Sukarno (actually attempting to overthrow him in 1958); Kennedy tried to establish better relations and had planned a state visit in 1964; Johnson then halted Kennedy’s policy and decided to revert back to 1958 and the coup attempt.  Except, this time, it was successful.

    Since that excellent essay was published in Probe magazine, others have built on it.  This includes Denise Leith’s book The Politics of Power: Freeport in Suharto’s Indonesia. Jim Douglass treated the subject in his fine JFK and the Unspeakable, and I discussed the issue in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed.

    But Poulgrain’s new book goes further than anyone has before.  In fact, it appears to be a milestone on the subject. Through extensive research into books and documents, plus new in-depth interviews, this book seems to have rearranged the calculus on what happened in Jakarta in 1965. And, rather appropriately, Poulgrain sees that massive slaughter through the prism of two personal profiles: CIA director Allen Dulles and the fallen president John F. Kennedy.

    To show just how rich this book is, and how new and unique its perspective is, I beg the reader to take note of just three highlights in this one chapter.

    First, Poulgrain reveals that Kennedy was working with United Nations Secretary–General, Dag Hammarskjold.  Not just on the Congo crisis, but on a solution to the Indonesia problem.  This was new and I consider myself pretty well informed on Kennedy’s foreign policy. This is arresting in two ways.  First, Hammarskjold must have appeared to be an even greater threat to the power elite in this light. Second, we all know how reluctant contemporary American presidents are to work with the UN, especially GOP ones.  But here you have JFK working with Hammarskjold on two key fronts in the third world.  

    Second, he reveals that, as with the Kennedy assassination, Harry Truman clearly suggested that he did not buy the airplane accident story about Hammarskjold’s death. In fact, he even went further in the Hammarskjold case than he did with Kennedy.  He actually said he had been murdered. In other words, Truman knew what happened to Dag, and he likely knew what happened to Kennedy.  In the case of Kennedy, he wrote a timely and suggestive editorial about the CIA which Allen Dulles tried to get him to retract—but he did not. In the Hammarskjold case, when asked to elaborate, he said in effect, I will let you guys figure that all out.  In other words, he was not going to go further, hoping they would.  

    Third, through information in Susan Williams’ book, Who Killed Hammarskjold? it appears that Dulles’s name was on some documents secured by Desmond Tutu through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. These indicate that he would be willing to cooperate in a plot against the UN leader. He was even offering information about the type of plane the UN chief would be flying and the date Hammarskjold would arrive. If Dulles was willing to cooperate in a plot against Hammarskjold in 1961 over Congo, why would he not do the same in 1963 over both Congo and Indonesia?  Since as we know, Kennedy continued the struggle for a free Congo after both Patrice Lumumba and Hammarskjold were murdered.

    Poulgrain’s work is part of a new path in Kennedy studies.  This began with Richard Mahoney’s landmark volume JFK: Ordeal in Africa.  It continued with Philip Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans, and Robert Rakove’s Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World. Now, Poulgrain extends that horizon line even further, one which finally shines light on who Kennedy really was and why he was killed.

    Chapter 2: The Incubus of Intervention | Buy The Incubus of Intervention on Amazon

  • The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates

    The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates

    The Criterion Collection is quite literally an invaluable asset in the world of modern day DVD releases. Criterion pioneered both the audio commentary track and the use of supplemental features per DVD release. The last film I saw of theirs was the excellent three disc DVD of The Battle of Algiers.

    They have now released another valuable production. This one is called The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates. It consists of four documentary films: Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, Crisis, and Faces of November. Robert Drew was a reporter and photographer for Time Inc. While on a study break at Harvard he began to explore why documentary films were so dull and uninvolving. When he returned to Time Inc. he began to attempt to break out of the confines that documentary film had slid into.

    What Drew wanted to do was to make a revolution in technique. He wished to dump the reliance on narration, on music and slick camera work that consisted largely of long takes or tracking shots. He also wanted to jettison the device of the interview. In fact he wanted the filmmaker to ask no questions of his subjects at all. And further, he did not want to even tell them where to sit while he was filming. This type of documentary film came to be known as cinema verité, or direct cinema. The revolution in documentary style that it created roughly corresponded to the revolution that French feature film directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had manufactured with the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave.

    Drew managed to create a unit at Time Inc. He then brought in other film-makers who shared his same goal: to help perfect this new aesthetic. These men included D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, and Richard Leacock. To say that they succeeded in their aim does not begin to describe their achievement. Consider some of the films these men were later responsible for: Gimme Shelter, Salesman, Grey Gardens, Don’t’ Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room, Startup.com, Ku Klux Klan—Invisible Empire.

    Robert Drew

    To achieve what they set out to do there were two technical barriers to surmount. First, there had to be smaller cameras so that they could do handheld shots. That is, the camera would not be attached to a tripod, or be placed on a dolly. It was portable and could follow the subject in the shot. Second, there had to be a way to record live dialogue in sync with what the camera was seeing. By early 1960, when Drew made Primary, both those problems had been solved.

    At the same time Drew was getting ready to create his revolution in film style, Senator John Kennedy was also about to create a milestone in politics. Prior to 1960 no major candidate for president had decided to lay his claim to the office by running the gamut during the primary season. Kennedy did so out of necessity. He did not have the party standing that his top three opponents—Stuart Symington, Hubert Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson—commanded. Up until 1960, the way to win the nomination was through currying favor with the party honchos. Both on the national and state level. Kennedy decided he could not win that way. But since he was photogenic, a good speaker, and his father was willing to spend a lot of money, he could win by dominating the primary season.

    So Drew approached Kennedy one day as he emerged from his townhouse in Washington. JFK asked him what he wanted. Drew said words to the effect: I want to follow you around during the Wisconsin primary with a movie camera. Kennedy asked him: why should I agree to that? Drew played his ace card. Aware of Kennedy’s writing career and his interest in history, Drew replied because if he did Kennedy would be part of a new kind of history. The candidate thought it over and said that if he did not call Drew tomorrow, then he could do it. JFK didn’t call. Drew then got in contact with Humphrey’s camp and got a similar approval. The four men were allowed to film the last five days of the Wisconsin race.

    In fact, they did create something extraordinary. The film Primary is not just exceptional because of its stylistic originality. But in watching we are transported back to what seems like a different universe, one that used to be called retail politicking. In the first scene we see Humphrey emerging from what looks like a corner grocery story, where he could not have been talking to more than 8-9 people. He then shakes hands with someone outside and actually exchanges a few lines of dialogue with him.

    We observe both candidates driving down barren country roads and into sparsely populated rural areas—which is where Humphrey was supposed to run strong. We see JFK standing outside a factory gate in the morning with an overcoat, shaking hands with the workers, one of whom doesn’t even look at him. We even see Kennedy signing autographs for young schoolchildren who don’t vote. (When later asked why he did such a thing during a short campaign, Kennedy replied because those kids go home and talk to their parents.) One can argue that this kind of politics does still exist today in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. But today even those kinds of events are well planned and then orchestrated for media effect. That was not the case back then. Because both candidates were relying on the local and state representatives to prepare the events. Therefore it was very much a hit and miss process.

    The big hit for Kennedy was a large auditorium rally at a Polish Catholic Church in Milwaukee the night before the election. This scene begins with what has now become an iconic shot of JFK. The camera is behind Kennedy: a wide angle shot from behind him and above. We see him go through the crowded entrance to the stage as the crowd applauds and sings “High Hopes”. Acknowledging he was late, Kennedy quips, “You’ve been standing there quite awhile, I’ve been standing for three months.” Some have written that this was a planned shot. In one of the disc supplements, it is revealed that the wide-angle lens was a last minute suggestion, and that the cameraman decided to hold the camera over his head to avoid the crowd. In other words, it was accomplished willy-nilly.

    Hubert Humphrey during Wisconsin primary

    The film is spotted with various human-interest angles. For example, we watch as Humphrey does a radio interview. During the interview, the host tells the candidate he thinks he will win. After Humphrey leaves the station, the host says that he actually thinks Kennedy will win. During that rally in the church auditorium, Jackie Kennedy addresses the crowd in Polish. The camera focuses on her twisting hands, which reveal her nervousness.

    The film concludes with Election Day, April 5th. We first see citizens coming into voting precincts. We watch as they enter booths, and the camera stays on their feet as they vote, commemorating their privacy. We then cut to a hotel room as the Kennedy camp watches the returns on television. Kennedy is relaxed, jacketless, slowly smoking a cigar. The early returns favor Humphrey by a 2-1 margin. But as the city of Milwaukee begins to count its votes, Kennedy makes up the difference and then surpasses his opponent. JFK ended up winning by a 56-44% margin. As he says in the film, the margin of victory was disappointing. It was not the knockout blow he was hoping to deliver in Humphrey’s backyard (Hubert was from Minnesota). Which meant they would have to go through the same exercise again in Illinois and then West Virginia. Humphrey ended up sticking around for another month.

    Wisconsin primary election day

    This hotel scene achieves the purest form of cinema verité. One really does feel as if one is eavesdropping. First, there does not appear to be any kind of cinematic lighting. Second, the filmmakers placed the tape recorder behind the sofa, and the microphone in the ashtray. Therefore, their presence was eliminated.

    The very last scene begins with a close up on a Humphrey for president sticker on the rear bumper of a car as it pulls out and then proceeds down a lonely country road. It’s a nice metaphor for the battle continuing—but the odds now being against Humphrey. The final results of the primary season were that Kennedy garnered nearly 2 million votes, Humphrey about 600,000. Which gave JFK a large advantage in delegates at the Los Angeles convention. One which neither Johnson nor Symington—who both decided to go the traditional back room route—could overcome.

    It’s hard to believe, but Primary did not get a wide release in America. Time-Life owned about six TV stations, and that was the extent of its public showing in the USA. Which tells the reader a lot about the sorry domestic distribution of culturally significant films. For, as I have shown, the film constituted an aesthetic revolution depicting a political milestone. For now the primary route would be the way to the White House for both parties. It was not until the film was exhibited in France that it garnered the recognition it deserved.

    II

    But a most important person in America did like it. That was President Kennedy. So much so that he agreed to do two more films with Drew. The first one was called Adventures on the New Frontier. Shot in the same cinema verité style, this is a fascinating combination of the Wisconsin primary footage, inauguration day footage, and concludes with a day in the life of President Kennedy. Because of a technical failure, we don’t actually see Kennedy’s inauguration. But we do see conversations about that famous speech between John K. Galbraith and Gov. Mennen Williams of Michigan. This is then followed by a conversation in a car between Galbraith and author John Steinbeck. The latter is fascinating, because these two experienced authors were very much impressed by the style and technique of the actual writing of the speech. And that is what they actually talk about in specifics.

    During the filming of Adventures on the New Frontier

    Once in office for about six weeks, Kennedy let Drew and his associates film him doing his job in the Oval Office. We see him meeting with John McCloy who he has appointed to do preliminary talks with the Soviets on atomic weapons reduction. He then meets with Arthur Goldberg, his Secretary of Labor. Goldberg had been an attorney for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and had been influential in the merger of the CIO with the American Federation of Labor. At this time, Kennedy and Goldberg discuss a solution to an airline strike of flight engineers, and also certain strategies to counter unemployment rates. They concentrate on unacceptably high unemployment in West Virginia. Kennedy wants to rush in government surplus food supplies for any family in dire straits. After this, Kennedy meets with his chief economic advisor Walter Heller. The president wants his forecast about the future trends on the unemployment horizon. Heller tells him that unless they take some kind of action, he does not see it improving on its own.

    The most fascinating part of this film now follows. First, we see Kennedy working on the creation of the Peace Corps with Williams and Richard Goodwin. Which is logical, considering the fact that the former would helm his Africa policy, and the latter would be his special advisor on Latin America. Kennedy briefly talks about how America had ignored Africa, and in the midst of the decolonization process, he wants those new countries to maintain their independence.

    We then watch Williams as he meets with some leaders in the senate, including Al Gore Sr. They advise him to proceed slowly. But Kennedy is worried that if they don’t engage quickly they will be too far behind the pace of change going on right then. (If the reader has acquainted himself with the reviewer’s two essays, “Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. the Power Elite” and “Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa”, the evidence reveals that Kennedy was correct in his estimate.)

    Drew then follows Williams to a meeting in Addis Ababa to meet with various African leaders, including Haile Selassie. While there, Williams made his famous quote. In response to what he saw his function there as, he replied, “What we want for the Africans is what they want for themselves.” This was slightly altered by the press to him saying, “Africa for the Africans.” Since there were still certain white supremacist nations in Africa, countries like England and the Union of South Africa took offense. When Kennedy was asked about this now controversial comment at a Washington press conference, he did not back away from it. He said, “I don’t know who else Africa should be for.”

    This film is a good visual bookend to Helen Fuller’s volume, Year of Trial. That valuable work is unfortunately out of print today, although one can still buy it on Amazon and E bay. But Fuller’s work, like this one, was a snapshot of the New Frontier in its first year.

    III

    The other request that Drew made was for a film of Kennedy’s administration in a crisis situation. Kennedy liked the idea. He replied that such a film should have been made of Franklin Roosevelt the day after Pearl Harbor. At first, Drew asked to film the deliberations of the ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But press liaison Pierre Salinger told him that would not be possible due to national security reasons. So in 1963, Kennedy suggested that Drew film what he perceived to be an upcoming showdown with Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Wallace was resisting integrating the University of Alabama, located in Tuscaloosa. This was in spite of a court ruling, based on Brown vs. Board of Education, that had gone against him. Wallace had sworn to defy the court by standing in the “schoolhouse door” in order to block entry of the two students who had been accepted by the university: James Hood and Vivian Malone.

    And that was a key point: the university had accepted the two well qualified African-American students. Wallace was literally trying to hold up the court ordered admittance on his own, essentially unilaterally. Learning from what had happened at the University of Mississippi the year before, Wallace understood the political value of making the federal government act against a state governor. He also knew that the media would be out in force for the event. Therefore, there would be millions of people watching it unfold on live television. In its political impact, the confrontation had the potential to catapult Wallace onto the national stage. Which it did.

    The Kennedys also learned a lesson from their experience with Governor Ross Barnett at Ole Miss in 1962. They had made a mistake and trusted Barnett’s word about the campus being secure for the entry of James Meredith. Then, when the rioting began, it took too long to get federal troops onto the scene. Two people were killed, and dozens were injured. So this time, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had tried to talk to Wallace on his home turf at the state capital in Montgomery in April and May of 1963. According to the AG, the discussions did not get very far. RFK felt that Wallace was being deliberately obscure in order to hide what he was actually planning to do. (See Robert Kennedy in his own Words, p. 185, edited by Edward Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman)

    What made the potential danger more ominous was that Wallace had wired the White House the first week of June. He said that in order to keep the peace, he was bringing along 500 state guardsmen with him on the 11th. That was the date the two students were going to register for the summer session. President Kennedy wired back thanking him for the notice, but he added the only threat of violence came from the governor’s defiance of the Alabama federal court ruling. (Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June, p. 74) By the time of the confrontation, Wallace would have 825 state troopers on campus.

    RFK getting reports from Alabama

    Robert Drew’s film Crisis begins with a triangularly intercut sequence. We first view Wallace leaving the governor’s mansion in Montgomery by limousine for Tuscaloosa. This is followed by the two students being escorted onto the campus. We then watch Bobby Kennedy in his office getting phone reports as to what is happening in real time. As the scenes shift, the background music modulates from the southern standard “Dixie” to the national standard “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A nice thematic touch, which accents the threat of military force.

    For in light of what happened at Ole Miss, the White House had decided to mass 3,000 troops outside the campus in advance. They were under the command of General Creighton Abrams, who we see in the film on the phone with RFK, and discussing circumstances on the scene with Bobby Kennedy’s deputy Nicolas Katzenbach. For contrary to what some have written, the White House did not know what Wallace would do. And, in fact, during the film one can hear Bobby Kennedy telling his brother that they might have to just push the governor aside. And RFK had mulled over that contingency. All the way down to taking into consideration how many doors were at the entrance and breaking them down. In other words, while shoving Wallace aside, the students could enter the furthest door. But that might have provoked the spark that turned a physical altercation into a riot.

    Katzenbach confronts Governor Wallace

    As the film shows, the ultimate strategy decided upon was the White House nationalizing the state national guard. But first, Katzenbach approached Wallace without Hood and Malone, who had gone up to their dorm rooms. Katzenbach then asked Wallace to stand aside so the students could register for their classes. Not only did Wallace refuse to do so, he even interrupted Katzenbach as he was speaking. Therefore, Kennedy nationalized the guard. Brigadier General Henry V. Graham, with a motorized detachment of 100 of his 17,000 men, then drove up to the entrance. Graham asked Wallace to stand aside upon the orders of President Kennedy. Realizing he was completely outmanned now, Wallace did so. The students were registered under the guidance of Bobby Kennedy’s lead civil rights lawyer John Doar. Graham and his detachment stayed on campus, in the student’s dorms, for several weeks. On national television that evening, President Kennedy made his epochal speech on the issue of civil rights. The most important and compelling speech on the subject by an American president since Lincoln. Drew intercuts that speech with shots of Wallace, the students, and Bobby Kennedy watching it.

    The film ends with an appropriate coda. Katzenbach calls Bobby Kennedy three days later and tells him that another black student had entered the University of Alabama at Huntsville. It happened without any repercussions. Bobby Kennedy then calls JFK and tells him about it. We watch as the Attorney General now leaves his office for the day. The battle over integrated colleges and universities had been won.

    But the film depicts an interesting quote by Wallace toward the end, which informs us of the price that had been paid. Due to this piece of televised resistance, Wallace states that the south will decide the next president. This was not technically true in 1964. But Wallace’s prediction did come true in 1968—and beyond. Kennedy’s struggle for civil rights turned the south from a reliable Democratic base for presidential elections to the bastion of future Republican political power. In that way, Crisis is an historically important film.

    The fourth film on the DVD set is Faces of November. This is a brief visual reverie depicting the grief which overtook Washington after Kennedy’s assassination. Drew includes here photos of Kennedy’s tomb being visited by the public in the Capitol rotunda, shots of the funeral procession, and Kennedy’s military salute at Arlington.

    Criterion made its reputation by the addition of interesting and educational supplements to their DVD packages. They added four of them for this collection. Far and away the most valuable one is a joint interview with former Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife Sharon Malone. Sharon is the sister of the late Vivian Malone who has since passed away. This interview gives us some personal insight into why Vivian did what she did and what gave her the courage to persevere through it. There is also a panel presentation on Primary done in 1998 at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. This includes Leacock, Maysles, Pennebaker and Drew. Something like this will never happen again, since all but Pennebaker have passed away. Finally, there are interviews with authors Andrew Cohen and Richard Reeves. The former offers some insights into the film Crisis, since he used outtakes from the film for his book Two Days in June. Although Reeves is not as offensive as he usually is, still Criterion could have chosen someone else, like say Harris Wofford. Wofford worked for Kennedy in his civil rights division and authored a good book about that struggle called Of Kennedys and Kings.

    Overall, this two-disc set is much worth purchasing and watching. How many DVD sets chronicle three history-making events? One dealing with our political system, one dealing with the struggle for American civil rights, and one with a stylistic revolution in film technique. This one does, which makes it unique.

  • Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. The Power Elite

    Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. The Power Elite

    indonesia header

    As many CTKA readers and observers of JFK symposiums will know, since the 2013 Cyril Wecht conference in Pittsburgh, one of the topics I have been researching and talking about is John F. Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy. To some people this seemed kind of pointless. After all, in virtually every JFK assassination book Kennedy’s foreign policy boiled down to Vietnam and Cuba. What else was there?

    Quite a lot. What was new in my speech mostly came from Philip Muehlenbeck’s volume, Betting on the Africans, which had been published the year before. (Click here for a review) Later, I discovered Robert Rakove’s book, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World. That book serves as a fine compliment to Muehlenbeck. (Click here for the CTKA review) I used much of the Rakove material to present my altered versions of the 2013 presentation at both the JFK Lancer in 2013 and 2014 and the AARC Conference in 2014.

    These two books form a thematic line that extends back to Richard Mahoney’s landmark volume JFK: Ordeal in Africa. That book was a trailblazing effort in the field of excavating what Kennedy’s foreign policy really was, and where its intellectual provenance came from. It was published in 1983. Even though it bore the Oxford University Press imprimatur, it had little influence. It virtually had little or no impact in the categories of Kennedy biography, studies of the Kennedy presidency, or the JFK assassination field. Which, in retrospect, is stunning. Because what Mahoney did in that book was revolutionary. In a systematic way, he traced the beginnings of President Kennedy’s foreign policy ideas. He did this with a wealth of data he garnered from weeks spent at the JFK Library. He used this ignored information to show how Kennedy’s ideas on the east/west struggles in the Third World originated, why they were different than President Eisenhower’s, and how they manifested themselves once he became president. No other book I had read elucidated this progress in such a detailed and rigorous way. In fact, when I was done with the book I actually felt like I had been snookered by relying on historians like Herbert Parmet, William Manchester, and Richard Reeves for my information on Kennedy’s presidency and foreign policy. Mahoney made them look like hacks.

    It became clear to me that there was, quite literally, a war going on. And as unsatisfactory as the Parmet, Reeves, and Manchester books were (with Manchester I am referring to his presidential profile book Portrait of a President) these would be superseded by even worse JFK books later: biographies by John H. Davis, Robert Dallek, Thomas Reeves, and worst of all—perhaps the worst imaginable—Sy Hersh’s pile of rubbish The Dark Side of Camelot.

    In 2008 Jim Douglass made a clean break with all the calculated trash. His fine volume, JFK and the Unspeakable, has become something of a classic. It has actually crossed over and is sourced in books outside strictly the JFK assassination or JFK presidency fields. I wrote a very approving essay about Jim’s book. (Click here)

    Douglass did an exceedingly good job in elucidating Kennedy’s Vietnam and Cuba policies between the covers of one book. But with the new scholarship by Rakove and Muehlenbeck, the Douglass book seems rather narrowly focused today. And with the even newer book by Greg Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention (see my recent review), we can now add Indonesia to Africa and the Middle East as objects of Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy. In fact, Douglass is on to this. He actually pointed out that I should read and review the Poulgrain book.

    Four trailblazing books on Kennedy’s foreign policy

    But the Kennedy Enlightment really began with Mahoney. And although his book dealt with three African trouble spots, the majority of the book was focused on the colossal Congo crisis. Which, like other problems, Kennedy inherited from President Eisenhower. As we learn more about the Congo conflagration, we begin to see how large and complex that struggle was. Large in the sense that, in addition to the UN, several nations were directly involved. Complex in the sense that there were subterranean agendas at work. For instance, although England and France ostensibly and officially supported the United Nations effort there, they were actually subverting it on the ground through third party agents. In fact, when one studies the seething cauldron that was the Congo crisis, there are quite a few villains involved. There are only three heroes I can name: Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjold and John F. Kennedy. All three were murdered while the struggle was in process. Their deaths allowed the democratic experiment in Congo to fail spectacularly. Ultimately, it allowed one form of blatant exploitation, colonialism, to be replaced by another, imperialism.

    II

    To sketch in the background: In 1960, Belgium was going to leave Congo after brutally colonizing the country for generations. But their plan was to leave so abruptly that the nation would collapse inwardly for lack of leadership. Belgium would then return in order to protect the Belgian assets still there. As we shall see, the CIA was in agreement on this. Especially when Patrice Lumumba was democratically elected as Prime Minister. As Jonathan Kwitny noted, Lumumba was the first democratically elected leader of an African nation emerging from the long era of European colonialism. Ideally, Lumumba could have set a precedent. That did not happen. And the reason it did not happen was largely because of outside interference.

    Within days of June 30th, Congo independence, the Belgian plan began to work. Rioting took place and Belgian soldiers began to fire into crowds. On July 11th, the regional governor of the immensely wealthy Katanga province, Moise Tshombe, declared his state was seceding from Congo. Tshombe was egged on by the Belgians and British who wanted mineral rights. In exchange, they promised him military aid and mercenaries if Lumumba attacked Katanga. (Kwitny, p. 55)

    As Kwitny notes in Endless Enemies, the CIA and the National Security Council did not like Lumumba. After all, he had the gumption to ask for aid in kicking out the Belgians, who were now parachuting troops back in. Lumumba asked for aid from the USA, the USSR and the United Nations. The first declined, the second seemed amenable to sending arms, and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold decided to send in a UN expeditionary force. The fact that Lumumba went to the USSR was enough for CIA station chief Larry Devlin to portray him as a communist. On August 18th he wired DCI Allen Dulles that Congo was experiencing a classic communist takeover. He then added that anti-West forces were rapidly gaining power and Congo was on the verge of becoming another Cuba. (ibid, p. 59)

    This was preposterous. There was no “anti-West force” build-up in Congo. In fact, England and Belgium were sending in troops and mercenaries. These were later joined by the French, who also wanted a stake in Katanga. But Devlin concluded by saying that Lumumba should be “replaced” by a pro-Western group. (ibid) This is just days after Lumumba visited the USA asking for help to expel the Belgians. Ambassador Clare Timberlake contributed the same kind of utter distortion. He told Washington that Lumumba wanted troops in order to expel the Belgians and then nationalize all industry and property. Lumumba would then invite communist bloc experts in to run the economy. (ibid, pp. 59-60)

    The Devlin/Timberlake cables had their intended impact. Within 48 hours DCI Allen Dulles and President Eisenhower agreed that Lumumba had to be neutralized. (ibid, p. 62) The CIA took two tracks to achieve this aim. First, Timberlake and his deputy Frank Carlucci tried to get President Kasavubu to stage a coup. He said no. So Devlin went to military colonel Josef Mobutu and asked him to eliminate Lumumba. In September, Kasavubu finally relented and dismissed Lumumba. Lumumba then said he was dismissing Kasavubu. With a Mexican standoff holding, Devlin then went to Mobutu and asked him to arrest Lumumba. But the UN emissary there, Rajeshwar Dayal, prevented the action. And Lumumba now became somewhat of a prisoner in his own home. Kasavubu then dissolved parliament, which had backed Lumumba. (p. 66) The second track of the CIA’s program now kicked in: assassination plots to kill Lumumba. (ibid, p. 67)

    As the reader can see, in the space of two months, the Americans and Europeans had pretty much destroyed whatever hope there was for the first democratic nation to emerge and survive in post-colonial Africa. In fact, one could fairly say that they strangled African democracy in the cradle. From here, it got worse. Devlin now wanted Mobutu to eliminate not just Lumumba, but his deputy Antoine Gizenga. (ibid) But Dayal and Hammarskjold kept him protected also.

    When Mobutu’s troops began to battle with the UN mission, Lumumba made an impulsive, perhaps reckless, decision. He escaped from Dayal’s protection and tried to flee to Stanleyville, his political base. With Devlin’s help, Mobutu captured him. And after severely beating him, returned him to the capital of Leopoldville.

    Three things then happened that sealed Lumumba’s fate. First, Russian planes carrying supplies and arms started arriving in Stanleyville. Second, two CIA assassins also arrived on the scene. And third, John F. Kennedy was about to be inaugurated. Because of these factors, , instead of having Lumumba killed by the CIA agents, or risk a more sympathetic policy under Kennedy, on January 13, 1961, Mobutu had Lumumba shipped to Moise Tshombe in Katanga. As Devlin must have known, this meant he would be killed soon. Four days later, he was. (ibid, p. 69)

    The information about his death was kept from President Kennedy for almost a month. He did not learn about Lumumba’s murder until February 13th. He learned of it on a phone call with UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. White House photographer Jacques Lowe captured the moment in a crystalline photograph:

    Kennedy hears of Lumumba’s murder from Adlai Stevenson
    (photo by Jacques Lowe)

    Perhaps no photo from the Kennedy presidency summarizes who Kennedy was, and how he differed from what preceded him and what came after him, than this picture.

    III

    In the wake of Lumumba’s murder, Dag Hammarskjold was not about to give up. Secretary General Hammarskjold was from Sweden and his family had a long history in public service. His father had been a regional governor and then Sweden’s prime minister. Two of his older brothers had also spent time in government service, one as a governor and the other working with the League of Nations. As an economist, Dag worked for the Finance Ministry and coined the term “planned economy”. He and his brother Bo helped launch the Swedish welfare state.

    Dag Hammarskjold
    August 27, 1960

    Hammarskjold first worked with the Swedish delegation at the United Nations. He then, rather unexpectedly, was voted its second Secretary General in 1953. As writer Susan Williams notes, his ascendancy coincided with the beginning of the de-colonization process in Africa and Asia. By 1960, 47 of the 100 UN members came from this Afro/Asia bloc. (Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold? p. 23) In 1960 alone, 16 African nations had joined the UN. Hammarskjold decided to tour the continent in late 1959. He had harsh words for the apartheid regime of the Union of South Africa. Therefore, he became an enemy of white supremacists on that continent. And with those nations who still held colonies there, or were trying to unduly influence their former colonies e.g. France, England, Portugal and Belgium. (ibid, p. 24)

    Because of his Swedish background and his work in civil service and planned economies, Hammarskjold had a special sensitivity to these new and awakening nations. He understood that, individually, these states felt weak and isolated. But as members of the UN, they felt part of a world community that could elevate their stature. Or, as he put it, the function of the UN was to protect the weak against the strong. (ibid)

    Hammarskjold suspected what the Belgian secret agenda was before they pulled out of Congo. Therefore he sent Ralph Bunche, part of the American delegation, there as independence was enacted. King Baudouin of Belgium was there for the official proceeding. He actually praised what Belgium had done for Congo and specifically singled out Leopold II for praise. Which would be like giving credit to John Calhoun in the struggle for civil rights for Black Americans. Lumumba felt he had to respond. He said, words to the effect, “we are your monkeys no more”. (Williams, p. 31)

    There can be little doubt that tensions began to build because of this exchange. Also because, in the ranks of the army, Belgians still remained in command centers. When violence broke out, Lumumba blamed it on the Belgians in the military and accused the former mother country of trying to recolonize Congo—which was accurate. As civilian Belgians tried to leave the country, Baudouin sent in troops to protect them. A week later, Tshombe announced the Katanga secession. Katanga contained about 60% of Congo’s mineral wealth. Tshombe was clearly in alliance with the giant mining conglomerate Union Miniere, a Belgian/British transnational. For immediately after this announcement, the company said it would not pay its corporate taxes to the Congo capital of Leopoldville anymore. It would now pay them to Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga. (ibid, p. 33) The company also extended Tshombe a large loan. Further, Belgian advisors began to flock to Katanga as well as British mercenaries from nearby Rhodesia. Congo was going to be stillborn.

    Lumumba now turned to Hammarskjold for help. The Secretary General immediately passed UN Resolution 143. This demanded that the Belgians leave Congo and promised assistance to Lumumba until the nation was able to defend itself. Within 48 hours, there were 3,500 UN troops on the ground in Congo. Although he was now being accused of acting too late by the USSR, Hammarskjold proclaimed he would not recognize either Mobutu or Kasavubu as the leader of Congo. (Williams, p. 39) But when Lumumba was murdered, the Russians again criticized the Secretary General for doing too little, too late.

    Hammarskjold replied by passing resolution 161. There were now 15,000 UN troops in Congo, they were now allowed to use military force. The mission was to expel all foreign troops, and Parliament would be reconvened under UN protection. The Secretary General clearly saw Congo as a defining moment for both the UN and his leadership. (ibid, p. 41)

    The UN commander on the ground, Conor Cruise O’Brien, demanded Tshombe step down and Katanga rejoin Congo. To strengthen himself, Tshombe now recruited French veterans of the OAS, the terrorist group of army veterans who had split off from French president Charles DeGaulle over Algerian independence.

    Moise Tshombe
    December 22, 1961

    In the face of this, O’Brien launched two offensives into Katanga. The first was called Operation Rumpunch, and the second was named Operation Morthor. The first operation was quite successful, the second was not. About half of Elisabethville was still under Tshombe’s control. (ibid, p. 49) By this time, the British premier of the African Federation—Roy Welensky— was clearly favoring Katanga, as was the Union of South Africa. Welensky, working with his colleague on African Affairs, Baron Cuthbert Alport, was also secretly supplying mercenaries from Rhodesia to Tshombe. (ibid, p. 51)

    As a result of this secret policy, Welensky now shifted troops into Ndola, the main airport for Rhodesia, which was just a few miles from the border with Congo. Welensky shipped in food, supplies and arms from as far away as Australia. (ibid, p. 53) Rhetorically, Welensky went as far as to compare the UN troops in Congo to the Nazis.

    This information is important. Since we are about to discuss the second high profile murder over the Congo Crisis: that of Dag Hammarskjold. Today I, and many others, call it a murder, not a suspicious death. The state of the evidence seems to me to clearly denote that this was a planned assassination. After considering some of the work of Susan Williams and others, the reader will likely agree.

    IV

    Hammarskjold flew into Congo on September 13, 1961. He was surprised to hear about Operation Morthor, since he maintained he had not authorized it. While there, the Battle of Jadotville began. This was fought between a company of Irish UN troops and mercenaries employed by Tshombe. During the battle, Tshombe requested a meeting with Hammarskjold.

    This was to occur on September 17th, in Ndola, a city in British controlled Rhodesia. Tshombe requested no reporters be alerted. But, Baron Alport was there. He stationed himself in the airport manager’s office, right below the control tower. As previously stated, also on hand was a temporary arm of the Rhodesian Ministry of Defense set up by Welensky. Hammarskjold was to arrive aboard a DC6 piloted by a Swede. Below him, on the runway, were 18 Rhodesian planes and two American DC3’s. (ibid, p. 68) In referring to the last, a Rhodesian air squadron leader told the UN Commission that there were “underhand things going on” at the airport, “with strange aircraft coming in, planes without flight plans and so on. There were American planes sitting on the airfield with engines running, likely transmitting messages.” (Lisa Pease, “Midnight in the Congo”, Probe, Vol. 6 No. 3 p. 20) Further, another witness said the American planes were full of sophisticated communications equipment. (Williams, p. 188)

    Hammarskjold’s flight never landed at Ndola. And there is no tape recording of the approach of the plane. But there were notes kept. According to the written record, the last message from the plane was that the pilot was descending from 16,000 to 6,000 feet. (Williams, p. 70) At this point, Ndola lost contact with the plane. Because it was around midnight, no search party was sent out. Alport made a comment that the plane must have landed elsewhere. He then suggested the control room staff retire at around 3:00 AM. Yet, there were reports being filed around this time that several witnesses had independently seen a large ball of fire go off in the sky in the nearby vicinity. (ibid, p. 72) At 7 AM, a UN plane flew into Ndola to begin a search for Hammarskjold and the 15 other lost passengers of the Albertina. The pilot was arrested upon touching down. (ibid, p. 73)

    The airport manager did not return until 9 AM, three hours after dawn. The search did not start until an hour later. The wreckage of the plane was found at about 3 PM, eight miles from the airport. There was one survivor, Harold Julien. He would pass away six days later. But not before he said the plane was in flames before it hit the ground. Further, the plane was determined to be under power, and the landing gear was lowered. Although all the passengers were severely burned, Hammarskjold was not—at all. Further, in something that simply cannot be explained, there was a playing card stuffed into his ruffled tie. Although it is not possible to determine what the card is from the photos, a witness at the scene said it was the ace of spades. (Williams, p. 7) Another oddity, Alport ended up with Hammarskjold’s briefcase. (ibid, p. 85) These anomalies suggest someone was at the crash scene before the official first responders arrived. As we shall see, the evidence for this is more than circumstantial.

    Two of the security guards on the plane had bullets in their bodies. This was officially explained by saying that the heat of the crash had caused ammunition to explode. But a Swedish expert who had done experiments on this topic said that, even if this were so, the projectiles would not have enough force to penetrate the bodies. (See Pease, and Williams, p. 6) What makes this even more fascinating is the testimony of Major General Bjorn Egge. Egge had been the head of the UN military information mission in Congo. He had flown to the Ndola hospital, where the victims had been transported. When he saw Hammarskjold’s body he noticed what appeared to be a bullet hole in his forehead. (Williams, p. 5) That hole is not apparent in the autopsy photos Williams saw. But when the photos were shown to forensic experts, two of them said it appeared the photo had been retouched at the forehead. (ibid, p. 9)

    Let us now consider sole survivor Julien’s crucial testimony: that the plane was in flames before it hit the ground. (Williams, p. 94) There is much evidence to corroborate this key point. Charles Southall was a Navy intelligence analyst in 1961. At the time, he was attached to the NSA base on the island of Cyprus. On the night of the crash, he was at home. His commanding officer called him and said he should come out and listen to a recorded communication intercept he had captured. This was the only time such a thing happened while he was in Cyprus, so Southall did so. He said that, on the recording, he heard a pilot say he was descending on the DC6. He then heard what he thought was the sound of a cannon firing. Then, the pilot said, “I’ve hit it…It’s going down.” (Williams, p. 143) Someone in the office recognized the pilot’s voice, and the NSA had a dossier on him. When the Swedish government reopened the case in 1992, Southall tried to communicate with them through the American State Department. But the Swedes found out about him through an independent source and he was interviewed more than once. (ibid, p. 147)

    Southall’s testimony is echoed by the words of Swedish flying instructor Tore Meijer. He was stationed as a flight teacher to the Ethiopian Air Force in 1961. On the night of the crash, he was listening to a short wave radio he had just bought. Therefore, he was testing various frequencies. (ibid, p. 152) He picked up a conversation that included mention of the Ndola airport. In his own words, he then described the following: “The voice says, he’s approaching the airport, he’s turning—he’s leveling—where the pilot is approaching the actual landing strip. Then I hear the same voice saying, “another plane is approaching from behind, what is that?” The voice then said, “He breaks off the plan…he continues.” Meijer said he lost the contact at this point.

    The idea that another plane intercepted Hammarskjold’s is corroborated by at least seven witnesses on the ground. (Pease, p. 20) For example, Dickson Buleni said he saw a smaller plane above the larger plane dropping something that looked like fire on it. (Williams, p. 117) This testimony is similar to that of Timothy Kankasa and his wife. (ibid, pp. 93, 122) But the Kankasas revealed something that may be even more interesting. They said that the crash was not initially discovered at around 3 PM on the 18th. Timothy and a few other residents of Twapia Township discovered it about six hours earlier. Further, the couple stated that this information was reported to local officials. Timothy also said he had reported it to the first investigating body from Rhodesia, but it had been edited out of his testimony. (ibid)

    Again, there is independent corroboration for this earlier successful search, which punctures the 15-hour official lag time between the crash and the discovery of the plane wreckage. Colonel Charles Gaylor had been instructed by the USAF to fly to Ndola to help escort Hammarskjold to any other destination he wished to fly to as a result of his work there. Therefore, he was awaiting the landing of the Albertina that night. When Hammarskjold’s plane did not land, Gaylor retired so he could wake up and begin searching for the lost plane. He found it the next morning and relayed the information to the Ndola airport. Gaylor said that the Rhodesian planes did not show up until four hours later. (ibid, p. 188)

    Another witness, who also saw a second plane in the sky, built on this disturbing indication of a deliberate and immediately enacted cover up as to the discovery of the wreckage. He saw two Land Rover type vehicles rushing at high speed toward the scene within an hour of the crash. (See Pease, “Midnight in the Congo”, p. 20) He and another witness then saw the vehicles return after they saw and heard a large fireball explosion. (Williams, p. 105)

    One should note in regards to this testimony: when studying the photos of the wreckage of the Albertina, it certainly does not look like the plane simply crashed. Because the damage is just too extensive. It does appear that there was at least one explosion. But further, there do not seem to be any photos taken of Hammarskjold in situ. (Williams, pp. 13, 111) Because of this lack, because of the delay in the “discovery”, because of the testimony of Bjorn Egge about a bullet hole in Dag’s forehead, because of the experts who detected signs of tampering with the photos, because of the lack of any burns, because of all this, some have suggested that Hammarskjold may have survived the crash. And I should add one more point on this issue. Williams could not find any official autopsy reports. There are only summaries and conclusions. (p. 8)

    From just this brief précis of the evidence, the reader can see that the original story, which said the crash was due to pilot error, is simply not credible today. The evidence indicates that Hammarskjold’s plane was sabotaged. A cover up, which seems preplanned, then ensued. The motive—as with Lumumba’s murder— was to make sure that Congo would not be an independent country. One in which the citizenry would be able to enjoy the fruits of its own prodigal resources. Which is what Lumumba had promised his followers during his campaign. With both Lumumba and Hammarskjold done away with, that aim now seemed unattainable.

    V

    As Susan Williams writes in her book, John Kennedy was an unflinching admirer of Hammarskjold. After his death, Kennedy summoned one of his assistants into the oval office. The president told Sture Linner that, compared to Hammarskjold, he was a small man. Because, in his view, Dag Hammarskjold was the greatest statesman of the 20th century. (p. 239)

    When Kennedy came into office, one of the reversals he made of President Eisenhower’s foreign policy was in Congo. He had tried to make the issue of the rising tide of African nationalism part of the 1960 campaign. For he attempted to differentiate himself from his opponent Richard Nixon on the point. (See Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, pp. 37-41) This was a legitimate point of difference. At a National Security Council meeting, the vice-president once claimed that “some of the people of Africa have been out of the trees for only about fifty years.” Budget Director Maurice Stans replied that he “had the impression that many Africans still belonged in trees.” (ibid, p. 6) Kennedy did not at all share in this view. From at least 1957, with his powerful Senate speech on the French/Algerian crisis, Kennedy had become a staunch advocate of favoring African nationalism and liberation over the concerns of our European colonialist allies. (ibid, p. 36) For in that speech he actually stated that a true ally of France would not have done what Eisenhower and Nixon had with Algeria. Which was to either remain silent on the conflict, or even supply France with weapons. A true friend would have pointed out the folly of the colonial struggle. And then escorted France to the bargaining table to foster her exit from a hopeless and expensive civil war. (The full text of this visionary speech is in the book The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 66-80)

    When Kennedy was inaugurated, he immediately enacted policies to carry out these differing views on Africa. As Muehlenbeck demonstrates, he did so on a number of different fronts. But the policy reversal that was done fastest was in Congo. Which he requested his first week in office. And which he approved on February 2nd. (See “Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa,” by James DiEugenio, Probe, Vol. 6 No. 2, p. 21) Upon hearing of this, Ambassador Timberlake sent word to Allen Dulles that Kennedy was breaking with Eisenhower, and his new program was more or less a sell-out to the Russians. When Hammarskjold got wind of the reversal, he told Dayal that they could soon expect an organized backlash to Kennedy’s reformist policy. Which, in large part, backed Lumumba—not realizing he was dead—and was open to negotiations with Russia over a militarily neutralized Congo. Kennedy also opposed the secession of Katanga and was willing to cooperate with the UN in an attempt to keep Congo free and independent.

    In other words, for all intents and purposes, Kennedy agreed with the outlines of what Hammarskjold was doing. To make the distinction clear, he recalled Timberlake. (ibid, p. 22) Then, in September, Hammarskjold was killed.

    At this point two remarkable things occurred in the immense Congo struggle. First, former President Harry Truman made a stunning comment. He said, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him.’ ” (Williams, p. 232) Author Greg Poulgrain later shed some light on the origins of this surprising comment. He interviewed Hammarskjold’s close friend and colleague at the UN, George Ivan Smith. It turns out that Hammarskjold and Kennedy were cooperating, not just on Congo, but on the problem of the Dutch occupation of West Irian, which Indonesian leader Achmed Sukarno felt should be part of Indonesia. (Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention, pp. 77-78) Smith also added that Kennedy had let Harry Truman know about these discussions. Which seems logical, since Truman was the only previous Democratic president still alive.

    The second remarkable development was that Kennedy decided to shoulder on with what Hammarskjold had begun in the Congo. In other words, by himself, he was going to oppose the imperialist forces of England, France, and Belgium. Which all desired to split Katanga away from Congo. And then make both states pawns for European multinational corporations. There can be very little doubt that this was Kennedy’s aim. Why? Because, after Hammarskjold’s demise, he went to the UN to pay tribute to his legacy. He then appointed Edmund Gullion as his ambassador to Congo.

    Anyone who knows anything about Kennedy will realize, it was Gullion who first altered JFK’s consciousness on the subject of the appeal of communism in the Third World. This occurred on Senator Kennedy’s visit to Saigon in 1951. JFK never forgot the prediction that Gullion made at that time. Namely that France would not win the war in Indochina. When Kennedy gained the White House, he brought Gullion in as an advisor on colonial matters. And now he sent him to Leopoldville to attempt to compensate for the loss of Hammarskjold. As Richard Mahoney wrote, this indicated just how important Kennedy thought the Congo was. Because no ambassador in the entire administration had more secure access to the oval office than Gullion. (Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 108) Kennedy then went further. He made George Ball his special advisor on Congo inside the White House. Ball later became famous as the one man willing to argue against President Johnson during his disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War. But even in 1961 Ball had a reputation as something of a maverick on foreign policy.

    Kennedy addresses U.N. General Assembly
    September 25, 1961

    Addressing the General Assembly at the memorial for Hammarskjold, Kennedy said, “Let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live or die in vain.” He backed this up by having his UN delegation vote for a use of force resolution to deport the mercenaries and advisory personnel out of Katanga. (DiEugenio, p. 23) In doing so, Kennedy was militarily moving against his formal allies, the British, French and Belgians. For those nations were all paying lip service to the UN forces. But not so clandestinely, they were undermining the mission. Therefore, Kennedy was not just honoring Hammarskjold rhetorically. He was continuing his policies—and pushing the UN into following him. In fact, when hostilities broke out in Katanga with Tshombe trying to block highways used by UN troops, Kennedy told the new UN leader U Thant, who was wavering on the commitment, not to worry at all about European reaction. He would take care of that. He then said in public, these leaders should spend less time criticizing the UN and more time convincing Tshombe to negotiate a truce with the new leader of Congo, Cyrille Adoula. (Mahoney, p. 117)

    Kennedy also had to deal with the big guns of the MSM who seemed to favor Tshombe. That is: Time magazine, who put him on their cover; William F. Buckley, who (incredibly) compared Katanga’s secession to the Hungarian uprising of 1956; and Sen. Thomas Dodd, who actually visited Tshombe in Katanga to show his support. In the face of this, Kennedy decided to use economic warfare. He told the representatives of the giant Union Miniere mining corporation that unless they significantly cut their monthly stipend to Tshombe, he would unleash a terrific attack on Katanga, and then turn over the company’s assets to Adoula. This achieved its aim. The stipend was significantly reduced. (DiEugenio, p. 24)

    Kennedy and Cyrille Adoula at the White House

    Kennedy then brought Adoula to New York. In his address to the United Nations, the African leader criticized Belgium and praised Congo’s national hero, Patrice Lumumba. (Mahoney, p. 134) In reaction, Tshombe’s supporters then wanted to bring him to the USA to counter this appearance. Gullion argued against it. He suggested denying Tshombe a visa on the basis that he was not a real representative of Congo. Kennedy listened to arguments for and against the denial. He then sided with Gullion and denied the visa. (DiEugenio, p. 24)

    On the day before Christmas of 1962, Katangese troops fired on a UN helicopter and outpost. Kennedy had previously forced the issue on his White House staff by demanding a unanimous vote to back the military invasion of Katanga. George Ball, who was holding out for more negotiations, came over to the Kennedy/Gullion side. So now the USA fully backed Operation Grand Slam, the UN attempt to finally take Elisabethville, capital of Katanga. By January 22, 1963 Grand Slam had succeeded on all fronts. Tshombe, predictably, fled to Rhodesia. As Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s representative to the United Nations wrote, it was that body’s finest hour.

    VI

    Kennedy addresses U.N. General Assembly
    September 20, 1963

    The UN had never before done what Hammarskjold had committed it to in Congo. That is, send a large military force into an independent nation to put down an internal civil war. But Hammarskjold had done so at Lumumba’s request. Both men had been murdered over that struggle. With Hammarskjold gone, the United Nations did not want to stay after Grand Slam was completed. In fact, it’s an open question if Grand Slam would have been launched without Kennedy’s visit to the UN the year before. But because of the expense, controversy, and length of the expedition, the UN leadership wanted to leave Congo in 1963. Even with Adoula’s position precarious and the Congolese army a rather unreliable force. Again, Kennedy took it upon himself to go to New York. On September 20, 1963 Kennedy addressed the UN General Assembly on this very subject. He said he understood how a project like this would lose its attraction after its initial goals were met. Because then the bills would come due. But he urged the UN to do what it could to preserve the gains they had made. He also asked that they do all in their power to maintain Congo as an independent nation in its fragile state. He concluded the UN should complete what Hammarskjold had begun.

    Kennedy’s speech turned around the consensus opinion to depart. The UN voted to keep the peacekeeping mission there. But later in 1963, things began to unravel. Kasavubu decided to disband Parliament. This ignited a leftist rebellion from Stanleyville. There was an assassination attempt on Mobutu. With this, Mobutu, already a darling of the CIA, now became the Pentagon’s poster boy at Fort Benning.

    Mobutu Sese Seko
    with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands
    (1973)

    After Kennedy’s murder, President Johnson sided with the CIA and the Fort Benning crowd. As the Stanleyville rebellion picked up steam, the CIA now descended on the American embassy and took it over. It became the base for an air operation run by Cuban exile pilots. Incredibly, Belgium now became an ally of the USA. Tshombe was asked back to Congo by Mobutu. Tshombe immediately found a treasure trove of Chinese documents and a defector who now said China was behind the leftist rebellion. (Kwitny, p. 79) Needless to say, within 18 months, Johnson and the CIA had reversed the Kennedy/Hammarskjold program. Adoula and Kasavubu were dismissed or forced out; Gullion left. In 1966 Mobutu installed himself as military dictator. The riches of the Congo were now mined by the European forces Lumumba asked Hammarskjold to remove. Like Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu became one of the richest men in the world. His holdings in Belgian real estate alone topped 100 million dollars. (Kwitny, p. 87) Like Suharto, he reigned for three decades. And like the Indonesia dictator, when he fell, he left his country in a destabilized, anarchic state with poverty predominating. In other words, where they were at the beginning.

    One of the most fascinating revelations in Greg Poulgrain’s The Incubus of Intervention was this: In addition to JFK working with the Secretary General Hammarskjold on Congo, the two were also working on a design for Indonesia. (Poulgrain, p.77) They were planning on a solution to the West Irian problem. Which was part of the former Dutch Empire that Netherlands did not want to let go. Probably because of the great mineral wealth there, which likely even surpassed that of Katanga. Further, the two men were also working on a plan to aid countries coming out of colonialism. This was called OPEX. This was a UN group that would send professionals of all kinds into these areas to aid their development. Not as advisors, but as servants of the new country. This is the plan Hammarskjold had in mind for West Irian. In their original concept, Hammarskjold would play the lead role in both Congo and Indonesia, with Kennedy supporting him. With the Secretary General’s 1961 murder, Kennedy had to soldier through both situations himself. He was doing a fairly good job, until he too was assassinated. In fact, he had planned on a state visit to Jakarta in 1964, a first for an American president.

    As one can see from this discussion, and also Poulgrain’s book, Kennedy’s policies were reversed in both countries shortly after his murder. (See again the above-cited review; also, this interview with the author) The results were horrendous for the citizens of both countries. For when Mobutu and Suharto took over, any idea of having the prodigal natural resources of both states aid in fostering its citizenry was lost. Because of the two overthrows, Lumumba and Sukarno did not funnel the money into improvements for the daily lives of their citizens, through building infrastructure, energy sources, hospitals, primary and secondary schools etc. Instead it went to the shareholders of the exploiting companies and into the pockets of Mobutu and Suharto.

    As Jonathan Kwitny has noted, Congo could have been a sterling example of a nation crippled by colonialism, now being set free. And aided by the USA, allowed to grow and nurture, and thereby be a model—for not just Africa—but the rest of the world. That is what Hammarskjold and Kennedy had hoped for. Just as they had imagined for Sukarno and Indonesia. Instead, something contrary to that occurred. Or as Kwitny wrote:

    The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in post-colonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. (Kwitny, p. 75)

    Kennedy and Hammarskjold understood this moral and practical quandary. It was not until recently that the importance of the Hammarskjold/Kennedy relationship has been highlighted. I and others have also tried to show that Kennedy’s foreign policy should be seen not just as a series of individual instances, but in the gestalt. That is, as part of an overall pattern. Largely because of his sensitivity to these Third World issues—which was not at all the case with Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon. But this gestalt concept has been very late in arriving. Because the cover up about the facts of Kennedy’s real foreign policy has been more stringent and assiduous than the cover up about the facts of his assassination.

    Too often we think of that foreign policy in terms of just Cuba and Vietnam. As seen above, that view foreshortens history. It’s the way the other side wants us to see Kennedy—a view without Hammarskjold. Constricted by this deliberate obstruction, we fail to see who Kennedy really was. Not only does that foreshortened view cheat history, it cheats Kennedy—and helps conceal the secrets of his assassination.

    from “JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder”
    JFK Lancer conference, November 2014

    Addendum

    See now U.N. to Probe Whether Iconic Secretary-General Was Assassinated for the discovery of the original SAIMR documents.

  • John Avery Emison, The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover-Up

    John Avery Emison, The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover-Up

    John Avery Emison’s The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover-Up is an interesting effort. But it has a somewhat misleading title. From that title, the reader would think that Emison was going to primarily focus on the House Select Committee on Assassinations inquiry into the King assassination. That is not really the case. The author spends more time on the local forces in Memphis who railroaded Ray and also on Ray’s unfortunate choice of Percy Foreman as attorney. He does deal with the HSCA inquiry, but this is later in the book.

    James Earl Ray

    One of the first elements of the King case that the author deals with is the racist factor. The authors who have done so much to frame Ray, for example George McMillan, have used that aspect to try and supply a motive to Ray’s alleged crime. As Emison notes, Ray was not a southerner. He was born in Illinois. (p. 25) If one goes through his military records and prison records, there are no credible indications that Ray was a racist. As for his life in crime, all the indications are that he was an inept, small-time criminal, one who was rather easy to capture by the police. But, after the murder of King, this was drastically altered. As the author notes, “Yet, for two months following King’s murder, Ray—a man who had never before flown a commercial airline—eluded the biggest manhunt in the history of the United States…” (ibid) Hiding out in such locales as Canada, England, and Portugal. Once captured at Heathrow Airport in London, he was sent back to Memphis, the scene of King’s murder.

    I

    And this is where Emison’s book really begins. As he notes, the entire proceeding of Ray and his attorney Foreman pleading before Judge Preston Battle took less than four minutes. (p. 26) During which Battle never asked any of the following questions: Did Ray have confederates, what was the origination of his funds for all the traveling he did prior to and after the assassination, where did he sight in the rifle, why did he flee to Canada and how he did he get a passport—or even, the most fundamental question of all: Why did he shoot King? (p. 27)

    Judge Preston Battle

    But a week later, Battle began to express some doubts about the efficacy of what he had done. For instance, in an interview with a reporter, he asked rhetorically: how did Ray choose the spot from where he fired? Because there was no public knowledge that King had a room at the Lorraine Motel, across from Bessie’s Boarding House. Which was the place where the police said Ray shot King. (p. 27)

    Which leads to the question: Was there an inside man in King’s entourage? It turns out there was. Many years later, it was revealed that the FBI had a paid informant in King’s camp. His name was Ernest Withers. The sheer mass of Withers’ reports is stunning. They come to a total of 93 single spaced pages. And they are absolutely complete. Down to the plans for demonstrations, who was at certain meetings, and the names and room numbers of King’s hotels. (p. 126)

    But Battle then also asked the reporter: How was it possible for Ray to escape from Memphis to Atlanta even though there was an APB out for him and his car? Which was an easy to identify white Mustang? (p. 27) As the author notes, Battle died about three weeks after the interview. At his desk when he passed away were letters from Ray requesting a new trial, which Battle was about to grant.

    Only one other person in officialdom showed any doubts about the case. That was Harry S. Avery of the Tennessee Commission of Corrections. But when Avery spoke of the possibility of a conspiracy, the governor, Buford Ellington, removed him from office. (p. 29) And this rather untoward behavior continued up until Ray’s death, when Governor Sundquist refused to grant his cooperation in a private effort for a liver transplant to keep Ray alive. He therefore died in 1998, as his lawyer William Pepper was trying to get a new trial for his client. John Avery Emison was related to the late Harry Avery. Which inspired his interest in the case and his subsequent interviews with Ray.

    Ray told the author what he has told everyone else. He purchased the alleged murder rifle, a Remington Game Master 760, while he was under the control of a man named Raoul. He had met Raoul in Ontario, Canada in the summer of 1967. He then went to work for him as a well-paid courier. To do so, Raoul bought him his one-year-old Mustang. (p. 41) Raoul paid for the Game Master rifle and Ray gave it to him the night before King was shot.

    Ray had checked into the boarding house on the afternoon of April 4, 1968, the day of the assassination. He used an assumed name, that of John Willard. Although the local authorities say that there was a chip in the window sill where the assassin laid his rifle, the FBI said such was not the case. (p. 43) Two witnesses reportedly saw a man move from the vicinity of the entrance to the communal bathroom. But neither one, Willie Anschutz nor Charlie Stephens, could make a positive identification. And Stephens was, by all accounts, stone drunk at the time. (ibid) This is what Stephens said the evening of the murder. He later changed his story.

    Continuing with the official story, it has Ray going into his room and putting together a bundle of his items in a green blanket. This included the rifle, ammunition and a prison ID. He then went downstairs, turned onto South Main Street, took a few steps to his left, and dropped the bundle in the alcove outside a store called Canipe’s Amusement Company. (p. 44)

    These last two movements create serious problems for the official story. Because although neither Anschutz nor Stephens could make a positive ID, a woman with Stephens, Grace Walden, said the man was not Ray. (p. 45) Both Walden, and another witness that Arthur Hanes (Ray’s first lawyer) secured, said the man they saw was short and wearing an army jacket. Neither of which fit the description of James Earl Ray. But further, when Hanes got the inventory of what the FBI found in Ray’s abandoned Mustang in Atlanta, it contained a small army jacket. (ibid) Hanes called this an “electrifying” piece of evidence. He thought it indicated that Raoul took the shot, because Ray could not fit into the jacket.

    The other problem was that the owner of the amusement company, Guy Canipe, was ready to testify that the bundle with Ray’s things was dropped a few minutes before the shot rang out. Hanes told the author that with these two pieces of evidence, he was confident that the defense could stymie the prosecution’s case. Hanes was ready for a full trial, and expected an acquittal. (p. 46) He even advised Ray to refuse a plea bargain that would have sent him to prison for a maximum of 13 years. Which was a much better deal than the one Foreman got for Ray.

    II

    Confounding the prosecution even more was the ballistics evidence. This came as a result of tests performed by the FBI. The death slug could have come from the Game Master, but its deformation and absence of clear-cut markings precluded a positive identification. The death slug could not be metallurgically matched to the other Remington Peters rounds. (p. 47) Further, in the bundle, there were rifle rounds that Ray did not purchase at Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham, where he purchased the rifle. The HSCA concluded that the cartridge found in the weapon was the only cartridge in the magazine. Which indicates that whoever loaded the rifle was supremely confident in his marksmanship abilities. And no one has ever stated that Ray was a fine marksman.

    Making this even worse for the official story is that the HSCA could find no evidence that the other cartridges had been loaded into the rifle. Therefore, the idea held out by more than one author, that Ray practiced with the Game Master, is very hard to support. (p. 53)

    And beyond that, there is no evidence that the rifle was ever mechanically sighted in, since Aeromarine Supply did not have that kind of equipment., called a collimator. Neither did Ronald Wood, the rifle salesman, take the weapon out to a firing range to test the sighting. It is also hard to think that Ray manually sighted in the rifle, because he simply did not know very much about firearms. Wood made that comment about Ray. (p. 53) All Wood did was a simple bore sighting; hence the FBI found the rifle was off three inches to the right. (p. 54)

    But there is still something else about the ballistics that raises more serious questions. Among the nine rounds found in the bundle were 4 military type bullets. The HSCA found that the markings on these differed from the sporting rounds. These appeared to have been loaded into an M1 rifle or machine gun belt. Where did those weapons come from? Where did the rounds come from, since they were not sold to Ray at Aeromarine? (p. 55)

    Ray’s fingerprints were not found in the bathroom. And his room did not have a proper line of sight to King’s room at the Lorraine. (p. 66) Considering all the acrobatics that Ray would have had to perform to shoot at King from the rim of a bathtub, it’s hard to buy this as part of a genuine case.

    III

    None of the authors who have written books to convict James Earl Ray—William Bradford Huie, George McMillan, Gerald Posner, and Hampton Sides—ever met James Earl Ray. (p. 69) Which allows them to make some rather bizarre and unfounded assumptions. For instance, McMillan wrote that after Ray escaped from prison in 1967, he tried to recruit his two brothers—John and Jerry—into a plot to kill King. (p. 71) They refused and therefore Ray proceeded on his own. This makes the timeline about ten months before the assassination. McMillan makes no allowances for how Ray got the money to do his rather extensive traveling from Canada to Mexico to Los Angeles at this time.

    Hampton Sides promotes the HSCA theory that Ray heard about an offer from a racist group in St. Louis, which put a fifty thousand dollar bounty on King’s head. But again, Sides makes for no allowances about how Ray lived prior to this, how he could prove that he had killed King to the promoters, or how he could have either found out about the bounty, or collected from the proper people. (p. 72) But further, the FBI did interviews with several wardens and inmates and there were no indications that Ray was a racist, or knew about this offer. Or that Ray ever caused any disturbances in prison. (pp. 73, 84, 88) But McMillan tried to fabricate stories that showed he was. The author does a nice job showing these are false.

    Gerald Posner writes that Ray knew where King was staying in Memphis at the time of the assassination. Yet, as the author shows, this was not broadcast on either TV or radio until after the shooting. Only one newspaper said he was at the Lorraine, and that was published on the fourth at about 3 PM. This story mentioned only that King had lunch there on the 3rd. And there was no mention of a room number. By the time the story appeared, Ray had already checked into his boarding house room. (p. 73)

    Sides also used a story that somehow Ray was helping the George Wallace presidential campaign while he was in Los Angeles. There has never been any credible evidence to support this. The most anyone has come up with is that Ray once gave a ride to three people who wanted to vote. Ray himself had never been registered to vote. (p. 79)

    Foreshadowing his main focus in the rest of the book, Avery now writes that one of the main problems the HSCA had was that they tried to characterize Ray’s plea bargain as voluntary and not made under duress. (p. 89)

    IV

    In what Emison labels as Part 2 of his book, he tries to forge his own theory as to how the King assassination came off. There is a large problem with trying to do this. There has yet to be the equivalent of the JFK Act passed concerning the King case. Consequently, there has been no Assassination Records Review Board constructed to declassify all the documents that are still classified pertaining to that case. Just considering what the HSCA did, there must be tens of thousands of pages still locked up. So the picture we have of what happened is, by necessity, not yet complete. (Although Ray’s last attorney, William Pepper, has made an interesting stab at explicating the case. And paid a high price for that attempt.)

    Emison tries to locate a CIA-based conspiracy amid limited files released on CIA officer Richard Ober. Ober was the man James Angleton placed in charge of Operation Chaos. This was a rough equivalent to the FBI’s COINTELPRO domestic operations, except Ober worked more with media. It turns out that the CIA opened a file on the King case when Ray was attempting to move for a new trial. Ober opened the file. (pp. 96-98)

    Another connection concerns William Bradford Huie. Huie went to Arthur Hanes because he wanted the rights to Ray’s story. These were granted since Huie’s name guaranteed a sale of essays and a book, which would help finance Ray’s defense. And at first, Huie wrote a couple of fairly sympathetic essays in Look. But this changed later with both the third installment and his 1970 book, He Slew the Dreamer. In these Ray went from Ray as part of a plot, to Ray as lone gunman.

    The author tries to account for this in the following way. He says that Huie hired William F. Buckley once he got out of the CIA to his magazine, American Mercury. Emison says there were other CIA linked authors that came in at this time, like Sidney Hook. He then writes that a TV show Huie appeared on, NBC’s Longines Chronoscope, was a part of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird program. (See pp. 102-103)

    This may or may not be true. But another way to explain Huie’s behavior is the fact that Ray changed attorneys. He went from Arthur Hanes, a man who was going to defend him as an innocent victim, to Percy Foreman, a man who did not defend him, and essentially sold him out. So as the defense attorneys changed, so did Huie’s agreement with them.

    The case with George McMillan seems qualitatively different to me. McMillan worked for the Office of War Information during World War II. Which means he was a propaganda officer. He then became a favorite of the FBI, specifically J. Edgar Hoover and Cartha DeLoach. (p. 103) In 1965, McMillan wed fellow journalist Priscilla Johnson. As many, many writers have noted, Johnson was clearly a CIA asset by this time. (See James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 286-88)

    McMillan denounced in public the formation of the HSCA. This was in an article published by The New York Times. (Emison, p. 105) He then wrote his book. He told a friend that it really was not an investigation of the crime, but actually a biography about James Earl Ray. In this, it resembled his spouse’s book Marina and Lee. Is it just a further coincidence that his book was published in 1976, and hers in 1977?—just as the HSCA was being formed and then in session? The book was immediately praised by longtime CIA asset Jeremiah O’Leary, who stated that McMillan had done the committee’s work for them already. (ibid)

    There is little or no doubt that these two books and authors did much to poison the public’s attitude toward Ray. But it’s another matter to base your theory of the crime on Huie and McMillan.

    The author seems to understand this. So he now shifts gears. He now begins to enumerate all the information that appeared back in the nineties about military intelligence spying on domestic disturbances in the USA. According to Emison, this began under General Creighton Abrams in May of 1963. It was never officially approved. And it stayed in effect until it was exposed by Captain Chris Pyle in 1970. (p. 115) The program tried to make the case that many of these disturbances were communist inspired. This included urban riots and civil rights demonstrations. One of the higher ups in the surveillance program thought that King and other black activists were being financed by the USSR and China. (p. 117) All told, the military had in excess of 1500 men in plainclothes garb spying on leftist groups, including King. Abrams employed a large conference room to run the program at Fort Holabird. That room divided up the country into seven sectors and had 300 officers running the program. (p. 117)

    The 113th Military Intelligence Group out of Evanston Illinois was so extreme it had a file on Adlai Stevenson III. Why? Simply because he had talked to Jessie Jackson. (p. 118) They spied on groups like the League of Women Voters and the ACLU. And they formed their own record keeping system called CRIS, which stood for Counterintelligence Records Intelligence System. When Pyle exposed this system, a full-blown cover up followed. (p. 119) But it was discovered that military intelligence did have files on King, reports on his activities, and had his office at Ebenezer Baptist Church wired. (p. 122)

    Poor People’s March on Washington, May-June 1968

    This surveillance activity ratcheted upwards when King announced his concept to hold a Poor People’s March on Washington. This was formally planned in November of 1967, and was to take place in May of 1968. As Gerald McKnight notes in his book, The Last Crusade, the Pentagon had readied 20,000 troops to be rotated into Washington in May. (McKnight, p. 93) McKnight also wrote that the FBI prepared a special COINTELPRO program to disrupt the march and its preparations called Operation POCAM (ibid, pp. 9-10) As others have done before him, Emison notes how the FBI maneuvered King out of the Rivermont Hotel in Memphis and into the Lorraine. They did this by using their media assets to harangue him for not staying at a black-owned motel. (Emison, pp. 126-27) On April 3rd, informant Withers told the FBI that King would be staying at the Lorraine and gave them his room number. Emison makes the case that this information was closely held. It is unlikely that James Earl Ray could have known about it. (pp. 128-29)

    V

    Of course, very little of this information was available at the time Ray was apprehended in London and returned to Memphis. Even at that, for reasons noted above, Arthur Hanes Sr. was ready to go to trial. He was so confident he would win that he turned down a plea bargain deal. Which leaves the question: How then was Ray convicted? The answer to that question can be expressed in two words: Percy Foreman.

    The issue of how Foreman entered the King case has always been clouded . The main reason being that Foreman told many lies about it. Even when he was under oath before the HSCA. And either the HSCA did not do its homework on the issue, or they were not going to call him on it for the record.

    Percy Foreman

    First of all, the idea that James Earl Ray ever wanted Foreman as his lawyer or ever mentioned his name to his brothers is false. Arthur Hanes came into the case through the efforts of the English barrister Michael Eugene, who was representing Ray in London. Eugene called Hanes since he knew that Ray was going to be shipped back to Memphis to stand trial. Ray’s brothers had no contact with James in England in June. So unlike what Foreman maintained: 1.)There is no letter that James Earl Ray sent to Foreman, either on his own, or through his brothers, and 2.) James Earl Ray did not want Foreman to represent him from the start. (pp. 131-34)

    The facts indicate that Foreman did not enter the case in any way until November of 1968, about five months after he said he did. Emison states that the reason that the Ray brothers—John and Jerry—even thought of switching lawyers was simple. James wanted to take the stand in his own defense. Arthur Hanes strongly disagreed. Because of this dispute, the brothers now believed that William Bradford Huie was calling the shots, since he did not want James to testify either. (p. 148) This turned out to be a terrible miscalculation.

    The brothers first went to a local lawyer. But this attorney told them that he needed a big name partner in the case. So Huie then floated Foreman’s name. Jerry Ray then got in contact with Foreman on or about November 9, 1968. (p. 134) When Foreman flew into Memphis, there was still no letter from James Earl Ray to allow him into the jail. But he proceeded there anyway. When he got there, James did not want to see him. The warden had to call Judge Preston Battle. And after about 90 minutes, Foreman was allowed to see the prisoner. (p. 139) In short order, Hanes exited the case. The contract Huie had with Hanes over a royalty split was replaced with one with Foreman. Which is another point Foreman lied about. Since he proclaimed in public that he was foregoing any fees in this case. (p. 131)

    Just how far was Foreman willing to go in order to conceal the true circumstances of his entry into the case—which was, at the least, unethical, if not illegal? He actually insisted on his “James Earl Ray sent me a letter” story to the HSCA. When asked to produce the letter, he said that it had been transferred to the offices of a lawyer friend in Nashville, from which Foreman said they were lost. Through a partner in that Nashville firm, Emison makes a good circumstantial case that this is another lie by Foreman. (p. 137)

    The point is simple. Because Hanes was still the lawyer of record and the defendant had not solicited a change, then Foreman’s entry could be challenged as unethical, or even illegal. If that would have been established, then everything that Foreman did after could have been challenged in an effort to reopen the case.

    After Foreman took over, he briefly talked about how he would win an acquittal for his client. (p. 146) But that did not last long. Foreman had his client declared indigent so he could get help from the public defender’s office. But there really was not much point in this aid since Foreman changed his mind and decided not to put on a defense. Foreman’s deal with the DA was essentially a plea of guilty in return for the promise not to request the death penalty. And there is no doubt that Foreman used every unethical trick in the book to get James Earl Ray to go along with the plea bargain. He told his client the FBI would pick up his father on a probation violation unless he copped a plea. He told Jerry and John that unless there was a plea, the state would implicate them in a conspiracy with James to kill King. (p. 151) Foreman told his client that the state had bribed witnesses who would place him at the scene; he therefore faced electrocution.

    But that was not the worst of it. The day before the court proceeding, Foreman had sent out two letters. One was to James and one to Jerry. The latter contained a check for five hundred dollars. (The equivalent of about three grand today.) The letter to James was an adjustment in the Huie/Foreman royalty rate, which would allow James a share of the profits. These rewards were both contingent upon there being no unexpected stunts pulled during the court proceeding. (p. 153) Is there any way not to construe this as bribery?

    This relates to an important discovery by Emison. Namely that there are two transcripts of the Ray/Foreman pleading in front of Judge Battle. And they differ in a most important way. In what the author proves is the genuine transcript, the following exchange occurs:

    Battle: Has any pressure of any kind by anyone in any way been used on you to get you to plead guilty?

    Ray: Now, what did you say?

    In other words, Ray was answering a question with a question. There was no answer. Amazingly, Battle did not repeat the question, as Ray requested. He went to another question. (p. 156) Now, someone in the DA’s office obviously saw that this was a problem for an appeals court to deal with, and would therefore open up all kinds of avenues for an attorney to bring in evidence that Foreman did pressure Ray into pleading guilty. So therefore, someone altered the original transcript. In this version, Ray’s reply to the question about pressure is as follows:

    Ray: No. No one in any way.

    Emison proves in a number of ways, including tape recordings of the hearing and the actual stenographer’s signed copy, that this second transcription is a forgery. In fact, he dedicates a large part of a chapter to proving this piece of fabrication. (See Chapter 7) And he blames Battle for accepting the plea without a full answer to his question about pressure. In fact, this may be the reason Battle had second thoughts about the case and was willing to give Ray a new trial.

    What makes it even worse is that the author states that, in the subsequent appeals by Ray’s lawyers, it is this false transcript that was used. (p. 176) Which is hard to believe since, once the page is blown up a bit, it strongly suggests the altered line was typed with a different typewriter. The HSCA also used this altered transcript.

    But it may be even worse than that. The author found the surviving audiotape of the hearing, He admits it is not a good recording. But he believes that what Ray actually says in reply to the question about pressure is, “I don’t know what to say.” (p. 181)

    VI

    Emison closes the book with two interesting topics. The first concerns the mechanics behind Ray’s pleading. Harry Smith Avery, as a top official in the Corrections Department, interviewed Ray three times while in prison. He ordered his mail recorded and a log made of all incoming and outgoing letters. When Governor Buford Ellington was told about this effort to investigate the King case, he was not pleased. In fact, he ordered Avery to halt the attempt. When he did not, he was eventually terminated in May of 1969. Later, when the HSCA began its inquiry, they paid Avery a visit. When he went to retrieve his files on the case, they had disappeared.

    Avery also told the author an anecdote about visiting the governor’s office prior to the Ray hearing in 1968. As he was waiting outside the doors, he managed to overhear one side of a phone conversation. It was one of the governor’s assistants talking to a higher up of the Justice Department in Washington. Avery could only hear the Nashville side of the call. He heard the following words: “Don’t worry. Ray is going to plead guilty; there won’t be any evidence put on by the prosecution, there won’t be any evidence that is tested in court—there won’t be a trial.” (p. 200)

    The author also touches on the issue of the Tennessee law in place at the time of Battle’s death. As others have noted, according to the statute, Battle passed away in receipt of Ray’s letters requesting a new trial, and was acting on them at the time of his death; when he died he had dropped his pen on the floor. Ray should have been granted a full trial automatically by the new judge. Not only did this not happen, this part of the law code—Tennessee Code Annotated 17-1-305— was simply ignored upon appeal. (p. 203)

    The last major topic the author deals with is the amazing coincidence of the aliases Ray used in the last year of his life. These were Eric S. Galt, Ramon George Sneyd, Paul Bridgeman, and John Willard. None of the names was fabricated. They were all real people who Ray did not know. All four of them lived within a five-mile radius of each other in Toronto. And they all shared ages and physical attributes that were similar to Ray’s. Ray had been to Montreal once. But there is no recorded information he had been to Toronto prior to the assassination. The two names he used the most were Galt and Sneyd. The former alias was used in America the year before the assassination. The latter was used after the shooting, when Ray fled to Canada and then Europe.

    Complicating this is the fact that when Ray fled to Canada, he had people in direct communication with him at both places he resided at in Toronto. In the first instance, beginning on April 8, 1968, he used the name Paul Bridgeman. About ten days later, he changed locales and used the name Ramon Sneyd. (p. 274) At the first location, Ray got a phone call asking for “Mr. Bridgeman”. At the second location, Ray got a phone call and a visitor. The visitor came calling for “Mr. Sneyd”. He then gave Ray an envelope. Within hours, Ray now paid for his passport, which had been waiting for him under the name of Sneyd, and ordered a commercial flight to Europe (p. 224)

    As the author notes, the excuses that writers like Gerald Posner and Huie use to explain away the above are ludicrous. How did these other people know 1.) Where Ray was staying, and 2.) The specific pseudonyms he was using. And to any objective person, it certainly appears that the second visitor was giving Ray money to get out of Canada and into Europe. Incredibly, neither the FBI nor the HSCA interviewed the landlords, or tracked down the person who brought the envelope. That was done by the deceased researcher and author Philip Melanson.

    Emison has written a credible and important volume on the King case. The author did a lot of valuable interviews and digging into the records of the case. It is a book worth having in one’s personal library.

  • Greg Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention

    Greg Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention

    The sub-title of Professor Poulgrain’s book is “Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles.” In this author’s opinion it is a valuable book because, although it does not deal directly with the 1965 CIA-inspired coup against Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia, it traces the major events and crises that caused that epic slaughter, which is usually labeled the bloodiest CIA coup in history.

    To this day, no one can say for certain how many people perished in the overthrow of Sukarno. The estimates range from 350,000 to a million. But almost everyone who has written about that event agrees that it was the most cleverly disguised coup d’état the Agency ever executed in a foreign country.  It literally took years to even begin to really understand what had happened. Over fifty years later, there is still much to be uncovered about what happened, and why, on September 30, 1965, and how this caused the mass murders that were then enacted all the way into the summer of the next year.

    As former CIA officer Ralph McGehee once said, the Agency very much guarded how it achieved the overthrow of Sukarno. They considered it such a near masterpiece of covert action that they used it as a model to teach certain tactics and strategies. (The Nation, April 11, 1981) In fact, the Agency has so clouded its own role in the twisted affair that to this day there is no single book that comes close to constituting a definitive study of the coup, which is not the case with say, the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala or Mossadegh in Iran.

    In fact, one of the first hints of what really happened in Indonesia in late September of 1965 was almost inadvertently delivered by James Reston in the New York Times.  On June 19, 1966, Reston was trying to defend Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War and the failure of that escalation to achieve its goals.  Therefore, he wrote that this should be balanced by more “hopeful political developments elsewhere in Asia.”  Reston then pointed to the “transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy under General Suharto.”  Reston, of course, was lying about Sukarno being a pro-Chinese communist; he was nothing of the sort. But, as with Patrice Lumumba in Congo, this is what the CIA used to justify the overthrow of his government.  Reston then hinted that such was the case when he wrote, “Washington is careful not to claim any credit for this change…but this does not mean that Washington had nothing to do with it.”  If the reader can comprehend it, Reston’s column was entitled “A Gleam of Light in Asia.”  No comment can underscore the sick inappropriateness of that rubric.

    In his introduction to the book The Silent Slaughter, Bertrand Russell wrote that according to two witnesses he knew, the 7th Fleet was in the waters off the coast of Java at the time, and General Nasution, who led the communist crackdown along with his colleague General Suharto, had a mission in Washington; therefore, the US “was directly involved in the day to day events.”

    On February 12, 1965, the New York Times, almost eight months before the cataclysm, partly explained why the USA was determined to overthrow Sukarno. They wrote that when “Sukarno threatened the Federation of Malaysia, he placed himself in the path of U.S. and British interests to contain communist China. Washington has left active defense of Malaysia to the British Commonwealth…” but seeks to influence Indonesia by aiding her army “against the expected Communist bid for power.” Again, this is another deception. There was no bid for power by the communist party on the archipelago called the PKI.  But the CIA used this specter–first conjured up by CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles–to begin the planning for the coup. 

    And, in fact, that planning may have begun the year before.  Peter Scott in an article for Lobster, (Fall 1990), quoted a letter from a former researcher who had seen a certain letter from a former ambassador who had a conversation with a Dutch intelligence officer assigned to NATO. According to the researcher’s notes, the ambassador’s letter was dated from December of 1964.  It said that Indonesia would soon fall to the west like a rotten apple. Western intelligence agencies would organize a “premature communist coup [which would be] foredoomed to fail, providing a legitimate and welcome opportunity to the army to crush the communists and make Sukarno a prisoner of the army’s goodwill.”

    According to several writers, in the early spring of 1965, the Agency sent in the so-called first team.  And according to at least one author–Donald Freed–David Phillips was part of this advance team.  One of the things they did was to organize an informal alliance of conservative generals–led by Nasution and Suharto among others. It eventually numbered over two dozen. As the months went by, it was formally called the Council of Generals. It was this body that reportedly plotted against Sukarno. Part of the point of this subterfuge was to try and provoke a response by the PKI.  In anticipation of that response, Bradley Simpson has written, “the CIA organized covert operations and propaganda efforts for the better part of a year.” As he also notes, the CIA had a role in encouraging and aiding the mass killings of PKI supporters through Moslem groups, youth gangs, and other anti communist forces. (For a gripping recreation of how this was done locally, see the acclaimed documentary film The Act of Killing)

    But Washington’s covert aid was consciously kept as secret as possible, since it would have provided a great propaganda boon to Sukarno in reining in the bloody chaos that was consuming his country. In the face of the massacres, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow recommended a policy of silence by the White House. But secretly the CIA was sending cash, small arms and communications equipment to aid the slaughter, since Nasution and Suharto had requested them. If that wasn’t enough, the American Embassy was furnishing the army with lists of PKI members. (See Monthly Review, December 2015)

    After placing Sukarno under house arrest, the Council of Generals eventually took complete power in 1966. Once the PKI was liquidated, the Council sold off their fabulously rich country to American and European imperialists. Suharto, for one example, became a billionaire; while the great mass of Indonesians lived in brutal, grinding poverty.

    As I said, I am not going to attempt to elucidate in any serious detail the chilling events that occurred in September and October of 1965 in Indonesia.  Authors who have studied it for years still have yet to convincingly explicate all of its complications. And that is not Poulgrain’s aim either.  What his book does is explain the long back-story as to why the horror of 1965 happened.  And it does so mainly through the figure of Allen Dulles.

     II

    In narrating this discouraging, sometimes depressing, tragic epic, it is imperative to understand that it was Sukarno who convened the first conference of non-aligned nations in Indonesia in 1955, which was actually arranged by his foreign minister and held in Bandung. For Sukarno, the term “non-aligned” meant just that.  These were nations that did not want to commit themselves one way or the other to the Cold War competition between the U.S. and Russia. They wanted to be neutral and to stay neutral.  They also wanted to be free to accept aid from both superpowers without the acceptance showing a commitment to Moscow or Washington. 

    This was not satisfactory with the Eisenhower administration, especially with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles.  Yet the irony is that Sukarno and many of his allies like Nasser of Egypt staged the conference for the specific reason that they did not trust the Dulles brothers.  (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Non-Aligned World, p. 3)  One could understand that readily after watching what happened in Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 1954. Foster Dulles’s State Department issued a paper calling Sukarno’s conference and the growing non-aligned movement, “one of the most dangerous political trends of the fifties.” (ibid, p. 6) The Secretary seriously contemplated staging a shadow Bandung conference with conservative, sympathetic American allied nations. (ibid, p. 9)  In a speech Foster Dulles gave in Iowa in 1956, he called neutrality in the Cold War a false pretense and he said he had constructed his string of alliances across the world, such as SEATO, the Baghdad Pact, to eliminate neutrals. Because of this, Allen Dulles began secretly funding the Masjumi Muslim party to the tune of a million dollars in one year. In fact, the Church Committee did find some evidence that the CIA may have been behind the assassination attempt of Sukarno in 1957. (op. cit. Scott)

    This was one point of contention between Sukarno and the Eisenhower administration. Another one was the dispute between the Netherlands and Sukarno over the territory of West Irian (also called Irian Java, West Papua and West New Guinea). This was part of an island territory that the Dutch maintained control of after Indonesia won its independence a few years after World War II. As Rakove notes, although Foster Dulles was neutral about this dispute in public, privately he did not want to give the territory over to Sukarno. (p. 15)

    Kennedy and Sukarno meet at the White House

    The first researcher to fully integrate this dispute over West Irian into a comprehensive essay on the Indonesia overthrow of 1965 was Lisa Pease.  She did this in her landmark essay entitled “JFK, Indonesia, CIA and Freeport Sulphur.”  That scintillating essay was first published in the May/June 1996 issue of Probe magazine.  It was Part Two of her series on the huge mining company Freeport Sulphur, today called Freeport McMoran. And although some have said that her essays are in the book The Assassinations, they are not. One has to purchase the Probe CD to read that excellent series. (Oddly, Poulgrain does not source Lisa’s work in his notes or bibliography.)

    In her essay, Lisa was one of the first to point out the importance of the Ertsberg lode and how it figured into the dispute between the Dutch and Sukarno. And further, how it later figured into the overthrow of Sukarno’s government, which he called a “guided democracy.” 

    In 1936 a Dutch geologist named J. J. Dozy discovered two enormous mineral deposits in West Irian.  One was called the Ertsberg and the other, only two kilometers away, was called the Grasberg.  The former was a mountain, the latter an elevated meadow.  (Poulgrain, p. 6) The political ramifications of this find have extended over the decades to this very day because the Dozy report was both kept hidden and also deliberately distorted.  One of the reasons for this is that Dozy discovered that the concentration of gold ore at Ertsberg was twice as rich as the wealthiest gold mine in the world at that time, which was located in South Africa. But further, the same gold ore at the Grasberg appeared to be even richer than the Ertsberg. (Ibid, pgs. 6,7)

    Needless to say, this discovery significantly altered the geopolitical importance of Indonesia—especially for the so-called Power Elite. A central reason for this was that one of the main architects of the Dozy expedition was Allen Dulles through his law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. (Poulgrain, p. 7)  Dozy was instructed not to formally announce the results of his findings for the simple reason that the Dutch control of West Irian was weak.  But further, the consortium of companies that arranged and financed the three-man expedition was a dual Dutch/American operation. On the American side, the two partners were two divisions of the Rockefeller-controlled petroleum colossus, Standard Oil. Since Sullivan and Cromwell organized the expedition, it was Standard that had a 60% controlling interest in the enterprise. (ibid, p. 17)

    As the author notes, in its decades long struggle to hang on to West Irian, the Dutch never made public the true facts of what Dozy’s expedition had discovered. But also, the American side of the consortium never accepted the Dutch offer to begin to actually break ground and exploit the mining potential of both areas. As Poulgrain postulates, the Ertsberg and Grasberg were at high elevations (about 14,000 feet) and in difficult locations for mining operations.  The Dutch did not have the wherewithal at the time to pull off such an engineering feat. In fact, as Lisa Pease points out, when Freeport Sulphur finally did break ground, they had to go to Bechtel Corporation to construct the engineering aspects of the mining.

    The Dulles brothers

    In a subsequent report about the expedition that was technical in nature, the gold potential of the Ertsberg was greatly discounted, while its copper content and remoteness was played up. (ibid, p. 24)  With this camouflage in place, the next objective for Sullivan and Cromwell was to force the Dutch out of the deal.  By refusing to cooperate with them on the mining engineering, Standard was attempting to do just that.

    In 1962, a second expedition ascended the Ertsberg. This was on the occasion of Sukarno and Indonesia taking control of the area.  This second mission actually discovered a notebook deliberately left behind by Dozy but again, the content of this notebook was kept shrouded in secrecy. In fact, Dozy lied to Poulgrain about it being returned to him. (p. 31)  Even at this late date, both Dozy and Freeport Sulphur’s geologist Forbes Wilson continued to discount the gold and silver deposits there and to exalt the copper deposits. Dozy’s secret report said that the gold at Ertsberg amounted to 15 grains per ton. In reality it was 15 grams per ton, which makes for a large difference. (ibid, p. 37)

    Around this time, something else was afoot. In interviews Poulgrain did with two Indonesian officials, they both revealed that secret money began to be siphoned to the Indonesian government. It was earmarked for the struggle with the Dutch over West Irian.  The funds were from American sources. (p. 33)  As Standard did not want to help the Dutch mine the area, the Americans did not want the Dutch to take permanent control of West Irian. Standard Oil could find its own partners and the mining company Freeport Sulphur was another Rockefeller-controlled company.

    III

    One of the most interesting parts of the book is the chapter concerning John Kennedy’s relationship with United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. Until reading Poulgrain, much of what most observers knew about this relationship was based upon the pair’s interplay in the monumental Congo crisis. Author Richard Mahoney had made that conflict the basis for his milestone book on Kennedy, JFK: Ordeal in Africa.  Kennedy had developed a strong interest in the issues of colonialism and Africa while he was in the Senate. His stance on the two was quite different than the Eisenhower administration’s, for he did not see the emerging countries of the Third World through the “with us or against us” lens that the administration did. For instance, he understood why Nasser did not join the Baghdad Pact.  And Kennedy looked at Foster Dulles’ reaction to this–his attempt to isolate Nasser, favoring Saudi Arabia, and pulling out of the Aswan Dam project–with disdain, since, for one thing, it threw Nasser into the arms of the Russians to get funding for the dam. But Kennedy also thought that America should actually favor someone like Nasser who was more of a socialist/secularist rather than the Saudis who were more Moslem fundamentalists. (See Philip Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans, p. 10ff)

    Dag Hammarskjold was a Swedish economist who worked on the Marshall Plan for Europe. He later became chair of the Swedish delegation to the UN General Assembly.  In 1953 he was elected Secretary General of that body.  Kennedy had nothing but respect and admiration for Hammarskjold.  Upon his death in 1961, he called him the greatest statesman of the 20th century.  As Mahoney pointed out at length and in depth, the two men had much in common during the Congo crisis, and Hammarskjold’s death in a suspicious plane crash in 1961 seemed to galvanize Kennedy on that front.  He was determined to back the followers of Patrice Lumumba and to prevent the mineral rich province of Katanga from splitting off from the country.  He backed a UN military action to prevent the latter. Kennedy’s Congo policy was drastically altered after his death.

    What Poulgrain adds to this equation is that Kennedy and Hammarskjold were also working on a plan for Indonesia. (p. 77)  In interviews the author did with Hammarskjold’s friend and colleague at the UN, the late George Ivan Smith, Smith told Poulgrain that JFK and Hammarskjold were discussing a solution to the West Irian crisis; the Netherlands wanted to hang onto the territory, while Sukarno thought it should be part of Indonesia. Considering the contents of the Dozy report, one can understand the motivation of the Dutch.  

    But further, Smith revealed that those discussions included a back channel by Kennedy to former president Harry Truman. (ibid)  In fact, Truman was well informed enough about the progress that upon hearing of Hammarskjold’s plane crash, he commented: “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him.  Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him.’”  When asked to develop that point, Truman replied with, “That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter. Draw your own conclusions.” (ibid, p. 78)  In itself, this is remarkable, but it is even more so when coupled with Truman’s famous editorial in the Washington Post a month after Kennedy’s assassination. That column was about how the CIA had strayed too far from what Truman imagined its original mission was. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed,  pgs. 378-79) With this new revelation about Indonesia, it now becomes apparent that Truman knew something–and if the Warren Commission had been a true fact finding body, which it was not, he would have been a witness before  it.

    As readers of the second edition of Destiny Betrayed know, Allen Dulles visited Truman in April of 1964.  Although Dulles was sitting on the Commission at the time, the visit was not formally related to that body. Dulles was there to try and get Truman to retract his editorial about the CIA becoming a rogue agency.  By the end of the conversation, it had become apparent that the former CIA director suspected that Truman had written the column because he felt the Agency was involved in the JFK murder. (ibid, pgs. 379-81)

    Poulgrain, using Susan Williams’s book Who Killed Hammarskjold?, adduces evidence that Dulles was involved with the murder of Hammarskjold. During the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Desmond Tutu discovered documents concerning a covert project called Operation Celeste. This appears to be a plan to murder the UN Secretary General and there were records of communications from Dulles in the file. The proposed plot machinations included planting a small bomb to disable the outside steering mechanism.  One of the communications stated that the UN had become troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjold should be removed. Dulles agreed and “has promised full cooperation from his people…” (Poulgrain, p. 74)  And as Williams pointed out, there were two CIA planes on the same runway Hammarskjold was supposed to land on that night. Congruent with this, Dulles had also forwarded information describing the plane the Secretary General would be traveling on and the date of his arrival.  Smith, needless to day, told Poulgrain that he thought Hammarskjold was murdered.

    There was one other project Kennedy was working on with Hammarskjold.  This was something called OPEX.  Hammarskjold was determined to help colonized peoples free themselves, but as an economist, he was also going to try and aid their development once they were free of colonialism. OPEX was a UN group that would send professionals into newly freed states to aid their development–not as advisors, but as adjuncts to the new governments. (ibid, p. 80) Poulgrain writes that this was the concept Dag had in mind for West Irian.  He was planning on turning over the territory to the natives on the island called Papuans. After Dag’s death, Kennedy had to soldier both the Congo and Indonesia crises more or less alone.

    In this author’s opinion, the Hammarskjold assassination (I will not call it a plane crash anymore) has been gravely overlooked by JFK researchers and with the work of Williams, Poulgrain, and Lisa Pease, it should not be. (https://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/16/the-mysterious-death-of-a-un-hero/)  Dag’s assassination, and the Congo crisis, are of key importance in the saga of John F. Kennedy’s career and his murder.

    IV

    Allen Dulles had been working the Indonesia terrain with covert operations for six years when Kennedy became president. It is strongly suspected that the Agency was behind the use of the Moslem extremists Darul Islam in an attempt to assassinate Sukarno in 1957. As Poulgrain notes, it is important to understand that Darul Islam later morphed into Jemmah Islamiah, the terrorist group linked to the Bali bombing of 2002. (p. 86) In other words, the work of the Dulles brothers in backing Saudi Arabia against Nasser, and Darul Islam against Sukarno, had sinister and pernicious future consequences.

    In his work on the background of Allen Dulles, Poulgrain found that in working for the State Department in 1920, one of his functions was to monitor the progress of the Russian Civil War. One reason for this was American interest (read Standard Oil) in the great oil fields at Baku. (ibid, p. 97)  It was here that Dulles met Sergius Alexander Von Mohrenschildt. Sergius was a director of the Nobel family oil fields in Baku, and he was also modernizing the Russian army. Sergius was the father of George DeMohrenschildt.  At the time, George and his mother were living in Baku at the domicile of Sergius. George’s brother Dimitri was in the Russian navy and would soon emigrate (actually escape) to the United States.

    Since Sergius was a White Russian, he was arrested by the Reds but he escaped to Poland with his wife and George.  They lived on a large estate in Poland, but George’s mother died soon after the move. George served in the Polish cavalry for a period of 18 months.  He then went to Belgium for university studies. (p 98)  In 1938, like his brother, George also emigrated to the U.S. He changed his name by dropping the Von and changing it to “de.”

    Standard Oil had targeted the petroleum in the Dutch East Indies since the twenties. They even established a phony Dutch front company to do so. But it was not until 1928 when Standard got concessions for exploration from the Netherlands. Allen Dulles worked on this by telling the Dutch they might lose everything to an outside force, like Japan, because their hold of the archipelago was tenuous.

    During World War II, Dulles arranged for Standard Oil to sell petroleum to Vichy France, effectively selling it to the Germans and that case involved George DeMohrenschildt. (p. 110)  In 1938, George lived with Dimitri on Park Avenue in New York.  It is there that he met Mrs. Bouvier, the mother of Jackie Kennedy.

    The International Cooperation Administration (ICA) was frequently used for CIA cover duties. It was established by Allen and his brother in 1955.  DeMohrenschildt worked for this unit when he went to Yugoslavia as an oil and gas specialist. His job was to recruit workers for a job in Egypt using American equipment.

    Poulgrain makes the case that because of some of his controversial work for Standard Oil  (like with Vichy France), Dulles got DeMohrenschildt out of the country and working for another Rockefeller oil subsidiary called Humble Oil.  He makes a circumstantial case that George was transferred to West Irian in the Dutch East Indies to work on Standard’s oil drilling there. It turned out that in addition to the Ertsberg and Grasberg, West Irian was the home of what turned out to be the largest oil deposit in all of New Guinea. (p. 121)  It was called the Vogelkop, and again, the Dutch tried to keep this hidden. Humble Oil did some preliminary drilling and thought the prospects were promising.  But as Poulgrain shows, this was kept a secret among the Power Elite.  Like the Ertsberg and Grasberg, the idea was to not let Sukarno know about these deposits. In fact, the author makes the case that not even Kennedy knew about them; it puzzled him that the Dutch would want to hang on to what he thought was such a desolate area as West Irian.

    V

    Poulgrain has written a book about the CIA-aided rebellion of the Outer Islands military forces against Sukarno and the central government located at Jakarta.  I have not read the book yet, but he incorporates some of that work into his chapter on the rebellion. The ostensible cause of the uprising was the fact that, for example the island of Sumatra was responsible for about 70% of GDP, but only got about 30% of it back in revenues. In fact Mohammad Hatta, who was Sukarno’s second in command when Indonesia was set free in 1949, resigned from the government in late 1956 over this issue.

    Another perceived problem for the military was the growing influence of the PKI.  Which by 1955 was the fourth largest party in Indonesia. (p. 142)  Sukarno did not really perceive the party as being communists and thought they were more nationalists; this is what he told President Kennedy later. But what accented this for Allen Dulles was Sukarno’s turn toward what he called Guided Democracy. This amounted to taking advice from certain groups in society like veterans and laborers. (p. 148) which to Dulles, looked like a class-oriented government, and not, as he preferred, from the Power Elite down.

    Guy Pauker, a professor at Berkeley and an expert of Southeast Asia, was a consultant for Dulles on Indonesia.  He recommended using the Outer Island dispute to play up the threat of the PKI. (p. 152)  The problem for Allen Dulles was John Allison who was the American ambassador in Jakarta.  He did not see the PKI as a real threat to take over and he did not see Sukarno as a communist or even a pinko. The problem was that many of his reports never got through to John Foster Dulles. In fact, Allen Dulles had installed his man at a new position called the Bureau of Research and Intelligence at State. This is where the directives inside the department came to support the rebellion (p. 153) and there was a working group set up inside this agency that included navy admiral Arleigh Burke that was in direct communication with Sullivan and Cromwell. (p. 155)  Finally Allen Dulles sent a friend and colleague in the Agency named Al Ulmer to visit Jakarta.  He came back and told Foster Dulles that Allison was soft on communism. Allison was now removed as ambassador and sent to Czechoslovakia.  (p. 159)

    Allison was removed in January of 1958. The rebellion began in February.  The story of the rebellion, and its failure, was well told in the book Subversion as Foreign Policy back in 1995.  Poulgrain has clearly read that book, as he refers to it often. But his thesis is different and revisionist.  He argues that Allen Dulles never really wanted the rebellion to succeed for the simple reason that the Dutch still controlled West Irian.  His plan was to have Indonesia take control of West Irian first, and then dislodge Sukarno and decimate the PKI. For that to happen, the main tool would be the army. Dulles felt the army was not a unified force at this time, as exemplified by the dissidents on the outer islands.  Therefore, he would use the rebellion to centralize the army in Jakarta. Once that was done, the possibility of dislodging the charismatic Sukarno was much stronger but only after West Irian was part of Indonesia.

    Poulgrain argues this thesis vigorously with some interesting points that have either been ignored or which he dug up on his own. For instance, Dulles helped General Nasution (who led the counter attack for Sukarno) recover a huge weapons drop originally meant for the rebels. (p. 148)  Also, there was never any serious discussion about rescuing American personnel. Third, a CIA officer named Sterling Cottrell called Nasution four times in one night.  The reason? To be sure he was aware that there was an arms drop for him at Pekanbaru airfield on Sumatra. (p. 204)  Dulles then camouflaged this to the National Security Council by saying the arms were delivered by an unknown third country.

    But further, after the rebellion was defeated, Dulles kept supplying it at a low level even though it had no chance of success. Poulgrain argues that the aim of this was to 1) Maintain martial law, which Sukarno had declared at the outbreak; and 2) Stop any elections from being held so the PKI could not increase its power in the government.

    VI

    Joseph Luns

    In January of 1961, Nasution was in Moscow reviewing a large arms purchase from the Russians. The purchase included bombers, fighters, torpedo boats, submarines, warships and cruisers. (p. 213)  These were to be used in an amphibious assault against the Dutch on West Irian. At the same time, Nasution was talking to Australia who owned the eastern part of New Guinea. He and Sukarno wanted Australia to stay neutral in the coming conflict which they agreed to do. And finally to round off the triangular arrangements, Nasution wires Washington that there is nothing more to his visit to Moscow than an arms deal and he has no sympathies towards the Soviets. (p. 215)

    Dutch foreign minister Joseph Luns visited Washington in April of 1961. He told President Kennedy that Foster Dulles had told him that the U.S. would support the Netherlands if it came to a military confrontation. Kennedy clearly was not sympathetic to this at all.  As stated previously, he could not understand why the Dutch were so determined to maintain such a faraway and desolate island. Luns, of course, was not going to tell him about the Dozy mission and what they found there. (p. 219)

    Luns later proposed a trusteeship that would be administered by the Netherlands. Kennedy and Hammarskjold had discussed a genuine trusteeship, one that would be administered by a neutral third party. They would then allow the Papuans to vote on what they wanted in a referendum. (p. 220)  In fact, Kennedy wanted Hammarskjold to handle the issue. But when the Secretary was killed in September of 1961, the issue fell to him.

    In November of 1961, an event occurred which worked against the trusteeship/referendum concept. Nelson Rockefeller’s son Michael disappeared off the coast of New Guinea. His body was never found after his boat overturned. Although he was collecting primitive art artifacts, Michael was in direct contact with a Standard Oil exploration team. They started a rumor that Papuan cannibals had eaten him. (p. 223)  Since the story was front-page news, it seriously damaged the image of the Papuans.

    Kennedy now wrote Sukarno and told him to hold off on any military attack but Sukarno did call for a general mobilization and launched a small torpedo boat attack, which was met by two Dutch destroyers.  How did they know this was coming?  In a preview of his role in the future, General Suharto relayed the information to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The military wanted their NATO ally, the Dutch, to be prepared.  (p. 232)

    Kennedy now arranged a conference in New York in which the U.S. would moderate between the two sides. The two representatives for the U.S. were veteran diplomat Ellsworth Bunker and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.  Luns later reported on how vociferous the U.S. was in favor of Sukarno, especially Robert Kennedy.

    Click image to see larger version

    Two notes should be added about the New York Agreement. First, President Kennedy insisted on a clause maintaining a plebiscite for the Papuans in 1969. At that time, they would choose to be independent or stay a part of Indonesia.  Since Suharto had taken control of Indonesia by then and signed a deal with Freeport Sulphur in 1967, this vote turned out to be a military-controlled sham. Second, although Indonesia was not supposed to take over the territory until 1964, they actually took control in May of 1963. This may have been to ensure that the official lease on the Ertsberg expired when it was outside of Dutch control. This was probably urged on by the numerous American allies and CIA agents inside Sukarno’s entourage, like Suharto and diplomat and economist Adam Malik, a highly paid CIA agent.

    After the New York Agreement was signed, Kennedy sent out memos to every relevant agency of  government. He wanted a full-court press in sending as much developmental aid as possible to Sukarno. (p. 236)  He wanted the economy stabilized and growing in order to keep Sukarno friendly with the west.

    A painting of Suharto

    But these good relations were short-circuited by Sukarno’s enemies in government, in Congress, and in the UK. Specifically, these included Dulles’ friend General Lucius Clay and Representative Gerald Ford.  They used Sukarno’s confrontation with the British over the creation of the state of Malaysia to begin to criticize Sukarno over his belligerence with our British friends. Sukarno now began to expel and expropriate foreign businesses, including Standard Oil’s Caltex and Stanvac. Kennedy insisted that they stay, but they negotiate profit sharing deals with Sukarno on a 60/40 basis favoring Indonesia.  Kennedy sent two trade representatives to successfully negotiate the deal. (p. 242)  In comparison, after Suharto, the split Freeport McMoran has with Indonesia today is reportedly 90/10 in Freeport’s favor. The reader can only imagine what Sukarno could have done for the people of Indonesia with the tens of billions he would have gotten in a 60/40 split over the Ertsberg and Grasberg mines.

    The Malaysian confrontation started riots in Jakarta at the British embassy. Kennedy insisted that this should not influence congressional approval over how much aid should go to Sukarno. (p. 244)  But it did and the aid package started to be pecked apart. Sukarno now told the American ambassador in Jakarta, Howard Jones, that he thought the CIA was out to topple his regime. To try and save the situation, Kennedy and Sukarno arranged a state visit for the president to Jakarta in 1964.  One of Kennedy’s goals was to wind down the tensions between Malaysia and Indonesia. In fact, he stated, why stop aid to Indonesia ”because of its attitude toward Malaysia, when three months from now it may or may not be the same as it is today?” (p. 247)

    Kennedy, of course, never got to visit Indonesia or halt the Malaysian crisis. Without Kennedy’s help, Sukarno’s prediction to Jones about the CIA toppling him came true. Sukarno said about JFK’s murder: “Kennedy was killed precisely to prevent him from visiting Indonesia.”

    Greg Poulgrain has written a provocative revisionist history of why the epochal coup in Indonesia happened as it did in 1965.  Along the way he has enlightened us on the crucial figures of Allen Dulles, Sukarno, Dag Hammarskjold and John Kennedy and how they played with and against each other and how this nexus led to a horrible tragedy.