Kennedys and King Test host626

Author: James DiEugenio

  • The Schlesinger Memo: JFK v CIA

    The Schlesinger Memo: JFK v CIA

    The Schlesinger Memo: JFK v CIA

    by James DiEugenio

     

    As everyone who studies the presidency of John F. Kennedy knows, the seminal moment in his education about the treacherous ways of Washington occurred rather early.  It was in April of 1961 with his ill-fated decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. As many commentators have said, the president had no real enthusiasm about this operation.  And even CIA Director Allen Dulles admitted as much. (Destiny Betrayed, by James DiEugenio, second edition, p. 36) When White House advisor Arthur Schlesinger asked the president what he thought about the plans for the operation, Kennedy pithily replied that he thought about it as little as possible. (ibid)

    Due to this reluctance, the CIA–in the persons of Dulles and Director of Plans Dick Bissell–had to entice Kennedy into going along with their concept. Therefore, they told him that Fidel Castro’s popularity was diminishing, that only 20 % of the public supported him, and that many native Cubans thought his regime would soon fall. The capper was this: if a rebellion would begin, the vast majority of the militia units would defect. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 294-95)

    But even with that, Kennedy decided to put the decision up for a vote of his advisors. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the scene in his memoir. As Kennedy went around the table, only one person dissented from approval.  And that person was not even a member of the administration–it was  Senator William Fulbright. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect, pp.25-27) But everyone else, the Joint Chiefs, members of the National Security Council, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and McNamara himself, all endorsed it. In fact, McNamara had passed a note to Kennedy saying that the Pentagon predicted that, even if the attack did not succeed, it would lead to Castro’s downfall.

    Needless to say, everyone but Fulbright was wrong. But what made it even worse was this: the CIA had deceived Kennedy.  The truth was that Dulles and Bissell knew the operation would not succeed. This was first discovered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy as part of the White House inquiry into the debacle helmed by General Maxwell Taylor.  In his interrogation of Allen Dulles, RFK was simply stupefied at some of the answers to his questions.  For instance, if the initial assault failed, the fallback plan was for the brigade to resort to guerilla tactics.  The problem with this was that when the AG went to one of the Cubans involved in the training for the operation, Manolo Ray, he said they had no training at all in those kinds of maneuvers. But further to have resorted to that, the brigade would have had to retreat into the hills, which were about 80 miles away through swampland. (Michael Morrisey, “The Bay of Pigs Revisited,” at Mary Ferrell Foundation)

    From his experience questioning Dulles, Bobby Kennedy suspected his brother had been snookered.  He decided that Dulles had to go.  So he consulted with his father, Joseph Kennedy, and discovered that Robert Lovett and David Bruce, two scions of the Eastern Establishment, had tried to dispose of Dulles years earlier. RFK brought in Lovett to join him to talk about what Dulles had done both to the Agency in general, and to him personally regarding the Bay of Pigs. (DiEugenio, pp. 48-50). President Kennedy not only terminated Dulles, but also Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell.

    II

    Bobby Kennedy was correct about the subterfuge. Many years later scholar Lucien S. Vandenbroucke discovered notes that Dulles had made concerning an article that he was going to pen for Harper’s about the Bay of Pigs.  It turns out that Dulles understood that the project was fey.  But what he was banking on was that Kennedy would intervene with American might rather than face a humiliating defeat. (Diplomatic History, Fall, 1984)  When Vandenbroucke published the article, Bissell replied in a letter.  The architect of the plan said that he and Dulles, “had allowed Kennedy to persist in misunderstanding about the nature of the Cuban operation.”

    It’s clear that the president was convinced by his brother and Lovett.  He said as much to his longtime friend Paul Fay. He confided that, when he first came into office, he was shocked at what poor judgment the military had shown. Being a former Navy man, as was Fay, he looked up to high officers. He assumed they had earned their stature by wise judgment and honest achievement. He now thought he was wrong. And he would not instinctively follow their advice in the future. Alluding to the Bay of Pigs, he said:

    They wanted a fight and probably calculated that if we committed ourselves part way and started to lose, I would give the OK to pour in what was needed. (Paul Fay, The Pleasure of His Company, p. 189)

    At this point we should note that Schlesinger wrote that it was Dulles’ assurances that the brigade could go guerilla that ultimately convinced Kennedy to put the operation to a vote. (A Thousand Days, p.257) It is also through Schlesinger that we know about the Lovett-Bruce report, since he found it among Robert Kennedy’s papers when he was writing his biography of RFK.

    This is all pertinent to the complete declassification of the 16-page Schlesinger memo that he wrote up for JFK in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. As David Talbot wrote in his book about Allen Dulles, Schlesinger saw the capsizing of that operation as an opportunity to “bring the CIA under presidential control, which neither Truman nor Eisenhower had been able to do.” (The Devil’s Chessboard, p.438) As a former OSS operative, Schlesinger thought he was the man to provide Kennedy with the plan to do so.

    Schlesinger decided to strike while the iron was hot. He wanted to propose something before any kind of official committee loyal to Dulles performed an apologia. As he wrote to Kennedy in the aftermath of the disaster, “It is important, in my judgment, to take CIA away from the Club.”  (Ibid) In that regard, Schlesinger had reservations about Taylor managing the White House inquiry into the operation.  To him, he was not the kind of crusader who would capitalize on the president’s initial response to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces.” (Talbot, p. 439)

    Although Kennedy stayed with Taylor for the analysis of what had gone wrong, Schlesinger convinced the president that he was the right choice to pen a reorganization plan for the Agency. He told JFK that he served in the OSS during the war, and had been a CIA consultant since.  He would not call himself a professional, but an experienced amateur. (ibid)

    According to David Talbot, Schlesinger took the job quite seriously.  He consulted with senate liberals like George McGovern, and a mysterious CIA whistle-blower who told him, “The Central Intelligence Agency is sick.” He also collected critiques from left-of-center journals like The Nation and The New Republic.  He handed the memo to the president on June 30th.  Before President Trump’s executive order, we only had the memorandum in partly censored from. We now have the whole memo, unredacted.

    III

    Schlesinger began his statement by saying that the CIA had simply been caught in too many overseas disasters. They had used up their allowed quota in that area. He then wrote that the problem as he saw it was “the autonomy with which the Agency has been permitted to operate.”  He then got more specific as to the causes:

    1. An inadequate doctrine of clandestine operations 
    2. An inadequate conception of the relationship between operations and policy
    3. An inadequate conception of the relationship between operations and intelligence.

    Schlesinger said that this autonomy, and the resultant three shortcomings, were the result of lack of input from the State Department.

    When the CIA began the State Department looked on this new venture with suspicion and renounced the opportunity to seize firm control of CIA operations. It did not, for example, try to establish any effective system of clearance for CIA activities; and some ambassadors frankly preferred not to know what CIA was up to in their countries. (p. 2)

    He then noted that after 1953, when the Director of CIA—Allen Dulles– and Secretary of State—John Foster Dulles– were brothers, this made the problem even worse. (This was, if anything, an understatement.) As a result, the CIA began to grow in stature and reach. CIA paid better and also Allen Dulles had protected his employees from McCarthy’s witch hunts.  This resulted in the employment and assignment of several capable and independent-minded employees. Thus began the more active role the CIA played in foreign policy.

    Schlesinger now comments that by the time State realized just how potent the CIA had become, the cat was more or less out of the bag. The CIA had assumed control over clandestine intelligence collection and operations, and even in the realms of political reporting and diplomatic conduct. (p. 2) Therefore with this non-supervision, the CIA developed a set of parallel functions to State and even Defense.  That is it had its own political desks, and “ in effect, its own foreign services”. Schlesinger added “it even has its own air force.” (p. 3). With its large budget, “The contemporary CIA possesses many of the characteristics of a state within a state.” (ibid)

    This power had been augmented by the fact that “there is no doctrine governing our conduct of clandestine operations.”(p. 3). As a result, the CIA has used the standard that if the communists do it, then we must do it, a sort of “fighting fire with fire” ethos. At this point, Schlesinger observed that those in power have not thought through this dilemma of how to maintain an open society alongside covert activities. Since America maintained freedom of speech and press, they could comment on the covert actions of the CIA.  He now stated that covert activity was allowable when it did not corrupt the principles of a free society.

    Schlesinger categorized some areas of CIA activity and to its relationship to the problem he had outlined. Going up the ladder from intelligence collection, to espionage, to covert action.  The last he found most objectionable.  And he cogently wrote that such operations which relied 

    …on the suppression of news, of lying to congressmen and journalists, and on the deception of the electorate should be undertaken only when the crisis is so considerable that the gains really seem to outweigh the disadvantages.

    The author then said, these problems are co-existent with the size of the operation.  (As this writer would comment, obviously the Bay of Pigs would be a prime example of this.)  Schlesinger warned that before such an operation is launched the case for its overwhelming necessity must be made. (p. 4). 

    IV

    Schlesinger went on to observe that the above was not the only consideration. Another important aspect was that CIA activities should be “subordinate to US foreign policy.” Which they had not been. (p. 5) And this could be a problem at any level of Agency activity, including recruiting double agents. Because the proposed target might be leading the CIA into a trap. And since the Agency does these things by itself, the ramifications of failure are a blow to the State Department, who were unsuspecting. Schlesinger argued that State, along with the ambassador,  should be informed of the possible approach and they should be able to measure the risks and rewards, and hold ultimate veto power over the operation. (p. 5)

    Schlesinger now addressed a problem he himself encountered during the Bay of Pigs operation. Namely, that State had not cleared and did not even know who many of the operatives were. And in that operation, the CIA recruited many Cuban exiles of questionable character. (p. 6). In this memo, he refers to his experience of going down to Florida at Kennedy’s request and observing that representatives of the Cuban Revolutionary Council had been detained by Operation Forty operatives, a group of thugs with their own secret agenda who were running parallel to the main operation. This might be the first time the rubric had been used in White House memoranda. Schlesinger implies that these types of men would never have been cleared by State. (For a fuller discussion of what Schlesinger knew about Operation Forty, see DiEugenio, pp. 50-52)

    Since the CIA considered itself more or less independent of State, the latter did not find itself aware of many covert actions until they were about to be launched. Therefore this gives these projects their own momentum of inevitability. This makes the advocate appear tough and realistic and the man with reservations legalistic and soft. (p. 7). The inescapable outcome is that the CIA was creating policy. Yet this was something that Allen Dulles himself said at the inception of the Agency should not be done: “The Central Intelligence Agency should have nothing to do with policy.” (p. 7). Here, Schlesinger mentioned in passing the attempted overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958, which was exposed as a CIA operation. Schlesinger strongly urged that this system be revised so that State can exercise control over covert actions which impact their policy.

    Schlesinger now addressed an issue that had been partly censored before the Trump order.  It is a subject he called “The Controlled American Source”. Today we call it the use of CIA employees acting under State Department cover, many of them in foreign embassies with diplomatic titles. Schlesinger pointed out that the Agency has nearly as many employees overseas under these covers as actual State Department employees. (p. 7) Again this was something Dulles had warned against.  In the Dulles-Correa-Jackson report of 1948, the authors wrote that this practice should be kept at a minimum and the CIA should find its own covers to lessen reliance on State. The reverse had happened. And at some embassies, in certain sections, the number of CIA people outnumbered the actual State Department employees. (p. 8). And at times the higher-up CIA people advocate for different policies than State;  Schlesinger mentioned Laos as an example. What made it worse was that these CIA people had access to the local presidents and/or prime ministers.

    The memo also mentions Paris as another example of this trend. There were 128 CIA people in that embassy and the Agency occupied the top floor of the building. They tried to dominate conversations with certain important political personalities. (p. 8). So far from weening itself off of this usage, the Agency was now committed to it for overseas cover. Schlesinger noted the obvious dangers in all this and strongly recommended it be curtailed. (p. 9)

    V

    Kennedy’s advisor now turned to the subject of paramilitary warfare. He began by saying, “There is almost no CIA function more peculiarly dependent on the political context than paramilitary warfare.”(p. 9) Schlesinger warned of a situation that Kennedy was familiar with: when the opposition has the support of the populace, it is much more difficult to defeat. (p. 10) So Schlesinger pointed out that this kind of low-level fighting needed a political goal for it to be successful.  And he quoted a leader familiar with all this, Mao, to back up this idea. Schlesinger concluded that this type of warfare “cannot be considered as primarily a military weapon.  It is primarily a political weapon….” (ibid)

    He then pointed out how the British model for policy control worked.  There, they kept “clandestine activity under strict Foreign Office control.” (p. 11) He then recommended this system for adaptation in the USA.  He warned JFK about the problem that State might be reluctant to do so.  He wrote that they had to overcome “inbred habits of diffusion, negativism and delay and to take a firm and purposeful grip on the situation.” (p. 12) He also pointed out that in the British system, clandestine collection of intelligence is done by the intel service. But the analysis and estimating part was in the Foreign Office. In America, the CIA did both.

    Schlesinger said that it was Dulles himself who argued for this method back in 1947.  Dulles said that facts should not be blinded by policy. The presidential advisor countered with the argument that if one is too much in favor of a covert action, one will select intelligence to support that operation. Which we have seen, and as Schlesinger wrote, was very much the case with the Bay of Pigs project. What was needed was an analysis by a joint group of authorities familiar with the aim of the project but not directly involved with it.

    In conclusion, Schlesinger states that what he was proposing was “a fairly drastic rearrangement of our present intelligence set-up.” (p. 14) He was also pleading for a stronger role for the State Department. He even suggested changing the name from CIA to National Information Service. (p. 15) And each and every covert activity would need to be cleared in advance by the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Intelligence. (p. 15). He also suggested changing the responsibility for collection and interpretation of data. He would retitle this to the Foreign Research Agency.  

    David Talbot pointed out that Schlesinger sent rough draft copies of the memo to future Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, diplomat Chip Bohlen, and speechwriter Ted Sorenson. Once it was sent to the White House, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was a recipient, the Dulles forces began to organize a counterattack. Maxwell Taylor argued against it by saying this was no time for major surgery since it would hurt morale. On the same grounds, Taylor also argued against changing the title. (Talbot, p. 440)

    Two weeks after his memo was submitted, RFK told Schlesinger that his reorganization plan was on hold until they could find a proper candidate to helm the plan. That man ended up being Fowler Hamilton. Hamilton was a Wall Street lawyer, a former prosecutor in FDR’s Justice Department, and was also a bombing analyst in the Army Air Force. Schlesinger thought he was qualified. But the reaction to Fowler was very strong. So Kennedy turned to Republican John McCone. 

    Schlesinger was quite disappointed in this choice. He protested that he was the wrong man for his plan:  “He sees the world in terms of a set of emotion-charged stereotypes.” (Talbot, p. 441). Schlesinger was correct on this. But some of the reforms that he had recommended came to pass: Kennedy issued orders that ambassadors should lead foreign policy in foreign countries. He also requested that the Joint Chiefs be more vigorous and direct in advice to him on paramilitary projects like the Bay of Pigs. Third, that all paramilitary operations be presented to a Strategic Resources Group which would appoint someone to run the operation. (DiEugenio, pp. 52-53) 

    But Schlesinger’s bold and reformist plan more or less died when Fowler was rejected. Kennedy apparently did not want a full-fledged internal battle on his plate at the time. So he settled for a piecemeal reform plan. It took the 9-11 disaster for an office superseding the CIA to be created: the Director of National Intelligence. But the very fact that JFK commissioned such a study, that he seriously entertained it, and that he had someone in mind to man it, tell us how opposed he was to what Dulles had created, represented, and run.  And how it had all combined to create the Bay of Pigs debacle, or what he called, “the worst experience of my life.” (DiEugenio, p. 52) 

    Click here to read the addendum.

  • Sky News Australia Interview of Jim DiEugenio

    Sky News Australia Interview of Jim DiEugenio

    Please watch the interview here.

    The SkyNews.com.au show notes are available here.

    Interview Transcript

    Well, it won’t be long until the world finally knows the truth about former US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

    Last month, President Trump signed an executive order to declassify the secret files on JFK’s 1963 death.

    Since then, the head of the task force that’s aimed at exposing federal secrets, Anna Paulina Luna, has declared that from what she’s seen so far, she believes the single bullet theory is faulty.

    She believes there were two shooters involved.

    Our first investigation will be announced, but it’s going to be covering on a thorough investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination.

    And I can tell you, based on what I’ve been seeing so far, the initial hearing that was actually held here in Congress was actually faulty in the single bullet theory.

    I believe that there were two shooters.

    And we should be finding more information as we are able to gain access into the SCIF, hopefully before the files are actually released to the public.

    Now, most Americans do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    So what has been hidden away for decades that we’re all about to find out when the JFK files are released?

    James DiEugenio is considered one of the best writers and researchers in America on JFK’s assassination.

    He’s written multiple books on the subject, including co-author of the JFK assassination chokeholds that prove there was a conspiracy.

    And he joins us on Power Hour now.

    James, thank you for joining us.

    We heard Anna Paulina Luna claim that she believes there were two shooters.

    That’s a conclusion, I believe, that you’ve come to as well.

    Can you talk to us about the evidence that support this?

    Yeah, well, I think it’s really good that she’s going to reopen this.

    And I think Trump signing that executive order was another really good thing.

    As per the belief that there was more than one shooter, there’s a Pruder film which shows Kennedy rocketing backwards when Oswald was supposed to actually be shooting from behind him.

    There’s the 42 witnesses at Parkland Hospital and at Bethesda at the morgue who did the autopsy that night who say that there was a big baseball-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head, which is strongly indicative of a shot from the front.

    All right?

    There’s also the fact that there was no sectioning of either wound.

    There was no dissecting of either wound, either the back wound or the head wound, to see if it was a through-and-through shot, if it did actually penetrate the body.

    There’s all this kind of evidence out there today that was not public back in 1963, which indicates that there was more than one assassin.

    And she’s correct.

    The Warren Commission report was, to put it mildly, you know, rather faulty.

    The Warren Commission determined in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    How did it get it so wrong?

    Well, there’s a lot of reasons why the Warren Commission report was faulty.

    You know, one of them was that they relied almost – about 80 percent of their work was based upon the work of the FBI.

    And the FBI, of course, did not do a very thorough investigation.

    To put it mildly, you know, J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, was not in really friendly terms with Bobby Kennedy, who was at that time was about to resign.

    But he was the attorney general, all right?

    And if you recall, you know, this is very interesting.

    That weekend, Kennedy was killed on a Friday.

    That weekend, J. Edgar Hoover went to the racetrack.

    In other words, he didn’t even come into work on Saturday.

    He actually went to the racetrack with his second-in-command, Clyde Tolson.

    So it was not, you know – again, I’m being mild – it was not a very thorough investigation by the FBI for a lot of different reasons.

    Why has some of these files been kept secret for so long?

    The FBI says it’s discovered now 2,400 new documents related to JFK’s assassination.

    What are you expecting from them?

    You know, I’m really glad you brought this up because those 2,400 documents that the FBI has just found, those were not even previously reported.

    You know, everything was supposed to be declassified by 94 to 98 by the review board.

    Apparently, they didn’t even know about these documents.

    I think we’re going to find out a lot more about Oswald in New Orleans, and I think we’re going to learn something about Oswald’s reported visit to Mexico City, which was about in late September, early October of 1963, all right?

    And he was, of course, in New Orleans that summer before going to Mexico City.

    Oswald was, to put it mildly, a very, very interesting character, which the Warren Commission never even scraped the surface of, all right?

    Most people today who have studied this case don’t believe the Warren Commission verdict about him being a communist, all right?

    They think he was some kind of low-level intelligence agent.

    What do you make of the assessments that are out there?

    There are a few that it was a foreign adversary, the mafia, or the CIA.

    You know, seeing a lot of the theories that are exposed and all the research and investigating that you’ve done, what’s your assessment of them?

    I think that the most logical conclusion today, and that which most people who have researched this case believe, that it was kind of like a triangular kind of a plot involving the Central Intelligence Agency at one point, the Cuban exiles at another point.

    And then when Oswald was not killed the day of the assassination, the CIA brought in his ally that has organized crime, you know, who they have been trying to knock off Castro before.

    And they brought in the mafia to go ahead and send Jack Ruby in to silence Oswald.

    Donald Trump promised that he would declassify the files during his first term, but he was visited by the CIA, the FBI, I should say, the FBI, and was told by Mark Pompeo not to open them.

    Why do you think he delayed opening up the files?

    You know, that’s a very interesting question, because a week or so before, Trump had tweeted that I’m looking forward, you know, to declassifying the last of the JFK documents.

    Then the very day he was supposed to do this, he’s visited by the CIA and the FBI, and he backs out of it.

    Now, according to his talk with Andrew Napolitano, he said words of the effect that if they would have shown you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have done it either.

    And Andrew said, who is they, and what was it they showed you?

    Okay, you know, and then Trump said, well, next time I talk to you, and there’s not 15 people around, I’ll tell you what that meant.

    You know, so he’s never explained exactly what it was, all right, that gave him pause.

    The implication is that it didn’t look very good for the Warren Commission, you know, but we don’t really know that.

    But the fact that they both went in there on the last day, and they warned him not to do it, I think that’s a very, very revealing kind of situation.

    Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it?

    It just makes you wonder why the truth was covered up for so long.

    And do you think that trust will be restored in the government when these files are made public?

    Well, I’m sure you’re aware of this. 65% of the public does not believe the official story on the JFK assassination.

    And a lot of social scientists believe that the lack of the belief in government today, which is very low, and the lack of the belief in the media, which is almost as low.

    A lot of them attribute this to the 1963-1964 events.

    You know, they trace the fall of the belief in government and the media because it began in 1964 when the Warren Commission report was first issued.

    And it was so vigorously defended by the mainstream media in the United States.

    And this includes CBS, NBC, and the New York Times.

    So hopefully we’ll get some restoration of this when all these files are finally out there in the open.

    And perhaps when Representative Luna’s investigation takes place in an open environment.

    One of the worst things about the Warren Commission is that it was a closed, all closed hearings.

    You know, so this contributed to the cynicism about their verdict.

    It’s interesting you bring up the media.

    I wanted to get your assessment on what role the mainstream media really played in covering up the truth, I suppose.

    You know, has it been frustrating for you hearing a narrative on repeat that’s possibly not the truth?

    It’s always been my belief that the main obstruction between the American public and the truth about the JFK case is what is termed today the mainstream media.

    Because from the very beginning, you know, from the very beginning, 1963 and 1964, the mainstream media was out there, okay, defending the Warren Commission verdict.

    To give you one very good example, in the fall of 1964, on the day the Warren Commission report was issued, both NBC and CBS broadcast shows endorsing its verdict.

    Now, Gabriella, the Warren Commission report is 888 pages long.

    How could you possibly read that many pages in one day and then report its contents without even referring to the evidence behind it?

    Because that wasn’t released until a month later.

    And this is what I think, I believe, that has contributed to this air of cynicism about the media.

    They’re reporting on something they couldn’t fact check.

    It would be impossible to fact check it.

    It’s interesting, you know, you’re expecting quite a bit from these files.

    Do you think there’s, as you say, 65% of Americans don’t believe that the Warren Commission got it right?

    Is there going to be much in here that’s going to shock us?

    You know, I really, I wish I could say one way or the other, but since I’m supposed to be a responsible kind of a person, without reading this stuff, you know, I can’t really say that.

    Now, I do know people have gone down to Washington, like Andrew Iler, okay, and a lawyer from Canada.

    And he told me that a lot of these closed files deal with Oswald and Mexico City.

    And let me add one last thing about this subject.

    The review board, which expired in 1998, made what is called a final determination on all the documents that they saw, which means that they all should have been declassified in October of 2017.

    If the agency made a final determination, that’s what that means.

    So the question is, why are we here in 2025 still debating about these documents that should have been declassified almost eight years ago?

    This is what gives people an air of cynicism and skepticism about this case.

    Absolutely.

    Look, when we do finally get the truth, what does this mean for RFK Jr., for the whole Kennedy family?

    Well, that’s a very good question also.

    Bobby Kennedy Sr., okay, never believed the official story.

    And as his son, Robert Kennedy Jr., he has never believed the official story about what happened to his uncle.

    And I think that when all this stuff comes out, finally,  you know, they’re going to both be vindicated on this subject.

    Also, I should say one other thing, and this isn’t commonly known.

    John F. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s only son, never believed the official story either.

    And according to an old girlfriend of his that doesn’t like to talk about it, but she does write letters, you know, one of his goals was to enter the political arena and try to find justice for what really happened to his father.

    Now, that’s a very interesting story, which I believe is largely true, that very few people know about.

    Yeah, well, absolutely.

    It’ll be really interesting to see what happens, and importantly for that family.

    The task force aimed at exposing federal secrets is also going to investigate the assassinations of RFK and MLK.

    It’s also going to look at the Epstein client list, the origins of COVID-19, UFOs, the 9-11 files.

    There’s so much that we’re going to learn about.

    What are you expecting from these other cases?

    You know, I thought that was really interesting.

    You know, there’s such a thing as picking up too much that you can carry.

    You know, that’s a lot of very serious cases for one committee to go into.

    You know, can you possibly do justice?

    I think it’s seven or eight cases to all those things.

    You know, but if they do, you know, and if they do find that something is faulty every place, well, then this really gives questions about, A, the mainstream media, and also our American historians, who seem to have been afraid to go into all the details about all of these cases, which the MLK, RFK, and JFK cases were really instrumental in what happened to America in the 60s.

    There would have been no Vietnam War if those three men had lived, which means about 58,000 Americans would be alive today and about 3 million Vietnamese.

    So there’s a whole change, a shift in the historical focus if those three people were killed by conspiracies.

    Where we are today in 2025, we are finally getting some truth, more transparency.

    Do you have faith going forward about the government in the U.S.?

    Do you expect there could be other instances being covered up in the future?

    Well, you know, it depends a lot on this congressional committee.

    You know, if these things are done in the open, and if they’re done with the best information that we have, and the committee members are really honest about their job, I think it might have a significant impact, you know, going forward.

    And I think it’ll be interesting to watch this.

    And, Gabrielle, I think one thing to look for is how much pressure from the outside is put on this committee.

    Because the MSM has a lot to lose if she comes out of the gate really swinging strong.

    Okay.

    Their credibility is going to be on the line.

    So that will be a very interesting tell about how that committee is going to deal with the pressures from the outside.

    They really don’t want this to happen.

    James DiEugenio, thank you so much for your time.

    How can we stay up to date with your work?

    Okay.

    I’m at kennedysandking.com.

    That’s my website.

    And I have a sub-stack under my name also.

    So that’s how you can read the most current information in this case.

    Thank you very much for having me on.

    Really appreciate you coming on the program.

    We’ll speak to you again soon.

    Okay.

    Bye-bye.

  • Trump and the JFK Files

    Trump and the JFK Files

    Please read the article directly on Jim DiEugenio’s substack, which is currently free. Read here.

  • Rick Perlstein and the Wages of Denial

    Rick Perlstein and the Wages of Denial

    Rick Perlstein and the Wages of Denial 

    Rick Perlstein cannot control his flatulence on the subject of John Kennedy. Perlstein is best known for his four volume set about the rise of the New Right.  This was published from 2001-20. It included the books Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland. 

    It is my belief, and also that of authors like David Talbot and John Newman, that one cannot tell that story without discussing the suspicious assassinations and following cover ups of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. As I wrote in the afterword to the anthology The Assassinations, the relevant question is what would have happened if all four had lived? (See p. 636) To take just one example, all four were involved with the historic 1963 March on Washington. In fact, as Irving Bernstein noted in his book Promises Kept, President Kennedy was the first white politician to endorse that event in public. He then called in his, rather surprised, brother and told him that, as Attorney General, he was going to provide security.  This demonstration had to come off perfectly since they were laying themselves on the line and their enemies would take them apart if it did not. It did come off perfectly and many believe it is the high point of post-war American liberalism.

    Robert Kennedy was looking forward to running against Richard Nixon in 1968.  He very likely would have been the candidate, if he was not killed in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in June of 1968. As Lisa Pease demonstrated in her excellent book on that case, A Lie too Big to Fail, Sirhan Sirhan not only was not his killer, he could not have been the assassin. 

    And unlike what Perlstein has written elsewhere, John Newman has shown that Bobby Kennedy was part of his brother’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam. (JFK and Vietnam, Second Edition, p. 416) Even Mr. Hardball, Chris Mathews has said that Bobby Kennedy would have been the anti-Vietnam candidate in 1968. (Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, p. 311) Hubert Humphrey’s fatal error was in not making this clear early enough in the campaign. Thus separating himself from the man who reversed Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, Lyndon Johnson. It was RFK’s  assassination, and that issue, that brought Richard Nixon his victory in 1968. Without that victory, what would Perlstein’s tetralogy have looked like?

    Make no mistake, as a man of the  doctrinaire left—he wrote for The Village Voiceand The Nation–Perlstein understands his dilemma and the problem it poses for him.  Long ago he decided on a “take no prisoners” stance on it.  At the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s murder he wrote a column for The Nation. (November 21, 2013) Consider how he opened that essay:

    The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese called the American War upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone’s JFK. It was made with only slightly more sophistication by Kenneth O’Donnell in the 1972 book, Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye….

    Note the way Perlstein pens this passage.  First the book he refers to was written by both O’Donnell and Dave Powers. Powers and O’Donnell told House Speaker Tip O’Neill that they heard shots from the grassy knoll area during the assassination. But the FBI talked them out of this testimony. (Man of the House, p. 178) When Kennedy was killed, Powers left the White House but O’Donnell stayed on until 1965. Therefore he was in a position to see how Johnson altered Kennedy’s Indochina policy.

    As per Oliver Stone’s picture–which came well after that book—the film’s Vietnam angle was based on the work of two men: John Newman and Colonel Fletcher Prouty. Prouty worked under General Victor Krulak, who was directly involved with Vietnam policy under both Kennedy and Johnson. Therefore, he was also in position to observe the alterations to Kennedy’s Vietnam policy.  Newman was the first person to write an entire book based on Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam and how it was changed afterwards. This included how Kennedy’s NSAM 263 was neutralized by NSAM 273. That later order was delivered to the White House after Kennedy’s murder.  Newman demonstrated how National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s draft of 273 was significantly altered by Johnson, when Bundy thought he was writing it for Kennedy. (Newman, pp. 462-66)

    Newman also included an important quote from Johnson, which he made in December of 1963. This is just one month after Kennedy was killed. At a White House Christmas Eve reception the new president told the Joint Chiefs, “Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.” As writer Monica Wiesak showed in her book on the Kennedy presidency, JFK did not even want the generals visiting Saigon, let alone planning for war there. (America’s Last President, p. 133) 

    As Fletcher Prouty pointed out, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was killed than when he was inaugurated. And, in fact, Kennedy was at work withdrawing the advisors at the time of his murder. The declassified record of the Sec/ Def conference of May 1963 in Hawaii proves this beyond any doubt.  The Pentagon was shocked in 1962 when they first learned of Kennedy’s plans to remove the advisors. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 120)

    To get around his tract-like thinking, what Perlstein did in 2013 was to rely on Noam Chomsky.. He says that Chomsky insisted that the withdrawal plan was reliant on Saigon winning the war. How this could happen without direct American intervention is a mystery that neither Perlstein nor Chomsky ever explained. And General Maxwell Taylor underlined this reality for all to see:

    I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against sending combat troops, except one man and that was the president. The president just didn’t want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do….It was really the president’s personal conviction that the US ground troops shouldn’t go in. (Wiesak, p. 128)

    U. Alexis Johnson, Dean Rusk’s Deputy, said the same for the record. Kennedy had drawn the line at “no combat troops” in 1961.  And this line was clear and indelible. (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 371) 

    But beyond that, as a result of that Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii in May of 1963, General Earle Wheeler stated that any proposal for overt action would be treated negatively by President Kennedy. (Wheeler notes of 5/6/63, Pacific Command meeting). The final hole in Chomsky’s leaking rowboat was applied by Newman when he listened to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s debriefs as he left the Pentagon. In those sessions McNamara said that it did not matter if Saigon was losing or winning.  Once the training period was over, America was getting out.  He and Kennedy had mutually decided on this policy in advance.  (Vietnam: The Early Decisions, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, pp. 164-67) 

    If anyone needed any more convincing of the difference between Kennedy and Johnson on Indochina just look at the first meeting LBJ helmed on the issue. As CIA Director John  McCone later wrote, the difference between the two presidents was readily apparent. Johnson said he had never been happy with our operations in Vietnam. And any person who disagreed with his policy should be removed. He actually compared losing South Vietnam to losing China in 1949. (Newman, p. 459) To put it mildly, Kennedy did not see it that way.  As he told General Lyman Lemnitzer, if we did not go into Cuba which was 90 miles away, why should we do so in Vietnam which was 8,000 miles away? (Newman, pp. 139-40)

    Johnson’s new policy was enthroned in NSAM 288 in March of 1964. This order is crucial in understanding what happened  to escalate the war in Vietnam. With NSAM 288, Johnson and the Pentagon mapped out an entire air campaign against North Vietnam, with literally dozens of targets, using American planes and pilots. Perlstein has to know about its primacy since two other sources he uses, Edwin Moise and Fredrik Logevall, mention it at length. Echoing the Pentagon Papers, Logevall wrote it was hard to exaggerate the importance of NSAM 288 on the road to direct American intervention in the Vietnam War. (Logevall, Choosing War, p. 129; Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, pp. 24-25)  It is revealing that Perlstein did not mention this milestone in 2013.  Perhaps because it proved that what Kennedy would not do in three years, Johnson did in three months. 

    NSAM 288 was part of a  deliberate planning scheme by Johnson  to escalate the war and insert massive American air and land power into theater. That planning  eventually included a draft for a congressional declaration of war. LBJ placed William Sullivan in charge of this effort at first. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, pp 87-91) The obvious question that Perlstein does not want to answer is: If as Johnson always said, his policy was a continuation of Kennedy’s, why would he have to do this? 

    The answer to that question is that LBJ knew Kennedy’s plan was withdrawal and he disagreed with it vehemently.  He even told McNamara this directly: How can you supervise a withdrawal in a war America is losing? (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310) That conversation, which we have on tape, shows just how bankrupt Perlstein is in utilizing a zealot like Noam Chomsky. The war was being lost and LBJ knew Kennedy was withdrawing. The new president was not going to oversee America losing a war.

    Which relates to Perlstein’s opening piece of snark, about Kennedy being a closet peacenik. When did troops enter a combat theater under Kennedy?  There were certainly opportunities for this to happen.  For example at the Bay of Pigs, during the Berlin Crisis, in Laos, in Vietnam, and during the Missile Crisis. Kennedy did not do so in any case.  But we know that past and future presidents would have i.e. Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon. Eisenhower told Kennedy that Laos was the key to all of Southeast Asia, and if America had to, she should intervene unilaterally. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 163) Nixon was explicit when he told Kennedy he should declare a beachhead at the Bay of Pigs and send in the Marines. (Schlesinger, p. 288). Lyndon Johnson thought Kennedy was giving away too much in his negotiations over the Missile Crisis and not taking enough action. (The Kennedy Tapes, pp. 590—602, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow). And Johnson sought and received Eisenhower’s approval  for his Vietnam escalations. (Blight, pp. 186-88). 

    Let us take another example. Does anyone think Kennedy would have sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic in 1965 to support a military dictatorship and deny the elected president Juan Bosch his office? Kennedy supported Bosch and began an economic embargo against the military coup. But Johnson sent 25,000 Marines into theater to safeguard Bosch from returning to power—which was a clear reversal of Kennedy’s policy. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78-79). But beyond that, Johnson had lied about his reasons for sending in those combat troops.  Senator William Fulbright and his staff grew suspicious of Johnson’s changing stores for the invasion. And they discovered that the “atrocities” LBJ bandied about were either clear exaggerations or, in many cases, simply fictional. (Goulden, pp. 165). This is important because it was Fulbright’s discoveries of these deceptions that led him to think that Johnson was also lying about his reasons for escalating in Vietnam—specifically the Tonkin Gulf incident. This then caused Fulbright to open the damaging senate hearings that the senator held about Vietnam that began to divide the nation and erode the president’s support for his land-air war in Indochina. (ibid, p. 171)

    What Perlstein and his like do is end up being camouflage for Johnson. It was Johnson’s disastrous foreign policy alterations which were largely responsible for splitting asunder the Democratic Party. As senate staffer Carl Marcy, working for Fulbright wrote, his hearings should try and ascertain what happened in the last 24 months to:

    Turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson and the right wing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration.(Goulden, p. 166)

    This was no less than a polarizing sea change and pretty much spelled the end of the FDR coalition stemming from the 1930’s. It literally exploded at the Chicago convention in 1968. Largely because Robert Kennedy was not there.

    To ignore all the above is simply astonishing.

    But now Perlstein has come back for more.  On December 5, 2024 he wrote another article, this time for The American Prospect. He now says that somehow the high feelings that the American populace has for the fallen Kennedys is a cult. If one can believe it, Perlstein actually uses  a 22 year old blogger named Joshua Cohen to dismiss this “cult”.  He quotes him as saying that baby boomers believed Kennedy was doing some things that others really did not want him to do.  And they took drastic action to stop him; this was followed by the end of the American Golden Age.

    Perlstein says that this was perhaps partly true.  In 1963 Kennedy did make a  fine speech on civil rights and then he did the Peace Speech at American University. Incredibly, this is all that Perlstein can come up with as to Kennedy’s achievements while in office.  He can name not one of Kennedy’s reversals of John Foster Dulles’ foreign policy: in the Middle East, in Indonesia, in Congo to name just three examples.  Or how this all reversed back under Johnson. This is really kind of shocking considering Kennedy’s relationship with Gamel Abdul Nasser and what is happening in the Middle East right now.  And of course he pretty much leaves out Vietnam.   

    I won’t even go into how he gives Kennedy short shrift on civil rights. But I will say that it is provable that JFK did more for that issue than FDR, Truman and Eisenhower combined. And this started on his first day in office.  That night he called up Treasury Secretary Doug Dillon.  He asked him: Why were there no black faces in that Coast Guard parade? Dillon said he did not know. Kennedy told him to find out.  This eventually led to the first affirmative action order in American history in March of 1961.  It is pretty hard to avoid a milestone like that.  But Mr. Historian of the sixties does it. When one links to this series the reader will see the work that I did and Perlstein failed to do. (https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-1) 

    What is amazing is how much Kennedy accomplished—for example with the economy– in slightly less than three years.

    Perlstein then gets even worse. He actually mentions Vincent Bugliosi’s oversized and overlong book on the JFK case, Reclaiming History. He says that his book demolished “every existing conspiracy claim”.  One does not know whether to laugh or cry at a statement as stupid as that. Bugliosi’s book was simply and completely a fraud.  And this author himself showed that was the case in a normally sized book length treatment. I demonstrated with footnotes how Bugliosi violated his own opening statement, namely that he would not leave out anything of importance. He did just that and he did it many times. (See The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today) That Perlstein could fully endorse a mirage like that shows what a cheap grandstander he is about the subject.

    About all the evidentiary holes in the Warren Report, like the MSM, Perlstein can chalk that up to fear of expanding the Cold War, “not an assassination conspiracy”.  He even states that this was J. Edgar Hoover’s excuse. Perlstein is unaware he is now in sci-fi land.  He apparently does not know that the FBI report on the JFK case does not include the Single Bullet Theory! But further that Hoover did all he could to cover up the bullet strike to bystander James Tague. Because that would undermine his report’s theory that all the projectiles struck inside the car. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 130-38) In other words Hoover knew the lone assassin paradigm was baloney.  And he actually admitted this in private–not once, but twice. (DiEugenio, p. 246)

    How can one explain what the CIA did with the Oswald tale in Mexico City as “the routine passion of bureaucracies to hide their own incompetence”?  That one is a doozy, even for Perlstein. Oswald visited both the Cuban and Russian embassies five times.  So there should be ten pictures of him entering and exiting. In 61 years, the CIA has not produced one. Since both embassies were also electronically bugged, the CIA should be able to produce a tape of the man’s voice. The one they sent to Dallas while Oswald was in detention was not Oswald. This is what drove Hoover to write on the marginalia of a memo that the CIA sold him a snow job on Oswald in Mexico City. (DiEugenio, p. 304)

    There is nothing fanciful about the above.  These are all evidentiary holes in the JFK case.  There is nothing political or “mythic” about  them. But either Perlstein or his buddy Cohen do not know about them, or they do not want to admit them.  Either alternative shows just what a faux historian Rick Perlstein really is.

  • Review of The Plot to Kill President Kennedy in Chicago

    Review of The Plot to Kill President Kennedy in Chicago

    The Plot to Kill President Kennedy in Chicago

    by Vince Palamara

    Vince Palamara begins The Plot to Kill President Kennedy in Chicago with a quote by Martin Martineau of the Chicago office of the Secret Service.  In an interview from 1993 Martineau said that he was certain there was more than one assassin on 11/22/63.  And he added that one reason he knew this was his own role in the investigation.  A second was his knowledge of and experience with firearms.

    Palamara then continues with a surprise phone call he got from a man named Nemo Ciochina.  Ciochina had a go between actually do the calling.  But he wanted to talk to Vince since he knew he was dying.  And, in fact, he passed away about two  months later. Nemo wanted to tell Vince that he was aware of his work. But he wanted to point out that, to him, the real conspiracy was in Chicago and not in Dallas. Nemo was in fact an agent in the Chicago field office who later served in Indianapolis. (Palamara, p. 6)

    He wanted to give Vince some information he thought was relevant but had been ignored. But he specified that he wanted to leave his name out of things until after he had passed.  The main piece of information that Nemo gave Vince was about a man who was named Lloyd John Wilson, which was an alias, but the most common one he used.

    Wilson was in the Secret Service files as of September 10, 1963. And there were continuing reports on the man after 11/23.  According to these reports Wilson had enlisted in the Air Force in late October of 1963 and been sent to Texas on November 2nd. (Palamara, p. 13). He was discharged from the Air Force on December 17, 1963 and turned himself in to the FBI a couple of days later.  He said he was part of a plot to kill JFK.  And he said he wrote a threatening letter he did not send.  An anonymous caller to the FBI said he had seen the letter. (Palamara, p. 41)  Wilson  also claimed he paid Oswald a thousand dollars to kill Kennedy. (p. 16). Wilson said he left this letter in a hotel in Santa Clara, in northern California.  But when the Bureau checked the room they did not find it. (p. 45). They concluded he was a nutcase.

    But Wilson was interviewed on October 29, 1963.  This was in Spokane after his file was flown in from San Francisco. The FBI took a ten page statement from him. The review was sent to an assistant US attorney named Carroll D. Gray in Spokane.  Wilson denied to Gray that he was organizing a white supremacist group; said he did not now own any weapons; and he was looking forward to being in the Air Force. He also added that he did not mean he was going to kill JFK personally, but destroy him politically.  (Ibid, pp. 47-49)

    The case was closed, prosecution was not enacted, and Wilson went on to duty in the Air Force in Texas.  Later on we learn that Wilson claimed to have met Oswald in San Francisco through a contact who heard Oswald was anti-Kennedy and had threatened the president. Wilson gave Oswald a thousand dollar bill and told him to go ahead.  This was at the Cow Palace in either late August 1963 or early September 1963. Allegedly Wilson paid him with a thousand dollar bill. (Palamara, p. 60)

    There are some problems with this story. To my knowledge, I have never seen any evidence that Oswald was in San Francisco at this time.  And I also have never seen any evidence that Oswald came into a thousand dollars, which today would be the equivalent of ten thousand dollars in this time period. Wilson was discharged from the Air force on December 17, 1963 because he appeared to be mentally imbalanced.  And I should add he also threatened President Johnson. (Palamara, p. 16)

    Its good to get this information out there I think.  And it probably would have been wise to maintain Wilson under some kind of surveillance.  But I tend to agree with Mr. Gray that it seems to me that Wilson was simply unstable.

    II

    The author now picks up his real subject which are the major threats to JFK toward the end of his life.  These include instances in El Paso in June of 1963, in Billings in September of 1963, the famous Joseph Milteer case, and the Walter telex made famous by Jim Garrison, which the author corroborates with a San Antonio telex of November 15, 1963. (Palamara, p. 79)

    Palamara reveals a couple of new details  on the November 18th Tampa threat.  (p. 82)  It turns out that Ted Shackley and William Finch assisted the Secret Service on this visit by JFK.   And the original threat was “posed by a mobile, unidentified rifleman with a high powered rifle fitted with a scope.” 

     Palamara also mentions the famous Cambridge News story. This is one of the strangest events in the entire JFK case, which does not get enough attention. About 25 minutes before the assassination, the Cambridge News in Britain was given an anonymous tip.  Someone called a senior reporter working the East Anglia area of England.  The caller said there was going to be big news from the States very soon. He advised the reporter to call the American Embassy in London.  The reporter then called  MI 5, the British version of the FBI.  The MI 5 said that the reporter had a reputation for being of sound mind with no prior record. (p. 86)

    One of the most telling parts of the book is a section where the author compares the protection afforded Kennedy in Dallas with what happened in Tampa. Palamara lists eleven significant differences. (pgs. 104-06). This includes agents riding on the rear of the limousine, the guarding of nearby rooftops,  Dr. George Burkley riding close to the president, and multiple motorcycles riding next to Kennedy in a wedge formation.  The author points out that what makes this even more odd is that Tampa was the longest motorcade President Kennedy ever took domestically. Dallas was much shorter, so it should have been more manageable. 

    III

    The book then focuses on several Secret Service agents who seem to have merited some special attention by subsequent investigations, but did not get it.  We will deal with only five of them here.

    Paul Paterni was a direct assistant to chief James Rowley.  During World War 2, he served in Italy with James Angleton and Ray Rocca.  Both men ended up being influential with both the Warren Commission and the Jim Garrison investigation. As the author learned from Chief Investigator Michael Torina, Paterni served in the OSS concurrently while on the Secret Service. (p. 115) Which mean that, potentially, Paterni would be a good nexus point for the CIA to have a listening post inside the Secret Service. It was Paterni who made Inspector Thomas Kelley liaison to the Warren Commission, where, to put it mildly, he performed questionably. Paterni was involved in the Protective Research Section about threats against JFK prior to the visit, and he reported none prior.

    Forrest Sorrels was Special Agent in charge of the Dallas Secret Service field office.  He took part in the dubious planning of the motorcade route.  According to Palamara, Sorrels was involved in the 1936 route for FDR in Dallas, which used Main Street instead of Houston and Elm. (p. 118)

    On November 27, 1963 the FBI was in receipt of a call from a woman who did not give her name.  She said she was a member of a local theater guild, and on numerous occasions she had attended functions where Sorrels had spoken.  She advised he should be removed from his position since he could not have protected Kennedy. She stated that Sorrels was “definitely anti-government, against the Kennedy administration, and she felt his position was against the security of not only the president, but the US.” (p. 118)

    Mike Howard was an agent who was proficient at putting out rather unsound stories concerning the assassination.  For instance, that a janitor had seen Oswald pull the trigger from the Depository building.  It was Howard and Charles Kunkel who tried at first to manipulate Marina Oswald into saying her husband had been to Mexico City, an overture she first resisted. Howard was also one who effectively smeared Marguerite Oswald  as being an eccentric and unreliable source. (pp. 134-36)

    Roger Warner, like Paterni, served both in the CIA  (12 years) and the Secret Service (20 years).  He was also in the Bureau of Narcotics for three years. He was on the Texas trip when JFK was murdered and it was his first protective assignment. (p. 121)  According to the late Church Committee witness Jim Gochenaur, Warner was the man who later accompanied fellow Secret Service agent Elmer Moore to Parkland Hospital with the Kennedy Bethesda autopsy in hand. They used that to align the Parkland witnesses not with what they saw, but what was in that very questionable document. (p. 125)  

    Of course, Palamara lists Moore as one of the agents about which an extensive inquiry should have been made. Jim Gochenaur talked about Moore at length in Oliver Stone’s films JFK Revisited and JFK:Destiny Betrayed. Not only was Moore involved in the Parkland doctors’ testimony, but Palamara notes that Moore was also involved in influencing Jack Ruby’s in a substantive way.  This included his movements on the day before the assassination. (p. 125)

    And it was not just Ruby and the Parkland doctors.  As exposed in Secret Service Report 491, there is evidence that Moore was one of the agents involved  in the interviews of Depository workers Harold Norman, Bonnie Ray William and Charles Givens.  In that interview these men changed some of their testimony that they had given earlier, and in a dramatic way. For instance, in the later report Norman mentioned hearing a gun bolt working and cartridge cases falling on the floor above him.  There was no mention at all of these noises in his November 26th FBI report.  Or to anyone else prior to Moore getting the interview. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 55)

    To put it mildly, the Secret Service did not perform admirably either before, during or after the Dallas assassination.

    IV

    Palamara concludes the book with his examination of the threats against Kennedy emanating from Chicago in November of 1963.  There was one early in the month and one late.   The later one, on November 21st was suppled by informant Thomas Mosley who was negotiating a sale of machine guns to Homer Echevarria, part of the Cuban exile community.  According to Mosley, an ATF informer, Homer said they now have new backers who are Jews, and they would close the arms deal as soon as Kennedy was taken care of.  When Kennedy was killed, Mosley reported the conversation to the Secret Service. (Palamara, p. 154)

    Echevarria was part of the 30th November Group which was associated with the DRE, who Oswald has associated with that summer.  According to Mosley, the arms deals was being arranged and paid for through Paulino Sierra Martinez and his newly formed well financed group, Junta of the Government of Cuba in Exile.

    Agent David Grant said that he had conducted surveillance on Mosley and Echevarria, prior to the assassination. All memos and files and notebooks went to Washington, and he was told not to talk about the case with anyone. For whatever reason this inquiry was later dropped.

    Palamara adds that interestingly, Chief Jim Rowley had written an article for Reader’s Digest in November that outlined how easy it would be to assassinate a president using a high powered rifle. (p. 155) To say the least it was odd timing that went unnoted after the fact.

    Earlier that November month, Rowley phoned the agent in charge in Chicago, Maurice Martineau.  The FBI had gotten wind of an assassination plot featuring a team of four men.  Martineau called in his men and briefed them on the call and said this inquiry was going to be hush hush.  It would have no file number and nothing was to be sent by interoffice teletype. (p. 156). It was never made clear why this was so.

    One of the most interesting parts of the book is the substantiation Palamara gives for this early November plot in Chicago. Over 7 pages the author lists 16 direct and indirect sources to prove such a plot was was in the making and that it was thwarted. It was not just journalist Edwin Black.  Not even close. And like Sorrels, Martineau did not like JFK, especially his stand on integration. (p. 167)

    The book concludes with Palamara’s discussion of Abe Bolden, recently pardoned by President Biden for a crime he very likely never committed. The frame up  was clearly retaliation for Bolden trying to tell the Warren Commission about the early November Chicago plot.  In fact, the man who set up Bolden later admitting to doing so. (p. 200).  Plus there was a man, Gary McLeod, who tracked Bolden to Washington when he was trying to talk to the Commission. 

    The book ends by listing all the Secret Service failures that took place that day in Dallas that should not have been allowed to occur.  But these led to the murder of Kennedy. Palamara lists 13 of them. This book shows—through descriptions of what happened in Tampa, Chicago, and Dallas and elsewhere–that for whatever reason, Kennedy was not getting out of 1963 alive.

  • Four Died Trying, Chapter Two

    Four Died Trying, Chapter Two

    Four Died Trying:  Jack Joins the Revolution

    I have had the opportunity to see the second part of the bold, ambitious documentary series, Four Died Trying.   Entitled “Jack Joins the Revolution”, it seems to me to be a notable achievement over which director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros should take a bow.

    It begins with Oliver Stone noting the difference in age and appearance between John Kennedy and his predecessors, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. We then cut to Robert Kennedy Jr. and he supplies an even more direct context, namely the Irish background of the Kennedy family. After all, the Irish had been colonized for 800 years.  And this is something that the Kennedy family never forgot since the British control deprived the Irish of true suffrage and political office, among  other rights– including that of property.  This domination was particularly aimed at Catholics, which was the religion of the Kennedys.  There had been rebellions and, to say the least, the Great Famine of 1845-52 was a controversial event. Ireland did not become a formal and recognized republic until 1949, and Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom.

    As Kennedy Jr. notes this is likely why, when the family migrated to America, they decided to get into state and local politics. This included both sides of the family, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Which brought them into conflict with the Boston Brahmins, represented by the union of the Lodges and Cabots from Beacon Hill.

     Joseph Kennedy,  Rose Fitzgerald’s husband and JFK’s father, was a wealthy businessman who served in several appointed national positions, including as Franklin Roosevelt’s chair of the Security and Exchange Commission. But, as author Monica Wiesak—America’s Last President—illuminates, although the father was a rich capitalist he wanted his children to have a wide ranging education. For instance the brothers Joe and Jack studied under the illustrious Harold Laski at the London School of Economics.  Laski was a radical Labor Party leader who was sympathetic to Marxism. What Laski did was to encourage independent thinking, not bordered by orthodoxies. Monica also describes Jack’s rather sickly childhood which allowed him much time to read and also to empathize with those who were suffering. 

     Joe Kennedy was appointed ambassador to England by FDR. He wanted the US to stay out of the continental war brewing between Germany  on one side and England and France. Since Roosevelt wanted to get America into the war, and Kennedy was perceived as an isolationist, Joe was removed from office in 1940.  Then Pearl Harbor happened and both Jack and his brother Joe joined the service. As brother-in-law Stephen Smith observes, they were both war heroes.  Joe died on a dangerous air mission, and Jack saved his men after a Japanese destroyer cut their PT boat in half. JFK never forgot the natives on the island who helped him: he  invited them to the White House.

    This war service helps shoehorn the film into its main theme. Kennedy served as a journalist and was at the San Francisco Conference which ushered in the United Nations.  He could have continued in that vocation.  But he decided that he wanted to actually be in a position where he could take action.  So he ran for congress and was elected at age 29.   As Wiesak states, on the domestic side he was anti-monopolist and advocated for low cost housing for veterans. 

    By the mid-fifties, he had begun to evolve into an anti-imperialist and nationalist in foreign policy. And, I must say, the research team on this project dug up films and articles that even I had not seen before in this vein. And I have spent around ten years focusing on this very topic.  

    In one instance, Kennedy states that America had now stopped being a model for the Third World.  So much so that we had given an opening on this to the USSR, which we should not have done. In another instance, he says that France was wrong not to cede any control in Indochina to the Vietnamese. He then adds that nationalism was more powerful than anti-communism.  Kennedy had the same attitude toward the countries of the Middle East.

    Appropriately, the film then cuts to David Talbot speaking about how the Dulles brothers, since they were partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, had a rather dramatically different point of view on the subject. Talbot speaks about their apogee of power under President Eisenhower.  Through an NBC special from the sixties, we see Dulles being interviewed and saying that the CIA was asked to help in Vietnam. (Whatever that was supposed to mean.). The film then contrasts Dulles with young John Kennedy.  And JFK speaks about how America should have followed the example of Indonesia, where the Dutch allowed for independence.  JFK expands on this by saying we can avoid both imperialism and communism–but only by allowing for some kind of freedom.

    Wiesak now talks about Kennedy’s landmark 1957 Algeria speech, which shocked the leaders of both political parties. And the film shows examples of the editorials which appeared, and the almost violent repercussions in newspapers like the Boston Globe and the New York Times. In fact, the latter printed direct criticism from the French about Kennedy.  Jim Douglass insightfully comments that this contest between Kennedy and the Establishment has either been forgotten or covered up by historians and the media.  Unlike Foster Dulles, Kennedy did not think you could bind the world together through treaties or by selling free enterprise in the Third World. 

    Adroitly, since Algeria was in Africa, the film now pivots to how that continent was greatly moved by Kennedy’s speech. Including how the African diplomats underwent segregation in the USA, even the ones who were in Washington to visit with him. In a real find, the film shows clips of Kennedy mentioning Africa during the campaign of 1960.  Former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden makes an appearance and states how much this appealed to African Americans.

    We now turn to Cuba and Castro.  Wiesak comments on how Kennedy understood that America was wrong to have backed dictator Fulgencio Batista for as long and as fully as we did. In fact, the American ambassador there was the second most powerful man on the island. This strong man syndrome in American foreign policy is commented on by author Stephen Schlesinger who co-wrote the fine book, Bitter Fruit,  on the 1954 CIA overthrow in Guatemala. The pretext that Foster Dulles used, that Guatemalans now had the freedom to choose, was utterly false. It was the CIA which had now overthrown a democratically elected leader in Jacobo Arbenz and installed a dictator in Castillo Armas. The difference being that Armas would now protect the holdings of United Fruit, a client of Sullivan and Cromwell. That overthrow was followed by decades of oppression, terror and murder– which eventually took the lives of approximately  100,000 citizens. 

    In a classic vignette, CBS reporter Eric Sevareid asks Allen Dulles if he has ever engaged in acts of violence, a charge which he denies.  Dulles then jests about the tales in the media about the CIA using murder tactics and usurping power abroad.  This segues to Joseph Kennedy’s service on the Hoover Commission.  That led to the legendary Bruce/Lovett report which called for reforms to the CIA, and what Dulles had done to it.  

    This could not make for a better bridge to the ending. Before Kennedy could take office in 1961, the CIA was working to overthrow the democratically elected government of Patrice Lumumba in Congo. Dulles knew that Kennedy favored him over the Belgian colonialists. Lumumba was dead three days before Kennedy was inaugurated.

    All in all, this is an impressive achievement in both research and execution. I was privileged to see a sneak preview.  And hopefully it will be released to the public soon. It’s the kind of history that the masses should know about, and MSM hacks like Chris Wallace wish to hide. 

  • Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 2

    Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 2

    IV

    But as bad as all the above is, its not the worst part of this awful book. No, the worst part is when Wallace tries to show that the Kennedy campaign stole the 1960 election.  To do this, he does something I thought no credible author would ever do again. He trots out Judy Exner and Sy Hersh. Again, can the man be for real?  He must be the only reporter in America who is not aware that the book he is using, Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, was discredited before it was even published.

    Hersh famously fell for a phony trust that was allegedly set up between the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe by her attorney Aaron Frosch. Hersh was told, not once, but twice that the signatures were faked.  (For an analysis of this, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/sy-hersh-falls-on-his-face-again-and-again-and-again) When experts in forgeries finally examined the papers, they proved to be forged in every way. The question later became why did Hersh, or his publisher, not do an examination first?

    But then Hersh used Exner and, as one will read above and below, that story also blew up in his face. Exner—who we will deal with soon– had now changed her story a second time.  She now said she was knowingly exchanging messages between John Kennedy and Sam Giancana. Unlike Wallace, Hersh realized Exner’s ever evolving story had credibility problems.  So Hersh now said that there was a witness to her messenger mission, namely Martin Underwood, a political operative for Mayor Richard Daley. (Hersh, pp. 304-305) 

    Like the Monroe trust BS, this also exploded in Hersh’s face.  Because when Underwood was examined under oath by the Assassination Records Review Board, he denied he did any such thing. (ARRB Final Report, p. 136) But incredibly, Wallace alludes to that part of the story again here.  For whatever reason, he does not name Underwood. (Wallace, p. 113)

    Now, still going with “pie on his face” Hersh, Wallace writes that Joseph Kennedy was involved in bootlegging operations with organized crime during Prohibition. This was disproved by author Daniel Okrent in his fine book on the era titled Last Call.  Okrent went through nearly 900 pages of FBI documents on Joe Kennedy.  These were done to clear him for the many positions he served on in government. Okrent found not one page or source who said a word about any such involvement. Joe Kennedy biographer David Nasaw discovered the same for his book, The Patriarch. But Nasaw, who had unprecedented access to Joe Kennedy’s files, also went over how Joe got so very rich. It was through stocks, real estate and, above all, the film business. As Okrent notes in his book, this mob mythology was begun in the sixties by gangsters who clearly had an agenda to smear JFK and RFK since they had made their lives so troublesome with their war against the Mob.

    Another point that Wallace sidesteps is this.  As FBI agent William Roemer explained in his book, Man Against the Mob, the Bureau had total surveillance on Giancana.  This included following him everywhere he went and having electronic wires on four dwellings that he did his business in. In Roemer’s 400 page book one will read no reference on tape to any arrangement with Joe Kennedy or the election.  Which is pretty convincing that it never happened.

    But for me, there is something even more convincing.  That is the work of professor John Binder. His landmark article “Organized Crime and the 1960 Presidential Election” first appeared in 2007 at Public Choice; it has been preserved at Research Gate. In a statistical study, Binder examined the returns for what were considered the 5 Chicago Outfit controlled wards. He discovered that there was no indication that the voting trends in those wards went up, and in some cases they declined. He also makes short work of the idea that the outfit could influence the Teamsters in that election. (Wallace, p. 214) Since Jimmy Hoffa depised the Kennedys and would not trust them with a tennis ball. After all they had already gotten rid of Hoffa’ predecessor Dave Beck.

    Thus Binder deduces that “union members in states where the Outfit operated voted less heavily Democratic than usual and therefore against JFK.” Binder concluded his essay by saying that “much of what has been written about the Outfit, the 1960 presidential  election and other events involving  the Kennedy family appears to  be historical myth”. (Here is a link to this fascinating article https://themobmuseum.org/blog/did-the-chicago-outfit-elect-john-f-kennedy-president/) 

    I should add one concluding note about Sy Hersh and his JFK book: Not even the MSM supported it. And  in most cases they savaged it. The most brutal and thorough review was composed by Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books on December 18, 1997. That memorable critique closed by saying it was an odd experience watching a once valued reporter destroy his reputation in a mad, and ultimately failed, mission to tear down President Kennedy–while simultaneously imploding himself. Somehow Chris Wallace missed that.

    V

    What Wallace does in trying to revive the dead corpse of Judy Exner is something I don’t even think magician David Copperfield would attempt.

    Exner first surfaced into the American consciousness for the Church Committee in 1975. At that time—and this is key– she stated that she wanted to head off wild-eyed speculation that she had ever discussed her relationships with either Sam Giancana or Johnny Roselli with John Kennedy.  She also said she knew nothing about the CIA attempts to neutralize Castro, and they were never brought up with the president.  Also, the president did not know she was seeing Giancana and Roselli. (NY Times 12/18/75, article by John Crewdson)

    She called a press conference in San Diego to say that she wanted to clear her name so as not to be implicated in “these bizarre assassination conspiracies.”  She also added that she “had no wish to sell the rest of her story to book publishers or to the news media.” (ibid) Although there were phone calls from Exner to the White House from California, no notations recorded her as a visitor to the Oval Office. (ibid). Evelyn Lincoln said the same. 

    It was revealed that when Hoover informed the White Hose of who she was, the communications stopped after March 22,1962. (Ibid)

    What is exceptional about this initial summary is that almost all of it will be radically altered over time.  And Wallace does not tell the reader about any of the revisions. She did take part in the writing of a book and Wallace quotes from it.  But that book was clearly a team operation out of agent Scott Meredith’s office with prolific Mafia writer Ovid DeMaris as co- writer.  It is important to note that DeMaris was also a big fan of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and a Warren Commission backer. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 330-31). There is a salacious and unbelievable  scene in My Story placed at the Democratic Convention of 1960, one which has all the earmarks of being a fabrication. And unsurprisingly, Wallace repeats it here. (Wallace pp. 169-70; DiEugenio and Pease, pp. 332-33)       

    Not only does Wallace not tell the reader that Exner altered her story, he does not even note when it happened. It was for the February 29, 1988 issue of Peoplemagazine. And they were radical alterations. She reversed herself on everything she said in 1975. She now stated that she was seeing Giancana at Kennedy’s bidding! But further that she helped arrange meetings between Kennedy and Giancana and Kennedy and Roselli,  some of which took place at the White House!  (ibid, p. 333) If one reads the two best biographers on those two gangsters, William Brashler and Lee Server respectively, nothing like this ever came close to happening. And the idea it would happen with Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General is pure science-fiction. Exner was selling whoppers, and she was being paid tens of thousands to do so. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 334)

    In her new and modified version, the reasons for these newly remembered meetings is in  order to cinch elections and to liquidate Castro. She specifically mentioned West Virginia at that time. Which Wallace agrees with.  Again, this shows  how poor his research is. Dan Fleming wrote a good book about that primary.  He notes that no subsequent inquiry—by the FBI, the state Attorney General, or by Senator Barry Goldwater—ever turned up any evidence of skullduggery that influenced the outcome of the election. (Fleming, Kennedy vs Humphrey: West Virginia 1960, pp. 107-12)  And unlike what Wallace tries to insinuate, Fleming interviewed literally scores of people throughout the state. He could not find any trace of any underworld figure on the ground during that primary.

    To show the reader just how bad Countdown 1960 is, Wallace mentions union leader Raymond Chafin, but he does so through author Laurence Leamer.  As far as I could detect, he does not refer to Chafin’s book Just Good Politics. Therefore Wallace twists the story of the Kennedy campaign contribution to Chafin for a get out the vote effort. Chafin originally backed Hubert Humphrey in that primary. Kennedy asked to meet with him and he told him that if he won, and then won the White House, he would give him even more than Humphrey had promised. Chafin changed his mind and asked for $3,500 to get out the vote.  Kennedy’s team misconstrued this and gave him $35.000, which he spent days delivering to other counties in the state.

    But that is not the end of the story.  Because Kennedy made good on his promise.  He summoned him to the White House after his inauguration. He was told he had 15 minutes with the president.  Kennedy countered and said Chafin would have all the time he needed.  At the end of the book, Chafin said that Kennedy ended up doing more for West Virginia than any previous president. That is quite a lot for Wallace to leave out of the story.

    In other words, Exner’s story about West Virginia is, to say the least, unfounded. But again, what Wallace leaves out is that Exner added to her story even further.  Almost ten years later, for Vanity Fair, she now said that JFK had impregnated her and she had an abortion.  Again, this is something she said the opposite of in her book. There she literally said “I didn’t have an abortion.” (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 336)

    But she then changed her story again for Hersh. For People, back in 1988, she said she was not really sure what was in the satchel that JFK gave her. Now it became 250,000 dollars in hundred dollar bills and the message was the elimination of Castro. (Hersh, pp. 303-07). To say that Exner changed her story is much too mild.  She has done a somersault from her original statements.  And the part about the elimination of Castro is an outright lie.  Because the declassified Inspector General Report on the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro specifically says that no president had any knowledge of them.  (Pp. 132-33)

    There is another outright lie that Exner told.  In Hersh’s book she told him that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy asked, “Are you still comfortable doing this. We want you to let us know if you don’t want to.” (Hersh, p. 308). Again, RFK is the man who had wall to wall surveillance on Giancana through both the FBI and the Justice Department. So Bobby was going to give Hoover bribery information on a mobster through the White House?  Who could believe this? 

    But Exner herself contradicted this.  In an interview she did with Larry King in 1992, she said that she never even talked to Bobby, perhaps in passing at a rally in Los Angeles.  In other words, Exner told so many lies she could not keep track of them. And this is the kind of witness that Wallace bases his book upon.  

    I could go on and on.  For example Wallace mentions the case of Florence Kater saying she had a picture of JFK leaving a girlfriend’s house at night.  The picture is not clear as to who the man is.  But Wallace attacks Kennedy for harshly scolding Kater about it in a threatening manner.  What Wallace does not reveal is this: Kater was blackmailing Kennedy.  She wanted a Modigliani painting.

    VI

    We now come to the reason for the book.  Which the author admits in his Acknowledgments. (p. 397). He says that during the January 6th Insurrection he was so disturbed  that he thought back to the elections he had covered.  He then writes that 2020 shattered the belief in acknowledging a winner and loser in a presidential campaign.  

    Wallace then makes a quantum leap in time.  He says that thinking about that day somehow reminded him of the election of 1960.  There is a slight problem here.  Wallace did not cover that election.  In fact, he was only 13 years old.  So, like much of the book, this simply does not wash. And if it did remind him of any election he covered, it should have been the 2000 election in Florida and the whole Bush v Gore phony decision commandeered by Justice Antonin Scalia and the Supreme Court. Where they halted the recount certified by the state and stopped the probability of Vice President Al Gore from winning the election.  Which it appeared he would have done since he was gaining on George W. Bush very quickly.  

    Besides the Supreme Court and its phony decision, we know that Roger Stone created a mini riot during a recount at the Steven B. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. This was later named the Brooks Brothers riot since it was made up of Republican staffers disguised as local residents. As Chris Lehmann noted in The Nation, it was this ersatz local riot that outlined the blue print for Trump’s insurrection. (August 4, 2022) Roger Stone had been a dirty tricks impresario under Richard Nixon. In fact Stone wore a Nixon tattoo on his back. He then moved into the orbit of Donald Trump.  Stone was then part of the Stop the Steal demonstrations in Washington on the eve of the Insurrection.

    As Lehmann notes, the difference between the two is that the Florida riot worked.  That particular recount was halted and then the Supreme Court sealed the deal for the disastrous reign of George W. Bush. Which, among other things, included the deaths of about 650,000 civilians in Iraq. Even William Kristol later said that the Brooks Brothers riot let loose a buried trait in the GOP that later became dominant. (ibid)

    Also, many observers think that the whole mythology about the corruption in West Virginia began with Nixon’s operatives late in the general election.  When it looked like Nixon had lost his lead, they planted a story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch to this effect.

    So 2000 is the proper precedent for the Insurrection. Not a pile of mythology created after the fact by gangsters, Judy Exner and Sy Hersh. Wallace does not want to go there for obvious employment reasons. But also because he admits he favored Nixon in 1960. (Wallace, p. 397). He clearly did not like Kennedy.  And that carried forward to this book.  Any reporter who would stoop to using Exner and Hersh to trash JFK is too biased to be trusted.

    The best way to close this review it to quote Wallace from the MSNBC show The Beat. On October 9th, he commented on the Fox defamation lawsuit over the 2020 election. He said, “There ought to be a price to pay when you don’t tell the truth.”

    As detailed above, you just paid it Chris.

  • Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 1

    Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 1

    Whenever one thinks that the MSM cannot get any worse, or purposefully bad on the subject of John Kennedy or his assassination, another reminder arrives showing they can.  The latest example of this is Chris Wallace’s Countdown 1960.  This book, by former Fox reporter turned CNN employee Chris Wallace, is ostensibly about the race for the presidency in 1960.  I say ostensibly because anyone who knows the subject will be able to figure out what this book is really about.  And, in fact, Wallace pretty much confesses to his real intent in the acknowledgements section of the book.  That section is usually included in the front of a volume, but here its at the end. I will get to why I think that is so later.  

    I

    Like almost every writer who wants to exalt his work on this subject, Wallace begins by saying that the primary system of electing party nominees for the presidency was somehow a novelty in 1960.  And Kennedy decided to use it to original effect.  This is simply not the case. The primary system was really invented during the Progressive Era, but the first one was held before that, in 1901 in Florida. And just a few years later, 12 states were conducting them. By 1910, the practice of holding state elected delegates to cast ballots for the party winner at the convention was established. And, in fact, there was a memorable donnybrook in 1912 during the primary season between challengers Robert La Follette, Teddy Roosevelt and incumbent president William Howard Taft. And there was another memorable race as recently as 1952 between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft.

    For me, the only notable differences in 1960 were 1.) The use of television, and 2.) The debates between Kennedy and Nixon. But the first would have happened anyway no matter who the candidates were.  It was a matter of the creeping reach and power of the broadcast media.  As for the second, this did not really establish a precedent. Because the next presidential debate did not occur until 1976. So right out of the gate, on page 3 to be exact, it can be said that Wallace is aggrandizing his subject. (As later revealed, this ties into his not so hidden agenda.)

    Another disturbing aspect of the book is the fact that Wallace and his researchers, Mitch Weiss and Lori Crim, did not seem to me to do a lot of genuine research.  In looking at the book’s reference notes, almost every one of them is to a prior book, newspaper article or periodical.  There is little that I would call new or original.  And, as I will explain later, some of the sources that Wallace uses are quite dubious; or as we shall see, in some instances, even worse than that.  These factors combine to make the book not just rather superfluous, but questionable at its foundations.

    One of the problematic areas of the book is that  very early Nixon is portrayed as an oracle on foreign policy. (p. 14) John Kennedy is portrayed as something of a cliché.  That is, the usual rich, handsome playboy portrait. (p. 17)  For example, Wallace begins by saying that Kennedy started running for the presidency in 1957, a thesis with which I would tend to disagree. (p. 2)  But if you are going to postulate such, how can any honest and objective author ignore Senator Kennedy’s great Algeria speech? Because it was made in that year. 

    Why is this both important and revelatory? There are two reasons why. First, that speech really put Kennedy on the national map. As Richard Mahoney noted, it provoked a firestorm of newspaper and periodical comments and editorials from all over the country. (JFK: Ordeal in Africa, pp. 14-16; see also, James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition,  pp. 25-28) That national furor ended up placing Kennedy on the cover of Time magazine, with the inside article titled “Man out Front”.  So how can that not be related to Wallace’s subject?

    The reason I think he does not include it is because that speech was a specific attack on President Eisenhower, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and, most relevant to Wallace’s book, on Vice President Richard Nixon. It assaulted the entire basis of their Cold War foreign policy in the Third World. Kennedy was essentially saying that America should not be backing European colonialism. We should be on the side of nationalism and independence in places like Algeria. And this was not just a matter of American idealism, but one of practicality.  He invoked what had happened three years earlier at Dien Bien Phu, where we had first backed the French empire–and it ended up in disaster. He proclaimed that what we should be doing now is assisting France to the negotiating table, in order to save that nation from civil war.  But we also should be working to free Africa. (See the anthology The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 65-81) 

    If one does not refer to this speech, or the trail that led Kennedy to make it, then yes, one can portray the senator as an empty Savile Row suit and Nixon as the experienced sagacious foreign policy maven. But that is simply not being accurate on the facts of the matter.  As John T. Shaw commented in JFK in the Senate, that speech made Kennedy the new voice of the Democratic party on foreign policy.  Since it challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of Eisenhower and Nixon. As Monice Wiesak wrote, this speech also made Kennedy the defacto ambassador to Africa. Because African dignitaries now began to follow him in the press and visit his office. (America’s Last President, p. 12)

    To ignore all of this is to shrink Kennedy and exalt Nixon.  If there is an historical figure who should not be exalted, it is Richard Nixon.  Because it was this Cold War monomania that first, got us into Vietnam, and then, from 1968 onward, kept us there. Until it became even more of a debacle than it had been under the French.

    II

    But there is another way that Wallace exalts Nixon. This is by minimizing the tactics he used to defeat, first Jerry Voorhees for a congressional seat, and then Helen Gahagan Douglas in a race for the senate. The latter is usually considered one of the dirtiest and most unscrupulous political races in American history. 

    Wallace spends all of one paragraph on it. (pp. 10-11)

    Which is really kind of startling.  Because illustrious author Greg Mitchell wrote a milestone book on that campaign in 1998.  It was titled Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady.  I could find no reference to that book in Wallace’s references.  In that campaign, Nixon’s team actually accused his opponent of being a conduit for Stalin. (Mitchell, p. 209) As Mitchell notes, up until that time, candidates who made anti-communism their focus usually lost.  That was not the case here. Nixon literally demagogued the issue to an almost pathological extent. As Mitchell notes:

    Republican and Democratic leaders alike interpreted the outcome as a victory for McCarthyism and a call for a dramatic surge in military spending…. Red baiting would haunt America for years, the so called national security state would evolve and endure and candidates would run and win on anti-Sovietism for decades. (ibid, xix)

    Nixon’s win seemed to demonstrate the political power of McCarthyism, which Senator Joe McCarthy had begun that same year with his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. But as Mitchell proves in his first chapter, McCarthy’s speech drew heavily on the actual words of Congressman Nixon. As with Nixon, it was McCarthy’s aim to make anti-communism a political issue, to portray Democrats as not just soft on communism—Nixon actually tried this with President Truman– but in some cases as commie sympathizers. (This is one reason why Kennedy’s Algeria speech hit home, because it broke through all that Cold War boilerplate with facts and realism.)

    As Mitchell reveals—and contrary to what Wallace implies–Nixon had a lot of money in order to smear Douglas. Not only did he get large corporate contributions, but both the LA Times and the Hearst newspapers backed him. Along with Hollywood bigwigs like Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hughes, Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, Louis Mayer, Anne Baxter, John Wayne and Rosalind Russell. (Daily Beast, article by Sally Denton, November 16, 2009) Nixon also used anti-Semitism, since Douglas’ husband was Jewish. Nixon’s campaign made anonymous phone calls saying, “Did you know that she’s married to a Jew?” (ibid) But in addition to anti-Semitism, the campaign utilized racism. In the last days, thousands of postcards were mailed to white voters in suburbs, and into northern California. That postcard was emblazoned with the phony title—note the gender– “Communist League of Negro Women.”  The message was “Vote for Helen for senator.  We are with her 100%.” (ibid). Can a campaign get any more scurrilous than that? This is why Nixon had such a deservedly wretched reputation as a political hatchet man. Which somehow, and for whatever reason, Wallace wants the reader to forget.

     Nixon lied about what his agenda was both before and after this ugly race. Before it started he said–rather satirically in retrospect–there would be “no name-calling, no smears, no misrepresentations in this campaign.” (Ingrid Scobie, “Douglas v. Nixon”, History Today, November, 1992) And later, he downplayed his tactics for the campaign.  One reason the race had a lasting impact is that Nixon’s manager, the odious Murray Chotiner, became a tutor to the likes of later GOP advisors Karl Rove and Lee Atwater. 

    To relegate all this–and much more–to a single paragraph is just inexcusable.  Because, with a trick worthy of a card sharp, it hides two of the most important and unseemly aspects of Nixon’s career, his Machiavellian morality, and obsession with dirty tactics. 

    As we have seen, Nixon’s Cold War ideology would lead to a hellish ending in Indochina. His political tactics would cause Watergate. Incredibly, Wallace wants to whitewash both.

    III

    But all the above is not enough for Wallace, who is herniating himself by cosmeticizing Nixon.  He now makes a rather curious  statement:

    In 1960, America moved slowly toward racial equality, partly because of detours placed along the road to civil rights by southern governors. (pp. 23-24)

    He then adds something even more curious: Nixon supported civil rights. He uses the crisis at Little Rock’s Central High and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as his evidence for this.  All of this relies on the ignorance of his audience to maintain even superficial credibility.

    Anyone who uses the web can find out that Eisenhower let the students at Central High be terrorized for 20 days while doing nothing. The courts had ordered nine African American students to enter Central High. Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent this. While this was boiling over, Eisenhower actually went on vacation to Newport, Rhode Island. He was then played for the fool by the redneck governor of the state. Faubus came to Newport and told Eisenhower he would now abide by the court ruling and withdraw the National Guard, who had worked against the students. He did not.  And the court ruled against him.  He then removed the Guard. Now the crowd had direct contact with the nine students the court had approved for attendance.

    Humiliated by Faubus and with the press now turning on him, Eisenhower had no choice but to call in federal troops.(LA Times, 3/24/1981, article by Robert Shogan.) Then he and Nixon tried to use a face saving device by submitting a weak civil rights bill to congress. They had no interest is expanding civil rights.  What they wanted to do was split the Democratic party in two: the northern liberals from the southern conservatives. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson did all he could to try and modify the bill so it would not be so polarizing to the southerners. (“The Kennedys and Civil Rights”, Part 1, by James DiEugenio) Because of this, the act ended up being little more than an advisory commission with virtually no real enforcement power.  So what Wallace is trying to sell here about Nixon on civil rights  is transparent bunk.

    But again, what he leaves out makes Wallace’s efforts worse than bunk.  The Eisenhower/Nixon team worked against civil rights. As Michael Beschloss has revealed, Eisenhower tried to convince Earl Warren not to vote for the Brown vs Board decision. And, in fact, both Eisenhower and Nixon failed to support that decision. In the 1956 Autherine Lucy case at the University of Alabama, Eisenhower let an African American student be literally run off campus, even though the court had supported her attendance. He did nothing to protect her. (Irving Bernstein Promises Kept, p. 97; Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 64)  This was two years after Brown vs. Board.

    In a full eight years, the Eisenhower/Nixon administration filed a total of ten civil rights lawsuits.  What makes that even more startling is that six of those years were under the Brown v Board decision. Two of those lawsuits were filed on the last day of Ike’s administration. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 104) And recall, during the Eisenhower/Nixon years, not only did you have the Brown decision, you had the Montgomery bus boycott. In other words one had some ballast to push ahead on the issue.

    Its not enough for Wallace to disguise the real facts about Eisenhower/Nixon on the issue. He now utterly distorts what Kennedy’s public stance was. He says that JFK had been silent about civil rights. (p. 24, p. 160). This is more rubbish from a book that will soon become a trash compactor. In  February of 1956 Kennedy said the following: 

    The Democratic party must not weasel on the issue….President Truman was returned to the White House in 1948 despite a firm stand on civil rights that led to a third party in the South…..We might alienate Southern support but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.

    It is hard to believe that Wallace’s research team missed this speech.  Why? Because Kennedy made it in New York City and the story appeared on the front page of the New York Times for February 8th.

    But in case that was not enough for Wallace, in 1957 Kennedy said the same thing.  This time he made that speech—the Brown decision must be upheld– in the heart of the confederacy:  Jackson, Mississippi. (Golden, p. 95)  As noted in the first speech, JFK made his opinion public knowing full well he would lose support in the south. Which, as Harry Golden noted, is what happened.

    One of the most bizarre things that Wallace writes is that Kennedy voted for the watered down version of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. What Wallace somehow missed completely is this: Kennedy did not want to vote for this bill at all.  As he wrote a constituent, it was because it was so weak. He had to be lobbied to vote for it by Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.  LBJ sent two emissaries to convince him to do so, but Kennedy resisted. Johnson now personally went to Kennedy to lobby him in person.  Kennedy still was reluctant, but he was instructed by some Ivy League lawyers who said it would be better than nothing. (See Lyndon Johnson: The Exercise of Power, by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, pp. 136-37)

    What was the result of all this back and forth?  Essentially nothing.  Because as Harris Wofford wrote in his book Of Kennedys and King, Eisenhower and Nixon resisted just about every recommendation the Civil Rights Commission—which originated with the act—made.  He should know since he was the lawyer for the agency. (p. 21)

    So the inactivity on civil rights in the fifties is clearly due to three men: Eisenhower, Nixon and Johnson. When JFK came into office, as Judge Frank Johnson said, it was like lightning.  Things changed that fast. Including going directly at those southern governors Wallace was talking about.

    Read part 2

  • On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Warren Report

    On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Warren Report

    The Warren Report was issued to the public on September 27, 1964, 60 years ago. It had been handed to President Johnson three days prior. The report is 888 pages long.  And most of the footnotes in the volume refer to materials that had not been given to the public yet.  Namely the 26 volumes of testimony and evidence. Those volumes would not be issued until about two months later.

    Yet, both CBS and NBC broadcast specials on the Warren Report on the day it was issued to the public.  How could anyone have read the 888 pages, digested it, and then put together, respectively, a 2 hour program, and a 1 hour program vouching for the validity of that report?  For that is what happened.  The NBC show was hosted by Frank McGee and supported by Tom Pettit, who was right on the scene when Jack Ruby killed Lee Oswald. The CBS special was hosted by Walter Cronkite, with Dan Rather in support.  Was doing such a thing not a violation of journalistic ethics?  It was the equivalent of taking a government press release and announcing it as factually truthful to tens of millions of people, without any review.

    But in the case of CBS, it was even worse than that.  As the documentary JFK Revisited reveals, CBS producer Bernie Birnbaum later disclosed that the network was cooperating with the Warren Commission, from a date very much prior to the release of the report.  The cooperation extended to the fact that the Commission appears to have recommended witnesses to place on the program. (Florence Graves, Washington Journalism Review, September, October 1978). But as Florence Graves reported, it was even worse than that.  For film maker Emile de Antonio and author Mark Lane viewed some of the outtakes from the CBS program in late 1965.  They told Graves that CBS led witnesses to say things on camera, some of whom were originally uttering things that contradicted the Warren Report.  In other words, far from letting the evidence speak for itself, CBS had molded that evidence to fit what was in the Warren Report, knowing that the report had to be problematic.  

    But it then got worse.  In what amounted to a cover up of this unethical practice, CBS would not allow de Antonio and Lane to use this footage in their documentary Rush to Judgment. This was even after there was an oral agreement to do so. (Mark Lane, A Citizen’s Dissent, pp. 75-79). The two protested to a CBS executive, reminding him that CBS was in the truth gathering business.  Therefore, the network should make all the facts available to the public.  Again, the network declined.  Lane concluded that CBS had begun its production with a script, and even though the Warren Report was officially released the day of the broadcast, it was clear that CBS was in bed with the Commission for a long time. (Lane, p. 77). The case of Howard Brennan is illustrative of this.  For he was not in the initial interviews CBS did. As Lane noted, “CBS, previously unprepared for …Brennan, flew him to New York and conducted an interview with him in time to meet the program’s deadline.”(Lane, p. 78). This action was complimented by one of curtailment.  As Lane wrote, “When a witness said something that challenged the script, that portion of the interview was snipped away and turned into an out-take.” (ibid)

    As Lane concluded:

    For millions of Americans, the program provided as reliable a view of the issues as would a glance at the visible portion of an iceberg reveal its true mass and shape to an inexperienced observer. (Lane, p. 78)

    As Graves noted, CBS also kept the outtakes from all of their JFK films from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).  In fact, CBS told the HSCA they would not surrender the cut materials even if subpoenaed.  The problem with this is that CBS had previously sold such materials, and they had an oral agreement with Lane and de Antonio.  When Florence Graves asked CBS President Richard Salant about other exceptions CBS made to this rule, Salant replied “If you have real evidence in a murder, it’s a different situation.”  Salant apparently was unaware of the humorous irony in that statement.

                                                 II       

    But it was not just the TV networks who were all too eager to praise a report they had no way of cross checking.  It was also the print media, both newspapers and magazines.  Two of the worst cases of this were respectively the New York Timesand Life magazine. About 24 hours after Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, the Times featured a headline saying “President’s Assassin Shot to death in Jail Corridor by a Dallas Citizen.” Yet Oswald always maintained his innocence while in detention;  he never had a lawyer, and of course never stood trial. But the newspaper of record was already pronouncing him as Kennedy’s murderer. On June 1, 1964, four months before the report was issued, Anthony Lewis did a preview of its contents on page one of the Times. Just a few days after the Warren Commission volumes were published the Times issued  a compendium of this testimony called The Witnesses. Anthony Lewis wrote the introduction for that book

    In the case of Life magazine, they swooped into Dallas and snatched up both Oswald’s wife and mother and stored them in a hotel.  Life then purchased the Zapruder film and kept it from the American public for twelve years. With the Zapruder film held in abeyance, on December 6, 1963 that magazine published what can only be called a deliberate canard. They wrote that the film showed Kennedy turning his body far around to his right as he waved to someone in the crowd, thus exposing his throat to the sniper behind him. The film shows no such thing happening, or even close to happening.  But there had to be an explanation for why the doctors at Parkland Hospital said they saw an entry hole in Kennedy’s neck. This supplied one—an explanation which was utterly false.

    In the initial reaction to the issuance of the Warren Report there was no examination of two major issues of large evidentiary import. The first was the mystery of Commission Exhibit 399, later deemed the Magic Bullet.  Yet, as many have stated, even members of the Commission itself—like Arlen Specter and Norman Redlich—declared that without the efficacy of that exhibit the thesis of the Warren Report falls apart.  If CE 399 did not do what the Commission said it did—namely go through both President Kennedy and Governor Connally, making seven wounds and shattering two bones while emerging virtually  unscathed—then this necessitated a second assassin.

    But perhaps even more important, if CE399 was not genuine, if it was a plant, then this would indicate a pre-planned upper level conspiracy.  And there were indications in the volumes that such was the case.  Just look at the way the Warren report handles the testimony of Darrel Tomlinson, the hospital attendant who was the first to discover the bullet on a gurney:

    Although Tomlinson was not certain whether the bullet came from, the Connally stretcher or the adjacent one, the Commission has concluded that the bullet came from the Governor’s stretcher.  That conclusion is buttressed by evidence which eliminated President Kennedy’s stretcher as a source of the bullet.  (WR, p. 81)

    If ever there was a piece of sophistry that could easily be exposed just by reading further, this was it.  And when author Josiah Thompson decided to examine this pretentious piece of pap, it fell apart on all four legs. In ten pages of analysis and investigation he shows how Specter badgered Tomlinson in a way that would not be allowed in court. How the person who Tomlinson had handed the exhibit to—security officer O. P. Wright– had no idea on which stretcher the projectile was found.  How by interviewing other attendants in the area, it is almost certain it was not found on Kennedy’s gurney, or Connally’s.  The evidence indicates it was found on the stretcher of a person unrelated to the case, a little boy named Ronald Fuller. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, pp. 154-165). Finally, the bullet that ended up in the National Archives, and labeled CE 399, was not the bullet that Mr. Wright saw and handed over to the Secret Service.  In fact, when confronted with a picture of CE 399 he starkly disagreed and pulled a sharp-nosed, lead hued bullet out of his desk to show the difference. (The Magic Bullet is round nosed and copper coated.). Thompson was so shaken by this information that he wrote:

    …CE 399 must have been switched for the real bullet sometime later in the transmission chain. This could have been done only by some federal officer, since it was in government possession from that time on. If this is true then the assassination conspiracy would have to have involved members of the federal government and been an “inside” job”. (Thompson, p. 176)

                                        III

    The second piece of evidence that should have jolted reporters attention was the Zapruder film. By the time the report was issued, it was common knowledge in media circles that Life had bought the film. It was also obvious that they were keeping it under wraps.  When the Warren Report was released, although it was clear they relied upon the film for their bullet sequencing, the actual frames were not in the report. And, as even Vincent Bugliosi admitted, they never mentioned the most startling feature in the film: at Zapruder frame 313, Kennedy’s entire body rockets backward with such force that it appears to bounce off the back seat of the limousine.  So now, in addition to the declared entrance wound in the throat, here again was powerful evidence that Kennedy was hit from the front. 

    Where was Anthony Lewis?  Why did he not go to Time-Life in New York and ask to see the film? The other place he could have seen it at was the National Archives.

    The third piece of evidence that should have set off the antennae of any reporter was the Parkland Hospital press conference that was performed in about an hour after Kennedy was pronounced dead at that institution.  At that press conference two of the physicians who worked on the president briefed the media about their efforts.  They were Dr. Kemp Clark and Dr. Malcolm Perry.  They made some rather interesting comments.  Namely that Kennedy had a large wound in the rear of his skull, and that the throat wound appeared to be one of entrance.  It is important to underline that this was on the afternoon of the assassination, one could not get any closer to the time of the actual shooting. 

    As Doug Horne discovered while working for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), the Commission requested a transcript of this press conference.  The Secret Service, through chief James Rowley, said they did not have one. This was a lie.  The ARRB found a transcript which was time stamped, “Received US Secret Service, 1963 Nov. 26 AM 11:40, Office of the Chief.” (Horne, Inside the ARRB, Vol 2, p. 647). 

    In other words, just on the surface, by the time of the release of the Warren Report any investigative reporter could have found evidence to disprove the operating theses of that report.  Namely that Oswald was the sole assassin, that all the shots came from behind, and also that there was fraud in the evidence trail.  A dead giveaway about this is that O. P. Wright’s name in not in the Warren Report.

    It is very had to believe that Arlen Specter did not know the importance of O. P. Wright.  After all, Specter was in charge of the medical and ballistics evidence for the Commission. If he interviewed Tomlinson how could he not know about Wright?  It seems he did know for in a long hidden interview that author Edward Epstein concealed for about a half century, Specter told Epstein how he convinced the Commission about his Single Bullet theory.

    I showed them the Zapruder film, frame by frame, and explained that they could either accept the single-bullet theory or begin looking for a second assassin. (The JFK Assassination Chokeholds, p. 253, by James DiEugenio, Paul Bleau, Matt Crumpton, Andrew Iler and Mark Adamczyk)

    We can properly assume then that the Commission had no interest in the second alternative, searching for a second gunman. We can also properly assume that this was a decision made by expediency and not based on evidence. This is further backed up by another question Epstein asked Specter many years previous  He queried the Commission lawyer: Why did the Secret Service not arrive at the Magic Bullet concept in December while doing reconstructions? Specter replied point blank: “They had no idea at the time that unless one bullet had hit Kennedy and Connally, there had to be a second assassin.” (ibid). Why the late Edward Epstein hid this exchange for so long is a mystery. It seems to me to be of the highest relevancy as to the operating procedure of the Commission.

                                                          IV

    In addition to there being no trace of Wright in the Warren Report, there is also no mention of the two FBI agents who were at the Bethesda autopsy that evening: James Sibert and Francis O’Neill.  Specter did an interview with these men and he read their report on the autopsy.  They both expected to be called as witnesses by the Commission, but they were not.  When William Matson Law interviewed Sibert for his fine 2005 book In the Eye of History, Sibert left no doubt as to why he was not called.  He did not buy the Magic Bullet:

    …if they went in there and asked us to pinpoint where the bullet entered the back and the measurement and all that stuff, how are you going to work it?  See, the way they got the Single-bullet theory was by moving that back wound up to the base of the neck. (ibid, p. 31)

    When asked to repeat what he thought on the subject Sibert replied with, “They can’t put enough sugar on it for me to bite it.  That bullet was too low in the back.”  When specifically asked about Specter, Sibert went even further: “What a liar.  I feel he got his orders from above—how far above I don’t know.” (ibid, p. 32). The missing names of these three men from the Warren Report and the lack of any depositions from them, amid 17,000 pages of evidence and testimony, is simply inexplicable in objective terms.

    But there was still another piece of key evidence that the Commission excised from the volumes. This was the death certificate for Kennedy that was signed by Admiral George Burkley.  When finally located, that certificate placed the back wound at the third thoracic vertebra.  Considering the projectile was entering at a downward angle, that is too low for it to exit the throat. (ibid, p. 35). Again, there is no deposition of Burkley in the Warren Commission volumes.  And when asked in an interview, if he agreed with the Warren Report on the number of bullets that entered JFK’s body, he replied with this: “I would not care to be quoted on that.” (ibid, p. 36)

    From all of the above, it is difficult not to conclude that the Warren Commission was a rigged investigation.  In fact, we have that specific information from one of the most credible witnesses that the Commission actually did interview.  Her name was Sylvia Odio. The FBI went out of their way to discredit her for the Commission.  But as Gaeton Fonzi showed, the Bureau attempt was based on fraudulent information. (Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, pp. 114-15)

    When Fonzi interviewed Odio for the Church Committee, he handed in a report of that encounter.  It was dated January 16, 1976. That report was not declassified until 20 years later.  And it was due to the JFK Records Collection Act, through the ARRB. In that interview she told Fonzi what she told the Commission through attorney Wesley Liebeler: that Oswald had visited her apartment with what appeared to be two Cuban exiles in late September of 1963.  They were looking for contributors to their anti-Castro cause.  Oswald was introduced to her as Leon Oswald. Within 48 hours, the exile called Leopoldo called her back and said Oswald was kind of loco and was talking about killing Kennedy. (Fonzi report to Church Committee) 

    That visit would be strong evidence of Oswald being impersonated in Mexico City, since they days for both events appear to overlap. How credible was Odio? When she saw a picture of Oswald on TV the day of the assassination, she fainted. She also had corroborating witnesses, including her sister who was there, and three people she confided in about the event, before the assassination. The implication being that Oswald was being set up by the Cuban exiles.

    Odio told Fonzi that after she was questioned for the Commission, their attorney Wesley Liebeler asked her to go to dinner with him.  During dinner, Liebeler kept threatening her with a polygraph test.  After that, Liebeler said:

    Well, you know if we do find out that this is a conspiracy  you know that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up. (Fonzi report of 1/16/76)

    Justifiably surprised, Fonzi replied with, “Liebeler said that?” Odio responded with, “Yes sir, I could swear on that.”  After her encounter with Liebeler, Odio said to herself, “Silvia, the time has come for you to keep quiet.  They don’t want to know the truth.”  

    Which most people would deem a rather natural reaction.

                                                 V

    Let us conclude with something that the Commission almost had to know about.  Because it is in the Warren Commission volumes. (Warren Commission Exhibit 3120). This was a pamphlet that Oswald was handing  out on the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 1963. This pamphlet was called “The Crime Against Cuba”.  It was written by Corliss Lamont and printed through Basic Pamphlets. The copy Oswald was handing out  came from the first edition published in 1961. Yet that pamphlet had gone through at least five editions by 1963. In fact, the CIA had ordered 45 copies of it back in 1961.  Further, when one looks at the document in the Commission volumes one will see stamped on the last page: FPCC, 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. (Volume 26, p. 783)

    When Jim Garrison discovered this document, he did something that none of the Warren Commissioners or their attorneys did.  He went to the actual location.  He noticed Mancuso’s Restaurant and went around to the other entrance to the building which was 531 Lafayette.  In one of the most memorable passages of his book, he now recalled that this was the location of “Guy Banister’s Associates Inc. Investigators”. (Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 24) Banister was a notorious rightwing fanatic who employed young students to infiltrate left leaning groups and organizations, and the FPCC on the pamphlet stood for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  As far as Garrison could figure, Oswald was the only member of the FPCC in New Orleans, and he actually paid people from the unemployment office to help him leaflet. (Garrison, p. 25)

    As Garrison writes, this was”…the first evidence I encountered that Lee Oswald had not been a communist or Marxist….Guy Banister…had been using Oswald as an agent provocateur.” (ibid). This began to unveil to the DA that the FBI was in on the cover up.  For they had to know that Banister had his office there, and Banister had been a former FBI agent.  This was a serious flaw with the Commission, its reliance on the FBI for about 80 per cent of its investigative capacity.

    There is no doubt today that Oswald was in Banister’s offices that fateful summer of 1963.  Numerous credible witnesses, including two INS agents, saw him there. We also know that Banister was very upset when he learned that Oswald had used his office address on his pamphlet. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 110-114) 

    But there is even more to the pamphlet than that. Clay Shaw’s right hand man at the International Trade Mart was Jesse Core. He happened to be on the street where Oswald was leafleting the Lamont flyer. He picked one up and noticed the Camp Street address.  He drew an arrow to that address and attached a message, “note the inside back cover”. He then mailed it to the FBI. It was also Core who summoned the TV cameras to the Trade mart to capture Oswald there. (See John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 568) So how could the FBI not have known about Oswald and Banister?

    Let us also note this pertinent fact:  The hearings of the Warren Commission were closed to the public. Only Mark Lane complained about this and so his appearances were opened. Can anyone today imagine the media accepting an arrangement for such an important event by a government agency?  

    It was left to private citizens to actually read the 26 volumes and compare them to the Warren Report.  It was people like Harold Weisberg, Josiah Thompson, Sylvia Meagher and Mark Lane who now reported, with footnotes, that the emperor was wearing no clothes. The Warren Report was an elaborate fraud.  But when organizations like Life, and the NY Times made some motions to do a reinvestigation, these were sabotaged from inside.  For example in the former case by editor Holland McCombs, who just happened to be a friend of Clay Shaw’s.  It was McCombs who retired Life’s two best investigators, Ed Kern and Thompson. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/last-second-in-dallas-part-2) This is why Thompson had to publish his work in the book Six Seconds in Dallas.

    This all held a very deleterious effect on America.  As Kevin Phillips noted in his book Arrogant Capitol, the decline in the citizenry’s belief in what the government was saying began in 1964. Prior to that time it registered in the 70 percentile. From then on, exacerbated by Vietnam and Watergate, it descended into the teens. 

    No one noticed a rather crucial event.  Just three months after the Commission released the 26 volumes of testimony and evidence, President Lyndon Johnson did something that Kennedy did not, and would not do. He sent combat troops to DaNang in Vietnam.  He actually had this landing filmed. 

    In a huge piece of tragic irony, it was that event that led to his ruin.

  • Review of Film – Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War

    Review of Film – Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War

    The valuable Fletcher Prouty finally has his biographical film. And its also autobiographical; since a good part of it is made up of various interviews with him. 

    Prouty was a military man who interfaced with the CIA for years on end, sometimes speaking directly to Allen Dulles.  After graduating from University of Massachusetts Amherst he began his military career with the 4th Armored Division in Pine Camp, New York. In 1942 he was transferred to the Army Air Force and became a pilot. He began service in World War II in 1943 in British West Africa.  He served as personal pilot to, among others, General Omar Bradley. In October of 1943 he flew a geological survey team into Saudi Arabia  to confirm oil deposits for the upcoming Cairo Conference. He later flew Chiang Kai Shek’s Chinese delegation to Tehran.

    Promoted to captain, he was shifted to the Far East in 1945 and ended up being on Okinawa at war’s end.  When the peace treaty was signed in Tokyo Harbor Prouty flew in Douglas MacArthur’s phalanx of bodyguards and he later shipped out American POWs. All in all, it was a distinguished war record.

    Afterwards Prouty was assigned by the army to start up an ROTC program at Yale. This is where he meet William F. Buckley and he later said he wrote some things for Buckley’s Yale paper. In 1950 he was sent to Colorado Springs to build the Air Defense Command. The mission of this branch was air defense of the Continental United States or CONUS. During the Korean War he served as manager of the Tokyo International Airport during the American occupation.

    In 1955 he began service at the position that would later make him stellar in studies of the John F. Kennedy assassination.  This was as a coordinator for military supplies between the Air Force and the CIA. Which roughly meant that if a CIA covert operation needed an air aspect, Prouty would be the man to consult. His work was so distinguished here that he was promoted to Colonel and became the focal point officer for the Defense Department with the same duties. He retired in 1964 and was awarded a Joint Service Medal by Max Taylor, Chair of the Joint Chiefs. After retirement he worked in banking and the railroad industry.  

    But there was a third area Prouty was involved in after he retired from his long stay in the service.  And that was the writing of books and articles.  Since he did not sign a non-disclosure agreement, unlike others, Prouty did not have to clear in advance what he wrote about his career, his assignments or his knowledge of certain affairs. Therefore, he was one of the first to disclose secret information about men like James McCord and Alexander Butterfield, both involved in the Watergate scandal. The former was not just a technician, and the latter—as Prouty learned from Howard Hunt– was a CIA contact in the Nixon White House. 

    Jeff Carter has now made a film about the fascinating life and career of this unique character.  The first part of Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War deals largely with the man’s military background.  And Carter goes into much more expansive detail than what I have sketched above.  But beyond that the film handles all of this information with skill and agility.  Carter did an admirable job in finding back up pictures and films to fill in the foreground and background of some very important points in Prouty’s career that happen to intersect with modern history. For instance, while at Okinawa, Prouty saw literally tons of equipment being landed and warehoused for a possible invasion of mainland Japan.  But since Japan surrendered before any such invasion, these arms were transferred to Indochina since Ho Chi Minh had been resisting Japan in the August Revolution.

    There are also valuable insights about how Allen Dulles started the Cold war with his part in Operation Paper Clip.  This was the transference of top grade Nazi scientists from Germany to the USA to play a role in designing modern weaponry against Russia. That agreement, of course, was accompanied by General Walter B. Smith with a parallel agreement. This one made between the OSS and Reinhard Gehlen to have the former Nazi spy chief take his information about the Russians from Germany’s eastern front to Washington DC. This was quite natural for the Dulles brothers—Allen and John Foster–since their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was active in business dealings in Germany until 1939. Therefore between the brothers and John McCloy, High Commissioner for Germany, the decision was made to go easy on the former Nazi regime in order to ramp up for our new enemy, Russia.

    The film deals with another subject that was relatively ignored until Prouty repeatedly pointed out its importance. This was the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report. That 1949 document was 193 pages long and was critical of what the CIA had done so far and also the performance of the Director, Roscoe Hillenkoetter. That report stated the CIA was not coordinated to meet national security interests, did not supply accurate National Intelligence Estimates often enough, and did not have a single office yet for covert and clandestine operations.

    The ultimate impact of this report was that Hillenkoetter resigned over his failure to predict the invasion of South Korea, and Walter B. Smith became the new DCI. One of the authors of the report, William Harding Jackson, became Smith’s deputy. And Smith and Jackson implemented that report into the Agency.  Thus the CIA now became more of a covert action rather than an intelligence gathering group.  And when Dulles became Deputy DCI and then Director, this aspect fully flowered.

    Prouty wrote a series of memorable articles for various publications in the seventies and eighties.  These essays displayed an intimate knowledge of contemporary American history, characters , American conflicts in world affairs and just how the CIA worked, both abroad and domestically. For instance, he was one of the first to point out that the Agency had lists of cleared attorneys and doctors in major cities who could be called upon to cover up certain crimes the CIA committed. A document proving such was the case was later declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB, see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 35)

    Along with Peter Scott, Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, he was one of the first to argue—contrary to conventional wisdom—that President Johnson had seriously altered Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam.  Fletcher Prouty was aware of this since he worked for General Victor Krulak. And Krulak was very closely involved with Vietnam policy in 1963.  As time went on, Fletcher also became more and more interested in the assassinations of the sixties, especially the murder of President Kennedy.  There was a now famous exchange of letters between Jim Garrison and Prouty over the former DA’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. Prouty was appreciative of Garrison’s efforts. So as Jeff Carter’s film notes, when Oliver Stone talked to both Garrison and his editor, Zach Sklar—who became co-screenwriter of JFK—those two urged him to get in contact with Fletcher.  

    As Prouty notes in the film, only half-humorously, if he would have known what was about to happen to him, he would have run for the hills.  To understand how this happened one needs to be reminded of the fact that the character of Mr. X, so memorably delineated by Donald Sutherland, was based on Prouty.  And it was through that character that the film JFK exploded the myth that Johnson, after Kennedy’s assassination, had continued Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam. 

    That explosion, quite literally, was a shock to the system. In retrospect we can see that the entire establishment—the MSM, academia, Washington—had cooperated to, not just hide the facts, but to also marginalize the voices that had tried to reveal the truth about this epochal tragedy. And they had done this assiduously for close to thirty years.  The combination of the film presenting the hidden record so dramatically and effectively, plus showing how Garrison was exposed to it at the time—which, as the ARRB proved, was also accurate—was just too much.  Too many people were now shown to be utterly and completely wrong e. g. New YorkTimes journalists David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. Plus, as the film suggested–because the policy reversal was so abrupt—it could have been the reason for Kennedy’s assassination. For as JFK demonstrated, the Warren Report was a false document. Lee Harvey Oswald had not killed President Kennedy. 

    Sutherland’s role as Mr. X in the film was a tour de force. And during the memorable walk he took in Washington with Garrison (Kevin Costner), the information that X conveyed about the overseas crimes of the CIA was all accurate information. And Prouty was there for much of it e.g. the secret war against Cuba.  

    But it was what Sutherland said about Vietnam that was so disturbing.  One reason being that just four months after the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission were issued, the first combat troops landed in DaNang.  An escalation that Kennedy would simply not countenance. (Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon Goldstein, p. 63) Further, the film took proper notice of NSAM 263.  That October 1963 order was to begin Kennedy’s withdrawal plan in December, to be completed in 1965.  Prouty knew about all this since, through his superior, Krulak, he worked on the withdrawal program. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, second edition, p. 408).  As he says in the film, the actual Taylor/McNamara report was ready and waiting to be handed to the visiting delegation upon their return.

    In other words, what Mr. X/Prouty, was saying in the film was this:  if Kennedy had lived, 58, 000 Americans, 3.8 million Vietnamese, and 2 million Cambodians would not have perished. America would have been spared ten more years of civil strife and massive demonstrations.  And the rebuilding of Vietnam would have begun much sooner.  What Stone and Sklar were also saying was this: there had been a cover up about this colossal matter, and just about the entire establishment was complicit in it.

    Because Prouty was the figure in the film that conveyed this rather powerful message, both the information, and the messenger were singled out for attack by the likes of George Lardner, Robert Sam Anson and Edward Epstein. (For my specific reply to Epstein, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-abstract-reality-of-edward-epstein) 

    What these three journalists all had in common was that they had previously attacked Jim Garrison back in the sixties and seventies. They were not going to stand idly by while they were belatedly proven wrong. So they all attacked Stone’s film, which because of their proven bias, they should not have been allowed to do.  In fact Lardner and Anson did so before the film was actually released. (See The Book of the Film, by Oliver Stone and Zack Sklar, pp. 191-98; 208-229) All three men either went after Prouty or disputed the information that Prouty (and historian John Newman) had supplied to director Oliver Stone about Vietnam.

    But here is the ultimate irony.  The declassifications of the ARRB proved beyond reasonable doubt that the film, and Prouty, were correct. In the documentary film, JFK Revisited, are displayed the records of the May 1963 Sec/Def conference. Those records were so compelling that even the New York Times had to admit that Kennedy was planning to get out of Vietnam at the time of his death. (See the book JFK Revisited, by James DiEugenio, p. 186) So, bottom line, this was all Sturm and Drang about Prouty to disguise the fundamental truth that he and Stone were correct about Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (For more on what Anson tried to do to Prouty, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/fletcher-prouty-vs-the-arrb) 

    The film deals with other controversial subjects which Prouty has special knowledge of, for example, the Suez Crisis of 1956, where Israel, France and England tried to dislodge Nasser as the leader of Egypt. In this episode, Fletcher concentrates on the duplicity of Foster Dulles and how he set up Anthony Eden to take the fall in the affair. His discussion of the U2 shootdown is also quite interesting since he thinks that Gary Powers’ flight was sabotaged.  The motive being to sandbag the upcoming May 1960 Summit Meeting in Paris.  Prouty also discusses how the Bay of Pigs mysteriously morphed from the time it was being planned by Richard Nixon and the CIA—then it was a guerilla action with 300 men—to the time Kennedy was inaugurated, where it was now training almost 3000 men. Prouty has always stressed the importance of the Taylor Commission afterwards, where Bobby Kennedy went after Allen Dulles tooth and nail.  It was here that RFK began to suspect that the operation was never expected to succeed, and that its imminent failure would be used to coax JFK into using the Navy to intercede.

    All in all, this is a worthy tribute to a worthy man. One  who was unjustly smeared, even by those in the critical community. Jeff Carter has interweaved several interviews with Fletcher by people like John Judge, Dave Ratcliffe, Bruce Kainer, and Len Osanic for maximum informational effect.  And there is a concluding interview with Oliver Stone which was done in Vancouver.  Here the director gives Fletcher Prouty the praise he deserves for the solid and valuable information he contributed to his landmark film.  

    From which, the establishment never recovered.

    The film may be watched here:  https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fletcherproutyscoldwar