by Emily Langer
Category: Obituaries
Notices of the death of important personages who were involved in some way with the assassinations of the 1960s or with their investigation.
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Richard Schweiker, Critic of JFK Assassination Probe, Dies at 89
by David Henry
At: Bloomberg
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The Two Faces of Gary Mack
Jim Marrs and Robert Groden with Len Osanic at BlackOpRadio
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Gary Mack dies at 68
by William Grimes
At: NYT – Listen also to Jim Marrs and Robert Groden on Len Osanic: The Two Faces of Gary Mack
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Vincent Bugliosi dies at 80
by Jack Noyes and Kelly LeGoff
At: NBC Los Angeles
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Harrison Livingstone Has Passed
by Vince Palamara
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Honor to Paris Flammonde
By James DiEugenio
Because Paris Flammonde lived in a small town and had retired long ago from his former rather high profile radio and writing career, his November passing went relatively unnoticed. CTKA belatedly found out about it through a posting by Albert Doyle at Deep Politics Forum. And even that was a rather non-descript notice. Flammonde deserves more. Much more.
I got to know Flammonde back in the early nineties when I was writing my book, the first edition of Destiny Betrayed. At that time, there really was not a lot of information to be had in secondary sources about the New Orleans aspects of the JFK assassination, or about the inquiry into that case by Jim Garrison. The ARRB had not been set up yet and that hindered access to much of the primary data. And one must recall that, at that time, there was not very much of value in the published book length sources. Unless one wanted to read hatchet jobs like American Grotesque. (Which, we later discovered, had been commissioned by Clay Shaw.) The obvious exception was Garrison’s own book, On the Trail of the Assassins.
I knew this since I had traveled all over southern California looking for a good and balanced book outside the DA’s own work. I couldn’t find anything. I did not know at that time that two books about Garrison, which were balanced and informational, had been aborted by the outcome of the Clay Shaw trial. One was by Bill Turner and one was by a Garrison assistant named Bill Brown. (These were not discovered until years later by the ARRB.) A previous and earlier effort by Garrison himself had also been killed, even after the DA had signed a contract. Garrison had to return the advance. Why? Because the editor gave the book to, of all people, Sylvia Meagher to critique.
Why do I say “of all people?” Because although Sylvia Meagher wrote an absolutely first class book demolishing the Warren Commission, she was frankly, unhinged on the subject of Jim Garrison. Even those who knew her closely and liked her would admit that. This includes Jerry Policoff, Ray Marcus, and the late Roger Feinman and Margie Field. According to Policoff, Meagher actually gave money to Clay Shaw’s defense fund. How on earth could a publisher hire someone like that to critique a book by Garrison? Policoff said to me that Sylvia should not have taken on the assignment.
But this indicates a very good reason why I could not find any book of real value with real information when I started working on my book. When Garrison’s investigation was first exposed, and then forcibly announced, most of the critics were joyous. But as the vitriolic and systematic attack on Garrison out of both New York (the media) and Washington (the CIA and FBI) took hold, many of the critics began to desert the DA. But not just desert him; they actually joined in the onslaught. In addition to Sylvia Meagher, there was also, for example, David Lifton. Lifton wrote two articles in the alternative press caricaturing Garrison. He did this largely because Garrison had seen a lot more in Kerry Thornley than Lifton did. For instance that Thornley had lied about not meeting with Oswald in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans. (For a good treatment of this subject, see Joe Biles’ valuable book, In History’s Shadow. For a shorter precis see Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition pgs. 187-93.) Lifton even helped Edward Epstein compose his hatchet job on Garrison in The New Yorker in 1968. This turned into the first entry on the anti-Garrison bookshelf, Counterplot.
It was incredible, but true, that none of these critics understood what was happening. They actually took the likes of Hugh Aynesworth, James Phelan, and Walter Sheridan seriously. Garrison was a charlatan or worse, and Clay Shaw was a persecuted saint. There really was nothing to find in New Orleans. And the information Garrison had was not worth looking at.
With the release of the ARRB records, we now know this was not at all the case. Not by a long shot. People like Paul Hoch, Josiah Thompson, Peter Scott and Tony Summers were buying into a CIA cover story. But because Garrison was “discredited,” they wanted to avoid any contact with him; so they could escape the tarring and feathering the DA had gotten in the press. The insinuation being that if they could avoid that association, then they would be taken seriously by the MSM.
We now know of course that, with very few exceptions, such was not the case. The latest reissue of Summers’ book, for example, ended up on the cover of the National Enquirer. Today Summers says, well, the JFK case may be a conspiracy, but if it is, the Mafia did it. Paul Hoch, it turned out, had not disclosed the evidence that Luis Alvarez’ infamous experiment about the jet effect was something he assisted on and was, to put it mildly, flawed. (This was discussed by Thompson at the Passing the Torch conference in Pittsburgh in 2013.) Scott’s subsequent career; in which he extended praise to the likes of Lamar Waldron– suggests he never met a conspiracy theory on the JFK case he did not like. Except Garrison’s. Thompson, as late as December of 1967 was questioning Garrison’s statement that Kennedy’s murder was a coup d’etat. And defending the MSM’s silence on the issue! (ibid, p. 381) In other words, the idea was this: the further you separated yourself from New Orleans and Garrison, the more respectability one had in the research community. And in the MSM.
My questions about this strategy back in the early nineties were these:
- Had the MSM given the critics a fair airing, even though they had scurried like rats from a sinking ship out of New Orleans? I could see very little evidence of that in all the years from 1969 to 1991.
- Was there valuable information to be had in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 about Oswald? As far as I could see, there was.
- Had these critics actually given Garrison a fair shake? That is, did they go through his materials and talk to his investigators and witnesses? Or were they doing the opposite, that is echoing the orchestrated choir that the media had assembled? They seemed to be doing the latter.
- Finally, in the interim, had these critics come up with anything better than what Garrison had, either in the gestalt–that is a macro view–or on the ground level, in the way of suspects and discoveries? In writing my first book, it seemed to me that they had not. Unless one agreed with Summers and Scott, that the Mafia was a major player in the JFK murder.
I did not believe that was the case. Not then, and not now. Therefore, I didn’t buy this self-serving and reflexive phobia/mania about Garrison. So I kept an open mind.
Then, one Saturday, I drove to the library at California State Dominguez Hills, near Long Beach. It was a long ride from where I lived at the time. But I figured I had to keep on looking for a major source book. On that day I found Paris Flammonde’s The Kennedy Conspiracy. I had not heard of this book before. In fact, many of the critics just ignored both the book and the man. Since it focused on the Garrison investigation, I checked it out and brought it home.
As anyone who has read the first edition of Destiny Betrayed knows, Flammonde’s book was an invaluable source for me. My first book would not exist in the form it does without Paris Flammonde. There was extremely relevant information to be found there on Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, Gordon Novel, and Dean Andrews, among many others. Information one could not find anywhere else. Information that other writers in the interim; for bewildering reasons; had failed to use. When my book came out, many people who read it thanked me for exposing them for the first time to Flammonde’s book. One researcher went and got it from a library and said, “That’s a good book now.” This was in 1992, 23 years after The Kennedy Conspiracy was first published.
I decided to contact Flammonde while doing research for that book. I wrote him a letter and told him to call me on the weekend. He did so and I was glad he did. When I asked him how he got all that wonderful information in his book, he told me something very interesting. He said, toward the end, on the eve of the Shaw trial, the DA was calling him up every weekend. He said, “I was the only source he could trust at that stage. He knew that what he was saying was being distorted, censored, and perverted. He felt I was the only person at that time who would treat him fairly.” Flammonde also told me that he subscribed to both New Orleans papers. And finally, he said that he had developed some good sources on his trips to New Orleans.
When I asked him why he had written the book–and stuck it out to completion–he said it was simple: He had always been drawn to the offbeat things in the news. (He had spent awhile in radio in New York City.) Secondly, when he went to New Orleans, he was convinced by talking to Garrison that something had happened there in the summer of 1963. Therefore, he went the extra mile. For instance, he paid a ducal sum to have the articles in the Italian press about Permindex translated into English so he could use them in his book. I personally thanked him for that since it did much to peel back the cover story around Clay Shaw. I asked him how the book did in sales. He said it was simple. Before the Shaw verdict the book did well. After the verdict came in, it tanked. That hurt us all I think. Because the book was such a unique effort.
When I was doing my early research, and making my first appearances at conferences, this negative attitude about Jim Garrison was still prevalent. I will never forget an occurrence at Doug Carlson’s conference in Chicago in 1993. I was on stage and I made a comment about the terrible preemptive strike made on Oliver Stone’s film JFK in the media, and also by some in the research community. Paul Hoch had a tantrum. He got up and asked Tink Thompson his opinion about Jim Garrison. That was a nice tag team act from two men who knew zilch about the subject. From the lectern, Hoch actually said that anyone who discovers anything about Clay Shaw in the new files should ignore it! I was stunned at this. It seemed to me to be the opposite of what doing academic research was all about. New information was new information. No matter who it was about. And William Davy’s fine book, Let Justice be Done, proved there was a lot of new information in the declassified files about Clay Shaw.
Peter Scott said something just as bizarre. But more prolix. At that conference, I read the compelling Fred Leemans’ confession. This demonstrated how Leemans had been suborned to lie by Walter Sheridan on his NBC special. (See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pgs. 240-41). Just recently declassified at the National Archives, and sent to me by Peter Vea, this was the first time the document had been read in public. It had a powerful effect on the audience. When I read the document, I had been on a panel with Peter Scott and John Newman. During the following Q and A, Scott felt he had to interject something about the Leemans confession. So he said it was a result of the war Bobby Kennedy had carried out against Jimmy Hoffa, through Sheridan, and somehow Garrison; and Leemans — got caught in the conflagration. I didn’t understand what that meant then. And I don’t understand it now. In fact, I don’t even want to think about it. But it helps illustrate just how reflexive and irrational the reaction, even at that time, was against Jim Garrison.
Thank God, this has been largely reversed today. Further work by myself, Bill Davy, Biles and Joan Mellen have shown that, contrary to what Hoch and Scott and Summers were selling, Jim Garrison did have a lot of interesting evidence. So much so that his successor as DA, the disgraceful Harry Connick, incinerated much of it. He then lied about it. (ibid, pgs. 319-22) So, as much as we have from Garrison’s files today, no one will ever know what was actually there originally.
It was Paris Flammonde who first alerted us to the fact that there was something in those files. Something valuable, revealing, sinister and dramatic. As Joan Didion once said, Garrison was turning over large stones and revealing a whole new dimension about the crime. Therefore, unlike what Summers said at the AARC Conference in Washington last year, Garrison did not conduct a circus. The circus was what went on around Garrison. For the FBI and CIA were determined not to let him proceed unimpeded. Because at the first meeting of the CIA’s Garrison Group, ordered up by Director Richard Helms, Ray Rocca said, if that happened, Clay Shaw would be convicted. (ibid, p. 270) So the CIA and FBI pulled out all the stops. To the point of secretly aiding Shaw’s lawyers. A fact that Shaw’s lawyers lied about forever. And a fact that Hoch, Scott and Summers ignore to this day.
We all owe thanks to Paris Flammonde for sailing against the current. He didn’t care about being “respectable.” He understood that, with the MSM, there really was no such thing as being respectable on the JFK case. For the simple reason that they had prostituted themselves on the subject in every way, and from the very start.
Paris Flammonde, in that respect, was a pioneer. And a courageous one. On his death, I salute him for his valiant, much ignored, but invaluable effort.
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The Deaths of Two Unsung Heroes: John Judge and Mike Ruppert
In the space of a few days in mid April, two fighters for the truth about America’s recent history were lost to us. John Judge passed away in Washington D.C. and Mike Ruppert passed in Napa, California. It’s appropriate that the two deaths in essence straddled the country. Because in a real sense, John and Mike worked hard to create an alterative paradigm to the MSM’s version of contemporary American history.
John Judge I knew both of these authors and activists for many years. In both a personal way and also in a professional manner. I first met John Judge (left, 11-22-96) at the ASK Symposium in Dallas back in 1991. This was the first of the research conferences, which became annual events when Oliver Stone’s film JFK debuted. John was a working research partner of the late Mae Brussell and he was selling a collection of her best essays there in a pamphlet called the Mae Brussell reader. John and Mae had researched the major assassinations of the sixties at length and in depth. That is, the murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. And since Mae had such a wide variety of interests, John also had a cosmopolitan view of modern American history. John had opinions on things like the Tate-LaBianca murders and the Jonestown tragedy. In all these instances John and Mae came to radically different views of these events than the MSM did.
Mae’s work was backed up by a huge archive of documents and books and clippings. I know this for a fact since I was one of the very few people who was allowed to utilize this archives. After Mae died in 1988, there ensued a rather unseemly battle over her legacy. This included her collection of broadcast tapes called World Watchers International. These had been made on radio station KAZU FM in Pacific Grove. It also included over 40 file cabinets of newspaper and magazine clippings and documents. In addition to that Mae had about 4000 books, some of which were very hard to come by. Lisa Pease and myself were allowed to go through these materials for a weekend in Santa Barbara when the late bookseller Tom Davis had them in his possession. Although Brussell was caricatured by many in and out of the research field, there were very few in the community that had the wherewithal and stamina to do the very difficult work she did on so many current topics. John benefited from this relationship in much of his work and in his viewpoint of how the importation of the Nazi scientific and spy apparatus through Reinhard Gehlen’s relationship with Allen Dulles and John McCloy impacted the American intelligence community at its inception.
As I said, at the time I met John and interviewed him for my first book, the first edition of Destiny Betrayed, he really was not a researcher anymore. He first became a public relations liaison for Mae’s work. But that effort was hamstrung over the internecine strife over who Mae actually left her archives and legacy to. John founded the Committee for an Open Archives along with Bill Kelly. That group then joined with CTKA and the AARC to form the Coalition on Political Assassinations, and John became the front person for the COPA. In the late nineties, when that group was formally disbanded, John continued to hold conferences under that banner. In addition to holding seminars on the JFK case, John also did the same in Memphis for the King case, in Los Angeles for the Bobby Kennedy case, and even in New York for the Malcolm X case.
When the 9-11 attacks happened, John immediately became involved with the family members in trying to get a federal inquiry off the ground. And he also monitored the work of that commission. From 2005 to 2007 he worked as a Special Projects Director for the exceptional Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Two things he did for her was to arrange a 2005 conference of the very best 9-11 researchers for congress to hear, and he helped draft articles of impeachment for George W. Bush.
One of the researchers who John invited to speak at that McKinney arranged conference was Mike Ruppert. (This conference can be viewed at You Tube under the title, Cynthia McKinney on CSPAN-Report Card 1 of 4.) Which is as it should have been. Mike Ruppert was involved in his alternative journalism career in September of 2001. Mike had been a police detective in Los Angeles for a number of years. While on this job he became romantically involved with a woman who introduced him to the importation of drugs into the US by a combination of the CIA and Halliburton. This led to his resignation from the force. He then got interested in reopening the RFK case. Mike had learned some fascinating things about the RFK cover up while on the force. So he joined forces with the likes of the late Jonn Christian to try and introduce new evidence to the LA Police Commission about that case.
But when Gary Webbs’s sensational stories in the San Jose Mercury News exploded onto the national agenda in 1996, Ruppert found his moment. When John Deutch visited Los Angeles, Mike confronted him on camera. This was an electric and iconic example of the old adage of “speaking truth to power”. Mike capitalized on this moment by launching his own publication called From the Wilderness. This began as a mailed periodical and then became an online journal. It was one of the very few alternative voices that arose during the so-called Internet Revolution that really was a vibrant and strong media outlet in the tradition of Ramparts and the LA Free Press. (Two others were David Talbot’s Salon and Bob Parry’s Consortium News.)
There were very few people who were as good as Mike was on the issues of CIA drug dealing. And From the Wilderness helped launch a vibrant speaking tour for Mike. From the Wilderness grew to have a circulation in the tens of thousands. And I eventually wrote for that fine journal. (See here and here.)
But when the 9-11 attacks happened, Mike pounced on this event like a tiger. As he told me, there just seemed to be too many anomalies about it: the late arriving interceptors, the large stock market manipulation which no one collected on, the many war games in progress that day. Mike had learned from the JFK case. He was not going to concentrate on the physical evidence in 9-11. After all he said, what is more compelling than the Zapruder film? Yet, the MSM casts that aside. So he concentrated on building an internal evidentiary case, showing how a series of acts built to the final denouement. The case he made was not against George W. Bush. It was against the dyed in the wool Neocons Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. His book on the subject, Crossing the Rubicon, is a bit long, but it is surely one of the finest books on that subject one can read.
As Mike’s manager, Ken Levine, told me, Ruppert was as bad a businessman as he was a good journalist. Therefore, because he was not a good delegator and manager, From the Wilderness never prospered the way it should have. He then moved out of California into the Pacific Northwest and ran into legal problems. This essentially brought down From the Wilderness. I actually tried to buy the publication from him, but he either never got the offer or never seriously considered it.
Mike tried to make a comeback with the documentary film Collapse. But although that film was a good one there were too many of them out at the time about the economic collapse of 2007-08. It did not do for him what he expected. But Mike kept up his talking and speaking engagements. And I think it’s fitting to remember him by two interviews he did with Allison Weiner on her fine program Media Mayhem. (Click here for these two appearances and here.)
I didn’t agree with John and Mike on every issue. But most of the time they were on the right track. Beyond that, they provided a serious and credible counterweight to the nonsense of the dying MSM.
We are all a bit poorer with their leaving us.
– Jim DiEugenio
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Elegy for Roger Feinman
Roger Feinman Roger Feinman Esq. passed away in New York City in mid-October of a heart condition. I did not meet Roger until 1993 at an ASK Symposium in Dallas. I was standing outside the main hall with John Newman when Roger approached us both and congratulated us on our recent books, Destiny Betrayed and JFK and Vietnam. He congratulated John without qualification and me with some qualification. When I got to know Jerry Policoff a bit better, I found out why mine was qualified.
Both men had studied at the foot of the illustrious Sylvia Meagher. And as most people know, Sylvia had little time or affection for Jim Garrison. Since my book centered on Garrison, Roger had reservations about it. (Although I also learned from Jerry that Sylvia’s attitude toward Garrison changed slightly later in life.) Since Roger, like Sylvia, lived in New York, he was even closer to her than Policoff was. Having Sylvia as a mentor had its (plentiful) attributes and its drawbacks. On one hand, Sylvia had a strong devotion to core texts in the field. Consequently, one had to study the Warren Commission and House Select Committee volumes, and the supporting documents, at length and in depth. And very few people anywhere knew those volumes as well as she did. As is proven by the fact that she indexed them both. She was also a stickler for pure academic form. That is, one had to follow standard footnote and sourcing guidelines. And these should be attached to only credible sources. Finally, one should be analytical in one’s approach to the evidence in the case. For the authorities had decided much too early that Lee Harvey Oswald, and he alone, was guilty. Therefore, they had deprived the man of any kind of proper defense. One of the functions of the critical community was to balance the scales of justice in that regard.
One of Sylvia’s drawbacks was that she rarely wanted to go beyond the core volumes. That is, she confined her approach to weighing the evidence in them and deciding the Warren Commission had not solved the crime–but actually helped cover it up. Hence the title of her excellent book Accessories After the Fact. She did not actually get out in the field and find other sources. Also, she tended to accept certain things in the Warren Report that to her, and to other first generation critics, just seemed too outlandish to question. For instance, Oswald’s possession of both the rifle and handgun as depicted in the famous backyard photographs. Consequently, when Jim Garrison began to go beyond the Warren Commission volumes in his inquiry—and to be tripped up by hidden forces both within and outside the mainstream press—she parted ways with him. She actually became one of his harsher critics. Hence Roger’s reservations about my first book. (I should note here, Sylvia was not alone in this attitude toward Garrison. Other first generation critics, like Paul Hoch and Josiah Thompson, felt the same way toward the DA.)
As Roger began to make his own way in the field, he began to concentrate on two areas. His first area of interest was the media. He later developed a strong interest in the medical evidence. Concerning the first, Roger probably developed an interest in the media because he worked for CBS News. He was lucky enough to have secured a job there at a relatively young age as a news writer. And he had a promising future in a (then) thriving corporation. His idols there were the illustrious Edward R. Murrow, and the less famous Joe Wershba, who, ironically, died just a few months before Roger did. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/16/national/main20063216.shtml)
Wershba had assisted Murrow on his famous See it Now series, including the two segments that attacked Senator Joseph McCarthy, and helped end his demagogic and pernicious career. But Roger also noted what CBS had done to Murrow after that famous interlude. They essentially had bought him off and placed him in a gilded cage by giving him a lot of money to do innocuous celebrity interviews with people like Liberace. As Roger had deduced, William Paley and the top brass at CBS decided that no journalist, especially a crusader like Murrow, should ever have that kind of power again.
Which makes what he did later at CBS even more admirable. Roger thoroughly understood that his company was up to its neck in the cover up of President Kennedy’s assassination. In fact, one could cogently argue that, from 1963-75, no other broadcast outlet did more to prop up the Warren Commission farce than did CBS. They prepared three news specials in that time period to support the Commission. These all came at crucial times in that time period. The first one was in 1964 to accompany the release of the Warren Report. The second was in 1967 to calm a public that was becoming anxious about what Jim Garrison was doing in New Orleans. The third was in 1975 at the time of the Church Committee exposure of the crimes of the CIA and FBI, and the Schweiker-Hart subcommittee report on the failure of those two agencies to properly relay information to the Commission.
Instead of being quiet, playing along, and watching his bank account grow and his life prosper, Roger did something that very few of us would do. He began to write internal memoranda exposing how the practices used in the assembling of the multi–part 1967 series clearly violated the written journalistic standards of the network. As an employee, Roger had access to both the people involved in the making of that series, and through them, the documents used in its preparation. To say that these sources cinched his case is an understatement. They showed how the show’s producer, Les Midgley, had succumbed to pressure from above in his original conception of the show.
His first idea was to show the viewer some of the points of controversy that the critics had developed. Then open up the program to a scholarly debate between some of the more prominent critics and the actual staffers on the Warren Commission. Wouldn’t it have been lovely to see Arlen Specter defend the “Single Bullet Theory” against Mark Lane? Or to listen to David Belin explain to Sylvia Meagher how the original rifle reportedly found, the Mauser, became a Mannlicher Carcano? Or to have Wesley Liebeler explain to Richard Popkin how all those reported sightings of a Second Oswald were either mistaken or didn’t matter? Even the one at Sylvia Odio’s apartment in Dallas. And to hear all this knowing that tens of millions were watching? What a great exercise in democracy: to have a thorough airing in public about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of President Kennedy. Especially while his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was escalating the Vietnam War to absurd and frightening heights.
It was not to be. There was virtually no debate at all on this series. It was essentially a multi-part and one-sided endorsement of the Commission; the main talking heads being Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. In his memoranda, Roger showed, with specific examples arranged in time sequence, how Midgley’s original conception was completely altered. Further, he named names all the way up the ladder. This included Dick Salant, president of CBS News. He then showed just how badly CBS had compromised itself to the Warren Commission forces. Midgley actually had Commissioner John McCloy act as a consultant to the program. Except this was done outside of normal channels, through his daughter, who worked at CBS and who functioned as a go-between between Midgley and McCloy. To conceal how badly CBS had compromised its own journalistic standards, Midgley then kept McCloy’s name off the program. In other words, the public never knew that CBS had consulted with a Warren Commissioner on a show that was actually supposed to judge the quality of work the Commission did. Of course, this would have been admitting to a national audience that the program was an extension of the Commission itself. And therefore was a cover up of a cover up.
Midgley’s career was not at all hurt by his caving into pressure. In fact, it prospered. (http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/29/local/me-midgley29) He spent 34 years at CBS, retiring in 1980 after winning several awards. On the other hand, Roger’s was hurt. Fatally. He was first warned to stop composing and forwarding his critical memoranda about the Kennedy coverage. Unlike Midgley, Roger would not compromise. So CBS now began termination procedures against him. The procedures turned out to be successful. Roger lost his job, career, and future at CBS over his desire for them to tell the truth about the Kennedy assassination. To me, this episode is an object lesson which illustrates the fact that journalism is compromised by its managers being too close to centers of power. So much so that the Power Elite—in the person of John McCloy– then actually dictates what the truth about an epochal event is. Roger resisted the hypocrisy. He was shown the door.
Roger then decided to go to law school. He graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. He was a practicing lawyer for a number of years until, again, his career got caught up in the Kennedy case. The Power Elite deeply resented the impact that Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK had on the public. It created exactly what Midgley had been directed not to do: a public debate about Kennedy’s assassination. And the debate was everywhere, and it went on for months on end.
Finally, Random House and Bob Loomis had had enough. Loomis, a Random House executive, now played the role of Dick Salant. He decided to orchestrate a quelling of the debate. He did this by hiring Gerald Posner to write a cover up book on the Kennedy case. Entitled Case Closed, the book was ridiculous on its face. Because Congress had not yet released 2 million pages on the Kennedy assassination. These were going to be declassified as a result of passage of the JFK Act, which was a direct result of the Stone film. So how could Posner close the case without this important information? Further, if Posner had closed the case, why was this information still being withheld?
Loomis, and his friends in Washington and New York, helped arrange an extravaganza of a book tour for Posner the likes of which had rarely, if ever, been seen. He was featured on ABC in primetime, his book was excerpted with a cover story in US News and World Report. This was meant, of course, to distract attention from what was going to be released in those files. In order to cut off another debate. How intent was Random House to crush the critics and drown out their message? Loomis and Harold Evans, then president of Random House, decided to take out a large ad in the New York Times. It was in two parts and it was meant to deride the critics and exalt Posner and his book. The first part took the pictures of some prominent critics, like Bob Groden and Jim Garrison, and excerpted quotes from them out of context. At the top of the ad in large letters were the words: “Guilty of Misleading the American Public”. For Roger, this was one more example of corporate arrogance and the irresponsible use of power in the face of a complex and crucial event like the Kennedy case.
So when Groden came to Roger and said he felt like his name and work had been smeared by the ad, Roger agreed to take on his case. If he had known what was in store for him, and the relationship between the judge in the case and Random House’s lawyer, he may not have done so. Because the judge clearly favored Random House, since he had been a clerk for Earl Warren. On just that basis, he should have recused himself. But he did not. When Roger protested the perceived bias, and the resultant favoritism that he felt short circuited the process and robbed his client of his day in court, he lost another career. He was disbarred.
Roger spent the last quarter of his life in his small New York apartment working off and on as a computer programmer. He never lost his interest in the case, which had actually brought him much personal sorrow and grief. And he never lost his interest in the medical evidence. He supported the work of Dr. Randy Robertson, which he felt proved a conspiracy in the JFK case. And he criticized the work of David Lifton with a very long essay—Between the Signal and the Noise— criticizing his book Best Evidence. I had the privilege of communicating with Roger in those years via an e-mail chain set up between Milicent Cranor, Gary Schoener, Jerry Policoff, and myself. Roger never lost his spirit about what had happened to the USA as a result of the assassinations of the sixties, and he was a keen student of how the political system had evolved and declined since then. I got to see him at several conferences. It was always a pleasure to talk to him about CBS and what he had learned there through the documents he had spirited out when he left.
One definition of the heroic is someone who sacrifices his own personal well being for a cause outside himself. Knowing full well that the odds against him triumphing are very high. Roger took that heroic gamble. Not once, but twice. He lost both times. Few of us, maybe no one, could display that kind of courage for a cause.
For that, he should be saluted on his passing.
(The following are links to some of Roger’s work)
Between the Signal and the Noise (http://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Feinman/Between_the_signal/Preface.html)
“When Sonia Sotomayor’s Honesty, Independence and Integrity were Tested”. This article describes how Roger was disbarred over the Groden vs Random House case
“CBS News and the Lone Assassin Story”, this is the script for Roger’s excellent visual essay on how Les Midgley’s CBS series covered up for the Warren Commission in 1967. Use this link.
See now also “How CBS Aided the JFK Cover-up” by Jim DiEugenio.