Kennedys and King Test host626

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.

  • Malcolm Perry, MD Falls into the Kennedy Vortex

    The recent death of Malcolm Oliver Perry, MD, [1] a key Parkland Hospital witness to President Kennedy’s wounds, provides an instructive opportunity to revisit not only some of the mysteries of JFK’s injuries, but also why, ironically, anti-conspiracy witnesses such as Dr. Perry make the case for conspiracy so compelling.

    As so often happens with a witness showcased by the government, Dr. Perry’s downright odd, flip-flopping behavior strongly hinted that authorities were exerting themselves behind the scenes to push the anti-conspiracy line. His saga also suggests that not only did a respected independent physician bow to those authorities, but so also did the press.

    Dr. Perry, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center, was one of the first physicians to attend to the president. And when he answered questions at a news conference shortly after JFK died, he was the first treating physician to speak publicly about Kennedy’s injuries.

    It was Dr. Perry’s unrehearsed, seemingly pro-conspiracy remarks about JFK’s injuries given right after his death, and how they were given a vigorous anti-conspiracy spin by the government, a servile press and the cooperative physician-witness himself, that convinces skeptics to this day that their doubts are well founded.

    Dr. Perry at Parkland Hospital on 11.22.63

    Little more than one hour after JFK was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital, Dr. Perry appeared alongside neurosurgery professor Kemp Clark, MD to answer questions at a press conference.

    A newsman asked Dr. Perry: “Where was the entrance wound?”

    Dr. Perry: “There was an entrance wound in the neck …”

    Question: “Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At him?”

    Dr. Perry: “It appeared to be coming at him …”

    Question: “Doctor, describe the entrance wound. You think from the front in the throat?”

    Dr. Perry: “The wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat; yes, that is correct. The exit wound, I don’t know. It could have been the head or there could have been a second wound of the head. There was not time to determine this at the particular instant …” [2]

    Dr. Perry’s initial impression isn’t proof the wound in JFK’s throat was an entrance wound. But at no time before the press did he allow that the wound might have been anything but an entrance wound. With but one exception, that of the New York Herald Tribune, to which we will later return, early press accounts accurately reflected Dr. Perry’s words.

    On 11.22.63 UPI reported that Dr. Perry had said, “There was an entrance wound below the Adam’s apple.” The New York Times reported that Dr. Perry had said, “Mr. Kennedy was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple … This wound had the appearance of a bullet entry.” [3] The Dallas Morning News reported, “The front neck hole was described as an entrance wound,” and it quoted Dr. Perry to say, “It did however appear to be the entrance wound at the front of the throat.”

    The problem with this account arose with Oswald’s arrest. For if he had indeed pulled the trigger, he’d have pulled it from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, above and behind JFK. Informed of the contradiction, Dr. Perry held fast to his initial impression. The Boston Globe‘s medical reporter, Herbert Black, asked Dr. Perry the next day how the throat wound could have been of entry if the gunman was behind the President. Perry answered, “It may have been that the President was looking sideways with his head thrown back when the bullet or bullets struck him.” [4]

    The Trauma Surgeon vs. the Press

    Arlen Specter and the Warren Commissioners saw these press accounts as a problem for the lone nut case they were building. So much so that Mr. Specter took the unusual step of contacting Dr. Perry and others Parkland physicians in Dallas the week before Dr. Perry testified formally to establish, as he put it, “for the record what was true and what was false on the statements (sic) attributed to them.” [5] Specter added that he had tried to obtain recordings of Perry’s public comments for Perry to review “prior to his appearance, before deposition or before the Commission,” but was unable to do so. [6]

    The Commissioners were also concerned. Allen Dulles requested that Mr. Specter send Dr. Perry “the accounts of his press conference or conferences” for Dr. Perry to point out “the various points in these press conferences where you are inaccurately quoted, so we can have that as a matter of record.” [7]

    There is no evidence that this was ever done. Perhaps the reason it wasn’t had something to do with the fact Dr. Perry proved to be a malleable and helpful a witness. Besides, considerable unpleasantness might well have ensued if Dr. Perry and The Commission had been forced to confront the doctor’s actual, pro-conspiracy statements.

    For example, in contrast to his telling reporters on 11.22.63 that the bullet “appeared to be coming at” JFK, when Mr. Specter asked Dr. Perry, “What responses did you give to [reporters’] questions relating to the source (entrance or exit) of the bullets, if such questions were asked?”, he answered, “I could not. I pointed out that both Dr. Clark and I had no way of knowing from whence the bullets came.” [8]

    Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles followed-up with: “Was there any reasonably good account in any of the press of this interview?” Perry: “No sir.” Rep. Gerald Ford then asked: “Were those reportings by the news media accurate as to what you and others said?” Perry: “In general, they were inaccurate.” [9]

    The Warren Report summarized the bad reporting on Dr. Perry’s remarks, writing, “Dr. Perry stated to the press that a variety of possibilities could account for the President’s wounds.” And it quoted Dr. Perry to say, “I expressed it [his answers] (sic) as a matter of speculation that this was conceivable. But, again, Dr. (Kemp) Clark [who also answered questions at the conference] (sic) and I emphasized that we had no way of knowing.” [10]

    To buttress that position, the Report added, “Dr. Perry’s recollection of his comments is corroborated by some of the news stories after the press conference. The New York Herald Tribune on November 23, 1963, reported as follows:

    ‘Dr. Malcolm Perry, 34, attendant surgeon at Parkland Hospital who attended the President, said he saw two wounds – one below the Adam’s apple, the other at the back of the head. He said he did not know if two bullets were involved. It is possible, he said, that the neck wound was the entrance and the other the exit of the missile.’” [11]

    Of course The New York Herald Tribune did not corroborate Dr. Perry’s actual words. And there were no other news stories besides that of The Tribune that supported Perry’s fickle memory, at least none that I could find after a lengthy search. Like The New York Times and Dallas Morning News, they faithfully reflected what Perry had actually said. He had not offered the press a variety of possibilities about the throat wound; rightly or wrongly, he offered them only one – the throat wound was an entrance wound. There is less irony than one might imagine in the fact that the very press accounts that Dr. Perry denounced as false were true, while the one the Warren Commission touted as true was false. But by this time The Commission had what it wanted. So, rather than checking Dr. Perry’s account against the verbatim transcript, which should not have been difficult to obtain, the Warren Commission accepted the professor’s inaccurate testimony at face value, letting stand in the record a helpful, if false, slur against the press. The press, which could have checked Dr. Perry’s testimony against the original footage, obligingly never did; or at least it never complained about Dr. Perry’s false slur. Debunking accurate media reports wasn’t the only service Dr. Perry provided the Warren Commission.

    Dr. Perry vs. Dr. Perry

    Under oath before The Commission, Dr. Perry described the wound, saying, “In the lower part of the neck below the Adam’s apple was a small, roughly circular wound of perhaps 5 mm in diameter from which blood was exuding slowly. [12] A few minutes later, he elaborated, “this was situated in the lower anterior one third of the neck, approximately 5 mm in diameter. It was exuding blood slowly which partially obscured it. Its edges were neither ragged nor were they punched out, but rather clean.” [13]

    This account more aptly described a wound of entrance, a fact not lost on his interrogator.

    Mr. Specter again pressed Dr. Perry on the point, appearing to ask the same thing, only this time he said, “…was it ragged or pushed out in any manner?”

    (Pushed out? This refers to the position of the edges: a wound’s edges are pushed out by an exiting bullet. Whereas punched out is an informal term used to indicate the condition of the edges. “Punched out” edges are clean and round, as if made by a hole punch.)

    Dr. Perry’s answer was not very different this time: “…the edges were neither cleancut, that is punched out, nor were they very ragged … I did not examine it very closely.” [14]

    Even though Mr. Specter had gotten Dr. Perry to perform satisfactorily, he wanted even more; he wanted Dr. Perry to say that he believed the throat wound was an exit wound. And Dr. Perry did say it, after Mr. Specter ran through an elaborate “begging the question” scenario.

    Midway through his testimony, Arlen Specter asked Dr. Perry a series of questions he would ask most of the Parkland doctor-witnesses: “Based on the appearance of the neck wound alone, could it have been either an entrance or an exit wound?”

    Dr. Perry: “It could have been either.”

    Mr. Specter: “Permit me to supply some additional facts, Dr. Perry, which I shall ask you to assume as being true for purposes of having you express an opinion.

    “Assume first of all that the President was struck by a 6.5-mm. copper-jacketed bullet fired from a gun having a muzzle velocity of approximately 2,000 feet per second, with the weapon being approximately 160 to 250 feet from the President, with the bullet striking him at an angle of declination of approximately 45 degrees, striking the President on the upper right posterior thorax just above the border of the scapula, being 14 cm. From the tip of the right acromion process and 14 cm. below the tip of the right mastoid process, passing through the President’s body striking no bones, traversing the neck and sliding between the large muscles in the posterior portion of the President’s body through a fascia channel without violating the pleural cavity but bruising the apex of the right pleural cavity, and bruising the most apical portion of the right lung inflicting a hematoma to the right side of the larynx, which you have just described, and then exiting from the hole that you have described in the midline of the neck.

    “Now, assuming those facts to be true, would the hole which you observed in the neck of the President be consistent with an exit wound under those circumstances?”

    Dr. Perry: “Certainly wound be consistent with an exit wound.”

    Mr. Specter: “Now, assuming one additional fact that there was no bullet found in the body of the President, and assuming the facts which I have just set forth to be true, do you have an opinion as to whether the wound which you observed in the President’s neck was an entrance or an exit wound?”

    Dr. Perry: “A full jacketed bullet without deformation passing through skin would leave a similar wound for an exit and entrance wound and with the facts which you have made available and with these assumptions, I believe that it was an exit wound.” [15]

    Apart from the fact that the angle of declination Mr. Specter described – downward at 45-degrees – is much too steep to fit with the supposed bullet path from JFK’s back to his throat, his line of questioning is preposterous. It is a classic example of a well known logical fallacy, “begging the question,” in which the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven when, in fact, no evidence or logic is provided to show why that assumption is true in the first place. [16]

    None of the Ivy-educated Warren Commission attorneys and staff, and none of the physicians subjected to this flawed and tendentious line of questioning, commented on the obvious logical defect in Mr. Specter’s line of inquiry. But Mr. Specter may have felt he achieved his goal.

    A Very Private Conversation

    Even though Dr. Perry swore that he believed the throat wound was an exit wound, he may not have actually believed what he said. On 2-14-92 an emergency room physician in Baltimore, Robert Artwohl, M.D. told an interesting tale in a “Prodigy” on-line post: Dr. Artwohl said that he had had a private conversation with Dr. Perry in 1986, and that Dr. Perry had said, “one of the biggest regrets in his life was having to make the incision for the emergency tracheotomy through the bullet wound, because he was certain that it was an entrance wound. He remembered making a very good mental note of the wound since he was cutting through it … speaking with Dr. Perry that night, one physician to another in (sic) Dr Perry stated he firmly believed the wound to be an entrance wound.” [17]

    Dr. Perry and the Posterior Cranium

    When doubts about the Warren Commission in the late 1970s led to a reexamination of the case by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Dr. Perry was interviewed by the HSCA’s Andrew Purdy, JD.

    Perhaps the most telling aspect of that interview was Dr. Perry’s reaffirming his original description of JFK’s skull injuries. In a note written at Parkland Hospital and dated 11-22-63, Perry described the head wound saying, “A large wound of the right posterior cranium was noted.” [18] Dr. Perry testified to the Warren Commission that, “there was blood noticed on the carriage and a large avulsive wound on the right posterior cranium…” [199 and “I noted a large avulsive wound of the right parietal occipital area, in which both scalp and portions of skull were absent, and there was severe laceration of underlying brain tissue ….” [20] He told the HSCA much the same thing.

    In an interview on 1-11-78 the HSCA’s Andy Purdy, JD reported that Dr. Perry had said he, “… believed the head wound was located on the ‘occipital parietal’ (sic) region of the skull and that the right posterior aspect of the skull was missing …” [21] and “I looked at the head wound briefly by leaning over the table and noticed that the parietal occipital head wound was largely avulsive and there was visible brain tissue in the macard (sic) and some cerebellum seen ….” [22]

    Thus, on the day of the assassination, under oath before the Warren Commission a few months later, and again fourteen years after that, Dr. Perry gave a consistent description of JFK’s skull wound, saying that it involved the posterior skull, the “parietal occipital” area. And he added that he’d seen cerebellum, which is a small lobe of the brain located at the very rear and bottom of the skull. Similarly, author David Lifton reported that Parkland emergency nurse Audrey Bell, who couldn’t see JFK’s head wound though she was standing along JFK’s right side, asked Dr. Perry, “‘Where was the wound?’ Perry pointed to the back of the President’s head and moved the head slightly in order to show her the wound.” [23] These accounts would later prove problematic.

    Dr. Perry vs. Oliver Stone and Charles Crenshaw, MD

    Nothing more was heard from Dr. Perry about the Kennedy case until the Journal American Medical Association brought him back into the fray when it strode into the JFK case in a series of articles published in 1992. JAMA’s work was a spirited defense of the Warren Report that came in response to Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, and the publication of a pro-conspiracy book by Parkland witness Charles Crenshaw, MD, entitled JFK – Conspiracy of Silence. [24]

    Dr. Perry was one of four Parkland Hospital physician-witnesses that JAMA had enlisted to both reaffirm the Warren Report and to discredit the dissident Dallas doctor. [25] JAMA wrote: “Since it is hard to prove a negative, no one can say with certainty what some suspect – that Crenshaw was not even in the trauma room; none of the four [Drs. Jenkins, Baxter, Carrico and Perry] recalls ever seeing him at the scene,” [26] and, “…Most of those who know the facts … question if he was involved in the care of the President at all…” [27] (emphasis in original) Ironically, in 1964 when one of JAMA’s sources, Charles Baxter, MD, was asked under oath by the Warren Commission, “Can you identify any other doctors who were there at that time?”, the first name Dr. Baxter gave was Dr. Crenshaw’s. [28]

    Had JAMA, with its legendary research capabilities, merely glanced at the index published by Warren Commission, [29] it would have found that Dr. Crenshaw’s name appears in volume VI of the Warren Commission’s “Hearings and Exhibits,” on pages 31 – 32, 40, 60, 80 – 81, and 141, pages that more than confirm his presence in JFK’s trauma room. [This bit of irresponsible journalism ended up costing JAMA nearly a quarter of a million dollars, plus court costs, when Dr. Crenshaw successfully sued the Journal for defamation after JAMA refused to publish a correction. [30]

    Among the claims Dr. Crenshaw had made was that JFK’s wounds were inconsistent with shots fired from behind. For example, the skull damage Dr. Crenshaw said he saw was not a blowout wound toward the right front of JFK’s skull, as the autopsy photographs seemed to show. Instead, Dr. Crenshaw said it involved the whole right side of the skull, including the back of JFK’s skull and the cerebellum – the parietal occipital region, in other words. [31] Well, that’s not far from how Dr. Perry had repeatedly described the wound over a span of fourteen years. But in the furious reaction to Mr. Stone’s movie and Dr. Crenshaw’s book, Dr. Perry suddenly remembered things differently.

    Dr. Perry vs. Robert McClelland, M.D.

    Pro-Warren Commission author Gerald Posner reported that Dr. Perry had told him, “I did not see any cerebellum.” [32] When told that Robert McClelland, MD, a close Parkland colleague and fellow witness, had said “I saw cerebellum fall out on the stretcher,” Mr. Posner claimed that Dr. Perry responded, “I am astonished that Bob [McClelland] would say that … It shows such poor judgment, and usually he has such good judgment.” [33] Mr. Posner did not point out to Dr. Perry that he had himself told the HSCA that he’d seen cerebellum. [34]

    Mr. Posner also proved that, when dealing with a helpful anti-conspiracy witness, he wasn’t a stickler about following the advice he gave others: “Testimony closer to the event must be given greater weight than changes or additions made years later, when the witness’s own memory is often muddied or influenced by television programs, films, books, and discussions with others.” [35]

    However, not everyone was so polite to Dr. Perry. In 1998, after JFK Review Board counsel T. Jeremy Gunn, JD, Ph.D. quoted Perry’s own Warren Commission description of JFK’s “right posterior cranium” injury, [35] Perry quickly retreated, lamely lamenting that, “I made only a cursory examination of the head … I didn’t look at it. I was in some kind of a hurry.” [37]

    The lessons we learn from Dr. Perry about how investigator bias can influence how evidence is handled and how witnesses can be manipulated by investigators are scarcely new. The Warren Commission, the Journal of the American Medical Association and author Gerald Posner are staunch Warren Commission supporters. They therefore were naturally disinclined to check the record of a witness like Dr. Perry who told them what they wanted to hear.

    One is left wondering why someone as accomplished, experienced and independent as Dr. Perry would seem to be so willing to make a fool of himself by contradicting himself and by not only turning on the press, but also on a colleague and friend, Dr. McClelland. While it’s unlikely we will ever know for sure what was behind all this, a seemingly credible witness has come forward with an intriguing tale that just might help us understand Dr. Perry.

    A Knock on Dr. Perry’s Door

    In a memo written to House Select Committee counsel, Robert Tanenbaum on 6.1.77, investigator Howard Gilbert described an interview with a man named James Gochenaur who had quite a story to tell about conversations he had had with a Secret Service agent named Elmer Moore. Agent Moore apparently told Mr. Gochenaur in 1970 that the Secret Service had sent him to Parkland Hospital to speak with the doctors about the wounds. Agent Moore told Mr. Gochenaur that he felt guilty about what he had done to Dr. Perry a few days after the assassination.

    Gilbert: “All right. What did he (Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore) have to say about Kennedy? Or anything that indicates to you that he may have knowledge – ah, or may have done something wrong in the investigation.”

    Gochenaur: “Ok, what he told me was this, he said that he had badgered Doctor Perry into changing his testimony, he did not feel good about that.”

    Gilbert: “He – being Moore?”

    Gochenaur: “Yes, Moore talked to Perry and, I guess, really laid it on to the poor guy.”

    Gilbert: “In what respect, what areas did he badger Perry with respect (sic)”

    Gochenaur: “Ah, what Perry had seen, as he was doing his emergency operation, apparently.”

    Gilbert: “Well, in what way’s did he indicate to you that he had Perry distort the truth?”

    Gochenaur: “In – I think that what he was trying to say was him [sic] to making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the neck, or that where the position of the wound in the back [sic], what Moore was telling me after he talked about that was the fact that his study, and the study that went into talking with the Doctors [sic], is that there was no conclusive evidence where any of the shots had come from, at that point. Ok? If the report that he had written up …” [38]

    Mr. Gochenaur said that Agent Moore offered him an explanation why he’d done the things he did in investigating the Kennedy case: ” [W]e had to do what we were told, in regards to, you know, the way the way they were investigating the assassination, or we get our heads cut off.” [39]

    Conclusion

    It’s clear that the story Dr. Perry told about the JFK assassination on the day of the murder is different than the story he later gave. It’s not clear, however, why he changed it. Mr. Moore might well have been the agent of change. Or it could have been the influence of Mr. Specter, both in open Warren Commission session or before that in the off-the-record interviews he conducted with the Parkland doctors. Perhaps the influence of both Agent Moore and Mr. Specter explains Dr. Perry’s turnabout.

    I have written elsewhere that the government has made myriad errors in its various investigations of JFK’s medical and autopsy evidence. [40] And rather than the errors being typical human, random mistakes – some favoring conspiracy, some against it – they instead tended uniformly to distort evidence along anti-conspiracy lines. The same pattern seems evident in the behavior of Dr. Perry, who appears to have allowed himself to be used to further the anti-conspiracy agenda by publicly denouncing accurate, pro-conspiracy press reports, which the government irresponsibly never cross checked; by contradicting his own, earliest (and therefore most likely reliable) statements; and even by ridiculing the account of a highly esteemed, close medical colleague, Robert McClelland, MD. Unfortunately, as I’ve also elsewhere written, [41] a scenario such as we’ve seen with Dr. Perry could be written about a number of the other Dallas doctors, with Dr. McClelland, MD being a notable exception. (William Kemp Clark, M.D. was another notable exception, and his story is should be the subject of a separate article.)

    Although it’s scarcely a surprise to many who are familiar with their work, celebrated Warren Commission defenders Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi were silent on Dr. Perry’s peculiar flip-flopping when they selectively quoted his comments to make their anti-conspiracy case. Not only did neither address Dr. Perry’s inconsistencies, neither ever mentioned the official HSCA memo to counsel Robert Tanenbaum concerning the plausible explanation Mr. Gochenaur gave for the doctor’s flip-flopping.

    Following his brush with history in the early sixties, Malcolm Perry quietly carried on a long and distinguished career as a professor of surgery at several respected universities, including the University of Washington, Cornell, Vanderbilt, and the University of Texas Southwestern. He died at age 80. During those years he apparently spoke almost nothing of the assassination, even when among fellow physicians. [42]

    ~Gary L. Aguilar, MD

    End Notes

    1.     David Stout, “M.O. Perry, Kennedy Surgeon, Dies at 80.” New York Times, 12.8.09 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/us/08perry.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Malcolm%20Perry,%20obituary&st=cse
    2.     http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/press.htm
    3.     New York Times, 11.23.63.
    4.     Boston Globe, 11.24.63. p. 9
    5.     3H378 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0193b.htm
    6.     3H378 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0193b.htm
    7.     3H377 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0193a.htm
    8.     3H375-376 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0192a.htm
    9.     3H376 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0192b.htm
    10.  Warren Report, p. 90 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0057b.htm
    11.  Warren Report, p. 90-91. http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0058a.htm
    12.  3H368 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0188b.htm
    13.  3H372 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0190b.htm
    14.  3H388 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0198b.htm
    15.  3H373 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0191a.htm
    16.  http://begthequestion.info/
    17.  Prodigy interactive personal service, 2-14-92, 7:45 AM, in:” Arts Club” bulletin board, books-nonfiction. In a posting to John Hensley (NXVX71A) from Robert Artwohl (BSMK63A)-copies available by request with SASE to author.)
    18.  17H6, Warren Commission Exhibit #392. http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0016b.htm
    19.  3H368 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0188b.htm
    20.  3H372 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0190b.htm
    21.  7HSCA295. http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0153a.htm
    22.  7HSCA302. http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0156b.htm
    23.  Lifton, David. Best Evidence. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988, p.704.
    24.  Charles Crenshaw, MD, JFK – Conspiracy of Silence. New York: Signet Book, 1992.
    25.  Breo, D. “JFK’s death, part II – Dallas MDs recall their memories.” JAMA, May 27, 1992; v. 267(20):2805. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/267/20/2804
    26.  Breo. JAMA. Vol. 267:2804. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/267/20/2804
    27.  Breo. JAMA. Vol. 267:2805. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/267/20/2804
    28.  6H40. http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh6/html/WC_Vol6_0025b.htm
    29.  15H761 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh15/html/WC_Vol15_0386a.htm
    30.  http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:yjWxy-jARHcJ:findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_n4_v58/ai_20979803/+Charles+Crenshaw,+JAMA,+lawsuit&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
    31.  Crenshaw, p. 79.
    32.  Gerald Posner. Case Closed. New York: Random House, p. 312.
    33.  Ibid.
    34.  7HSCA302. http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0156b.htm
    35.  Posner, p. 235.
    36.  ARRB depositions of Parkland witnesses, p. 19.
    37.  ARRB depositions of Parkland witnesses, p. 23.
    38.  HSCA Memo from Howard Gilbert to Robert Tanenbaum, dated June 1, 1977, HSCA Record Number: 180-10109-10310, Agency File Number: 014182, p. 22. http://spot.acorn.net/JFKplace/03/g2t.txt
    39.  HSCA Memo from Howard Gilbert to Robert Tanenbaum, dated June 1, 1977, HSCA Record Number: 180-10109-10310, Agency File Number: 014182, p. 21. http://spot.acorn.net/JFKplace/03/g2t.txthttp://spot.acorn.net/JFKplace/03/g2t.txt
    40.  Gary Aguilar, Kathy Cunningham, “How Five Investigations into JFK’s Medical/Autopsy Evidence Got It Wrong.” http://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong.htm
    41.  GL Aguilar, CH Wecht. The Medical Case for Conspiracy. In: Crenshaw, CA, Trauma Room One. New York: Paraview Press, 1992, p. 170-286.
    42.  Obituary, Dallas Morning News, 12.08.09. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/120909dnmetperryob.3fc0b99.html

  • Edward M. Kennedy: A Multilayered Object-Lesson in Political Courage

    Here’s a remarkably indirect comment by Mike Barnicle on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “He knew that he had a certain luxury that his three brothers didn’t have.”

    Translated, it means that Edward M. Kennedy, 77, the youngest of four Kennedy men for whom their father had the most ambitious and tragic hopes, did not die a violent death.

    The sentimental commentaries that consumed our media in the aftermath of his death—all richly deserved—did not do justice to the underlying realities of intrigue and risk in which Ted Kennedy proved himself a hero of his time, and ours. A “managed” and timorous media will see to it that certain taboos are observed.

    “There’s got to be more to it,” Ted Kennedy told Sander Vanocur of NBC News on the plane carrying Bobby Kennedy’s body to the East Coast for interment in June of 1968.

    Of course there was “more to it” in the slaying of the presidential candidate—although you wouldn’t know it if the mainstream media were your only source of information.

    Ted’s two older brothers had been victims of domestic political conspiracies of the most lethal sort: they were assassinated. Countless people were aware that an attempt on JFK’s life would be made. J. Edgar Hoover himself knew for months of plots to kill Kennedy—and did nothing. Bobby, who had said after Dallas that “I thought they’d get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. I thought it would be me,” expressed his renewed sense of risk during the tumultuous 1968 campaign: “I can’t plan. Every day is like Russian roulette.”

    Americans who believe that Jack and Bobby were not victims of conspiracies are at best naïve or ignorant, at worst in full-blown denial. (“It can’t happen here.”) Study the evidence.

    The “heir apparent,” who had come to the Senate in a special election in 1962, was in private deeply suspicious of the forces behind the assassination of JFK, although in his new memoir True Compass, the late senator, it has been widely reported, writes that he has always accepted the lone-assassin findings of the Warren Commission.

    Re-elected seven times, he would play a constructive role in some 300 pieces of major legislation. He recognized—as did many of his mentors and colleagues—that he possessed legislative qualities that Jack had never displayed, and that Bobby as a senator from New York was too impatient—not to mention anguished and distracted—to cultivate.

    The Kennedyesque environment in which she found herself took an alcoholic toll on Ted’s wife Joan, and he too drank heavily—and womanized. In July of 1969 a party of Kennedy cronies and loyal female associates culminated—in circumstances that are unclear to this day—in the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne, who had worked tirelessly in Bobby’s 1968 campaign. Ted Kennedy, who had probably been drinking heavily, was pilloried for lying about what he had done—or had not done—to save the young woman, who was found in a car that he had allegedly been driving. He was pilloried for leaving the scene of the accident in the middle of the night and failing to contact authorities for nine hours. He was pilloried for special treatment in being charged with “leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury” and receiving a light sentence of incarceration, which was suspended. Soon thereafter, he addressed the nation in shame and regret. His political prospects had been dashed.

    But his detractors wanted several pounds of flesh. “Chappaquiddick” became a term of derision for legions of Kennedy-haters in the land. Refusing to resign, the villain of this sad story returned to the Senate in a neck brace. In 1972 he decided, for reasons of his own safety, not to run for president. The forces threatening him, he said, “are kind of self-evident.” (They included Kennedy-haters in the CIA.)

    Jack Kennedy had received some 400 death threats annually during his short-lived “thousand days.” Ted Kennedy in the late 1960s and through the 1970s received even more—the majority of them, no doubt, from extremists of the right including white supremacists, fundamentalists, Catholic—haters, liberal—haters, and the like. (Which political party might have fanned these fires?)

    The impetus for substantial health-care reform will take strength from EMK’s courage, his energy, his compassion. As an expression of his stature and legacy, we have the testimony of Boris Kast, a Jewish refusnik whose emigration with his family to the U.S. was negotiated by EMK in the 1970s. Said Kast in an NPR interview: “He’s one of those rare people whose major role in life is to help people.”

    A lion of the Senate indeed—and with his death the end of an epoch in which those responsible for the political murders of two of his brothers have never been brought to justice. The phrase national disgrace barely suffices.

    H.C. Nash, a native Virginian, lives in Williamsport, Pa. He is working on a book entitled Patsy of the Ages: Lee Harvey Oswald and His Nation 46 Years Later.

  • Homage to Ted Kennedy

    I was on vacation with my sister in that blessed haven of Santa Barbara when I learned of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy on August 25th. When I first heard of it, I thought it would be treated as a rather high profile senator dying in office. Was I ever wrong.

    It dominated the air waves for four days. The outpouring of grief and admiration and loss had to have been unprecedented for a senator in our lifetime. Perhaps in American history: the televised lying in state at the JFK Library, the Irish wake on Friday night, the Saturday Requiem mass attended by President Obama and three former presidents, and the following interment at Arlington near his brothers. These all had a regality and national prominence that rivaled the death of presidents – and actually surpassed some of them. Cumulatively it was kind of overwhelming.

    And then you look at the list of bills he was responsible for, and it gets more overwhelming. Over three hundred of his bills were passed into law. In more or less chronological order, he was actively involved in, or directly responsible for, what follows: the famous civil rights laws of 1964-65, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which helped end a quota system based upon nationality), and the creation of the National Teachers Corps.

    In 1971, before it was fashionable, he called for an independent Ireland. In 1968, a little late, he began to assail Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies. After the Watergate scandal, he began pushing for campaign finance reform, and he was one of the leaders behind the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974.

    Kennedy was always in the forefront of bills that really had no active or influential constituencies in Washington. Therefore he chaired a sub committee on political refugees from Vietnam, China and Russia. Back in the seventies, he was unequaled in his support for women’s and gay rights. When the Democrats entered their Dark Ages, that is the Reagan years of 1980-88, he became a master of parliamentary procedure and did all he could to slow down the conservative express. But along with that, he supported extending the Voting Rights Act something that the Reagan Justice Department wanted to drop to gain white support in the south. He was one of the early advocates for funding for AIDS treatments. He was a strong supporter for the vigorous enforcement of Title IX, which allowed for equal rights for women to participate in college athletics and extra-curricular activities. He was in the forefront of the opposition to Reagan’s intervention in Central America i.e. the bloody and not-so-secret wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Kennedy resisted and ridiculed some of the rather extravagant and unnecessary Pentagon boondoggles of the Reagan years e.g. the B-1 bomber, the MX missile, and its Strategic Defense Initiative – which he satirized as “Star Wars”. Instead, he wanted to prolong and strengthen the ABM Treaty and he supported the movement for a nuclear freeze – which the Reagan administration, in a cheap echo of J. Edgar Hoover, intimated was supported and influenced by the KGB.

    In 1985, repeating a controversial visit by Robert Kennedy, he staged a high-profile tour of South Africa. He defied the apartheid government’s express wishes and spent a night in the Soweto home of Bishop Desmond Tutu. On his return, he led the way for a bill enacting economic sanctions against South Africa. Despite a veto by President Reagan, this passed in 1986 and it began to turn the tide against that government. He urged Reagan to sign an arms limitation bill with the Soviets and on a trip to Russia he helped secure the release of dissident mathematician and chess prodigy Anatoly Shcharansky.

    Then came the riveting theater of the1987 Reagan nomination of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. At the beginning no one really thought the conservative Bork would be rejected. But Kennedy and his staff did two things in advance. First, they did their homework on the long paper trail left by Bork. Therefore they isolated and fanned the flames around his most controversial writings and decisions. Secondly, at the beginning of the process Kennedy made a sensational (in two senses) speech that was reminiscent of Harry Truman in 1948. (Click here.) Perhaps unfairly, he made Bork into the antithesis of every liberal policy enacted since the New Deal. The ferocity of his attack took the Reagan White House by surprise, and it made moderate Democrats hold their votes until after the questioning. In a high profile showdown with President Reagan, Bork was defeated.

    After Reagan, he led the successful fight to block most of Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America program. In 1989, with the unlikely partner of Sen. Orrin Hatch, he passed the Ryan White Care Act, which provided medical treatment for low-income people affected by AIDS. In 1990, with the help of Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, he passed a bill of which he was especially proud: the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. This provided, among other things, discrimination laws to help in the hiring of qualified disabled individuals and allowed access to the disabled into public and commercial buildings.

    Another vote he thought was important was the one he cast in 2002 against the war in Iraq. He was one of only 23 senators to oppose that disastrous resolution. Again, his staff did their homework and he decided that the twin banners of “weapons of mass destruction” and “Hussein’s aid to Al Qaeda” were mirages. He was right.

    Finally, there was health care. If you can believe it, as early as the 1970’s he began to push for universal health care. Realizing it was not possible to pass a huge, transformative bill at the time, he decided to proceed in stages. First he helped enact the COBRA Act of 1985,which extended employer-based health benefits after leaving a job. This was in turn extended and expanded by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Kennedy then expanded health insurance benefits to those with mental and emotional issues with the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996. In 1997 he was a principal mover behind the epochal State Children’s Health Insurance Program. This program used increased tobacco taxes to fund the largest expansion of taxpayer-funded health insurance for youths since Medicaid in the 1960’s.

    His dedication to this issue was reportedly behind his 2008 decision to publicly endorse Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama before the Super Tuesday primaries. There is little doubt that the now-famous American University event gave Obama a rocket boost in that race. One of the reasons President Obama is pushing a public option in his plan is because, “I promised Ted.”

    Considering the fact that I left a lot out, it is nothing less than a phenomenal record. Did any senator ever pass so much legislation that impacted the lives of so many people? But more specifically, and more pointedly: Was any senator ever involved in this much legislation whose aim was to help people who really needed the help and had no one to lobby for them? If any senator ever exemplified over the long haul the famous Democratic dictum that the aim of government was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable it was Ted Kennedy.

    In addition to the above, he was a fine orator. He made two immortal speeches. The first was the quietly moving eulogy for his brother Robert in 1968 (which you can listen to in part here). The second was his powerful and reverberating “Dream Shall Never Die Speech” at the 1980 Democratic Convention (which you can listen to in part here). This was billed as a concession speech after his failed attempt to defeat President Carter in the primaries that year. But it really wasn’t. Kennedy was never happy with either Carter or later, Bill Clinton. He thought they had moderated the true heritage of the Democratic Party. Which is why he made that splendid 1980 speech. It was really a liberal call to arms in the face of the impending southernization of his party. Because another reason Kennedy ran that year was because both he and his chief adviser Bob Shrum did not think Carter’s modified approach could defeat Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, they ended up being correct.

    It was a touching experience to watch the procession of over 50, 000 people march through the JFK library on Wednesday and Thursday just to make the sign of the cross in front of his coffin. Did you notice all the people in wheelchairs? That was because of his aforementioned 1990 bill to help them gain equal access and legal rights. They were there to say thanks to their champion.

    I guess the main thing that made him special is that he was the one Kennedy brother who actually had a long political career. And by doing that he kind of summed up and represented what America would have been like if his brother Joe had not died during the war, or if John and Robert had not been assassinated. It would have been like all the good legislation he helped pass. Except 24/7. For the last 46 years. And without the ill-founded and wasteful wars i.e. Vietnam and Iraq.

    But the thing no one wants to talk about is that after 1968, his was a losing battle. America today is not anything like it was in the sixties. It is a much worse country than when Ted joined the Senate in 1962. And that is mainly because, since 1968, when RFK and King were killed, Ted fought against Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. In other words, for 28 of those forty years, the GOP occupied the White House. And in the 12 years that the Democrats did, Teddy did not really like either President. Which, as I said, is why he ran against Carter in 1980, and could not stomach another triangulating Clinton in 2008.

    Kennedy had human failings of course. He made a big mistake I think in not running against Nixon in 1972. I think that may have been as bad as Mario Cuomo not running in 1992. There is no doubt he would have won the nomination and I think he could have beaten Nixon. And that would have been a real game changer. I have never been able to figure out the full story about what happened in 1969 at the bridge at Chappaquiddick. And Kennedy clearly displayed deplorable judgment in the 1991 Palm Beach incident, which resulted in the rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith. But I think it’s important to understand that both controversial incidents were the results of a period of mourning over the premature deaths of first his brother Robert, and second his brother-in-law Stephen Smith.

    But I am glad for what he did do, and what he tried to represent: The idea of American liberalism, as modernized by FDR. The concept that government can be a force for good in people’s lives, that it can temper greed and avarice, that there is such a thing as a common good, and that it was the government’s moral function to protect and help those in the dawn of life, the dusk of life, and the shadow of life – that is the young, the old, and the crippled. Nobody did that as well or as persistently as he did for the last four decades. (Click here for him in his full fury fighting for a raise in the minimum wage.) When others in the party were talking up things like neoliberalism, or moderation in order to cater to the center, Ted understood that if you did that you moved the center to the right! Which is something he was not willing to do.

    If he never became active in investigating the true circumstances of his brothers’ deaths, I appreciate what he tried to do to keep their legacy alive. Unfortunately, there were not enough like him. Which makes him look good, and the shell of the Democratic Party we have today look bad.

    With the passing of his sister Eunice earlier this year, there is only one child left from the family of Joseph and Rose Kennedy: the youngest sister Jean. And worse than that, there is no one really like him to carry on his heritage on Capitol Hill. No one even close.

    Bye Ted, and thanks. For those of us who were around in 1962, you symbolized the last vestige of what America could and should have been.

  • Edward M. Kennedy

    Edward M. Kennedy

    kennedy bros
    The Kennedy Brothers

    Edward Moore Kennedy, one of the longest serving senators in United States history and a legendary political icon, died late August 25 after struggling with brain cancer for more than a year. He was 77 years old.

    Family members said Senator Kennedy lived longer than his doctor expected after his diagnosis last year. “We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” the Kennedy family said in a statement. “He loved this country and devoted his life to serving it.”

    Kennedy will be buried in Arlington National Cemetary near two of this brothers, former President John F. Kennedy and former Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

    President Barack Obama, whom Senator Kennedy endorsed during the 2008 Presidential race, lauded the Massachusetts Democrat for his tireless work for legilslation that changed the lives of millions. “Even though we knew this day was coming, we awaited it with no small amount of dread,” Obama said. “His extraordinary life on this Earth has come to an end. The extraordinary good that he did lives on.”

    Senator Kennedy was an outspoken advocate for health care reform, long before the contentious, circus atmosphere town hall meetings of summer 2009, as demonstrated in this video (which runs 4:18).

    The Kennedy family’s full statement, posted to the Senator’s official web site, is as follows:

    “Edward M. Kennedy—the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply—died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port. We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever. We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice, fairness and opportunity for all. He loved this country and devoted his life to serving it. He always believed that our best days were still ahead, but it’s hard to imagine any of them without him.”

    In July, the Senator was named a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. At that time he said, “”I am profoundly grateful to President Obama for this extraordinary honor. My life has been committed to the ideal of public service which President Kennedy wanted the Medal of Freedom to represent. To receive it from another President who prizes that same ideal of service and inspires so many to serve is a great privilege that moves me deeply.”

    Senator Kennedy’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died on August 11, 2009. The Senator said in a statement, “Eunice is now with God in heaven. My sister Jean and I, and our entire family, will miss her with all our hearts. I know that our parents and brothers and sisters who have gone before are filled with joy to have her by their side again.”

    Edward Kennedy was first elected to the Senate in 1962, while his brother John was president.

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • Yuri Nosenko Dies

    By Walter Pincus

    from The Washington Post

    Yuri I. Nosenko, 81, a Soviet KGB agent whose defection to the United States in 1964 and subsequent three-year harsh detention and hostile interrogation by CIA officials remains immensely controversial, died Aug. 23 under an assumed name in a Southern state, according to intelligence officials. No cause of death was reported other than “a long illness.”

    Mr. Nosenko, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police and intelligence agency, personally interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald during his time in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962. When Mr. Nosenko defected in 1964, he provided the first information that Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was not a Soviet agent.

    Senior CIA officers at the time, including James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counterintelligence chief, and David Murphy of the Soviet division, did not believe Mr. Nosenko was a real defector and ordered his imprisonment. Mr. Nosenko had initially made inaccurate statements about his past, and some of his information conflicted with that provided by another KGB officer, Anatoly M. Golitsin, who had defected the year before. As a result, they considered him a plant sent by Moscow to confuse Washington about Oswald.

    Richard Helms, then CIA director of operations, in 1966 ordered that a conclusion be reached in the Nosenko case. In 1967, after passing multiple polygraphs, Mr. Nosenko was released and in 1969 he was found to be a legitimate defector. He subsequently became a consultant to the agency, given a new identity and provided a home in an undisclosed location in the South.

    Last month several senior CIA officials visited him and presented him with a ceremonial flag and a letter from CIA Director Michael Hayden honoring his service to the United States, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.

    First word of his death came yesterday from Pete Earley, an author of books on the CIA who had been trying for four years to get an interview with Mr. Nosenko. Earley said Mr. Nosenko was bothered by a book released last year called Spy Wars, written by Tennent H. Bagley, a key CIA player in Mr. Nosenko’s defection and arrest. The book continued to argue that Mr. Nosenko was not a bona fide defector, but in fact was sent to cover up the KGB’s influence over Oswald.

    “I was fascinated by Nosenko because in spite of the horrific things that the agency and government did to him — the torture and mental deprivation — in the only public speech that he ever gave at the CIA, he praised the United States as being the world’s best hope for humanity, condemned Communism and Moscow, and said he never regretted his defection nor held a grudge against the officials who had persecuted him,” Earley said.

    During his incarceration, at Camp Perry, the CIA facility in Virginia, the agency kept Mr. Nosenko in solitary confinement in a small concrete cell. He often endured treatment involving body searches, verbal taunts, revolting food and denial of such basics as toothpaste and reading materials.

    Last year, the International Spy Museum in Washington canceled a session during which Bagley was to speak, allegedly because CIA officials objected to having the Nosenko issue raised.

    In his 1992 book Molehunt, author David Wise wrote, “The ‘war of defectors,’ the conflict over Golitsin and Mr. Nosenko . . . split the Agency into two camps, creating scars that had yet to heal decades later.”

    Claire George, a former CIA deputy director of operations who worked in the Soviet division at the time of Mr. Nosenko’s defection, said yesterday that the handling of Mr. Nosenko “was a terrible mistake.” But George added, “You can’t be in the spy business without making mistakes.”

    Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was born in 1927, in Nikolayev, a Ukrainian town on the Black Sea.

    His father, a naval engineer, rose to minister for shipbuilding under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, while his mother arranged for private tutors to school Mr. Nosenko in classical Western literature from Virgil to Voltaire. He developed an attraction to western culture. Mr. Nosenko served three years in naval intelligence after his 1950 graduation from the State Institute of International Relations in Moscow. He then became a leader within the KGB’s Soviet internal security division.

    According to Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior (1991), a book about Angleton, Mr. Nosenko’s KGB career specialized in following U.S. agents posted in the Soviet Union and in recruiting turncoats from foreign intelligence services. Mangold’s book said he also oversaw blackmail operations. Mangold asserted Mr. Nosenko eventually grew angered by what he considered hypocrisies of the Soviet system and signaled to U.S. intelligence agents his wish to defect on ideological grounds. He made his first successful contact with U.S. intelligence in 1962, pleading desperation after squandering KGB funds on alcohol. He asked for $200 to repay the money. He later admitted this was a fabrication, and his request later raised doubts within the CIA about his intentions. Would he really sell out his country for $200?

    But his propensity to drink was not a lie, and he was fully loaded when he met CIA officials in Geneva, where he was accompanying a diplomatic mission. He revealed key information about Soviet moles working in the embassies of Western nations as well as Russian intelligence methods. According to Mangold, he pinpointed 52 microphones planted inside the U.S. embassy in Moscow and how the Soviets avoided detection of the listening devices.

    But his most stunning revelations were about Oswald, notably how the Soviet agency felt Oswald was too unstable mentally to be of much service.

    None of this saved Mr. Nosenko from a bitter fate. Golitsin stoked Angleton’s increasing paranoia about double agents in the CIA and the veracity of defectors, and Mr. Nosenko soon began his 1,277 days in custody.

    After Mr. Nosenko’s rehabilitation, he looked up the disgraced Angleton’s number in the phone book in 1975 to confront him.

    It was a brief and fruitless exchange, with Mr. Nosenko rising in his passions and Angelton cool and adamant about his judgment.

    “I have nothing more to say to you,” Angelton said.

    “And Mr. Angelton,” replied Mr. Nosenko, “I have nothing further to say to you.”

  • Robert Maheu Dies at 90

    Robert A. Maheu, who was a powerful aide to reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes and whose cloak-and-dagger exploits included involvement in a CIA and Mafia plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, died Aug. 4 at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas. He was 90 and had cancer and heart ailments.

    Mr. Maheu (pronounced MAY-hew) was a onetime FBI agent who ran a Washington company that he said carried out secret missions for the Central Intelligence Agency.

    Mr. Maheu’s first jobs for Hughes in the 1950s included private-eye snooping on Hughes’s past and prospective girlfriends in Hollywood. Later, as Hughes’s chief adviser, he helped make his boss Nevada’s third-largest landowner, after the federal government and the state power company. After becoming Hughes’s director of Las Vegas operations in 1966, Mr. Maheu was the most influential member of the billionaire’s inner circle and acted as his liaison to leading political figures and the world at large.

    “If he wanted someone fired, I did the firing,” Mr. Maheu wrote in his 1992 autobiography, Next to Hughes. “If he wanted something negotiated, I did the bargaining. If he had to be somewhere, I appeared in his place. I was his eyes, his ears, and his mouthpiece.”

    Before he was abruptly fired in 1970, Mr. Maheu spoke with Hughes as many as 20 times a day on the telephone. But in all their years together, he never met the eccentric mogul face to face. Hughes lived in seclusion on the top floor of the Desert Inn Hotel, with only a few private aides admitted to his presence.

    “He finally told me that he did not want me to see him because of the way in which he had allowed himself to deteriorate, the way in which he was living, the way he looked,” Mr. Maheu said on Larry King Live in 1992. “He felt that if I ever in fact saw him, I would never be able to represent him.”

    Mr. Maheu earned $520,000 a year and was living in one of the largest houses in Las Vegas when Hughes had two other aides fire him in December 1970. In 1972, Hughes broke a long silence by speaking in a telephone news conference, seeking to prove he had nothing to do with a purported autobiography by Clifford Irving, which was later confirmed a hoax.

    During that news conference, Hughes called Mr. Maheu “a no-good son of a bitch who robbed me blind.” Mr. Maheu sued him in federal court for defamation. He initially won a $2.8 million settlement from Hughes, but the decision was overturned.

    The four-month trial revealed many engrossing details about Hughes’s business dealings, his political contributions and his increasingly bizarre private life. Mr. Maheu disclosed that in 1970 he delivered $100,000 to Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo, a close friend of President Richard M. Nixon’s, in return for possible future favors for Hughes. Mr. Maheu entertained Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, on his yacht and regularly played tennis with then-Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt (R), who became a U.S. senator.

    But Hughes spread his political largess to both parties, contributing $100,000 to 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Hubert H. Humphrey. Mr. Maheu said he personally placed a briefcase containing $50,000 cash — from receipts at the Hughes-owned Silver Slipper casino — in Humphrey’s limousine. The contributions were legal at the time because they were considered private donations from an individual, not corporate contributions.

    Mr. Maheu said he twice turned down requests from Hughes to arrange $1 million payments to Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon — payable after they left office — if they would agree to stop underground nuclear testing in Nevada, where Hughes lived until moving to the Bahamas in 1970. (He died at age 70 in 1976.)

    “In ’57, when I agreed to be his alter ego,” Mr. Maheu told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1992, “I thought it would be very challenging: representing him at presidential inaugurals, handling multimillion-dollar deals in his behalf … In reality, you’re living a lie.”

    Robert Aime Maheu was born Oct. 30, 1917, into a French-speaking family in Waterville, Maine. After he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., he analyzed aerial photographs for the Department of Agriculture before joining the FBI.

    During World War II, the FBI assigned him to monitor a French spy who became a double agent and helped deceive the Nazi high command with false radio transmissions. By the mid-1950s, Mr. Maheu said he did undercover work for the CIA — “those jobs in which the agency could not officially be involved,” he wrote in his autobiography.

    Recently declassified CIA files confirm that Mr. Maheu was present at a 1960 meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., between organized crime bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr., as part of an abortive CIA effort to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The plan was dropped after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

    “If anything went wrong,” Mr. Maheu wrote in his memoir, “I was the fall guy, caught between protecting the government and protecting the mob, two armed camps that could crush me like a bug.”

    After leaving Hughes, Mr. Maheu became a successful real estate investor but was admittedly careless in his bookkeeping.

    “Most people, I have observed, spend 90 percent of their time scribbling notes and keeping records to justify their existence,” he said in 1974. “I prefer to use that time getting things done.”

    Mr. Maheu had expensive tastes and helped found a Las Vegas chapter of a French gourmet society, and as time went on, he reveled in chances to tell of his colorful life.

    His wife of 62 years, Yvette Doyon Maheu, died in 2003. A daughter also preceded him in death. Survivors include three sons; 10 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

  • The Passing of George Michael Evica

    The Passing of George Michael Evica

    On November 10, 2007 longtime writer and researcher George Michael Evica succumbed to lung and brain cancer. He died at his home in Connecticut where he was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Hartford. Evica had taught at Brooklyn College, Wagner College, Columbia University, and San Francisco State before settling at Hartford. He taught there from 1964 until 1992 when he retired.

    evica

    In addition to writing books and articles on the JFK case, he was also associated with the Lancer group in Dallas. He helped edit their quarterly journal Kennedy Assassination Chronicles. He also served as the program chair for their annual November in Dallas conference until his retirement from that position in 1999. Further, he hosted and produced a radio program called Assassination Journal. This was a weekly radio program broadcast live on WWUH in Hartford. Evica broadcast the show from 1975 until July of 2007 when his illness forced him to stop. In the early nineties, Evica was one of the hosts and organizers of the Dallas based ASK conferences which sprung up in the wake of Oliver Stone’s film JFK.

    Evica wrote two books on the John Kennedy murder case. The first was And We are All Mortal which was published in 1978. This volume was a solid all around reference work which was quite creditable considering the time at which it was written i.e. before the published volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the release of JFK, and the declassification process of the Assassination Records Review Board. That book had several areas of emphasis that the author developed in a sober and scholarly method. Evica was one of the first to seriously look into whether or not the rifle the Warren Commission adduced into evidence could be the one the Commission said Oswald ordered. Writers like Sylvia Meagher had touched on this issue previously, but Evica explored it for five chapters and over sixty pages in this book. After this long and serious discussion, Evica came to the conclusion the rifle ordered was not the one in evidence. His work in this area would not be surpassed until John Armstrong’s even more conclusive dissertation in Harvey and Lee nearly three decades later. In his first book Evica also brought the possibility of John Thomas Masen as an Oswald imposter to the fore. He poked holes in the FBI’s spectrographic analysis of the bullet /lead evidence. Evica did a nice job of profiling David Phillips and his possible role in the plot and he concluded with a thesis that seemed to state that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy originated in the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro: They were reversed onto JFK when he pulled the plug on MONGOOSE. And I should add here, Evica did all this in less than 450 pages. Which seems almost nostalgic in these days of Lamar Waldron, Vincent Bugliosi, and Joan Mellen.

    When Evica resigned from Lancer, he said he was planning to write several books on the case. Unfortunately he only published one of them.

    A Certain Arrogance was published in 2006. It was both narrower and broader in scope than And We are All Mortal. It traced the history of U. S. government involvement with religious groups for both infiltration and surveillance purposes. It went back to the 1880’s to what the Rockefeller family did with Christian missionary groups in South America to quell native American unrest against economic imperialism. It then traced this kind of activity forward in time to the activities of Allen and John Foster Dulles and how this intertwined with the mushrooming activities of American intelligence. This practice was used through two world wars and into the Cold War. And in this later manifestation, the practice broadened to Liberal Protestant groups, the Unitarian Church, and the Quakers.

    Evica then connected all this to one of the most interesting and startling releases of the Assassination Records Review Board. On December 13, 1995 the Board voted to release a set of five FBI documents that the Bureau had resisted releasing for over a year. This was due to what was referred to as “third party interests”. The third party was the government of Switzerland. And how the government of Switzerland got involved with the short but epochally impacting life of Lee Harvey Oswald was where A Certain Arrogance found its focus in the JFK case. After Oswald left for Russia in 1959, his mother Marguerite sent him a series of letters with money enclosed. She got no replies. In April of 1960 she complained to the FBI about this and the possibility that Oswald could be lost in Russia. Marguerite told the FBI that she had received a letter from an official at Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, a man named Casparis. Casparis told her that Lee had been expected there in April of 1960. And most interestingly, while in the service, stationed in California, he had sent them a deposit and registered for the spring, 1960 session.

    Hoover began a search for the official and the college. He forwarded a cable to FBI legal representatives in Paris to find the college and Mr. Casparis. The FBI officials had no idea where the college was and had to get in contact with the federal Swiss Police. It took the Swiss authorities two months to locate the school. There was no official record of it with federal government records in Bern. As detailed in Probe (Vol. 3 No. 3) the “college” was founded in 1953 by the Unitarian Church and accommodated less than 30 international students, with apparently no Swiss nationals-which is why the Swiss government was unaware of it. Even though it had very few students, it had 68 international representatives of the college. The American representative was Robert Shact of the Unitarian Church in Rhode Island. It was he who had been in receipt of Oswald’s application to the college. Shact told the FBI that Albert Schweitzer was not actually a “college” but an “institution”. Whatever it was, it was closed down shortly after Kennedy’s murder, in 1964. And the FBI had visited again in 1963 to review the records of Oswald.

    The obvious question of course was if the institution was so obscure that neither the FBI nor the Swiss police knew of it, how on earth did Oswald ever hear of it in California? And what prompted him to apply for admittance? Further, why was he accepted and why did he then not attend? Predictably, none of these issues are explored in the Warren Report, which only mentions Albert Schweitzer in passing. (p. 689)

    It was this arresting and unaddressed religious-intelligence phenomenon that formed the focus of Evica’s final work. And I should add here that it relates not just to Oswald but other figures in the assassination landscape, like Ruth and Michael Paine, and Ruth Kloepfer. It had been ignored for too long and it took Evica to open up the issue. He will be missed.

  • Author Shaped Lens for Viewing U.S. History

    Author Shaped Lens for Viewing U.S. History

    By Adam Bernstein

    Washington Post Staff Writer

    Friday, March 2, 2007

    Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 89, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote about the evolution of the American democratic tradition, served in the Kennedy White House as a “court philosopher” and was among the foremost public intellectuals of his era, died Feb. 28 at New York Downtown Hospital after a heart attack.

    arthur
    Schlesinger in the 1960s

    Schlesinger rose to prominence at 28 when his book “The Age of Jackson,” about the democratization of U.S. politics under President Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century, won the 1946 Pulitzer for history. Twenty years later, his book “A Thousand Days,” an account of his role as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, won the Pulitzer in the category of biography or autobiography.

    In the 1950s, Schlesinger also wrote three volumes about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Depression-era political and economic doctrine. Published as “The Age of Roosevelt,” the books were considered valuable accounts of a tumultuous period.

    Sean Wilentz, a history professor and former director of American studies at Princeton University, said of Schlesinger: “He was certainly one of the outstanding American historians of his generation. He set the terms for understanding not just one or two but three eras of American history — Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It’s enough for most historians to write one book and get recognition for it.”

    Schlesinger wrote or edited more than 25 books, most recently “War and the American Presidency,” published in 2004, which called President Bush’s approach to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “a ghastly mess.”

    In addition to his best-selling books, Schlesinger was known for essays and articles he contributed to an array of magazines. While serving under Kennedy, he wrote movie and book reviews for the Saturday Review. With his horn-rimmed glasses and perpetual bow tie, he seemed to cultivate a near-caricature of the reserved Harvard University professor he once was, yet he thrived on the gossipy salon circuits of Washington, New York and Boston. He developed close relationships with newspaper publishers such as the Graham family in Washington, writers such as Truman Capote and, of course, the Kennedys.

    “It was hard to resist the raffish, unpredictable, sometimes uncontrollable Kennedy parties,” Schlesinger once wrote.

    Noticeably absent in his books on the Kennedy clan was a tone of critical and dispassionate historical perspective. Author Gore Vidal called “A Thousand Days” a “political novel.”

    Nevertheless, in the earliest books that shaped his reputation, Schlesinger was revered for his engaging and interpretive approach to history. Most intriguingly, Wilentz said, Schlesinger saw Jackson as a man more shaped by East Coast intellectuals and the new labor movement than was previously thought and saw the New Deal not as a fixed set of principles but an evolving experiment.

    Schlesinger’s 1978 book “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” which won the National Book Award, also provided one of his more enduring personal analyses of John and Robert Kennedy. “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic,” he wrote. “Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”

    Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger was born Oct. 15, 1917, in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Iowa City and Cambridge, Mass. He later changed his middle name to Meier and added the suffix “Jr.” to honor his father, a prominent historian at Harvard.

    Although it was never officially confirmed, Schlesinger said that his mother’s side of the family included the 19th-century historian and diplomat George Bancroft, often regarded as the father of American history. Starting in 1834, Bancroft wrote the 10-volume “History of the United States” and also served as secretary of the Navy.

    Schlesinger graduated from the private Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and traveled with his family around the world before enrolling at Harvard at 16. He graduated summa cum laude in 1938 and briefly considered a career as a theater critic before his father swayed him to write a book based on his senior thesis. That work, “Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a 19th-century author and cleric, received positive reviews.

    After a year studying at Cambridge University, Schlesinger received a Harvard fellowship that allowed him to research “The Age of Jackson.” Published in 1945, the book sold 90,000 copies in its first year, won the Pulitzer and established him as a force among a post-war generation of scholars.

    Alan Brinkley, provost of Columbia University and a history professor, said the Jackson book “changed the way people viewed American history generally, because it was a rebuttal of the frontier thesis that [Pulitzer-winning historian] Frederick Jackson Turner made so central to historic interpretation in the 1920s and 1930s. Schlesinger argued that it was not the frontier that created Jackson’s democratic ethos; it was cities, workers.” Furthermore, the book’s focus on the formative decades and spirit of U.S. democracy caught on with the public after World War II.

    Schlesinger, who had poor eyesight, spent the war years as a writer in the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA. He joined Harvard’s faculty in 1946 as an associate history professor — a rare accomplishment for someone so young and without an advanced degree.

    In 1947, he helped start Americans for Democratic Action, a political group made up of a range of New Deal liberals, including former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, labor lawyer Joseph Rauh, economist John Kenneth Galbraith and future vice president Hubert H. Humphrey. The organizers wanted to counter the influence of the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace, which they saw as Communist-dominated.

    Out of the ADA movement came Schlesinger’s 1949 book “The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.” It was credited with providing an ideological basis for practical liberalism during the early years of the Cold War and a philosophical alternative to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, the red-baiting Wisconsin Republican.

    Schlesinger wrote in the book: “Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.”

    Schlesinger became a full professor at Harvard in 1954. He took consulting jobs for government agencies and ventured into back-room political work. In 1952, he urged W. Averell Harriman to give up his challenge to Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson for the Democratic presidential nomination. He advised Stevenson’s unsuccessful campaigns in 1952 and 1956 and said he was frustrated by the candidate’s cerebral approach to politics at the expense of a more assertive voice that he thought would capture the public’s imagination.

    Schlesinger said that even if Stevenson were not the most compelling candidate, he “made Kennedy’s rise possible.” He added: “His lofty conception of politics, his conviction that affluence was not enough for the good life, his impatience with liberal cliches, his contempt for conservative complacency, his summons to the young, his demand for new ideas, his respect for people who had them, his belief that history afforded no easy answers, his call for a strong public leadership, all this set the tone for a new era of Democratic politics.”

    During the 1960 presidential election, Schlesinger became a Kennedy partisan and wrote “Kennedy or Nixon: Does it Make Any Difference?,” which threw into sharp relief what he thought was the idealism Kennedy offered and the materialism of the Republican candidate, then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

    Starting in 1961, he took a two-year leave from Harvard to work for the Kennedy White House. As special assistant to Kennedy, he was close to the center of power but had a debatable degree of influence.

    Although Schlesinger was often described as a general “court philosopher,” Kennedy aides Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers wrote in their 1970 book, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” that Schlesinger was “special assistant without a special portfolio, to be a liaison man in charge of keeping Adlai Stevenson happy, to receive complaints from the liberals and to act as a sort of household devil’s advocate who would complain about anything in the administration that bothered him.”

    At one time, Schlesinger wrote a memorandum cautioning against what became the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961. When it was clear that the invasion was imminent, he wrote another memo advising the president to let blame fall on his subordinates.

    Kennedy ignored the advice and publicly took “full responsibility” for the failure, and Schlesinger was criticized for telling the media at the time of the invasion that there were 300 to 400 men in the landing force, although the accurate figure was 1,400. He later told Time magazine, “I was lying,” but he said he had no choice if he wanted to stay with the White House. “Either you get out, or you play the game.”

    After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Schlesinger transformed his notebooks into “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,” which also won the National Book Award. Largely seen as a flattering account of the president, the book aroused controversy for its depiction of tensions between the president and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Schlesinger briefly stayed on under President Lyndon B. Johnson but felt shunted aside. In 1966, he became the Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at City University of New York, a position he held for almost 30 years.

    Meanwhile, he wrote a book criticizing Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War, “The Bitter Heritage” (1966), which faulted the war’s advocates for “seeing the civil war in Vietnam as above all a moral issue.”

    Living in Manhattan, Schlesinger became active in then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s (D-N.Y.) bid for the presidency in 1968. After the candidate was killed that June, Schlesinger gave an angry commencement address at CUNY, underscoring the “hatred and violence” he saw around him. Among his later books were “The Imperial Presidency” (1973), which placed allegations of Nixon’s abuse of power in conducting foreign affairs in the context of post-World War II attempts to expand presidential authority.

    “The Disuniting of America,” his 1991 bestseller that condemned the rise of “political correctness” as well as ethnic history movements such as Afrocentrism, won him strong reviews in the mainstream media. However, a range of black scholars, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Leonard Jeffries, used highly personal terms to denounce his work.

    Schlesinger dismissed much of the attacks. “What the hell,” he told The Washington Post. “You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass.”

    The first volume of his memoirs, “A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950,” was published in 2000. An edited version of his 6,000-page diary covering 1952 to 1998 is scheduled to be released this fall by Penguin Press.

    His marriage to Marian Cannon Schlesinger ended in divorce. A daughter from that marriage, Katharine Kinderman, died in 2004.

    Survivors include his wife of 36 years, Alexandra Emmet Schlesinger of Manhattan, N.Y.; three children from his first marriage, Stephen C. Schlesinger and Christina Schlesinger, both of Manhattan, and Andrew Schlesinger of Cambridge, Mass.; a son from his second marriage, Robert Schlesinger of Alexandria; a stepson, Peter Allan of Manhattan; and three grandchildren.

    Addenda

    “I Can’t … and I Won’t …”

    How did the late Arthur Schlesinger view the matter of conspiracy in the JFK assassination?

    In 1967 Raymond Marcus, one of the earliest Warren Report critics, had an opportunity to meet Schlesinger in Los Angeles. Schlesinger was in town for an appearance on a local TV talk show. The program’s host, whom Marcus had gotten to know, called Marcus to invite him down to the studio.

    Marcus had analyzed both the Zapruder film and the Moorman photograph, and believed he could use them to demonstrate there had in fact been a conspiracy. The talk show host, he recalled, “suggested that I bring my photo materials…

    “When I arrived I was ushered into a waiting area, and there I spread out some of the Zapruder and Moorman photos on a table.” Schlesinger arrived a short time later and the two men were introduced. “Schlesinger glanced at the photos and immediately paled, turned away and said, ‘I can’t look and I won’t look.’ That was the end of our meeting.”

    Thirteen years later, Marcus went on, Schlesinger provided an endorsement for Anthony Summers’ book Conspiracy:

    One does not have to accept Mr. Summers’ conclusions to recognize the significance of the questions raised in this careful and disquieting analysis of the mysteries of Dallas.

    (The above account is derived from Addendum B, by Raymond Marcus, p. 64.)

    Have A Cigar!

    In its December, 1998 issue, Cigar Afficianado magazine featured a cover story by Arthur Schlesinger called “The Truth As I See It,” in which the historian sought to refute “the revisionist version of JFK’s legacy.”

    Cigar Afficianado may seem an unlikely forum for a thoughtful defense of the Kennedy presidency. Perhaps to justify the article’s presence, the magazine’s cover was an oil painting of a reflective, reclining JFK, thick stogie in hand. Accompanying the text were photos of JFK lighting up while watching naval maneuvers off the California coast, and puffing away as he watched a baseball game. Schlesinger noted, in the article’s conclusion, that JFK was “never more relaxed than when sitting in his rocking chair and puffing away on a fine Havana cigar.” It could also be that Schlesinger enjoyed the odd Cubano, although he was not identified as a smoker in his brief end-credit.

    He was, however, identified as a former special assistant to President Kennedy, and therein lay an obvious conflict, which the author sought to defuse: “I make no great claim to impartiality. I served in JFK’s White House, and it was the most exhilarating experience of my life … I may not be totally useless as a witness.”

    Generally, he was not. Schlesinger cited a variety of polls showing that JFK remained an immensely popular figure, so many years after his death — less so among historians, but popular still. Yet Schlesinger sought to dispose of the fanciful notion that Kennedy-era Washington was Camelot. “No one when JFK was alive ever spoke of Washington as Camelot — and if anyone had done so, no one would have been more derisive than JFK. Nor did those of us around him see ourselves for a moment, heaven help us, as knights of the Round Table.”

    More substantively, Schlesinger took on a number of what he called “myths” about the Kennedy presidency, starting with the 1960 campaign. Citing the allegation that the Kennedys stole the election in Illinois, he wrote that “Illinois was not crucial to Kennedy’s victory. Had he lost Illinois, Kennedy still would have won by 276 to 246 in the electoral collage.” Furthermore, Schlesinger declared, if there was any vote theft by Democrats in Cook County, Republicans were equally guilty of stealing votes elsewhere in the state.

    In the balance of “The Truth As I See It,” Schlesinger:

    1. refuted stories Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger;
    2. downplayed stories of JFK’s marital infidelities;
    3. reminded readers that JFK inherited the Bay of Pigs operation and CIA assassination plots against Castro;
    4. said JFK believed intervention by non-Asian troops in Vietnam meant a “foredoomed failure”; and
    5. stated that Kennedy was determined to end the Cold War and stop the nuclear arms race.

    Schlesinger’s article was replete with citations and opinions that second his own. This was not necessarily a good thing; his faith in the sworn testimony of Richard Helms, for example, that Operation Mongoose was “not intended to apply to assassination activity” is mystifying.

    Kennedy certainly made mistakes, including the reappointment of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. But Schlesinger believed that JFK’s achievements were many, though not always quantifiable — as in his challenge to a new generation to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. The country had seen nothing like it since the New Deal. Kennedy was, Schlesinger concludes, “the best of my generation.”

  • E. Howard Hunt Dies

    E. Howard Hunt Dies

    Everette Howard Hunt, a cold warrior whose Intelligence career spanned three decades, died in Miami on January 23 at the age of 88.

    E. Howard Hunt was a co-founder of the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two. A strident anti-communist, he proudly took credit for orchestrating a 1954 coup against Guatemala’s elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, and the 1967 killing of Fidel Castro ally Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He also organized the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion

    hunt 01

    But Hunt’s most notorious act was as one of the masterminds of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate building in Washington, DC. “I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,” Hunt said in 1997. “But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.”

    Hunt, a devoted servant of President Richard Nixon, relied on a circle of militant Cuban contacts from the Bay of Pigs invasion to carry out the break-in. The Cuban burglars rifled campaign files and financial records in search of evidence to back Hunt’s suspicion that Castro had given money to Nixon’s rival, Democratic nominee George McGovern.

    “I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land,” Hunt told People magazine in 1974. “I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country.”

    Hunt spent 33 months in federal prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, pleading guilty to evade what could have been a 35-year sentence if convicted at trial. Two dozen other men also served time for the bungled break-in. Nixon was forced to abandon his second term on Aug. 9, 1974, becoming the only U.S. president to resign.

    After his release from prison, he devoted much of his time to writing spy novels, which he had begun producing in the 1940s. He wrote more than 80 books. A memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, is due out next month.

    In an interview for Slate magazine in October 2004, Hunt said he had been doubtful of the Bay of Pigs’ prospects for deposing Castro because of State Department interference in the CIA operation and the Kennedy administration’s insistence on keeping it low-key.

    Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971.

    Many believe Hunt played a role in the Kennedy assassination. In 1978 Spotlight magazine, a publication of the right-wing Liberty Lobby, published an article by former CIA employee Victor Marchetti that linked Hunt to the assassination. Hunt sued for libel and won a settlement of $650,000. That verdict was vacated in 1985. Hunt never received any of the money and declared bankruptcy in 1997.

    Some have put forth the theory that Hunt was one of three so-called tramps arrested near Dealey Plaza shortly after the assassination. Hunt always denied it. “I was in Washington, D.C., on November 22, 1963,” he wrote in a 1975 letter to Time magazine, while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base’s prison camp. “It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time.”

    Hunt underwent gall bladder surgery in the late 1990s and had a leg amputated after arteriosclerosis developed, spending his last years in a motorized wheelchair. He lived in a modest home in the Miami area with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt. His first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972.

    Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children.

  • Gerald Ford Dies

    Gerald Ford Dies

    Gerald R. Ford, the thirty-eighth President of the United States and last surviving member of the Warren Commission, died the day after Christmas. He was 93 years old.

    In announcing Ford’s death, his widow Betty Ford said, “His life was filled with love of God, his family, and his country.”

    No cause of death was immediately given, but Ford had suffered a number of medical problems over the preceding year.

    ford sworn in

    Gerald Ford ascended to the Presidency in 1974 following the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. He ran for re-election in 1976 but was defeated by Jimmy Carter.

    Ford was an undistinguished congressman from Michigan when Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the Presidential commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. That commission, of course, concluded that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, and that there was no conspiracy in the assassination.

    Publicly, at least, Mr. Ford stood by that conclusion for the rest of his life, in spite of overwhelming evidence of conspiracy. In 1991 he said, “I reaffirm the two basic decisions of the Warren Commission are as valid today as they were then. Those were that Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination, and secondly, our commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic…I don’t think we have found any evidence to date that there was a conspiracy.”

    In 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board released materials showing that Ford personally altered the wording of some sections of the Warren Report, and in so doing strengthened its lone-assassin case. Probe magazine reported (October 1997, Vol. 4 No. 6) that then-Commissioner Ford edited a draft of the Report, changing the location of one of JFK’s wounds. “By moving the point of entry from the back to the neck,” Probe said, “Ford alters the trajectory of the bullet through Kennedy’s body making the Commission’s [lone assassin] thesis more tenable.”

    In 1966 Ford published a book called Portrait of the Assassin, ghostwritten by his assistant John R. Stiles. The book opened with an account of a top-secret Warren Commission meeting in January 1964, in which the Commission heard allegations that Lee Oswald was an FBI informant. “Ford quoted extensively but selectively from what he called ‘discussions among members of the Commission on Monday, January 27,’ 1964,” Harold Weisberg wrote in Whitewash IV: JFK Assassination Transcript. “In other words, he published for personal profit excerpts from this TOP SECRET executive session of January 27, edited to his own liking and advantage and for his own dishonest political purposes.”

    Weisberg further asserted that Ford lied about this during his Senate confirmation hearings in 1973.

    The early days of Ford’s 895-day administration were touched by controversy when Ford pardoned Richard M. Nixon for all crimes he committed as President. According to conventional wisdom, this may have contributed to his failed re-election bid in 1976. In between the pardon and his defeat, two attempts were made on his life.

    On December 27, 2006, CBS Evening News broadcast a videotaped interview with Ford dating back to 1984. CBS informed its viewers that Ford granted the interview with the stipulation it not be broadcast until after his death. In the excerpt CBS showed, Ford recalled reading a draft of his first speech as president, following Richard Nixon’s resignation. “I read it and that phrase, ‘the long national nightmare,’ sort of jarred me. I said, ‘Bob, we really ought not to use that. Let’s not be too harsh.’” Speechwriter Bob Hartmann prevailed. Any other juicy tidbits from that interview? Not yet, and I’m not holding my breath.

    It is worth remembering that Gerald Ford’s legacy also includes vetoing a bill to amend the Freedom of Information Act, reportedly at the urging of Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia.

    Most initial news reports of Gerald Ford’s death stressed that Ford was the nation’s only unelected President, but those accounts failed to consider current president George W. Bush.

    Click here to see a cartoon recalling Gerald Ford’s editing skills.