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  • Mark Lane, Part II: Citizen Lane

    Mark Lane, Part II: Citizen Lane

    When Mark Lane’s autobiography was published in 2012, I was working on my rewrite of Destiny Betrayed.  Right after that, I started in on Reclaiming Parkland. I tried to get someone else to review Citizen Lane, but there were no takers.  In retrospect, I am sorry that I could not get anyone interested. And I also understand why no one in the MSM reviewed the book.  It is, in quite simple terms, both a marvelous read and an inspiring story.

    Too often in the JFK field, we focus solely on the work of the author or essayist on the assassination itself.  In my view, this is mistaken.  It’s important to me to know who an author is outside of the field.  To give one example, Robert Tanenbaum—who wrote the thinly disguised roman a clef about the HSCA, Corruption of Blood—was a graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law. He then became a prosecutor under the legendary New York DA Frank Hogan.  He rose to become head of the homicide division. Tanenbaum never lost a felony case in his nearly decade long career in that office. Therefore, he cannot be dismissed as a tin foil capped conspiracy theorist.  The late Philip Melanson rose to become the head of the political science department at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.  He then built an RFK archives at his university, the best such repository on the east coast.  He wrote 12 non-fiction books, including an excellent one on the Secret Service.

    In my elegy for the recently deceased Mark Lane, I alluded to some of the things he had accomplished outside the Kennedy assassination field: his work for the alleged killer of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray; his book on the fey, chaotic Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968; and his prime role in freeing an innocent man from death row, James Richardson.  Little did I know how much I was still leaving out. I, and many others, clearly shortchanged the career of a truly remarkable attorney. 

    I have belatedly read Lane’s autobiography, Citizen Lane.  Let me say two things at the outset.  Everyone should read this book.  It is the testament of a man who dedicated his legal career to a lifelong crusade for the causes he believed in.  And, as we will see, Lane did this almost right at the beginning of his career. It is clear that no obituary of Lane came close to doing him justice, because there seemed to be a unified MSM  boycott about this book.  Without reading it, no one can come close to fairly summarizing his career. 

    Lane was born in New York in 1927, two years before the stock market crash.  His father was a CPA, and his mother was a secretary to a theatrical producer.  All three of their children went to college and graduated, which is quite an achievement for that time period.  Lane’s older brother became a high school mathematics teacher and a leader of the teachers union in New York. His younger sister became a history professor who eventually took over the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Virginia. She built it from virtually nothing to the point where it had fifty majors, and the areas of concentration were expanded.  (See here https://news.virginia.edu/content/ann-j-lane-first-director-women-s-studies-uva-has-died)

    After serving in the army in Europe during World War II, Mark Lane returned home and decided to become an attorney.  He attended Brooklyn School of Law. It was founded in 1901, and is highly rated today by the National Law Journal.  That particular publication rates law schools by return on investment.  That is: how many of the graduates sign on with the top law firms in the United States.  According to that rubric, Lane’s alma mater is in the top 15% of law academies.  But Lane did not intend on cashing in on his law degree. 

    Lane decided that what he wanted to do was to offer legal services to those who did not have access to them but, in fact, really needed them.  So he began as a member of the leftist National Lawyers Guild, and working in an office with the later congressional representative Bella Abzug.  Lane started out as little more than a researcher and court stand-in for his boss when he was behind schedule.  But one day he happened to walk by a court in session while the great Carol Weiss King, founder of the National Lawyers Guild, was defending a client.  Lane heard her say, “Just who does this government think it is that it can violate the law with impunity, that it can traduce the rights of ordinary people, that it can tell us that the law doesn’t count because these are extraordinary times? ” (p. 27) 

    From that propitious moment on Lane decided he was not going to be a gopher for anyone anymore.

    II

    He now set up an office on the second level of an apartment building in Spanish Harlem. Because few other attorneys were there, people began to come to him with their most dire needs.  Prior to Lane’s arrival, when there was a gang shooting, the young Latin accused of the crime almost automatically was executed or got life imprisonment.  With Lane there this all changed, even in instances when the victim was white and the assailant was Puerto Rican.  Lane was one of the first to assail what was called the Special Jury System.  (pgs. 43-44)  In New York, under these circumstances, the jury master could choose a jury, instead of having one picked at random.  Therefore, the accused was not judged by a jury of his peers. Later, Lane was instrumental in getting this system abolished.

    Once he developed a higher profile, Lane would set up legal clinics for the public in high school auditoriums. One of his specialties was advising local renters on how to set up tenant councils and, if necessary, conduct rent strikes. (p. 48) He even arranged to have a legal clinic at the offices of the local Hispanic newspaper. With their help, Lane helped save the concept of rent control in New York City. (p. 49)

    Lane was also an active member of the National Lawyers Guild. Like many young lawyers in the late forties and fifties, Lane thought the ABA did not take a strong enough stand against Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee or the demagogue Joe McCarthy.  He volunteered to organize a benefit show for the Guild.  When the main targeted performer refused to sign on, Lane went to the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger.  Seeger invited the jazz artist Sonny Terry.  Lane also invited female folk singer Martha Schlamme.  Every ticket was sold, with scores of people paying for standing room only. Lane went on to do two more of these shows for Seeger.  They went over so well that the young attorney briefly thought of becoming a musical impresario. (p. 36)  But, lucky for us, he did not. Lane married the talented and attractive Schlamme, who unfortunately, died of a stroke in 1985.

    By this time, the mid fifties, Lane had been in practice for just six years.  But yet, his reputation as a champion of lost causes was so prevalent that a young man named Graciliano Acevedo walked into his office one day. He was an escapee from a young adult prison.  Except it was not called a prison.  It was called Wassaic State School for Mental Defectives. Acevedo began to recite a virtual horror story to the young lawyer.  He told him that Wassaic was not really a school.  It was a prison camouflaged as a school.  Acevedo had been committed there without access to an attorney and not given a hearing or a trial.  He did not want to return. He said there was no real schooling going on there, and that the guards were incompetent and sadistic and would beat up some of the prisoners.  In fact, one guard actually killed an 18-year-old prisoner. (p. 58)

    Lane took Acevedo to a psychiatrist.  When his IQ was tested it turned out to be 115.  So much for him being a mental defective. Lane decided he was not going to turn him over.  He now enlisted two local reporters to his side: Fern Marja and Peter Khiss.  Marja ran a three-day series on the abuses of this “school,” which culminated with an editorial plea for it to be cleaned up.  Which it was.  There was no more solitary confinement, books were now made available, academic tests were now given in Spanish, guards were fired (some were prosecuted), and hundreds of the inmates were released.

    It is hard to believe, but at this time, Lane was just 28 years old.

    III

    Lane was interested in improving the community he worked in, as were some other talented people.  So, through his defense of a parishioner, he met with the famous reverend, Eugene St. Clair Callender.  After getting the young man off, he and Callender decided to work on creating a drug treatment center at the Mid-Harlem  Community Parish. (p. 79)  Once the two men got the center up and running, they passed its management on to one of the former patients. That center ended up treating 25,000 patients.  After a meeting with baseball star Jackie Robinson, a company he was affiliated with agreed to hire some of the rehabilitated drug addicts.  To culminate their success story, Lane and Callender invited a young rising star of the civil rights movement to come north and speak in Harlem. Martin Luther King spoke in front of the Hotel Theresa in 1957.  Lane supplied the power for the sound system through a nearby nightclub run by boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. (pgs. 86-87)

    From social problems, Lane now turned toward the political field. The young attorney did not think the Democratic Party of New York was representing Spanish Harlem anywhere near as well as it should.  So Lane decided to organize his own version of the party.  He got the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt in this effort. At the beginning, he said that if he won his race for the state legislature, he would only serve one term.  He then wanted to pass the seat on to a local Hispanic.  With the help of his sister, brother and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Lane campaign registered over four thousand new voters. At the same time he was running for office, he was managing the local campaign of Senator John Kennedy for president.

    On Election Day, his backers patrolled the ballot boxes to make sure no one from outside the district tried to vote.  Lane won and celebrations broke out. As promised, after he served one term, he passed the seat on to a local Latino community organizer he knew.

    At around this time, the early sixties, the struggle for civil rights was heating up to a fever pitch. The election of John Kennedy and the appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General, inspired long delayed public demonstrations to attain equality for black Americans.  Callender decided to join in one of these actions, the Freedom Riders movement, by sending Lane and local black activist/lawyer Percy Sutton south to join in them. (p. 138)

    In Jackson, Mississippi, before they could even participate in the protest, both  men were arrested for sitting next to each other at an airport terminal. The charge was disorderly conduct. They were convicted without trial and sentenced to four months in prison.  They were released on bail and promptly interviewed by the New York Times and New York Post. (p. 144)  After the bad publicity, the two men returned south to stand trial. Wisely, the prosecutor moved for a directed verdict of not guilty.

    IV

    We now come to a part of Citizen Lane that most of our readership will be partly familiar with.  That is, Lane’s writing of his famous National Guardian essay proclaiming doubt about the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of President Kennedy.  What inspired Lane to write his essay were the pronouncements of Dallas DA Henry Wade after Oswald had been killed.  This was suspicious in itself, since Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on national TV in the basement of City Hall. In spite of that, perhaps because of it, Wade held a press conference and stated that, even though he was dead, and would not have an attorney, or a trial, Oswald was still guilty. (p. 150)  Lane studied the charges levied by Wade. He now decided to respond to the DA’s bill of indictment.  Although he offered his work to several outlets e.g. The Nation, Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, none of them would publish it.  Finally, James Aronson of the left leaning National Guardian called. He had heard of the essay through the publishing grapevine.  Lane told him he could have it for now, but not to publish it yet.  In the meantime, he went to Jimmy Weschler of the New York Post.  The Post had helped him with the Wassaic scandal, and covered his political campaign fairly.  Weschler turned it down. After final approval for Aronson, it became a mini-sensation.  Aronson had to publish several reprints.  Weschler never spoke to Lane again.  (p. 152)

    This essay was not just hugely popular in America, it also began to circulate through Europe and even Japan. Therefore, with the money Aronson made through the $100 dollar sale of the rights from Lane, he arranged a speaking tour abroad for the author.  With Lane’s dissident profile rising, the head of the ABA and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wanted him disciplined because of his defense of Oswald.  (p. 155)  But Marguerite Oswald had read Lane’s work and wanted him to defend her deceased son, which Lane agreed to do.  But the Warren Commission would not tolerate anything like that, by Lane or anyone else.  In fact, following through on Powell’s suggestion, Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin filed a complaint with the New York City bar.  Lane had to get an attorney to represent him and the complaint was dismissed.  (p. 157)

    Even though Rankin would not tolerate a formal defense of Oswald before the Warren Commission, Lane now established his Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI) to informally investigate the Kennedy case through a wide network of volunteers.  Through his lecture tours he raised enough  money to fly to Dallas and talk to witnesses. He also rented a theater in New York and began to appear on college campuses.  When he was invited to travel to Europe, the American embassies abroad tracked his appearances and tried to talk his backers out of their sponsorships.  At one appearance in Vienna, they planted a translator who deliberately misspoke what he was saying.  When the crowd started objecting, an American living there took over the duties. (p. 159)

    When Lane returned to the States, he tried to get a book published based upon the Warren Report and the accompanying 26 volumes of evidence.  But the FBI visited some of the prospective publishers and talked them out of working with Lane.  They also visited local talk radio hosts and tried to discourage them from having him on the air.  The Bureau then tapped the phones of the CCI so they would know when and where Lane would be traveling in order to investigate the case.  He was also placed on the “lookout list” so that when he arrived back from a foreign speaking tour, the FBI would know he had returned.

    Because he was working for nothing but expenses, and he had neglected his private law practice for the Kennedy case, Lane was extremely low on funds at this time.  Finally, a British publishing house, the Bodley Head, decided to publish his manuscript called Rush to Judgment. A man named Ben Sonnenberg went to the company and volunteered his services to edit the book. When Lane saw his suggestions, he thought they were weird.  It later turned out that Sonnenberg was a CIA agent who was relaying information to the Agency about what was in the book.  (p. 165)

    The book did well in England and the Bodley Head began to look for an American publisher.  They contacted Arthur Cohen of Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  Cohen was very interested but, probably through Sonnenberg, the CIA found out how explosive the book was. Although it did not implicate them, they tried to talk Cohen out of publishing the book anyway.  Cohen told them if they did not leave him alone, he would double the advertising budget.  (p. 165)  Norman Mailer did a good review of the book in the New York Herald Tribune and the volume became a smashing best seller in America.

    Lane began to tour the country from coast to coast as the book caught on like wildfire.  In St. Louis, he got a phone caller on a talk show who said he wanted to talk to him offline.  He then told him that he needed to talk to him out of the studio.  So he directed him to a phone booth nearby.  When Lane got there, he now instructed him to go to another phone booth a few miles away.  Lane, who had received numerous death threats before was now getting worried.  But it turned out that the caller was alerting him to an assassination attempt on his life.  He told Lane that this would take place in Chicago, outside of a hotel room he would be staying in and he actually gave him the room number he would be at.  He then added that there would be a studio across the street.  Lane would cross the street to get there at a precise time, and then there would be an attempt to run him over with a truck.  (p. 169)  Lane asked him how he knew all of these details.  The man said that he had been hired to drive the truck, but he refused to kill an American on American soil.  He then added that he would now send a taxi to pick Lane up and return him to his hotel, which he knew the name of.  When Lane got to Chicago, all the details the assassin told him were accurate.  So he changed his room number, and then arrived at the interview via a circuitous route.

    {aridoc engine=”iframe” width=”560″ height=”315″}https://www.youtube.com/embed/3XoAg-FeU9I?rel=0&showinfo=0{/aridoc} 
    Mark Lane appears on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. Although many people had been
    skeptical of the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in
    the assassination of President Kennedy, Lane’s book Rush to Judgment was the first to
    lay out the argument seriously. He defends himself ably in this spirited exchange.

    After Rush to Judgment became a national bestseller, documentary film director Emile De Antonio got in contact with him to a do a film based upon the book.  So the two traveled to Dallas to interview some witnesses.  One of them, Sam Holland, told them that he had been alerted in advance about them coming.  And he had also been told by the police not to talk to them. Further, he had been threatened with the loss of his job if he did so. When Lane asked him if those were the circumstances, then why he was talking to him, Holland replied with words that have become hallowed in the annals of JFK assassination literature:  “When the time comes that an American sees his president being killed and he can’t tell the truth about it, that’s the time to give the country back to the Indians—if they’ll take it.”  As Lane reports, Holland had tears in his eyes as he said this.

    I should add one more detail about their work on this film, one that does not come from this book, but from Lane’s 1968 volume A Citizen’s Dissent. While at work on the film, the two struck a deal with CBS to look at their outtakes from their 1964 two-hour special on the Warren Report.  The first night they watched five hours of film.  They understood it would eventually run to 70 hours—for a two-hour documentary?  Lane and De Antonio found something shocking that first night.  CBS was, as Lane put it, filming from a script.  If any witness diverted from that scenario, the interviewer yelled cut. The witness was then instructed with new information so as to alter their answer for the camera.  The witness then gave the revised answer. Only the rehearsed parts were shown to the public.  Needless to say, after their first night, CBS called the librarian and said the agreement they had was null and void.  (Mark Lane, A Citizen’s Dissent, pgs. 75-79)

    V

    While on a speaking tour in northern California in 1968, Lane picked up a magazine and read the story of James Joseph Richardson.  Richardson was a resident of  Arcadia, Florida, who was charged with killing his seven children with poison.  (Citizen Lane, p. 187)  Lane happened to have another speaking engagement upcoming in Florida. While there, he found that Richardson had been convicted.  Lane got in contact with Richardson’s attorney and then with Richardson.  After this he and three of his friends and working associates—Carolyn Mugar, Steve Jaffe and Dick Gregory—conducted an eight-month investigation, after which he published a book about the case called, appropriately, Arcadia.  This managed to attract some attention to the case and place some pressure on local officials. 

    The book strongly suggested that Richardson had been framed and that the local police chief and the DA had cooperated in manufacturing evidence. This turned out to be the case.  Lane got TV host David Frost interested in the case and he did a jailhouse interview with Richardson.  Dick Gregory got a story in Newsweek.  Lane called a press conference on the steps of the state capital after he had acquired a copy of the master case file.  These documents proved the accusations he had made in his book.  The governor now ordered a special hearing into the case and the new facts were now entered into the record.  Janet Reno had been assigned the case as a special prosecutor.  Lane was allowed to make his case to vacate the previous judgment.  Reno made a short presentation which, in essence, agreed with all the facts Lane had presented.  She also agreed the verdict should be vacated.  The judge agreed also and Richardson was set free. (pgs. 206-07)  Lane later called the day Richardson was freed after 21 years of incarceration the greatest day of his professional life.

    Mark Lane (left) with Jane Fonda

    It would seem almost destined that an attorney like Lane would get involved with the long and arduous attempt to end the Vietnam War.  Lane did. With actress Jane Fonda and actor Donald Sutherland, he helped arrange the famous Winter Soldier Investigation.  This was a three-day conference in Detroit in 1971. It was designed to publicize the atrocities and crimes that the Pentagon had committed in its futile attempt to defeat the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam.  A documentary film was made of the event and the transcript was entered into the Congressional Record by Sen. Mark Hatfield. 

    Both President Richard Nixon and his assistant Charles Colson despised the conference, as did the Pentagon and the FBI. They therefore began counter measures to neutralize its impact. Lane wrote a book about the subject called Conversations with Americans. Consulting with the Pentagon, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan wrote an article saying that since some of Lane’s interviewees were not listed in Pentagon records, then the persons must be ersatz.  When Lane tried to call Sheehan and enlighten him on this issue, Sheehan never returned his calls.  Lane understood that some of the soldiers would not want their actual names entered into the book for fear of retaliation.  Therefore, he had entered the real information about the subjects on a chart and given this information to a former lawyer for the Justice Department.  (See pages 219-221) Sheehan apparently never wanted this information.  And neither does former professor John McAdams because he still runs a link to Sheehan’s false article to discredit Lane. 

    Neil Sheehan was a former acolyte of Col. John Paul Vann. Vann had been part of the American advisory group that President Kennedy had sent to Vietnam to assist the ARVN. Vann became convinced the war could not be won unless direct American intervention was applied.  In this, he was in agreement with New York Times reporter in Vietnam, David Halberstam.  Kennedy disliked them both since he had no intention of inserting American combat troops in Indochina.  Somehow, 42 years after the fall of Saigon, McAdams still does not understand what made it such a disaster. It was partly because of writers like Sheehan and military men like Vann.

    But that is not all Lane did to try and stop the war.  He also read up on the laws concerning conscientious objectors and provided counseling to scores of young men who wanted to use that aspect of the law to either avoid service or leave the service.  (p. 236)  In addition to that, because Lane had achieved a high profile on the war, one day a Vietnamese pilot training in Texas got in contact with him.  He said he did not want to be part of these Vietnamese Air Force missions, since most of them targeted civilians. So he asked Lane if he could be granted political asylum in America so as not to go back and do bombing runs.  Lane did some work on the issue.  He told him that he did not think he would be successful petitioning for asylum in America, but he thought he could do so in Canada.  Therefore, along with his lifelong friend Carolyn Mugar, the two set up a kind of underground railroad into Canada. Carolyn would stop her station wagon before the border checkpoint. Lane and the man he calls Tran (along with two other trainees) jumped out of the car and circled around into a snowy, thin forest.  After Carolyn passed the border, she then drove along a narrow road to pick up the pair on the Canadian side. Because of its success, Lane duplicated this along with Mugar several times.  He later talked to a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman who said that they were on to what he was doing. but they actually were in agreement with him.  (p. 283)

    VI

    One of the most gripping chapters in the book is Lane’s description of his participation in the defense of Russell Means and Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973.  AIM had organized an effort to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson who they felt was a totally corrupt pawn who was actually abusing the tribe. The area was cordoned off with FBI agents and US Marshals. During the siege, several people were shot and at least one disappeared.  After the siege was lifted, Banks and Means went on trial for conspiracy and assault.  They were defended respectively by Lane and William Kunstler.

    The trial began in January of 1974.  Lane motioned for a change of venue to St. Paul, Minnesota, which the court granted.  It became very obvious early on that the FBI had illegally wiretapped the phone at the reservation and that they had suborned perjury from their star witness. (p. 267)  Although one of the jurors became ill before a final verdict was voted on, the judge accepted an acquittal to one charge and threw out the other because of prosecutorial misconduct. That ruling was accepted on appeal.

    Most of us know about Lane’s participation in the Martin Luther King case.  He and Dick Gregory wrote a good book about the murder of King.  It was originally titled Code Name Zorro and then reissued as Murder In Memphis.  In this volume, Lane only discusses his work with Grace Stephens.  Stephens was at Bessie’s Boarding House with her common law husband, Charlie Stephens, when King was shot.  She saw a man run out of the communal bathroom.  Yet, she would not say it was James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, even though she was sober and got a good look at him.  Charlie was stone drunk at the time and was not a witness to the man running out. He did not even have his glasses on. (p. 290) But since he would say it was Ray, he was used as a witness to extradite the alleged assassin from England.

    When Lane started investigating the case, he asked around for Grace.  No one knew where she was or why she was never called as a witness.  Finally, Lane got some information that she was squirreled away in a sanitarium.  He went there and looked for her. When he found her, he sat down next to her, took out a tape recorder, and asked her about the man she saw.  She said she did get a good look at him.  And when she was shown pictures of Ray, it was not him.  Lane left the place and then played the tape on local Memphis radio.  He then got a hearing called in order to free Grace Stephens. (p. 294)

    In the fall of 1978, Lane was asked by his friend Donald Freed to go to Jonestown in Guyana.  James Jones wanted Freed to lecture there on the King case.  Freed figured that since Lane knew much more about it than he did, he would let him do the talking.  Lane was well received and he was invited back in November.  Before he left, he got a call from a congressional lawyer in Washington. He inquired about how many news media would be there, and if the congressional delegations of Leo Ryan and Ed Derwinski would be small. He was assured that there would be no media and that just one assistant would accompany both congressmen. (p. 305)  He had inquired about this because he felt that if everything was kept small scale, he could serve as a mediator if Jones got too paranoid about being investigated.  Lane was either misinformed or he was lied to on both points.

    Jones did feel threatened by the rather large delegation and Lane could not control things.  After watching and intervening in a murder attempt on congressman Ryan, Lane advised the representative from northern California  to leave the scene. Jones had seen Ryan bloodied and the newsmen were trying to take photos. (p. 310)  Lane convinced Ryan to go. He told him he would interview the people his constituents were inquiring about.

    After Ryan left for the airport—where he and others would be killed on the tarmac—Lane and the People’s Temple lawyer Charles Garry were placed in a cell.  Lane talked to one of his guards and convinced him that he would be the perfect author to tell the truth about the colony. Miraculously, the two lawyers made it through the jungle to Port Kaituma where they were rescued by the military.  They then sought refuge in the American Embassy.  Lane concludes this chapter by agreeing with most authors:  Jonestown was not a mass suicide.  It was at least partly a mass murder.  (Please read Jim Hougan’s three-part series on Jones to gain some understanding of what really happened at Jonestown http://jimhougan.com/JimJones.html)

    As shown in the video clip above, many people know that Mark Lane opposed William F. Buckley on his show Firing Line about the JFK case.  What very few people knew, including me, was that Lane also opposed him in court on four counts of defamation.  Buckley had sued Willis Carto for libel because he had called him a neo-fascist and a racist.  Carto’s first lawyer took a powder on him and so he turned to Lane in desperation: Buckley was requesting $16 million dollars in damages.  Even though the judge was clearly biased towards Buckley, Lane did very well.  He simply used words that Buckley had written in his own magazine, National Review  to show that Buckley had clearly sided with the forces of segregation in the south way past the time when King and Rosa Parks began their campaign to integrate the area.  He also showed that Buckley encouraged the prosecution of African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and that he was also in favor of the poll tax.  The $16 million was reduced to $1,001.00.  (pgs. 321-28)

    It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did. Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords? Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes? Not to my knowledge.

    Two other things I did not know about Lane that are in this book.   He successfully argued a case before the Supreme Court against Jack Anderson.  This again involved a libel case in which Anderson had libeled Carto.  The district judge had thrown the case out.  Lane argued it should be reinstated.  He won the case and Carto settled for a withdrawal of the charges and a token payment to a charitable cause.  (p. 336) 

    Second, Lane had a radio show. He made an appearance on a radio program in New Jersey in 2004 to talk about the JFK case.  He did so well that he was invited back.  He was then offered a job five days a week, which he declined. But he agreed to do the show once  a week with a co–host.   The show was called Lane’s Law and I really wish I had known about it since it sounds very funny. Lane had a great time making fun of pompous fools like Sen. Bill Frist. (p. 346)

    When Lane’s sister Anne became ill and had to resign her Department Chair at Virginia, Lane moved to Charlottesville to be close to her. She later recovered and moved to New York to attend her children and grandchildren.  Mark decided to stay in Virginia.  Coincidentally, all three siblings passed away in a period of four years, from 2012-16.

    Unlike what Bob Katz once wrote about him, Mark Lane was not an ambulance chaser.  In each high profile case he entered, he was requested to do so: from the JFK case to the Buckley case, and all of them in between, including Wounded Knee and the King case. It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did.  Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords?  Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes?  Not to my knowledge.

    Mark Lane was such an effective defense lawyer he could have made millions a la Dick DeGuerin defending the likes of Robert Durst.  Instead, he decided to be an attorney for the wretched and the damned.  A counsel for the downtrodden and the lost. But they happened to be, like Wounded Knee and the JFK case, just causes.  And Lane acquitted himself well, considering the forces arrayed against him.  I know of very few lawyers who could have written a book like this one.  Lane’s life stands out as a man who did what he could to correct the evil and injustice in the world around him, with no target being too small or too large in that regard. This book stands out like a beacon in the night. It shows both what a citizen should be, and what an attorney can be. Buy it today.

  • The JFK Document Explorer

    The JFK Document Explorer @ Mary Ferrell

  • Photo of George H.W. Bush giving speech in Tyler, TX at noon on 11/22/63

    by Chuck Ochelli, At: The Ochelli Effect Radio Show

  • 11/22/63: Stephen King and J. J. Abrams Lay an Egg

    11/22/63: Stephen King and J. J. Abrams Lay an Egg

    I actually talked to Stephen King on the phone once from his home in Maine.  This was when Stanley Kubrick was making a movie out of his book, The Shining.  I was trying to put together a feature magazine article on that picture. But I could not secure an interview with Jack Nicholson until it was too late for the magazine’s publication date. I decided not to go through with the project. When I actually saw the film, I was not terribly agonized over my failed attempt.  From what I have read, King did not like the movie either.  So much so that he made his own TV version of that book.

    King is now part of the production team that has made another TV movie from a more recent book of his.  Except it’s actually a mini-series.  Quite a long one.  It plays over eight installments. And since the first installment is two hours long, it clocks in at nine hours. From what I have been able to garner, producer-director J. J. Abrams was the man in Hollywood who decided to take King’s book under his wing.  But, as is the usual case with the big names in Movieland, Abrams then turned over the project to what is called a line producer, or developer.  In this case her name was Bridget Carpenter. Carpenter has written over ten plays, and worked on several TV series, most notably, Parenthood and Friday Night Lights.

    At almost 900 pages, King’s book was quite long. Apparently, once you attain King’s stature in the publishing business, no one dares edit your work.  It was that original length which necessitated the nine-hour mini-series format. Because of that length, this series was clearly a team effort. It had five directors and four writers working on it.  Carpenter, by far, wrote the most installments.  She either wrote or co-wrote five of them.  No director helmed more than two installments.

    In virtually every other instance of my (long) reviewing career, I have always read the source material for any adaptation.  Offhand, I really can think of perhaps only one or two exception to that practice. But, for two reasons, I just could not bring myself to read King’s book. First, I don’t care for novels about the Kennedy assassination. Because the original inquiry, the Warren Report, already fictionalized what really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  Secondly, why would any intelligent, interested person read a book that, in its central tenets, was more or less a restatement of that original fiction?   Which King’s book is. In other words, why pile one fiction on top of another?  Especially concerning such a crucial event in American history.  So in this one case, I declined to read the book on which this mini-series is based.  I hope the reader understands that decision.

    After more than one preview, King’s novel was published in November of 2011. In what I have been able to dig up about its genesis, one of his main influences in the writing and research for the book was the Dallas museum about the JFK case, The Sixth Floor. He specifically consulted with the late Gary Mack, who passed away in 2015. We all know that, for about the last 20 years of his life, under the influence of Dave Perry, Gary Mack had done a backflip on the case. He migrated over to the Warren Commission camp.  (Click here for info on Perry). Whether King entered the creation of his book with an open mind on the JFK case, and was then influenced by Gary Mack, or whether he was in the Krazy Kid Oswald camp all along, that is an issue I have not been able to definitively discern. 

    II

    King decided to make his book a science fiction thriller.  The gimmick behind it all is a good old sci-fi staple: time travel.  Jake Epping (played by James Franco) is a high school English teacher who also teaches adult education GED preparatory classes.  At the beginning of the series two things happen, back to back, which set the plot in motion.

    In the opening scene, in his GED class, Jake is listening to his adult students orally present papers about the most important day in their lives. The first person we see is an elderly student named Harry Dunning.  He is standing in front of the class presenting his (rather shocking) paper. Harry is telling the story of the night his father Frank came home drunk and killed his mother, sister and brother with a long-handled hammer.  (Which, I think Mr. King, is plenty life-changing.)  Jake is very impressed with this presentation and gives Harry an A+. 

    Right after this we see Jake in a diner. The owner Al Templeton (played by Chris Cooper), emerges from the back coughing and wheezing; he then collapses on the floor.  Jake takes him home to recover. The next day, Al tells him to walk into a closet behind the front of the diner. This ends up being the time tunnel portal. Ever so briefly, Jake gets transported back to October of 1960.  He then returns. Al tells him he is too old and sick to use the time tunnel for what he wants to utilize it for: To stop the assassination of President Kennedy. Jake replies, you cannot change the past.  Al tells Jake to go back again. This time, he gives him a knife and tells him to carve something into a nearby tree.  Jake does so, he returns, and they go outside. They see that the initials of JFK are still there. 

    At this point the film, through Al, sets some terms and conditions of King’s version of the fourth dimension.  Whenever one gets sent back in time, he will always arrive in October of 1960.   Second, no matter how long one spends back there, upon returning, only two minutes will have elapsed.  If one changes something, but then goes back again, everything resets to the way it was before.  Finally, the past is obdurate:  it resists changes.  Some of these changes end up in what King calls tributaries, sort of like alternate universes. 

    Actor James Franco, Stephen King, and J.J. Abrams

    For this viewer, these three scenes did not make for an auspicious beginning. First, I had a hard time believing Harry would make a speech like that in front of a class.  I was involved in the education system as a student, teacher and adult education instructor for over thirty years.  I never heard any student reveal anything that traumatic or horrible.  And no teaching colleague ever told me about something comparable occurring in his or her class.

    Secondly, although theories of time travel have progressed by leaps and bounds since H. G. Wells’ classic book The Time Machine, King makes no explanation at all about the science aspect of his fiction.  At least Wells, working with much less information, tried a bit.  In this case, it’s a time portal in a restaurant—and that is it. Then there’s those terms and conditions!  They all seemed designed to make it easy for the author to construct his story the way he wished.  The protagonist would not age, changes would not be permanent, and the scope of time dealt with was narrow.

    So, at the very beginning, with the shocking story told in class, and all these rules –with no real explanation–this viewer understood that the story we were about to see would rely a lot on plottiness. Let us make a distinction: There is a difference between a well-constructed story and plottiness.  For instance, the Robert Towne/Roman Polanski film Chinatown has a wonderfully structured story that is so cohesive and subtly carpentered that one is never aware of the engine of the plot turning over. That is, the plot machinations are so dramatically ingrained with the film’s other elements that the audience is not fully aware of being carried along by the current of the story until the end. That is good story structure.  And that is why the screenplay of Chinatown is actually taught in screen writing classes at universities.

    I don’t think King, Abrams and Carpenter will be paid that educational compliment. Because here, the characters, the plot device, even the dialogue, are at the mercy of a heavy-handed plot. Almost nothing seems natural. It all seems set up: reminiscent of the standardized TV series writing of the fifties and sixties, where high points in the plot were timed for commercial breaks (which actually happens here).  For instance, when Harry told his story in front of the class, I immediately said to myself: This is so bizarre, so much of a reach, I think its going to be used as part of the plot.  Which it was.  And there is another plot strand—to be discussed later– that is almost as violent and bizarre as that one.

    III

    But the main plot line concerns the assassination of President Kennedy. To get that going, when he returns to the diner, Al tells Jake about his obsession with the JFK case. He then convinces him to go back in time to try and stop the murder. Al says that the bullet that was fired at General Edwin Walker in April of 1963 was the same bullet that was fired at JFK in Dealey Plaza.  (Which it was not. See Reclaiming Parkland, by James DiEugenio, pgs. 79-80) Al tells Jake to go back in the portal and see if Lee Harvey Oswald did shoot at Walker in Dallas.  If that happened, then Oswald probably killed Kennedy. But if it didn’t, then someone else likely killed him. Al then tells Jake he would do so himself, but he is afflicted with cancer.  He then packs a briefcase for Jake, including his JFK collection of newspapers and essays, plus a false identity package. He adds a small notebook with summaries of sporting events for him to bet on if he needs money e.g. boxing matches. And with that, Al is now off on a three-year voyage backward in time. One that will actually take two minutes.

    Back in 1960, Jake buys a car.  Which leaves him a bit low on funds.  So, utilizing the previously planted bookie device, Jake asks the car dealer where the nearest betting parlor is.  Jake makes a bet on a championship fight, actually picking the round the knock out will occur.  The bookie suspects something fishy and sends a goon to get his money back.  But Jake anticipates this, gets the jump on his assailant, and escapes from his rented room.  He then drives to Dallas, rents a room at a bed and breakfast, and begins studying the JFK case through Al’s files. 

    Informed by Al,–who appears in flashback throughout–Jake follows George DeMohrenschildt around.  First to a Kennedy speaking engagement, then to a high-class restaurant.  At the restaurant, Jake secures a table next to George, who is sitting with two other well-dressed gentlemen.  The film uses every cheap trick under the sun to prevent Jake from clearly hearing the discussion:  a blender goes off next to him, the table on the other side is quite loud, a waiter spills a tray of drinks.  But he does hear George mention Oswald’s name.  On his return to his rooming house, the building is on fire. Since his belongings were left in the room he goes inside to try and recover what was left of them.

    Jake decides to leave Dallas.  He gets lost on the way out of town. He realizes he is close to Kentucky.  Which, of course, is where Harry Dunning grew up. Jake decides to visit the town in order to prevent the triple murder.  He rents a room and befriends a bartender named Bill Turcotte (George MacKay). Frank Dunning then walks in and he and Jake begin to talk and become acquaintances. After an altercation with Frank at his butcher shop, Jake buys a gun and is casing the Dunning house on Halloween night, which is the night that his student Harry said the killings occurred.  He is accosted in the bushes by the bartender Bill.  (Why Bill would find Jake suspicious enough to follow him around town for two days is not explained.)  The two have a rather unusual conversation: Bill tells Jake that Frank was married to his sister and killed her.  Jake tells Bill that he is from the future. Jake pulls a gun on Bill to subdue him, and then runs into the house where Frank is in the process of beating and killing his family.  Jake intervenes and kills Frank. He then leaves town.  Bill joins him (it’s not clear, but it appears he was hiding in his car). Jake now tells him the story of why he is there.  Bill decides to join him on his trip back to Dallas. Bill agrees to help Jake in his mission.  Jake informs Bill of his strategy: if Oswald shot at Walker, then he probably shot at JFK.  So if he can find out about the former, he can feel justified in killing Oswald.

    Jake gets a teaching job in the fictional town of Jodie, Texas.  He is hired by Principal Deke Simmons (played by Nick Searcy). To celebrate, Bill and Jake go out to a strip club. At this point came one of the most surprising scenes in the series. Not for what happened; but because of what did not happen. For the club they go to is owned by Jack Ruby.  The two have decided on a cover story of being brothers. They introduce themselves to Ruby as such. There is a very brief discussion of John Kennedy. I mean very brief.  The entire scene lasts for one minute and twenty seconds.  But the shocking part is this: We never see Ruby again! The film-makers may justify this because, as we will see, in King’s version, Ruby does not kill Oswald.

    IV

    We have come to 1962.  Tipped off by Al, Jake is at Love Field when Lee Oswald arrives in town from his overseas stay in the USSR.  The first appearance of Oswald (played by Daniel Webber) in the film is notable.  First, he seems to be speaking with a mild Russian accent.  Second, he asks his mother Marguerite (played by Cherry Jones) why there is no cadre of press awaiting him.  This tells us that the film will use the Warren Commission version of Oswald as the basis for their character portrayal.  Oswald is a publicity hound who thinks he is a great man going unrecognized. Which is pretty much what Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler decided upon when he could not think of any other reason why Oswald shot Kennedy. In fact, as we will see, in its attempts at caricaturing Oswald, the series goes even beyond the Warren Report.  Which is a bit stunning since there has been a quantum leap since 1964 in our knowledge and understanding of Oswald.

    Jake and Bill then find the apartment Lee and Marina are staying at.  They rent the downstairs unit and hire a surveillance technician to sell them equipment so they can hear the couple speaking upstairs.  They discover a lot of Russian being spoken by the Oswalds. Jake surmounts the translation obstacle by obtaining a Russian-English dictionary from his school. (I’m not kidding, though I wish I were.)

    The caricature of Oswald is furthered as we see him attending a rally for rightwing activist General Edwin Walker. Oswald is there with George DeMohrenschildt.  Afterward, outside the building, Oswald starts screaming at Walker.  He then attempts a violent confrontation with him. Security guards restrain him. But he still tries to physically attack Walker. The scene ends with Oswald throwing a rock at Walker and threatening to kill him. The outdated portrait of Oswald as an unstable sociopath is now cinched.  

    In the next scene, Oswald has the rifle the Warren Commission alleges he used to kill Kennedy. We watch him assemble and dissemble it.  He then goes outside with Marina and DeMohrenschildt.  The infamous backyard photograph is now snapped. Except for one rhetorical question by Bill, the script makes no attempt to explain why Oswald’s anger at a neo-fascist like Walker would spill over into the murder of the most liberal president since Franklin Roosevelt.

    The attempt on Walker’s life now approaches.  Bill and Jake begin to case out the Walker home.  But again, the heavy breathing of the screenwriters manipulates the story—this time in two ways.  First, Jake’s romance with Sadie Dunhill, the school librarian (played by Sarah Gadon) intervenes.  Sadie’s husband chooses the day of the Walker shooting to kidnap his wife who is in the process of divorcing him. So before saving Sadie, Jake calls Bill and tells him he alone has to find out if it was Oswald at Walker’s.

    But that convenient piece of carpentry is not enough.  While at Walker’s house, Bill watches some people come out of the nearby church.  He thinks one is his long lost sister!  So he runs over to confront her and, of course, it is not her. (This was really weak, since Bill told Jake that his sister had been killed by Frank Dunning.)  But the shot goes off while he is preoccupied.  So Bill cannot tell for sure if the sniper who shot at Walker was Oswald.  So now the option of just killing Oswald is conveniently gone. And while going through this crisis with his girlfriend, Jake also tells her about his secret mission to stop the JFK assassination.

    This takes us to October of 1963. Oswald is applying for his position at the Texas School Book Depository. Which will put him on the Kennedy motorcade route on November 22nd.  Ruth Paine, with whom Marina Oswald was staying in October and November of 1963, arranged that job for Oswald.  The script cuts out Ruth Paine’s role in this. And Ruth Paine is portrayed—ever so briefly—as the kindly Quaker lady from the Warren Report.  When I saw how this was ignored, I then thought back and realized that, in the nine-hour series, there is no portrayal of Oswald in Mexico City, or Oswald in New Orleans that summer. This could have easily been accomplished if the two subplots about the murderous husbands in Kentucky and Dallas had been dropped. After all, those two long segments have little or nothing to do with the JFK case.  But New Orleans in the summer of 1963 has a lot to do with the Kennedy case.  As does Oswald’s alleged journey to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, right before he returned to Dallas.  But evidently King, Abrams and Carpenter didn’t think so.

    {aridoc engine=”iframe” width=”560″ height=”315″}https://www.youtube.com/embed/HErDQT35h-M{/aridoc} 
    Although 11/22/63 is a fictional account of the JFK assassination, one of the film’s moreinaccurate, and downright bizarre, scenes is a poorly executed reenactment of the assassination itself as seen above.

    V

    There was something else just as odd in the script.  Even though it is October of 1963, George DeMohrenschildt is still on the scene in Dallas.  This is really kind of inexplicable.  I know King wrote a novel. But it is based upon history.  George left Dallas in April of 1963 for Haiti.  So the events depicted here with DeMohrenschildt simply could not have happened—they are an impossibility.

    In what to me was a rather wild twist—wild even for this plot—Bill falls in love with Marina Oswald.  Which causes a lot of friction between Bill and Jake.  In fact, they come to blows, and Bill pulls a gun on Jake.  Jake then plots to get rid of Bill. He tells Bill that Marina is in Parkland Hospital delivering her child.  This is a pretext to have Bill committed to the mental ward since Jake thinks he is a liability to his mission.  How Jake could arrange this is glossed over.  Because the two are not blood relatives, and just a modicum of standard questions by the administrators—like asking for ID– would have brought that out.  But the story is now headed for its climax and the trifecta of King/Abrams/Carpenter wanted to add a dash of romance to the ending. So they dumped Bill.  Jake will now team up with Sadie on his mission to stop Oswald.

    But again, there is still more to the story.  Jake makes another sure bet with a bookie.  Again, with uncommon accuracy about how long a prizefight will last.  But this time the bookie and his goons track him down and give him a serious beating.  So much so that he sustains a concussion and loses his memory.  The film now shows us Sadie wheeling him around in a wheelchair.  And in standard movie cliché, Jake asks himself things like, “Who is LBJ?” and “When is my birthday?”  Therefore, this twist allows him to lose track of Oswald as Oswald goes to the FBI office to leave a note for FBI agent Jim Hosty (who figures in the story for two brief windows.)

    Finally, after about a half hour of this, there are headlines in the papers of Kennedy’s upcoming visit to Dallas.  The film now shows us Jake and Sadie talking about the newspaper notice. After a pep talk by Sadie, Jake then flushes his memory pills down the sink. We then cut to Oswald sitting on a park bench looking at the JFK newspaper notice.  He then discards the paper and starts whistling the tune “Soldier Boy.” (Subtlety is not one of this script’s strengths.)

    Now that he is recovered from memory loss, Jake and Sadie first go to Oswald’s apartment, and Jake is going to kill him with a knife.  But Oswald comes out of the back room with his newborn child in his arms.  They then go to Ruth Paine’s to try and find the rifle that was allegedly used in the assassination.  But it is not there.

    Jake and Sadie now end up in Dealey Plaza in the very wee hours of the morning of the 22nd.  Then the script adds in, actually caps, a Twilight Zone motif that has been used throughout.   A man who King calls the “yellow card man” (he has such a card in his hat) now appears in Jake’s car, replacing Sadie.  This figure has been seen several times throughout the film.  He usually says, “You’re not supposed to be here.” This time, he tells a story about having to watch his baby daughter die, drowning in a stream. This fantastic touch was to me, both pretentious and bombastic: An attempt to add depth and meaning to a script that has neither. 

    The script now gets even wilder.  We see Oswald—with his long package–walking right next to Wesley Frazier as they cross the street and enter the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald then goes right up to the sixth floor!  He is, of course, whistling “Soldier Boy.”  He then walks to the window, starts setting up the boxes for the so-called “sniper’s nest.  And then, incredibly, he just sits there, waiting for the motorcade to pass.  This is as impossible as having George DeMohrenschildt in Dallas in October.  I mean do the writers really expect the audience to be so stupid as to think Oswald would sit at a window with a rifle for three and a half hours waiting to kill Kennedy?  With witnesses both inside and outside to see him?  This is just plain silliness.

    We now see Jake and Sadie on a high-speed chase to get near Dealey Plaza.   (Even though they were supposed to be there already.  But like I said, anything goes with this script.)  When they do get near, guess who they see?  Jake sees Frank Dunning, and Sadie sees her ex-husband.  Both of whom have been killed by Jake. What this means is anyone’s guess.  And at this point, who cares?

    When they get to the Depository building, it’s locked. (Which is another reversal of reality, as it was not.)  So Jake breaks in at gunpoint and the couple flies up the stairs.  As they do, Oswald is muttering, “They will know your name.” After they get to the sixth floor, Oswald fires one shot.  Jake starts screaming  “Lee, stop!” Oswald now turns and fires on the couple.  As he does, the door they came in through somehow slides back shut, so they are caught inside. Oswald then says, “I came here to do something important!”  A combination physical fight and shoot out follow.  Lee kills Sadie and Jake kills Lee.  Of course, the police do not arrive until after Sadie dies.

    The best I can say for this ending is that, thankfully, the film was finally over. As the reader can see, the story does not respect itself.

    The rest of the Dealey Plaza story is just as dumb.  Jake is accused of trying to kill Kennedy.  He is booked and fingerprinted.  Captain Will Fritz and FBI agent Jim Hosty question him.  Fritz accuses Jake of actually being Oswald’s alias, Alek Hidell. Fritz then leaves and Hosty and Jake play a game of blind man’s bluff, trying to see who has more information on whom.  (How Hosty got so much information about Jake in about five minutes is another puzzler.)  But then a call comes in from President Kennedy.  He and Jackie thank Jake for saving their lives.  Jake is now freed.

    VI

    Jake now returns to Lisbon, Maine.  He goes to Al’s diner, but it’s gone.  But just standing there, near the portal, now transports him to what King calls a “time tributary,” or in plainer parlance, an alternative universe.  A world that looks desolate and abandoned.  He meets up with Harry Dunning who is being attacked by a pack of thugs.  Jake helps run them off. Harry takes him back to his home, which is inside what looks like a deserted factory. 

    There he tells him that he knows that Jake saved his family from his father.  Jake asks him about history.  Harry tells him that Kennedy was re-elected and then George Wallace won in 1968, since RFK did not run.  He then tells Jake that Kennedy set up camps throughout the country.  His mother had to go to one.  (Why and how this happened is not explained.)

    Jake now tries to “reset” the past.  He goes back to the time portal and is transported again.  This time he goes to Lisbon.  And—in this script surprises never cease– he sees Sadie in the back seat of a car. She looks just exactly like she did before she died. He runs after her and she does not recognize him.  He then goes to Al’s diner.  It is empty, but he walks though it even though Al is not there.  At his teaching job, he runs into Harry Dunning.  That night, he goes online and searches for Sadie.  She is being honored for her years of service as a librarian down in Jodie, Texas.  He goes down to see her at her banquet. She looks about 65 years old.   They share a dance even though she doesn’t know who he is.

    The best I can say for this ending is that, thankfully,  the film was finally over.  As the reader can see, the story does not respect itself. Science fiction follows certain rules that are internally consistent.  This script did not want to do that.  So it now interjects elements of fantasy.  Which makes it even more meretricious and pretentious.

    I have concentrated here mostly on the actual story.  Because both King and the scenarists will defend their work on the basis that it is a historical novel.  In this reviewer’s opinion, for reasons stated above, it fails even as a superficial entertainment.

    The rather large cast is uneven.  The two best performances are by Annette O’Toole as one of Jake’s landladies, and Cherry Jones as Marguerite Oswald.  O’Toole began her career as a kind of glamorous sexpot. She is 64 years old now, so those days are gone.  She nicely underplays this crusty, odd, rightwing fundamentalist. It’s a sharply etched minimalist type of performance.  Jones uses the opposite technique. She envelops her characters with every fiber of her being: voice, imagination, emotion, and body control. But none of that is Cherry Jones. She uses what she has to create someone else. She makes Marguerite Oswald–who has been caricatured for decades–into a real, living person.

    The rest of the cast ranges from OK, to adequate, to inadequate. Which simply isn’t good enough for this long of a film.  Jonny Coyne as George DeMohrenschildt is miscast from the start.  He doesn’t resemble the upper class Russian émigré either facially or in physique.  And his acting does not conjure any of the old world charm that made him so attractive to such a wide variety of upper class figures.  Chris Cooper as the crusty old diner owner Al Templeton is adequate.  If you can imagine what say Walter Huston could have done with the part, Cooper gives you about 80% of that.  In a hopeless part, Daniel Webber is lost as Oswald.  As Jake’s sidekick Bill Turcotte, George Mackay is simple and nervy, and not much else. Sarah Gadon as Sadie Dunhill is attractive enough and sweet.  James Franco as Jake is pretty much James Franco. It was clear to this viewer that he never found a model for his character.  And none of the directors could help him.  So in addition to a cheap, nonsensical story, you have a main character who is pretty much a zero.

    Let me close with why the film cannot be taken seriously–even as a fictional comment on important historical events. In speaking of his novel, Stephen King has said that from his research the probability that Oswald killed Kennedy is at about 98-99%.  He has actually called Oswald a dangerous little fame-junkie who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

    Those two comments really make you wonder about the “research” King did.  Concerning the former, every lawyer who has taken a look at the JFK case in an official capacity since the issuance of the Warren Report in 1964, has disagreed with its conclusions. The last one being Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board. Who looked at the most declassified documents.  In light of that, King’s comment is so eccentric as to be bizarre.  Secondly, if Oswald was a fame junkie, why did he never take credit for killing Kennedy?  In fact, he did the opposite.  He called himself a patsy.  Then he was gunned down while in the arms of the Dallas police.  But since the film arranges things so as we do not see that, and Jack Ruby is in the film for about 70 seconds, that can be ignored.

    King more or less spilled the beans when he stated what books were most important to him in his research phase.  He named Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, Legend by Edward Epstein, Oswald’s Tale by Norman Mailer, and Mrs. Paine’s Garage by Thomas Mallon.   He actually said that Mallon offered a brilliant portrait of the “conspiracy theorists.” And he termed those who disbelieve the Warren Report as those needing to find order in what was a random event.

    Well, if the final film leaves out Jack Ruby’s murdering Oswald as he comes in the basement door of the Dallas city hall; if you leave out Oswald’s call to former military intelligence officer John Hurt the night before; if one does not tell the viewer that the rifle the Warren Report says killed Kennedy is not the same rifle that Oswald allegedly ordered; if one does not mention 544 Camp Street in New Orleans and Guy Banister, David  Ferrie and Clay Shaw; if one does not mention Oswald with Shaw and Ferrie in the Clinton-Jackson area in the summer of 1963; if one does not show all the problems with Oswald allegedly being in Mexico City, while he is supposed to be at Sylvia Odio’s door in Dallas with two Cubans—well yeah Stephen, then you can tell us all about randomness and Occam’s Razor and, oh my aching back.  Those events I mentioned are not theories, Mr. King. They are facts. 

    My advice about this heavily weighted apparatus which produces next to nothing is to avoid it at all costs. All it really produces is more money for King and J. J. Abrams, like they need it.  It is nothing more than a stupid, demeaning waste of time.  Abrams should stick to Star Wars, and King should stick to teenage female wallflowers with telekinetic powers.

  • JFK Vigil on May 29, 2016 in Washington, D.C.

    by Karl Golovin, At: Eventbrite

  • Castro Figured Out The JFK Case in Five Days: Speech of November 27th, 1963

    Castro Figured Out The JFK Case in Five Days: Speech of November 27th, 1963

    SPEECH BY COMMANDER FIDEL CASTRO, FIRST SECRETARY OF THE UNITED PARTY OF THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION AND PRIMER MINISTER OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT IN THE MEMORIAL CEREMONY OF NOVEMBER 27TH, HELD AT THE STAIRWAY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAVANA, NOVEMBER 27TH, 1963.

    (DEPARTMENT OF STENOGRAPHIC VERSIONS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT)

    Students:

    Days ago, while on an almost customary visit to the University of Havana, I thought — as I was talking to a group of students — that this November 27th would be a good opportunity to address, from this university grandstand, a number of issues of interest to our country, of interest to our economy, and of interest to you. But then a series of events took place. Or better said, a single international event of great importance — and above all one very revealing of the state of decomposition of the imperialist society. An event which made our people shift their attention towards the analysis of this event and give due attention to such event.

    Afterwards and due to different reasons – precisely yesterday – we had a meeting with high school students. On that occasion, some of the issues that we had planned to deal with here today were brought up before those students. With this I mean to tell you that this November 27th has come about not with the characteristics we would have liked — meaning without other problems that were not purely technical problems, academic problems, things related to students and learning.

    That is why, it seems to me, I sense that in no way I will be very satisfied, because I thought that this was going to be the day on which to address a number of issues related to the economy, to education, to a lot of things. But about this other issue we have to say something nonetheless — I mean the topic of which we would have preferred not to talk about here.

    I will refer as briefly as possible to the matter of the murder of the President of the United States. Events have been taking place which are gradually exposing the whole maneuver — the dirty, unconscionable operation behind it. It is a plot against peace, a sinister conspiracy that is increasingly clear in the imagination, as are those responsible for that event.

    Every day the public opinion around the world receives more and more evidence that lays bare — that completely unmasks the maneuver that was woven against the world and (as part of that world) especially against our country. There are a whole series of strange things that become stranger by the day — things that every day weaken the fabrications and insinuations that were made after Kennedy’s death. There have been a whole series of events about which the world has begun to think, about which everyone has started to think, and the more they think about them, the less they make sense.

    Today, for example, a shooting champion who can be called a shooting specialist, an Olympic shooting champion (I believe his name is Hubert Hammerer) declared in Vienna that it is improbable that a shooter equipped with a repeating rifle with a telescopic sight can hit the mark three times in a row in a timespan of five seconds while shooting at a target 180 meters away that moves at a speed of 15 kilometers per hour. Quite a number of details are starting to emerge.

    While we were reading this news cable, we remembered some experiences on these issues, especially on issues regarding rifles with telescopic sights. When we landed in Cuba we had half a hundred rifles with telescopic sights, and we had prepared them very well. We had practiced a lot with those rifles. We know perfectly well all the features of such a rifle, because we had rifles of different capacities. And one of the difficulties of a rifle with telescopic sight is that once you start to shoot at a target, the target gets out of focus as a result of the shot — just as a result of the shot — so it is necessary to find it again quickly, especially when you have to work the bolt again. At the beginning we were told that an automatic rifle had been used, then we were told that it was not automatic or a semiautomatic, but a bolt-action rifle. With that kind of weapon it is really difficult to do three consecutive shots; but above all, it is difficult to hit the target, almost impossible.

    We remembered certain shooting competitions which are held in different countries. For example, in Mexico, there is an amateur shooting competition in which a lamb is set loose at a given point and it runs through the hills – I think it runs over a distance of 200 meters – and as it runs, three shots are allowed. The best shooters, with sufficient time on their hands and with total calm, very rarely hit the target twice as the animal runs the distance. And only in exceptional situations do they hit it three times – and this is with a lot of time at their disposal and absolute calm, absolute tranquility.

    And in most cases this is not done with telescopic sight rifles, but with the so called “Lyman sight” rifle, which is the one used for the American Garand rifles. These are shooting rifles with a small circle in the sight, in whose center the target is located. In order to shoot quickly, it is better to use one of those rifles than to use one with a telescopic sight, because you don’t lose sight of the target. But the news cables talked about a rifle with a zoom of four times to eighteen times, meaning a rifle that gets very close to the target. And the more powerful the sight, the more sensitive it is to any movement, and the easier it is to lose the target.

    There is, furthermore, the circumstance (and everything seems to indicate that the rifle could have appeared there as part of the plot) that the rifle was left there, since it is not the kind of weapon used to shoot at a target 80 meters away, nor a weapon to shoot three times in a row. The telescopic sight rifle a weapon to shoot at a target 300, 400, 500, 600 meters away and even more. Many of the fellows who came in the “Granma” practiced shooting at a dinner plate, 600 meters away, with a rifle rest, not one held by hand. That is how a sniper uses a rifle to shoot from afar. It is really weird that whoever was planning an assault at 80 meters, from a window, acquired a rifle with telescopic sight, when any other kind of weapon without a telescopic sight would have been a lot more appropriate for a shot from that distance. That is just one of the strange circumstances that are gradually arising.

    Another fact that got my attention is that the rifle was bought by mail for $12.28 or $12.78, or something like that — meaning 12 dollars. And a good sight like that one, on its own, costs 12 dollars and more. Where in the world are high power rifles with telescopic sights sold through a catalog at $12.28 or $12.78? We bought a few of those rifles and we know how much they are worth, we had the need to buy several sights and we know how much they cost. That was another strange fact. A number of really weird things are piling up. Supposedly, the individual acquired a telescopic sight rifle to shoot from a safe distance and to shoot at a stationary target, not at a moving one. When shooting at a moving target, the telescopic sight is more of an obstruction. Such a weapon is used to shoot from a distance at a clear target, which means that the individual who had tried to use a telescopic sight would have done so looking for both a clear shot and for safety for himself. But in this case, against a moving target 80 meters away, he was not getting a clear shot, nor, funnily enough, a shot far enough away to make himself safe.

    It is very strange. And what is really clear out of all of this is that he was not a fanatic, in my opinion. In these situations you always have to rely on opinions, on assumptions; but it is undeniable, in the first place, that a fanatic… Probably it would be the first time in history in which a fanatic used a telescopic sight. The first time in history. Fanatics have used handguns, pistols and bombs, but never a telescopic sight. Furthermore, fanatics in general do not operate from a window in a fifth floor. In general, a fanatic confesses his crime immediately and explains why he committed it. That is the normal psychology of a fanatic.

    But here we have the strange case in which the suspect, the alleged murderer, took the shot from his own workplace. No one who had a plan to escape – I mean, not a fanatic, but someone who was hired to do the shooting – would execute the attack from his own workplace in which, in five minutes, he will be identified and where in five minutes he will be ferociously pursued everywhere. He would have looked for a roof in another building; he would have rented an apartment along the route; he would have positioned himself, with a telescopic rifle, at such a distance that would have allowed him to escape. But it is very strange that an individual would shoot from where he works, a place where he will be identified in five minutes. Who would carry out an act with such huge implications and from such an obvious location but at the same time try to escape? It is not logical, it makes no sense. There are a number of strange circumstances like that one.

    Someone using that kind of rifle from that place and trying to escape knowing that he would have been identified right away? All those things are contradictory, illogical and inexplicable, and they prove that either the culprit was framed or that the author of the crime… let me say this: here there are two possibilities: either this individual is innocent and he was framed by the police, or he is the one who shot the President — but in that case his actions are very difficult to logically explain. This is an individual who commits murder, thinks of escaping, but at the same time knows that he’ll unquestionably be identified as the author of the crime? That could only have one explanation: this is an individual who has been perfectly prepared to commit the crime, who has been given the promise of an escape. Someone who was assigned a number of activities which were meant to compromise him. Someone upon whom the real authors of the crime are very interested in seeing that all of the blame for the act is dropped upon him.

    Now we have obtained new data: information from the Mexican newspaper, Excelsior, stating that this man had visited the Consulates of Cuba and of the Soviet Union to obtain a transit visa through Cuba toward the Soviet Union. We immediately inquired with our consular officers. The newspaper’s version, very objective, explained how the individual had left the Consulate upset, slamming the door, because he had not been given the visa.

    We requested information and we verified that on September 27 he had indeed visited our Consulate in Mexico, he had requested a visa, it had been explained to him that such a visa could not be granted by the Consul without express authorization from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who, in turn, did not grant transit visas without the country of destination issuing a visa first. Besides, our consular offices received a lot of transit visa requests from a lot of people, and our officers are usually very cautious, very conservative because we have to presume that the enemy is constantly trying to send his agents in here, and that is why a lot of safety measures are implemented. A visa is not granted to just anyone who requests it, we need to know their background very well. That is why our officer rejected his application.

    Now, the following day, Saturday evening, only 24 hours after Kennedy’s death, agents of the Mexican Federal Police arrested an employee of our Consulate – she has Mexican citizenship – and her husband as well. Why and what did they arrest her for? They arrested her to interrogate her. They interrogated her brutally, they mistreated her, suggesting alleged connections with the individual accused of murdering Kennedy. The Police were trying to obtain, by means of coercion, some information. We did not know about that — I ignored the fact when I last spoke – I understand it happened on Saturday evening. But this is proof of how everything is surfacing.

    The police officers claimed that she had been interrogated as a result of the visit of this man, Oswald, to the Cuban Consulate. How did they know? Who told them? Where did the information come from? Because we didn’t know, it was an everyday thing. No one in the Consulate, not one officer, had identified the individual as the suspect out of all the individuals – the hundreds of individuals – who had filed a request for a visa. But the American police knew. The Dallas police reported it. How did they know? Why did they report it? When that had not been reported by the media yet — when it only appeared in a Mexican newspaper two or three days later?

    The thread can be seen clearly. What was this man doing at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico? What was his excuse? To request a transit visa in order to travel to the Soviet Union. He could have gone through England, which was closer and would have been easier. He could have gone through France, through many European countries. Why did he go to Mexico to make a longer trip requesting a transit visa to the Soviet Union through Cuba?

    Hypothetically — if this man is the true murderer — it would be clear that the intellectual authors of the murder had been preparing his alibi carefully. They sent this individual to request a Cuban visa. Just imagine! Just imagine that Mr. Kennedy had been murdered by an individual, whose identity and workplace were perfectly known, who had been in the Soviet Union! And that the President of the United States had been murdered by that individual who had just come back from the Soviet Union travelling through Cuba! It was the ideal alibi. The ideal circumstance to cause American public opinion to suspect that he was a communist or an agent – as they would actually say – of Cuba and the Soviet Union.

    It is very strange that someone who had already been to the Soviet Union (and when he was there for the first time, he didn’t travel through Cuba) and had been given a U.S. passport easily — if he had the resources to go to Mexico — why did he have to come to Cuba if not for the sole purpose of leaving a trail, of developing the plot? Why did he get upset when he did not get the visa? Why did he slam the door, why did he leave? No friend of Cuba, no communist does that when they visit our consular offices. No one behaves in such a rude way.

    Of course we do not have this individual’s full records. We do not have any detail other than the ones published by the media. We will never state categorically that someone is guilty of a crime if we do not have irrefutable evidence of it. But as a hypothesis: if this man is the one who shot the President, then his trip to Mexico, his alleged interview with reporters presenting himself as a defender of Cuba just a short time before the event, his alleged fist-fight with counter-revolutionary elements — all of that would be part of a perfectly crafted alibi.

    Once this is seen the plan becomes perfectly explainable. This is someone who was offered an escape plan and agreed to do the shooting. He would leave a trail, he would be identified, then he would disappear. They would say he came to Cuba, and that Cuba sheltered him. Maybe his accomplices would make him disappear later; but they would make people believe he had come to Cuba, that he had been in Cuba before the murder took place. It looks as if he was guilty and he tried to escape but when he ends up arrested he smiles to the TV cameras, he doesn’t confess anything, he doesn’t deny anything, he does not agree to go through a lie detector. And then, gentlemen, the most extraordinary, the most unbelievable thing occurs – the thing that strengthens the suspicion that everybody has today: barely 36 hours later, 48 hours later, in the basement of the jail, surrounded by police officers, he is murdered. He would never say another word.

    Who? Why? A gangster, a gambler, the owner of a night club, with nudity and all, known to be a playboy, a goon. He manages to position himself in front of the suspected murderer. An individual known to the whole police department for what he was: as a gambler, as the owner of immoral night clubs, as someone who was arrested by those same police. How then can that same police force then mistake him for a news reporter, given that all those officers knew him perfectly well? How can he be there, impersonating a journalist, and shoot the suspect just like that?

    And what does he claim afterwards? The most ridiculous, the most absurd thing. This gambler, this vicious man, this gangster with a criminal record, he declares that he did what he did to prevent the President’s widow from having to go back to Dallas for the trial.

    It was very difficult to make anyone believe that an act of such a nature would be carried out in vengeance, as revenge against the criminal – if he were indeed the criminal – when the electric chair was already waiting for him? How are we to believe that in these circumstances, someone would have wanted to take justice into their own hands? These cases occur only when there is no justice, when the criminal is not punished. But in this case, he killed a man for whom the electric chair was waiting. In fact, he killed a dead man. That’s what this gangster did.

    How could they ask anyone to believe that he was acting out of emotional reasons? There might have never been a bigger scandal! Possibly not even the worst gangster ever acted as vulgarly, as sloppily, as outrageously!
    This demonstrates that those responsible for Kennedy’s death desperately needed to eliminate the suspect at all costs. They were extremely pressed for some reason — possibly for him not to talk; they were in a hurry to eliminate him, and they eliminated him just like that.

    Once the suspected murderer had been removed, police and judicial authorities in Dallas declared the case closed, as if it had been not the murder of the President of the United States, but a dog killed on the road. They declared the case closed 48 hours later. The case was closed when it was becoming less closable, when it was becoming more mysterious, becoming more suspicious, becoming more investigable from a judicial and criminal standpoint. I am sure that no objective judge closes a case under circumstances like these, in a case in which the main suspect is murdered.

    Of course we carefully read the news cables where this second murder was reported, and especially those of the UPI. Immediately afterwards, UPI used the same emphasis it had used while presenting Oswald as a filo-communist, as a Castro-communist, as an admirer of Castro. They used the same emphasis when presenting this man, Jack Ruby, as a great admirer of Kennedy.

    The first thing the UPI does is to present the version it was interested in: to present this as a case of a murder of passion, of sentimentalism, as a murder of patriotism. What a disservice would the UPI do to whoever was President of its country — presenting this gangster, this gambler, this immoral and vicious man as an admirer of Kennedy. And as such and extraordinary admirer that he would be willing to face the electric chair in order to avenge his death! An individual that throughout all his life did nothing but profit from vice, gambling and immorality?

    What’s the purpose of such incredible moral flattery for a depraved, degenerated individual? What’s the purpose of such altruistic sentiments? The UPI in its first cables tried to give the impression of Ruby as an admirer of Kennedy. They interrogated the sister, and she said he could not sleep since the President had been murdered. They interrogated the sister of this Mr. Ruby to further elaborate the theory that he had acted out of emotional and sentimental reasons. The UPI didn’t hesitate to foist such an admirer to the assassinated President of the United States.

    What a lack of scruples, what dishonesty, what a scandal! With the same emphasis they put in presenting Oswald as an admirer of Castro, they put immediately into presenting Ruby as an admirer of Kennedy. That is how imperialism works; that is how reaction works; and that is how they fabricate their campaigns and their lies. But everything seems to indicate that this second shooting came with some blowback. [APPLAUSE]

    And thus later news came by: “The doctors who treated the assassinated American leader report now that they cannot assure wether it was one or two bullets that ended the President’s life, and that they cannot establish which were the entrances and which were the exits of the projectile or projectiles.”

    Governor Connally, in an interview he gave to news reporters from his bed in the hospital among other things said, “What happened in Dallas was the manifestation of the hatred that prevails in our society, the same hatred that was manifested when a bomb was placed in the Birmingham church that lead to the death of five kids.” This was said by the other man who was shot while riding next to Kennedy.

    And so it will be very difficult to continue dressing this doll up, it will be very difficult to maintain the story they have been telling. We even think that it is difficult to imagine that there will not be enough reaction within the United States for the incident to go by without further investigation. It is difficult to believe that there are not many Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, their ideology, who driven by an elementary sense of propriety, of shame and prestige, who will not demand that all the facts are clarified, and that all these strange circumstances are explained. It will be very difficult — and only at an extraordinary cost of prestige for the United States — to cover up for the individuals responsible for the murder. It will be very difficult to keep hidden all of the motives and the true purposes — as well as the intellectual authors, the organizers — of this crime.

    But they themselves, the same who forged this plan against peace, against Cuba, against the Soviet Union, against humanity, against progressive and even liberal sectors of the United States, are to blame. It is unlikely that they will be able to keep the secret and the mystery to the end. Let us wait calmly, but not with confidence. We are not confident because we see what kind of dangers threaten humanity, what dangers threaten all people! We see the lack of scruples, we see what kind of evil and cynicism are present in the imperialist society, among the most reactionary elements of that society! How many dangers they cause, how many sinister plans! That is why I say we should wait calmly, but not with confidence, because this is a lesson. In the meantime, let’s see how those who organized the plot stew in their own juice, because now even Olympic shooting champions are giving their opinion anywhere in the world.

    Anyway, our motherland, who was again threatened, who saw again how the weapons of aggression were pointed at her in an attempt to throw at her and at her Revolution a storm of infamies — she has witnessed once again how it is evident, how the behavior of each one has been unveiled. In this test, as in every test she is submitted to, our Revolution will be triumphant with more reason, with more morals, because in the eyes of the world it is clear – and it will continue to be even more so — how those reactionaries in the United States wanted to turn our country and the world into victims of their criminal plans, even at the price of murdering their own President.

    All these events resemble more and more an FBI novel, they look more like an incident between gangsters than a political act. All the circumstances, including the scandalous way in which the two murders were committed, remind us of the gangster movies we have watched so many times — filmed precisely in Hollywood. And in case one might miss all the similarities, the one in charge of lynching the first suspect was nothing less than a gambler from Chicago.

    How will they explain all those things to the world? How will they defend this kind of impudence to humanity, those who have acted with such a lack of respect towards the world’s opinion, those who have shown such a lack of human sensitivity?

    This concludes the reference that we were obliged to make in order to clarify aspects related to the facts.

    Credit for arranging the translation of this speech go to David Giglio. Audio of the speech can be found on his YouTube channel, and also at his archive site, Our Hidden History.

  • Clint Hill, with Lisa McCubbin, Five Presidents

    Clint Hill, with Lisa McCubbin, Five Presidents

    Oh, what I hath wrought to the world. As readers of my critical review of Lisa McCubbin’s first of four “co-authored” books The Kennedy Detail well know [1], I am thoroughly convinced that it was my 22-page letter to Clint Hill in 2005 that awoke a sleeping giant. Hill, then 73 and with zero want or desire to write a book (a sort of badge of honor that he carried for decades), was angered by my letter, a “cliff notes” version of the basics from my then self- published first book critical of the JFK-era Secret Service entitled Survivor’s Guilt.[2]It is important to emphasize the fact that Hill had an unlisted address and phone number at the time; it was only through the good fortune of an unsolicited bit of help via a colleague of Hill’s, former agent Lynn Meredith, that I was able to obtain this then highly-sought bit of information. As I discovered during my June 2005 conversation with Gerald Blaine, Clint shared the contents of my private letter to his fellow former agent, a man who, I soon found out, was his best friend for many years and who was, by any measurable standard, an obscure agent of the Secret Service who was on the Texas trip (but not in Dallas), having served a meager five years with the agency.

    Perhaps you can figure out where this is headed to.

    As fate would have it, it was during this same summer of 2005 that two things happened: Gerald Blaine began writing his book[3] and Clint Hill, writer of the Foreword to the book (and participant in the book tour and numerous television programs), destroyed his personal notes he had in his possession for decades.[4] It was also during this very same time that Lisa McCubbin, an obscure former television reporter who lived in Qatar in the Middle East for six years as a freelance journalist[5], began helping Blaine with the writing of his book. McCubbin was born after the assassination and was friends with the Blaine family; in fact, she had dated Blaine’s son.[6] In an unexpected turn of events, McCubbin (born in 1964) would start a romantic relationship with Hill (born in 1932), although Hill is still married. [7] This partnership, professional and otherwise, would reap many benefits: The Kennedy Detail in 2010 and the accompanying Emmy-nominated Discovery documentary of the same name[8], Mrs. Kennedy and Me in 2012[9]; Five Days In November in 2013[10]; and, now, Five Presidents in 2016, all of which would go on to become New York Times best-sellers, having the distinct advantage of being published by the biggest publishing house in the world, Simon and Schuster, who can guarantee instant articles on Yahoo, People magazine exposes, and coverage on Fox, CNN, and NBC. McCubbin even brags on her website that “she is widely respected within the U.S. Secret Service for her responsible and accurate writing about this highly secretive agency.”

    And, yet, as I have written at length about in both my book Survivor’s Guilt, my forthcoming book The Not So Secret Service, and in several CTKA reviews (not to mention countless blogs and posts online), her work cannot be trusted with anything controversial. Sure, you can take it to the bank when she writes about harmless historical items such as Hill’s many interactions with Jackie Kennedy and other Redbook/Reader’s Digest type moments, but her work should be viewed with a jaundiced eye when the Kennedy assassination is mentioned.

    Hill, Blaine and McCubbin are much aware of my work; no delusions of grandeur here. Apart from my aforementioned 22-page letter that opened Pandora’s box, Hill and Blaine have discussed my work on C-SPAN with CEO Brian Lamb (in Hill’s case, twice);[11] Blaine sarcastically names me as a Secret Service “expert” on pages 359-360 of his book (and quite a few other pages are a direct response to my work); I am credited at the end of a 2013 television program in which Hill briefly addresses my “allegations” (McCubbin also participated as well)[12]; Blaine had his attorney send me a threatening letter[13]; McCubbin, who contacted me about my blog, gave my first book a one star on “Good Reads” and has even admitted on C-SPAN of finding information that contradicted Blaine (almost certainly my work)[14]; Blaine added my book as an item “to read” on “Good Reads”; Blaine and Hill friend (and former agent) Chuck Zboril, much aware of my blog, gave my first book a one-star review on Amazon; former agent Ron Pontius mentions one of my articles without naming me on the television documentary; and I have been treated to petty harassment by several other personal friends of Blaine, both at home and at my former place of employment.

    With all of this in proper focus, it is time to examine the latest offering from the Hill/McCubbin partnership, Five Presidents.

    Clint Hill with Jackie Kennedy

    While serving five different presidents is somewhat noteworthy, Hill is hardly the first or only one to have served five or more presidents or to have written books about their service. SAIC Edmund Starling (author of the 1946 book Starling of the White House), SAIC/ Assistant Director Rufus Youngblood (author of the 1973 book Twenty Years in the Secret Service: My Life With Five Presidents), Chief/Director (and former SAIC) James Rowley, SAIC Gerald Behn, ASAIC Floyd Boring (who contributed to David McCullough’s 1993 book Truman and the 2005 Stephen Hunter book American Gunfight), ASAIC Roy Kellerman, Art Godfrey, Chuck Zboril (misspelled “Zobril” on page 451), Winston Lawson, Emory Roberts, Vince Mroz, Howard Anderson, Morgan Gies, SAIC of PRS Bob Bouck, John Campion, Ron Pontius, Stu Stout, Hill’s brother-in-law David Grant, Director Stu Knight, and others served five or more presidents (the number is quite large if one were to include agents from field offices and/or on temporary assignments, as it was not unusual for an agent from the FDR-Ike era to serve for many years on the White House detail, later known as the Presidential Protective Division, or in the Washington field office, among many other field offices around the country and, indeed, the world. The number is even larger if one was also to include those agents who also protected former presidents or vice presidents who later became president such as Truman, Nixon, LBJ, Ford, and Bush 41).

    Part 1 of the book, encompassing the first seven chapters, details Hill’s time protecting President Eisenhower. After learning that Hill served in Army Counter Intelligence from 1954-1956 (pages 8-10), serving duty at Fort Holabird (where Richard Case Nagell and fellow agent Win Lawson also served), Hill makes a troubling error, claiming that James Rowley was the Special Agent in Charge of the White House detail since the FDR days (page 14) when, in actual fact, he became SAIC on 5/3/46 during the Truman era, replacing George Drescher.[15] In yet another contradiction to the writing of Gerald Blaine and Lisa McCubbin found on page 398 of The Kennedy Detail, wherein they state that Ike usually rode in a closed car, there are seven photos of Eisenhower in a motorcade and every photo depicts him in an open vehicle. This is in addition to various times in the actual text where Hill mentions Ike riding in an open car (this reviewer has found dozens and dozens more photos online of President Eisenhower in an open-topped vehicle. In fact, one is hard pressed to find any photos of Ike in a closed car).

    In the coup de grace, Hill (and, presumably, McCubbin) writes on page 44, not realizing the stark contradiction, “[the canvas roof] really bothered Ike, who liked seeing the crowds, but more important, wanted them to have the opportunity to see him…President Eisenhower preferred to use the car as an open convertible whenever possible so he could stand up and be even more visible to people viewing the motorcade.”

    On pages 40 and 46, in particular, the heavy use of well-armed military guards on Ike’s foreign trips paints a picture in sharp contrast to Dallas circa 11/22/63. On page 48, there is a minor contradiction: Hill states that Ike’s eleven-nation tour was his first time out of the United States, yet, on page 24, he writes of an earlier one-day trip to Canada with Ike.

    On pages 53-55, Hill describes working with Harvey Henderson, a controversial and racist agent from Mississippi who harassed fellow agent Abraham Bolden to no end.[16] While Hill describes Henderson as “a good ol’ Southern boy,” he was more forthcoming to author Maurice Butler: “Now there were certain individuals in the service, I won’t deny that, who were very, very bigoted. Most of them came from Mississippi or Alabama or somewhere in the South. Sometimes we had problems with them. They didn’t want to work with a black agent.”[17] Fellow agent Walt Coughlin told me, “Harvey Henderson he [Bolden] is probably rite (sic) about.”[18] Yet The Kennedy Detail’s Gerald Blaine, in typical fashion, wrote this reviewer on 6/12/05: “I don’t remember anybody on the detail that was racist. Merit was perceived by a person’s actions, their demeanor, reliability, dependability and professional credibility – not race! Harvey was not even on the shift that Bolden was during his thirty day stay. Even though Harvey Henderson was from Mississippi, I never heard of him discriminating nor demeaning anyone because of race.” Can the reader see why I have major problems with history as seen through the Blaine and McCubbin prism? There’s a real tendency to whitewash and omit crucial information. They know better…and they know I know better, but they are hoping you do not, if that makes any sense. But I digress a tad.

    Also on page 55, Hill notes that local police helped secure buildings and routes of travel, as well as checking out the local medical facilities (which he further notes on page 81). Yet, again, when President Kennedy goes to Dallas, officially speaking, no buildings were secured, the motorcade route was woefully short staffed, and they allegedly did not know that Parkland Hospital was the closest hospital in case of emergency.

    Overall, I would assess Part 1 of the book-the Ike era- as a fairly decent perspective of an agent’s time protecting the former World War II hero. Although glimpses of Eisenhower come through, I was left more with Hill’s outlook on trying to do his job than any deep analysis of Ike.

    Part 2 covers the Kennedy era and encompasses chapters 8-19 and much of it will be familiar to anyone who has read the three previous Lisa McCubbin co-authored books; lots of repetition here. That said, there are some items of interest. On page 112, it is noted that the 27-mile motorcade route in Caracas, Venezuela was massively guarded by the host country’s heavily-armed military, involving more than 30,000 soldiers and 5,000 police officers. The bubbletop was used, despite the nice weather, and agents rode on the rear of the limousine.[19]

    On page 133, while discussing President Kennedy’s European tour (in an obvious allusion to the upcoming Dallas trip several months later), Hill writes: “There was no way to check every building or every rooftop,” yet that is precisely what they were able to do on past trips, at least those involving multi-story buildings.[20] Chapters 16 and 17 (pages 141-160) cover the Texas trip and the assassination. On page 142 McCubbin, as she did with Blaine in The Kennedy Detail and in the prior two books with Hill, mentions once again the alleged “order” from President Kennedy, via Floyd Boring, to not have the agents on the back of the car. I have written at length on this specific topic, as I am extremely skeptical of the veracity and timing of this situation.[21] My first reaction when reading this section was “McCubbin HAD to put that one in there again.” On page 152, not realizing the huge contradiction, Hill/ McCubbin write: “I knew the president didn’t want us on the back of the car, but I had a job to do.” Hill jumped off and on the back of the limousine four different times on Main Street. So much for the president’s “order.” No other agent attempted to get on the back of the car.

    Hill deals with the infamous drinking incident at Kirkwood’s the night before JFK’s death in a very dismissive fashion on page 147. Hill was one of nine agents who drank the early morning of the assassination. Hill was also one of the four agents who drank alcohol who would go on to work the follow-up car in Dallas (the others were Paul Landis, Jack Ready and Glen Bennett).

    On pages 153-154, Hill writes of the shooting sequence and, as he has done in the past (echoing the same thoughts as Dave Powers and Governor Connally on the matter), Hill states that all three shots made their mark and there was no missed shot: the first shot hit JFK, the second hit Connally, and the third was the fatal head shot. Again, he does not realize the grave contradiction to official history. In this regard, he once again repeats what he has written (and said) many times before: JFK had “a gaping hole in the back of his skull” (page 155).

    Once again, as was noted in their prior works (and as I was the first to note in my own work): ”Normally [SAIC Gerald] Behn would be on the [Texas] trip, but as fate would have it, he had decided to take a few days off-his first vacation in years…” (page 156). “As fate would have it.” huh?

    On page 178, Hill states his disagreement with the “magic bullet theory,” stating that Governor Connally and his wife Nellie agreed with him. Hill cannot seem to understand you cannot have your cake and eat it, too: either there was a “magic bullet” or there were two assassins. Still, it is nice to have him on the record about this vital issue. And he seems unaware that as authors like Joe McBride have shown, Connally actually disagreed with the entire thesis of the Warren Report. (McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 418)

    Overall, I would assess Part 2 of the book-the Kennedy years- as largely repetitive from his and McCubbin’s past books, which all seem to tout the same recurring agenda in two parts: his adamant stand that there was only one assassin (despite his contradictory views as expressed by his statements about the wounds and the shooting sequence), and that the agents did the best they could, despite their feelings of failure (and making sure to put that false blame-the-victim nugget in there again for good measure). That said, there were some new tidbits of information about prior trips and, to be fair, the Kennedys shine through in a positive way in this section.

    Part 3, the LBJ section, encompasses chapters 20-29 and is arguably the best part of the book- Hill really captures Johnson and the so-called “Johnson treatment” quite well. Even before the formal Johnson section of the book begins, the JFK section ends with Hill’s auspicious first greeting to LBJ in October 1964 when the President visited Jackie Kennedy in New York. Hill extended his hand to Johnson and said “Hello, Mr. President, I am Agent Clint Hill.” LBJ simply ignored him, reached into his back pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. Hill said the experience, witnessed by the agents of the White House detail who were guarding LBJ, was “humiliating.”

    Another minor error occurs on page 227 when Hill states that the Kennedys visited Mexico in 1961-it was actually 1962, as is correctly noted on page 114.

    Hill succeeds the best here when he vividly describes Johnson’s interactions with himself and others, as well as the impromptu nature of the brusque Texan. Like the travels of Ike and JFK, the many travels, domestic and foreign, of Johnson are duly noted and Hill (and McCubbin) do an admirable job describing the interaction the president had with the hosts and with the spectators, as well as with the agents themselves. When the McCubbin “team” (either with Blaine or Hill) aren’t treading into controversial waters, they actually succeed with some well-written stories and presidential anecdotes. Perhaps this is why I liked Mrs. Kennedy and Me the most- other than a couple pages, it was harmless fun about the elegant First Lady and a touch of Camelot, albeit a tad maudlin and trite in places. In this regard, I believe Five Presidents is a very close second to that work, with Five Days In November being disposable and forgettable and The Kennedy Detail as the worst by a country mile for its deceit and deception. In fact, one could argue that Five Presidents, despite the Kennedy-era repetition and one page (page 142, to be exact) of controversy, is the best of the lot, but I digress.

    What I think makes the LBJ section such a winner is not just that it is the longest section of the book, but that the “safe” button was switched to off and Hill is telling the true stories with the bark off, so to speak. It is actually a shame, for history’s sake, that an agenda pervaded two of the three earlier books (and a very small part of the other two, this one included) because, again, when McCubbin and Hill just tell the tales, I find myself begrudgingly admiring the vivid pictures of the presidents they draw. In hindsight, perhaps it was Blaine as the true culprit in all of this and Hill merely thought it was good to have in-house symmetry when a touch of the blame-the-victim (JFK) mantra was repeated in his books–less readers would be left to wonder why he appeared to disagree with his adamant colleague. Paradoxically, when it comes to Ike, Hill is diametrically opposed to Blaine (the above-mentioned open car versus Blaine’s claim of an Eisenhower preference for a closed car).

    Funny enough, there is also fodder for the LBJ-did-it crowd on page 235: Hill, describing Johnson’s 1966 trip to Australia, wrote that the president “crouched down in the backseat…it was the only time I ever saw a president duck down in the rear seat of a car to avoid being seen.” Roger Stone and Phil Nelson, take note.

    On pages 236-237, Hill describes the Melbourne, Australia trip, wherein angry Vietnam War protestors threw balloons filled with paint at the presidential limousine and, by extension, several of the agents surrounding the car. Hill again makes a minor error, stating that agents Rufus Youngblood and Lem Johns rode on the rear of the car when, in actual fact, it was Youngblood and Jerry Kivett, as several clear films and photos of the motorcade incident demonstrate, although Johns was indeed there and was also splattered with paint, albeit in his position walking by the automobile.

    The travels and tribulations for LBJ continue through 1967 and 1968, as Hill does a good job of documenting the activities of President Johnson in relation to the monumental events of this two-year period. In particular, the assassinations of MLK (pages 278-286) and RFK (287-295), as well as the turbulent 1968 Democratic convention (pages 303-306), are remarkably described in the context of Hill’s and LBJ’s reaction to them. Interestingly, although Hill’s brother-in-law, fellow agent David Grant, is mentioned on one page (page 303), once again, as he did in his previous two books, Hill does not mention their family connection (although Blaine did so in The Kennedy Detail and in a conversation with myself in 2005, although nothing was mentioned when Grant and Hill appeared, separately, on the television documentary of the same name). As I describe in my forthcoming book The Not So Secret Service, I believe there was bad blood between the two near the end of Grant’s life, having something to do with his writing partner, among other things (Grant passed away 12/28/2013). Hill’s wife Gwen is mentioned in his obituary but Clint is not. As mentioned above, Hill is still legally married to Gwen[22]).

    Part 4 covers Hill’s involvement in the protection of Presidents Nixon and Ford and encompasses chapters 30-38. Although quite interesting in its own right. Hill was off the front lines of presidential protection and relegated to, first, the SAIC of the vice president’s detail for Spiro Agnew and, shortly thereafter, to Secret Service headquarters. He was first Deputy Assistant Director of Protective Forces, then later Assistant Director of the Presidential Protective Division (PPD). So the intimacy and interaction with both President Nixon and Ford pales in comparison to the prior three presidents, especially LBJ. That said, it is what it is; Hill was where he was in those moments in history. Still, there are several items of special interest. On page 367, after describing how fellow agent (since the Kennedy days) Hamilton Brown was angered by President Nixon’s disregard for security protocol by visiting anti-war demonstrators at the Lincoln Memorial on 5/9/70, Hill writes: “all of us were disgusted with the attitude of the president for placing himself in such a vulnerable position.” [23]

    On page 376, Hill reveals that he was “one of very few people who knew about the [Nixon] taping system, and, as with all types of similar privileged information, it was kept very private, limited to people on a need-to-know basis.” After learning on page 381 that then-Secretary of the Treasury John Connally was instrumental in promoting Hill to his highest position in the Secret Service (the aforementioned Assistant Director of PPD), Hill describes the inner turmoil he felt in having to witness multiple viewings of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination during Secret Service training classes.

    On pages 388-391, Hill totally whitewashes the Bob Newbrand-as-informant matter. Agent Newbrand was used as a plant by Nixon and his henchmen to try to obtain information of a derogatory nature against Ted Kennedy.[24] Interestingly, Hill was in contact with Alexander Butterfield and James McCord (and agent Al Wong), principal people in the Watergate mess.

    While the dismissal of agents Bob Taylor, the SAIC of PPD, and his assistant, Bill Duncan, by the Nixon/ Haldeman gang is relatively old news for those like myself who study these things (page 403), Hill adds that agent Art Godfrey was also a victim of the purge. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Godfrey, whom I spoke to and corresponded with, was removed by Nixon’s hand (Director Rowley retired in October 1973). While Deputy Directors Rufus Youngblood and Lem Johns were ousted by the Haldeman gang a few years earlier. In fact, Godfrey was a favorite of Nixon, belonged to the February Group (die-hard Nixon loyalists), watched the Grand Prix with Nixon after the president’s fall from grace, and was even asked by Nixon’s best friend Bebe Rebozo to work for him.[25] Further, it is a matter of record that Godfrey retired in 1974, a year after this all took place, as ASAIC of PPD, not from some field office.[26] Godfrey served on PPD protecting Presidents Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ and Nixon. Needless to say, I am skeptical of Hill’s assertion. Perhaps Hill is simply mistaken.

    Chapters 37, 38 and the Epilogue contains some fascinating personal details of Hill’s final days as an agent and the troubled aftermath, as Hill has had trouble coping with his failure on 11/22/63. He goes into detail about his appearance on 60 Minutes in November 1975 (which aired the next month). Hill states that Mike Wallace’s interview was the first time, other than his Warren Commission testimony, that he had ever spoken to anyone about the assassination (pages 429 and 430). This is wrong; Hill was interviewed by William Manchester for his massive best-seller The Death of a President (on 11/18/64 and 5/20/65, to be exact). Manchester also talked to The Kennedy Detail’s Gerald Blaine, Gerald Behn, Bill Greer, Roy Kellerman, Lem Johns, and a host of other agents. However, to be fair to Hill, Blaine also denies ever talking to any author (including Manchester) before he wrote his book. [27] In addition, Hill also spoke about the assassination for 60 Minutes once again (November 1993), The History Channel’s The Secret Service (1995; also a home video), The Discovery Channel’s Inside the Secret Service (1995; also a home video), and National Geographic’s Inside The U.S. Secret Service (2004; also a DVD still available).

    On the second to last page, Hill/McCubbin write: “As with our previous two books [28], our overriding concern was to present a factual account to preserve history, while also abiding by the Secret Service pledge to be worthy of trust and confidence.” I would say it is the latter part of that statement that has guided McCubbin, Hill and Blaine through all four books. Sometimes to extremes – don’t embarrass the agency (what J. Edgar Hoover would call “the bureau”) and protect reputations as they would protectees.

    Nevertheless, with all the aforementioned points and previous disclaimers in mind, Five Presidents must be considered a worthy addition to anyone’s library. The first was the worst…they saved the best for last.

    Footnotes:

    [1] review of The Kennedy Detail

    [2] review of Survivor’s Guilt

    [3] review of The Kennedy Detail

    [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gRhG3ya7JE

    [5] http://lisamccubbin.com/

    [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYpY8zI_wwA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmCEx-f0dfI

    [7] http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/features/why-i-blame-myself-for-jfks-death-248893.html

    [8] “Slick propaganda” and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oALbLw4U7U0

    [9] review of Mrs. Kennedy and Me

    [10] A mostly repetitive photo book that appears to have been a cash grab for the 50th anniversary. Since this book is basically a shortened version of Mrs. Kennedy and Me with glossy photos, I chose not to formally review it.

    [11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbD1shPmla8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqE0rPJyGI

    [12] JFK: The Final Hours 2013, National Geographic (also a DVD); see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNXJKs9xAMI

    [13] review of The Kennedy Detail

    [14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgB2mnmiU-s

    [15] George Drescher oral history, Herbert Hoover Library.

    [16] Survivor’s Guilt (2013), pages 174-175, 403, 407-408.

    [17] Out From The Shadow: The Story of Charles L Gittens Who Broke The Color Barrier In The United States Secret Service by Maurice Butler, KY: Xlibris, 2012, pp. 125-126.

    [18] Survivor’s Guilt (2013), page 408.

    [19] See photo in Survivor’s Guilt.

    [20] See Survivor’s Guilt and my forthcoming book The Not So Secret Service.

    [21] See my CTKA reviews of The Kennedy Detail, the accompanying documentary, and Mrs. Kennedy and Me, as well as my own book Survivor’s Guilt (especially chapter 1) and my upcoming book The Not So Secret Service.

    [22] http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/washingtonpost/obituary.aspx?pid=168833469

    [23] See my book Survivor’s Guilt, especially chapters 1 and 10.

    [24] See my forthcoming book The Not So Secret Service.

    [25] The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000) by Anthony Summers, pages 247 and 262.

    [26] Survivor’s Guilt, chapter 13.

    [27] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxZVgPIt05o and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23K1J_cMt2c

    [28] By definition and book order release, this statement omits The Kennedy Detail.

  • The Missing Church Committe Transcripts

    by Rex Bradford, At:  Mary Ferrell

  • CIA Admits It Sent Mandela to Jail

    At:  This Day Live

  • Bridge of Spies: Spielberg and the Coen Brothers Punch Up History

    Bridge of Spies: Spielberg and the Coen Brothers Punch Up History

    The mythology about Rudolf Abel survived for decades on end.  It began when he was captured and then tried as a Russian espionage agent in a New York City court in 1957. The legend was furthered by not one, but two hearings before the Supreme Court concerning whether or not the arrest of Abel was done within the boundaries of a legal search and seizure.  It reached its apogee when President Kennedy approved an exchange of Abel for captured U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962.  Abel’s American lawyer, a man named James B. Donovan, carried out that exchange in Germany.  In 1964, Donovan wrote a book on the Abel case and the later prisoner exchange.  Strangers on a Bridge became a national best seller. Now even more people were exposed to the Abel myth.

    What do I mean by the “Abel mythology?”  First off, there was no such Russian spy born with that name.  He borrowed that name from a deceased Russian colonel.  Abel’s real name was Willie Fisher.  And as one can guess by that moniker, he wasn’t Russian.  He was born in 1903 in Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England.  When his family moved to Russia in the twenties, Fisher became a translator since he had an aptitude for language acquisition.  He later developed an affinity for electronics and radio operation.  And this was what the NKVD, precursor to the KGB, used him for during World War II.

    Another myth is that the FBI uncovered Fisher and then cracked the case. This is not at all accurate. Fisher was caught through the betrayal of his assistant. That assistant was named Reino Hayhanen.  Moscow had sent Hayhanen to help Fisher.  But Reino turned out to be a very bad assistant.  He was both a drunkard and a womanizer—he squandered some of the money given to him by Fisher on prostitutes.  When Fisher had had his fill of him, he sent Reino back to Russia.  Sensing that he would be disciplined upon his return, Hayhanen stopped at the American Embassy in Paris.  There he turned himself in as a Soviet spy.   And this is how Fisher was uncovered.

    A third myth is that he was a master spy, somewhat on the level of Kim Philby.  As several latter day commentators who have studied the Fisher case have concluded, there is simply nothing to even approximate such a lofty comparison. To use just one example: there is no evidence that, in the entire nine year period that Fisher was in America, he even recruited one agent, or source, on his own.  But further, once the KGB got the news of Hayhanen’s betrayal, Fisher had an opportunity to dispose of much of the incriminating evidence in his flat.  He did not.  But further, although he had used a false name with Hayhanen, he had taken him to his home. By casing the building, by following some of the residents who fit Reino’s description, and then snapping a picture of the man Hayhanen knew as “Mark,” this is how Fisher was caught.  Through his own carelessness and errors in tradecraft.

    Fisher’s cover while in the United States was that of a painter/photographer.  Steven Spielberg begins his film Bridge of Spies with a clever and adroit composition. The spy is painting a self-portrait in his studio.  Shooting from behind, we see then a dual image of the man: one in a mirror, and the other on the canvas–with the real subject in between, his back to us.  This makes not just for an interesting composition, but it’s a nice symbolic précis of who the man is.  We then watch as the FBI begins to follow Fisher around New York as he paints and takes photos.  They then break into his hotel room.  Fisher asks for permission to secure his palette of colors, and as he does he hides a coded message he had just secured from a drop point.

    From here, the film now cuts to the man who will be the main character, attorney James Donovan. Once Fisher was caught, the FBI had planned on deporting him, since he was in the country illegally under various aliases, and had not registered as a foreign national. Which is why the INS was in on the raid. They shipped him to a detention center in Texas.  There, they tried to turn him into a double agent.  (Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge, pgs. 16, 45)  Fisher turned down the offer.  Since the Bureau discovered so much incriminating material in both his hotel room and his apartment, they switched strategies.  Instead of deporting him, they now decided to place him on trial.  Which was a rather unusual decision.  Because, as Donovan wrote, there was no case he could find of a foreign spy being convicted of peacetime espionage. (Donovan, p. 19) The actual indictment contained three charges: 1.) Conspiracy to transmit atomic and military secrets to Russia; 2.) Conspiracy to gather classified government information; and 3.) Illegal residency in the U.S. as a foreign agent. (ibid, p. 20)

    The Brooklyn BAR association decided to ask Donovan to represent the defendant. (ibid, p. 9) Donovan was at this time, 1957, mainly an insurance lawyer. But he had worked for the OSS during the war, and was one of the lawyers at the Nuremburg trials.  Although the film only shows Donovan with one assistant, he actually had two. (Donovan, pgs. 34, 54) Some affluent law firms through the BAR furnished these.  To his and their credit, the local legal establishment was determined to give the spy a decent defense team.  (In a rather odd departure, the film does not portray Reino Hayhanen on screen.)

    Rather early in the case, Donovan discovered that his best hope in defending Fisher were problems with the original search and seizure.  Donovan concluded that this process was legally faulty due to the fact that the original strategy was to use the threat of deportation to turn Fisher.  In other words, the FBI wanted to keep the profile of the raid low, so that the KGB would not understand that they had turned Fisher into a double agent.  Therefore, they had not secured the properly designated warrants. But once they failed to turn the man, they now wished to prosecute him as if they had the proper warrants.   (Donovan, pgs. 109-110)

    The original trial judge would not accept Donovan’s motion to suppress evidence based on this issue.  If he had, the prosecution’s case would have been gravely weakened.  So once Fisher was convicted, Donovan raised the motion in an appeals court hearing. Once it was denied there, he went to the U.S. Supreme Court.   That court heard the case twice.  They eventually denied the appeal on a 5-4 vote.  The film does not include the original appeals court case. It then collapses the two Supreme Court hearings into one.

    Spielberg apparently wanted to cut down on these legal procedures to add more about Donovan’s family life, specifically under the pressures applied during the case; and also to make more screen time for the Gary Powers aspect of the story.  The assumptions being that the former will add more human interest for the audience; the latter more action and opportunity for visual imagery. But there ends up being a problem here.  For me, it’s at about these points that the film starts to slide off the rails as far as dramatic license goes.  For example, in his book, Donovan does note that he got some crank calls because of his defense of Fisher.  He then changed his phone number.  (Donovan, p. 50)  That wasn’t enough for Spielberg.  This gets changed to an actual shooting attempt on Donovan’s daughter as she is quietly watching television alone in the living room.  Now, I am sure if this had actually happened, Donovan would have written about it.  It probably would have been front-page news in New York. 

    This is paralleled by what Spielberg does with the shoot down of Powers over Russia in the U-2.  As Philip Kaufman proved  so memorably in his fine film, The Right Stuff, high altitude aviation can be viscerally exciting; it’s an excellent subject for cinematography.  But again, that in and of itself was apparently not enough for Spielberg.  After Powers ejects from his plane, we actually see him hanging onto the tail and working himself around to try and push the “Destruct” button on the front control panel. Which, of course, he fails to do.  Then as he parachutes downward, we watch as the plane actually brushes alongside his chute.  In no account I have read of this incident have I seen any of this mentioned.  Why was it necessary?  Powers had serious trouble ejecting anyway because he couldn’t separate from his oxygen tank. Secondly, one of the pursuing planes was shot down by friendly fire.

    I was kind of taken aback—again.  First, the CIA director does not represent the “highest levels” of government, at least not overtly.  But second, Dulles had left the CIA in November of 1961.  The new director was John McCone.

    But beyond that, there are two other aspects that the director and writers could have used for dramatic effect.  First, Lee Harvey Oswald was in the USSR at the time of the Powers shoot down. There are even some writers who think he may have been in the gallery during Powers’s trial.  Secondly, it was this incident that scuttled the Paris summit conference scheduled for just two weeks later. President Eisenhower tried to deny it happened.  But the Russians kept Powers confined and hid the wreckage that they found of the plane.  So Eisenhower was blindsided.

    From what I have been able to garner about the screenplay, it was originally written by Matt Charman.  Spielberg then brought in the Coen brothers  (Joel and Ethan) to, as they say, “punch it up.” To put it mildly, if I was doing an historical film, about the last writers I would bring in to “punch it up” would be the Coen brothers. 

    Because what I have mentioned above is just the beginning of the pushing the limits of dramatic license.  After the Supreme Court ruling went against Donovan, and Fisher started serving his sentence, the White House decided to seriously move for a prisoner exchange between the Russian spy and Powers.  Donovan writes about it in his book’s last chapter.  But he prefaces it with a warning that it was secret and he cannot reveal all of its elements.  (Donovan, p. 371)  But he does reveal two important things about the mission.  First, it began on January 11, 1962 when he attended a meeting in Washington with several other persons, including a Justice Department lawyer. (ibid, pgs. 373-75) Secondly, at this meeting, he was told that this prisoner exchange had been approved at the highest levels of the government.  Is that not kind of unambiguous?  The highest level of the government would be the White House, right?

    Again, this was not enough for Spielberg and the Coen brothers.  In the film, Donovan (played by Tom Hanks) goes to Washington to meet CIA Director Allen Dulles.  I was kind of taken aback—again.  First, the CIA director does not represent the “highest levels” of government, at least not overtly.  But second, Dulles had left the CIA in November of 1961.  The new director was John McCone.  As I said, Donovan’s book places this meeting two months after Kennedy had forced Dulles to resign.  Again, I don’t see what was gained by this.

    But during this meeting, Dulles tries to tell Donovan that he will be getting very little support on this mission.  He will be largely on his own.  This is not true even in the film’s terms.  But it is certainly not true according to Donovan’s book.  In the film, we watch as Hanks is escorted around West Germany by various American agents.  They give him a safe house and a phone number to call.  (The film actually has Donovan memorize this phone number when, in reality, he kept it on a card as he went to East Germany.) 

    In fact, in every step of Donovan’s trip—including the flight over on a MATS plane—he was escorted and assisted by American agents. The only part of his mission where he was alone was when he crossed over into East Germany. And that, of course, was pretty much unavoidable.  Again, in this aspect, we see Donovan spending  time in a holding cell at the hands of those brutal East Germans.  Not only did that not occur, but also the incident that causes it did not happen either (e.g., the Abel family lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, speeding at over a hundred miles per hour in his sports car).

    Let us close with three more points of divergence. The film makes much of the dealings between Donovan and the Russian Embassy official Ivan Schischkin, and the family lawyer, Vogel.  This is because Donovan wants to release both Abel and an American economics student imprisoned in East Germany, Frederic Pryor.  This led to a much longer mission than planned.  Two days stretched into over a week.   But this is not really accurate either.  For Donovan actually was trying to release three prisoners.  In addition to Pryor and Abel, he tried to release a man named Marvin Makinen.  At this he did not succeed.  But he did extract a promise that the Soviets would let him go later if super power relations improved.  They did, and in October of 1963, Makinen was freed.

    The film shows Donovan having his coat stolen from him under threat from a small gang of East German thugs.  Again, this is not in Donovan’s book.   The arrest of Frederic Pryor is made while the Berlin Wall is being constructed.  As Pryor later revealed, he was not even in Berlin when the wall was going up. (Click here for more from Pryor).

    I could go on further, but here is my question: Where are the history defiler zealots?  You know, those screaming  fanatics who come out of the woodwork whenever Oliver Stone makes a history film and uses elements of dramatic license?  This highly praised film got very little of that kind of criticism as far as I could see.  The Washington Post did allow David Talbot a brief column pointing out the Dulles fallacy and the actual primacy of President Kennedy over the mission. (See 10/28/15) But that was about it as far as I could tell.  I made this same distinction in my review of Clint Eastwood’s poor film J. Edgar. There really does seem to be a double standard for people in the club, and those not in the club—that is the Washington/Hollywood nexus.  It is a slice of pernicious hypocrisy that seems ingrained into our society.

    But let me add something here. In Oliver Stone’s case, he is working in fields in which there are many unknowns (e.g., the JFK assassination, Nixon and Watergate). In other words, he is pushing the envelope. I don’t think that applies in this case.

    As per the aesthetic elements of the film, Spielberg had a very long apprentice period as a director.  It was over ten years from when he began making his amateur films in Arizona until he made his first really well directed feature film, Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Since then, his films have generally been quite well made.  As noted above, he has a good pictorial eye, knows what he wants lighting wise, and his films are acutely edited.  As he himself has said, he doesn’t really have a directorial style.  He tries to serve the material at hand as well  as possible. And, most of the time, he does.  (Who can forget the disasters of Hook and 1941?)

    I have always thought Tom Hanks was a gifted comic actor. He proved that on television in Bosom Buddies, and then furthered that reputation in Splash. In comedy he has energy, timing, and technical command.  I have never been very much enamored of him outside of comedy.  And when he tried to really stretch himself in Road to Perdition, playing a heavy, he fell on his face. (Whereas Michael Caine, who also is good in comedy, pulled off a similar role quite well in Get Carter.)  Hanks is passable here.  He doesn’t really act.  He flexes certain aspects of his personality to fit the moment.  Sort of what someone like Gary Cooper would have done in the fifties, before the Actor’s Studio revolution took hold.

    On the other hand, British actor Mark Rylance as Fisher/Abel really does act.  It’s a subtle, understated performance.  One that is full of delicate secrets untold hidden inside the character.  From the start, Rylance is in that very low emotional register and he not only sustains it throughout, he manages to articulate the character without ever breaking out of that key.  It’s a union of both the British tradition of technical surety, combined with the American revolution of method acting.

    As I noted in my book Reclaiming Parkland, Hanks and Spielberg have definite ambitions in doing historical subjects.  They both fancy themselves amateur historians.  Their idol in the field was the late Stephen Ambrose.  Bridge of Spies is a well-made film.  I just wish it had dispensed with a lot of the dramatic license, which I do not think was really necessary. It would also be nice to see these two men do something a little gutsy concerning American history. Like what Jeremy Renner did with his film about Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger. But as I also showed in my book, because of personal reasons, that doesn’t seem possible. At least not right now.