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  • RFK Jr. and the Unspeakable: Why This Historic Moment Matters

    RFK Jr. and the Unspeakable: Why This Historic Moment Matters

    When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, he raised nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in grassroots donations to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. After he dutifully backed out and endorsed the candidate chosen by the party’s super delegates, a lot of his supporters reportedly ended up voting for Donald Trump in November. When a reporter asked him how he felt about ex-members of his camp voting against Clinton, Sanders answered: “Wrong question.” If so many of his followers had decided to turn to someone whose policies were anathema to his own, he asked, then they must have been pretty angry about something, right? The media, he suggested, should figure out what ordinary voters are so mad about instead of blaming him and his populist movement for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

    While it’s true that the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan has not raised Bernie-levels of grassroots cash, it’s also true that ordinary voters have less disposable income than they did eight years ago. What RFK Jr. did do, however, was gather over a million signatures nationwide through the mobilization of some 100,000 volunteers for access to the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Sanders never had to worry about ballot access in the Democratic primaries. For some reason, RFK Jr. was not only shut out of the party’s nominating process; he also had to qualify the “hard way,” as an independent, when he finally gave up on the once-upon-a-time party of his father and uncle. 

    Thus began one of the ugliest and most vicious assaults on a presidential candidate in recent memory. Even though he decided to run as an independent, the Democratic National Committee (DNC)  launched a well-financed “lawfare” campaign through the courts to block him from the ballot in the general election. This was when he was taking more voters away from Trump than Biden! DNC-friendly mainstream media lent this discrimination campaign a helping hand by censoring him from their airwaves as much as possible. Joe Biden disgraced his presidency by denying him Secret Service protection until two days after the assassination attempt on Trump, and nearly 15 months after Bobby announced his own candidacy. Now that he’s formed a coalition with Trump, it’s fair to echo Sanders and say his supporters might have been a bit angry also.

    As someone who has volunteered for Kennedy’s campaign since shortly after he declared his candidacy, I confess to brief shock at the announcement that he was suspending his run, endorsing Trump, and calling on his supporters to refrain from voting for him in about ten “battleground states.” Those ten might include my own, Virginia, where “RFK2”– as he’s sometimes known–polls relatively high. But I’m over it. 

    In 1968, many supporters of his liberal father’s presidential campaign transferred their vote to George Wallace, very possibly in sheer protest at RFK’s untimely and highly suspicious demise. For all his faults, New York real estate mogul Donald Trump is neither the racist Alabama governor nor his running mate, warmongering Gen. Curtis LeMay, who may have been smoking a cigar in the autopsy room during the postmortem exam of President John F. Kennedy, a man he hated. Trump has never smoked, and Wallace would have thoroughly disdained Trump’s Oval Office photo ops with African-American admirers.

    With his stance on tariffs and no taxes on tips or on Social Security, Trump claims the mantle of a populist;  and whether he is or not, elites do not like populists. They did not like Sanders either. But the neocons among the “Never Trump” crowd – e.g. Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz – despise Trump mostly for what they perceive as his “nativism,” which embarrasses them as members of the urban-liberal intelligentsia. Trump’s potential isolationism (he started no new wars) is the worst of it and frightens them to this day. Yet even a populist-nativist isn’t necessarily a “threat to democracy.” I think many people sincerely believe Trump is a threat, and I respect that, but I don’t see it myself. January 6th was a tragedy, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. has described Trump’s actions during that violent, vandalistic riot as “reprehensible.” Personally, I’ve never believed Trump intended or foresaw what happened, even if he bore blame through his recklessness or negligence. 

    Moreover, three and a half years later, we have to ask who poses the greater threat to basic freedoms?  Was it those involved in the insurrection or the authorities cracking down in its aftermath? 

    A recent article by Margot Williams at Jefferson Morley’s JFK Facts (a Substack I write for), explains the excesses of federal law enforcement, which even now is rounding up and arresting people who did no more than enter the Capitol and walk around after a (small) advance mob broke in a door with a battering ram under the eyes of the immobile police. 

    RFK Jr. and the JFK Assassination

    At a fundamental level, ending the toxic polarization of American society over the last decade and figuring out how to end it has always been the main theme of the RFK Jr. campaign. But the causes of our current social crisis are deep-seated, rooted in history, and I think they find their origin in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, before I was even born. After much study, I now hold the sincere conviction that this isn’t just a historical issue but an extremely important current one too. Every historic episode is both a cause and an effect, but many of our problems lead through November 22, 1963, when the fundamental nature of our government changed. Jeff Morley, who has done invaluable pioneering research into the JFK assassination, opines that it isn’t the most important issue facing America today: people have bills to pay, jobs to hold down, kids to put through school. When ordinary folks are thinking day-to-day about making ends meet this week, they aren’t thinking about a violent event from generations ago. I understand that.

    But whatever John Q. Citizen is thinking as he goes about his day, I respectfully disagree with the JFK Facts editor-in-chief. It doesn’t necessarily follow that an issue is less important because most Americans think so. The “Great Crime” must stay alive as an issue in current U.S. politics and society until it’s resolved to the satisfaction of serious historians and researchers at large. Only one campaign now pledges to address that: Donald J. Trump and his new ally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

    The murder isn’t just a fetish for conspiracy freaks and assassination hobbyists. It is a seminal event that still affects us. Thanks mostly to the political and media influence of RFK Jr. this election cycle, it is a live issue now as well. It may be a long shot to expect Trump and the GOP to seriously do any justice to it, but a long shot is better than no shot at all. Maybe a re-elected President Trump will have no power to force disclosure on the 61-year-old atrocity;  because maybe, as some believe, all presidents are only cyphers of the national-security state. But while cynicism makes some people feel superior, it doesn’t do it for me.

    Regarding transparency over the still-withheld files related to the assassination of JFK, Trump has already disappointed “bigly.” His postponement of full disclosure in 2017 only aroused more public discomfort and mistrust. Yet if Trump was bad on the JFK files, President Joe Biden has proven to be worse.  He is not only postponing release of the remaining withheld assassination records but also announcing the “final certification” under the JFK Records Act. Congress’s unanimous passage of that law in 1992 prevented President George H. W. Bush from vetoing it, and Biden himself voted for the law as a senator. Worse, instead of honoring the spirit and letter of the law to serve the public interest–as attorney Andrew Iler showed–Biden devised a new scheme to conceal the records and replace the JFK Act. 

    This scheme, known as the “Transparency Plan,” was devised by the CIA-led national security apparatus and essentially guts the 1992 federal statute by burying its timeframes and requirement of periodic review. By executive order, Biden handed all declassification decisions over to the CIA and other unelected agencies in control of relevant records, washing his hands of the process forever. In doing so, Biden not only grievously abused the public trust. He probably didn’t even see any records before making his fateful decision. Already in cognitive decline, he very likely just signed where he was told to sign and forgot about it. At least Trump claimed he saw something, at least according to Judge Andrew Napolitano. It’s just that what he saw was so bad, he felt he had to bow to the will of the national security state and keep it under wraps. 

    But Biden? Nothing. Now his vice president, the Democratic nominee for his job, is eventually going to have to make her own position known on JFK. Does Kamala Harris even have an opinion? Born after the assassination, she has – to the best of my knowledge – never expressed any view at all. With any luck, the subject will come up in the upcoming Trump-Harris debate, but how will Harris “get out in front” on the issue when her boss has already tried to bury it? Trump will be able to comment first-hand, but I see no cause for optimism from Harris. I therefore have little compunction over favoring Trump right now.

    The issue of transparency in the JFK assassination isn’t the exclusive reason I decided to support RFK Jr. for president, but it’s at least tied for first place. I already knew his position on his uncle’s assassination – as well as his father’s – and that made him a qualitatively different and unprecedented kind of candidate. But on Friday, August 23rd, confronted with the image of him on stage with Donald Trump in Arizona, I admit I trembled a bit. The former president graciously introduced RFK Jr.  as having “lost his father and uncle in service to our country.” He vowed to establish an “independent presidential commission” to revisit the JFK assassination and release all the withheld records. I imagined RFK Jr. standing there, waiting to speak, exhilarated at coming as close as anyone in the last 60 years to doing what Dorothy Kilgallen said she was going to do right before her mysterious death. 

    Maybe Bobby wasn’t thinking that at all, and when he took the podium, he never even mentioned the JFK assassination. He talked, as usual, about public health, endless war, and censorship. But I wanted to believe he was consciously hoping President Trump would speak to that morbid tragedy in Bobby’s own family for him, and that Bobby – like all of us outside the inner circle of the national security state – still put a top priority on finding out what happened to his uncle. This was probably the best chance he had ever had in his lifetime. Whether Trump was only prompted by the recent attempt on his own life seemed immaterial at that moment. The point was: millions of people were watching and listening. It was live.

    Again, full disclosure over JFK’s murder continues to be a matter of vital public interest. Without at least an official rejection of the official history as currently disseminated by government and mainstream media, Americans won’t even have a version of events that is closer to the truth than what their government now peddles to them. We will continue to languish in a social sickness complementary to the physical degradation Kennedy so passionately wants to reverse, and about which he continually warns us. We need the topic of the JFK assassination in the news cycle now more than ever, so that it resonates into the next administration and stays in the public memory, no matter who wins. In Oliver Stone’s JFK, Jim Garrison paraphrases Tennyson: “Do not forget your dying king.” To find out what happened, we have to resist forgetting.

    Kennedy, Trump, and Harris

    Whatever the political fallout from the Trump-Kennedy coalition (liberal MSM commentators quickly united in their attacks), I have no regrets about supporting RFK Jr.’s campaign. The dominant experience of working with other RFK Jr. volunteers was, primarily, an absence of hate. Plenty of fellow campaign workers had voted for Biden in 2020, and plenty of others for Trump. But when handing out campaign literature or soliciting signatures for ballot access, the only hate we ever encountered came from obvious Biden supporters. They would hiss at us, sometimes spitting inadvertently in the process, their faces red as tomatoes, telling us we were a “disgrace” or “dangerous” or should be “ashamed.” Trump supporters would sometimes refuse to sign our petition forms, but they were never mean or unhinged. The “Bidenista” passers-by were manifestly contemptuous, sometimes calling us “nuts” or “crazy” even as they boiled over right in front of us.

    How different from that experience could Bobby Kennedy’s have been at the level of the DNC high grandees? He and running mate Nicole Shanahan both said that the Biden-Harris people had refused even to speak to them, whereas the Trump campaign was at least willing to meet. Under these circumstances, why would anyone blame RFK Jr. for giving up on cooperation with the arrogant Biden-Harris cabal? Would anyone passionate about issues of vital public interest, who meets a brick wall from one side and an ajar door from the other, go on bashing his head repeatedly against the bricks and mortar? 

    Maybe a significant percentage of RFK Jr. supporters now refuse to back him for endorsing Trump as a means of advancing his own agenda of peace, public health, and free speech. I haven’t met any yet. But at the end of the day, faced with the Democratic Party’s well-financed litigation drive to keep him off the ballot, plus censorship by overwhelmingly DNC-friendly mainstream media, Bobby evidently felt he had to choose between doing something or doing nothing. He decided to do something, to take a chance on Donald Trump honoring an agreement to prioritize the issues closest to him. Even if Trump reneges on his pledge of full disclosure in the JFK assassination, I think Bobby did the right thing. 

    The drab, uninspiring Democratic Party long ceased to be the party of RFK Jr.’s uncle and father. It is not the party of FDR, JFK and RFK. It is the party of LBJ, a corrupt, brutal scoundrel desperate to use the White House for the public adulation he craved. The long-term symptom of LBJ is the Democratic Party of today. And the DNC hit squads are part of this LBJ apparatus. (NY Times, May 2, 2024 online edition or May 4, 2024 print edition, article by Michelle Cottle: “The Drive to Tell Voters What They Don’t Know About R.F.K. Jr.”)

    It is largely a party made up of elites.  Nancy Pelosi ushered out Biden, and after, there was no competition from anyone to take the spot.  Not even a token of a debate took place. And, if one recalls, there was no debate during the Democratic primaries, or what passed for primaries. Harris was anointed, she was not in any way elected.  How interesting that process becomes when compared with how Robert Kennedy Jr. was treated in the media. This is democracy?

    The censorship Kennedy speaks about is not conspiracy theory. It’s real and palpable, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg now confirms publicly that “deep state” goons pressured him to censor content related to COVID-19 and other subjects. Moreover, the “censorship-industrial complex” (as RFK Jr. calls it) traces its roots to November 22, 1963. In interviews, Bobby has repeatedly recommended James Douglass’s influential book, JFK and the Unspeakable (2008), which refers to a systemic evil, a “void” permeating official policy and discourse, making it soulless and hollow. The assassination put a kind of “final seal” on what had built up over the previous decade and a half, as an unaccountable “deep state” acquired more and more power at the expense of elected authorities. That power manifests itself everywhere, particularly through censorship. Scholarly writers, researchers, and historians of the JFK assassination are marginalized and deprived of the big, lucrative book deals and promotions, as well as prestige. There is no meaningful difference between “muzzling” these writers and state censorship.

    Ironically in the so-called “information age,” the idea that certain things are “unspeakable” is still strong. Six decades after the assassination of JFK, and 56 years after the murder of RFK, Bobby Kennedy Jr. has exhumed a range of issues buried under a mass of mainstream media talking points developed over generations. Possessed of a collective blindness residual of the Cold War, most Americans have ignored the “forever wars,” dietary and environmental toxicity, the waste of our economic resources, and the decline of our civic consciousness. A drug-addled, unhealthy nation, we’ve received a big wake-up call from RFK Jr., who has brought issues of vital public interest back into popular discourse. For instance, the revolving door between big pharma and public health agencies.

    The issues that Kennedy leads with – (1) the war in Ukraine, (2) chronic illness and disease, and (3) the mainstream-media censorship regime – are all the product of the rise in power of the unelected national-security apparatus, which secured its dominance over the political system after passage of the National Security Act of 1947. President Truman signed it into law, giving official birth to the Central Intelligence Agency. As soon as President Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sat about writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, essentially lamenting the effects of a law he was responsible for enacting. He suspected the CIA was involved in the murder of his young successor, and that suspicion permeates his op-ed. 

    The CIA had gradually accumulated more and more power under President Eisenhower, who would warn the public about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell speech in January 1961. By the time JFK attempted to resist its power, it was too little, too late. The title of David Talbot’s book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government  (2015) is no cliché. Our unaccountable “secret government” is the biggest open secret in America today. Only one candidate talked about any of this in any detail, and that is RFK Jr. It was probably that, plus his opinion of Anthony Fauci that sealed his fate at the starting gate.

    The Biosecurity Agenda and the ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ Pejorative

    One issue remains largely “unspeakable,” as mainstream media and government barriers to talking about it are still mostly intact. It is what RFK Jr. calls the “Biosecurity State.” The most recent manifestation is the attempt by governments worldwide to restrict freedom in societies over which they preside. The method is known as “PPR” – pandemic preparedness response. The World Health Organization declares a “pandemic,” and national governments stand ready to impose a series of measures, including lockdowns, school closings and other mandates, thus curtailing basic liberties. Behind PPR and restrictions on human freedom stands the obscenely profitable pharmaceutical industry – “Big Pharma” – which rolls out “cures” as soon as it can scare everyone enough. The gravy train is then off and running again. Anyone who dismisses as “conspiracy theory” the idea that Big Pharma is irretrievably corrupt should read a book by a bête noire of Warren Report dissenters everywhere, Gerald Posner’s Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (2020). When Kennedy calls Big Pharma a “criminal cartel,” he’s being gentle.

    Many educated people seem to shrug all this off, but many of us are sincerely alarmed. RFK Jr.’s recent book,  The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race (2023), traces the historical continuity between Pentagon and CIA experimentation and abuses at Fort Detrick, Maryland.  This began around the late 1940s,and it spread to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in 2020. Which is where former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Anthony Fauci took his “gain of function” research after the Obama administration imposed a temporary moratorium on that dangerous activity within the United States. Kennedy’s previous book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (2021), gives scholarly content to a now-widespread perception that the longtime, powerful, and highly-paid NIAID chief is corrupt, self-serving, and responsible for serious public health policy abuses in service to the bottom line of both himself and Big Pharma e.g. the whole disastrous AZT as a cure for AIDS debacle. Fauci has never even hinted at suing Kennedy despite the book becoming an instant bestseller. And it is not just RFK Jr. who has made these charges against Fauci.  Senator Rand Paul has done the same against both Fauci and Gates. Senator Paul wanted to charge Fauci for lying to congress about gain of function research and how this caused the breakout of CV 19 in Wuhan.

    Although RFK Jr. has never led with the issue specifically, he is not shy about explaining his vaccine safety advocacy in the face of accusations that he is a “nut” or (per the first sentence of his Wikipedia page) a “conspiracy theorist.” Most citizens of the industrialized West have been vaccinated for different things at various points in their lives, and I make no exception of myself. Neither does RFK Jr. But the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in tyrannical new rules about the subject.

    RFK Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense (CHD) advocacy group and its online periodical, The Defender, offered scholarly analysis for anyone entranced by the three-letter public health agencies’ scare-mongering for Big Pharma. But they had to be aware of CHD in the first place. CHD should have acquainted everyone with the “Biosecurity State” before censorship of mass media and internet in the democratic West really ramped up, since Kennedy had been warning of it for years. But social media – to say nothing of the MSM – suppressed it. Those of us who had never felt blunt censorship in America could see social media “moderating” or deleting posts for even questioning public health policy by the end of 2020. The words “false” and “falsely” became mantric in MSM, intensifying after President Trump publicly charged that the 2020 election result reflected fraud. 

    The censorship situation in the West became extreme after the “warp speed” rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, when even wire services openly branded anyone daring to question their safety or efficacy “conspiracy theorists” promoting dangerous views. RFK Jr. became super-prominent among the targets of coordinated attacks by legacy outlets of America’s ostensibly “free press.” The pharmaceutical industry’s power over supposedly neutral organizations like Reuters and AP had been more subtle, but by the end of 2020, the “corrupt merger of state and corporate power” was brazenly and frighteningly visible every day. Another target was author Naomi Wolf, who had written more than one bestseller and was an advisor to both Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

    Friends’ acceptance of my choice to rely on my innate immune system in confronting COVID-19 has, at least, reassured me. Others have been less fortunate. The family of an unvaccinated American friend overseas told him if he wanted to come home for Christmas, he had to be COVID-jabbed. He spent Christmas of 2021 alone in a country that doesn’t even celebrate it. 

    As time has passed, and more and more vaccinated friends have contracted COVID: Jim DiEugenio contracted it twice. The realization that people like me aren’t as loony as they first imagined has become more ingrained. The full symptoms of my own bout with COVID-19 lasted four or five days. After no longer testing positive, I felt even more confident of the benefits of strengthening natural immunity. 

    Even vaccine enthusiasts have to admit to a level of adverse side effects never seen before, since this is a matter of official record, not theory. It isn’t necessary to indulge in conspiracy theory to conclude that the COVID-19 vaccines have never been proven totally safe. The CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has received more reports from the COVID-vaccinated than for all previous vaccines combined, yet in the late 1970s, the “swine flu” vaccine was withdrawn after a tiny number of recorded Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) cases. Many more GBS cases have been recorded for the COVID-19 jabs. Again, the best explanation for why the COVID-19 vaccines survived is record levels of state and corporate stipulation. No matter how much others claim to “believe in” the COVID-19 vaccines, there is no basis for “trusting” the companies producing them. They trade in year-end profits, not long-term public health. Whatever COVID vax advocates argue, skeptics have the right to remain skeptical, especially since we cause no increased harm to anyone by remaining “jab free.”

    Warp Speed and Political Orthodoxies

    One does not have to conceive of a “plandemic” designed and implemented by a “high cabal” to reduce the world’s population through vaccine mandates. Corruption and greed can explain what happened, and why it should not happen again. After all, Operation Warp Speed broke several rules in its haste to come up with a vaccine. But there is still an important point to be made, and I felt it most intensely when I attended RFK Jr.’s “Defeat the Mandates” protest in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in early 2022, with SWAT teams on the roof and police helicopters circling loudly overhead. That point is, no matter how much our friends, family, or anyone else may show tolerance toward our refusal to be vaccinated for COVID-19, if universal mandates were ever imposed, the overwhelming majority of these “friends” wouldn’t lift a finger to defend our right to refuse them. One can easily picture them, instead, shrugging, wishing us “good luck,” and sauntering off to comply with the latest Biosecurity-State rule. In short, we have to defend our own civil rights, and RFK Jr. is the most powerful tribune for our cause. 

    Among those of us who have never availed ourselves of the COVID-19 vaccines, the sense of freedom to speak more loudly about our personal choice is much stronger today, in no small part thanks to RFK Jr. His supporters – vaccinated and unvaccinated – overwhelmingly oppose mandates, and the diversity of his base reflects a healthy political realignment, resurrection of wholesome social values, and reintroduction of vital interests to public discourse. 

    As people like Jimmy Dore have shown, the  MSM relies on Big Pharma accounting for a disproportionately large share of its ad revenue. Consequently, it  has already trotted out more pharmaceutical execs posing as “independent experts,” telling us we need to mask up and get the next shot. But yet, neither Peter Hotez nor Jake Tapper for two, would debate Robert Kennedy Jr. Robert Kennedy’s response to Hotez was that he was not talking about a conspiracy, he was talking about an orthodoxy which had taken hold, one that stated silence was the best course; so many smart and moral people decided that the best road was to keep your head down and move forward.

    Reportedly Trump has offered Kennedy a role in his transition team, one in his health program, and one on a commission to declassify all the records on the JFK assassination. These negotiations began right after the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. At the start the Vice Presidency was on the table, which Kennedy refused outright. Two of the go betweens in the talks were Calley Means, a preventivve health care advocate, and Tucker Carlson who had Kennedy on his much watched program. (NY Times, 9/2/24, story by Maggie Haberman).

    It is interesting of course that these negotiations began after Butler, since RFK was the only candidate talking about the subject of assassinations for months on end. And reportedly it was Carlson—who has famously defied the MSM orthodoxy in the JFK murder– who first connected the two candidates via text message. (ibid). As former RFK manager Dennis Kucinich has noted, the DNC had shown no such outreach to the candidate.  In fact, they had done all they could to sabotage him, similar—and perhaps worse–than what they did to Sanders. (Ibid, NY Timesarticle by Michelle Cottle) The DNC started 9 nuisance lawsuits to keep Kennedy/Shanahan off state ballots; they sandbagged particular events; and according to a talk show interview by VP candidate Nicole Shanahan, they even sent in double agents to certain offices. (Click here for this revealing interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAqVn5lRdes). And the whole time, Kennedy was denied Secret Service protection, thus forcing his campaign to spend hundreds of thousands per month on private security. This was startling,  considering the history of that family.

    If the alliance with Trump does not, in the end, produce meaningfully greater transparency in the assassination of JFK, RFK Jr. can’t be blamed. The struggle will continue. The “Justice for Kennedy Act” introduced in the House by a Republican congressmen in early 2023 is apparently dead, but the lawsuit of Mary Ferrell Foundation v President Biden and the National Archives has now reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, already well known for unpredictable decisions. Hopefully, the Democrats will feel forced to confront the assassination issue, perhaps with another legislative initiative, since Biden’s presidency was such a failure on the topic. So even if Trump’s executive-branch “commission” disappoints us, activism elsewhere could compensate for another letdown. There is, in sum, ample cause for hope, attributable in no small part to the influence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We now have Trump on tape in front in front of multiple cameras saying so.

  • Requiem for William Pepper

    Requiem for William Pepper

    I’ve long thought that, under normal circumstances, Hollywood would have already made a movie out of William Pepper’s first meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King. Pepper, then a photojournalist, had gone to Vietnam in 1966 and taken some of the most horrific pictures in human history – Vietnamese civilians, most of them children, burned by white phosphorus.  Those photos were subsequently published in Ramparts magazine, with a foreword by Dr. Benjamin Spock, in an article called “The Children of Vietnam.” (A few years ago I helped Dave Ratcliffe obtain a physical copy of that magazine, which he then put up on Ratical. You can find that here, although I should warn you that the photos are nightmarish.)

    That magazine found its way into the hands of Dr. Martin Luther King. Going through his mail, he opened the magazine sitting down to breakfast one morning. Moments later he said he was no longer hungry. He soon announced that he wanted to meet that photojournalist, and wound up calling him on the phone. As Pepper tells the story, he was both amazed and dubious to get the call, not less so when King asked him to speak at his church. “Why did he want this honky to address his congregation?” he thought. He had no idea what to say. Nonetheless, he did so, and he and King became friends.

    Pepper’s article was the last straw in a line that MLK had been pondering for some time. King had wanted to address the war, but that it was futile to try and address the ravages of racism and poverty without dealing with the military industrial complex. His decision to speak about it not only increased the vitriol of his enemies but alienated many of his supporters. The major newspapers, never his friend, ran open attacks on him. His brilliant speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” given on April 4, 1967, provided a political and empathetic analysis of the situation: 

    What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?

    On April 4, 1968, precisely one year to the day after Dr. King gave that speech, he was state executed in Memphis, TN. Needless to say, Hollywood has chosen not to dramatize this final episode of the great man’s life, or the role played by William Pepper in it.

    Into this void has stepped John Barbour with a new film, A Tribute to William Pepper. Barbour is the creator of the 1970s reality series Real People, as well as two films containing important interviews with Kennedy assassination investigator Jim Garrison, The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes (1992), and; American Media & The Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2017), the latter of which I was able to see at the Texas Theatre in Dallas with a number of other researchers in a screening hosted by Barbour. Aiding Barbour on this film is Black Op Radio’s  Len Osanic, who had been a good friend of Pepper.

    This new film consists essentially of two extended interviews of Pepper, conducted by Barbour, along with an introduction by Barbour as well as cutaways for additional information and clarification on Pepper’s statements. The approach is no-frills but effective: with the first interview exploring in the main how Pepper got involved in the case; while the second interview goes through many of the details captured in Pepper’s third book on the case, The Plot to Kill King. 

    One thing that comes through is how remarkably well-connected Pepper was in his life. He had worked in the Bobby Kennedy senatorial campaign as his citizens’ chairman in Westchester County beginning in 1964. Then, as noted earlier, he found himself in 1966 in Vietnam, taking the photos for what would become his 1967 Ramparts article. Pepper fills in the background in response to Barbour’s questions, relating that the article was also considered for Look magazine. At that time, Look was a huge magazine, with a massively greater circulation than Ramparts, a radical leftist publication that ran articles from the Black Panthers, among others. 

    The editor at Look was William Attwood, who was sympathetic to Pepper and wanted to run the piece. Unfortunately, Attwood received a personal visit from Averill Harriman, carrying a message from Lyndon Johnson. The message? “Don’t ever publish anything by William Pepper.” Needless to say, the article was not published in Look.

    Pepper also notes that he received an opposite opinion from Attood when going out to lunch with journalist Mike Wallace, who would eventually be the face of CBS’s flagship program 60 Minutes. as I’ve had related elsewhere, Wallace was partly responsible for a film called The Hate that Hate Produced, back in 1959, which both popularized and demonized Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Pepper says that Wallace called him a traitor for his Ramparts piece. “I almost put him through the wall,’ Pepper notes dryly.

    ***

    Following Dr. King’s assassination in April 1968, and then Bobby’s assassination two months later, Pepper found himself exhausted and understandably unwilling to continue pursuing the case. A few years later, however, around the time the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was getting started, Mark Lane asked Pepper to look into the MLK case and represent the accused assassin James Earl Ray. Pepper met with Ray. After a ten-year deep dive into the case, Pepper was finally willing to represent Ray in 1988. In the course of his representation, he managed to arrange for Dexter King to meet with Ray.  Since this was broadcast live on TV,  it caused a stir when Dexter stated he did not believe Ray had killed his father.

    Pepper first arranged for a mock trial of Ray for HBO television in 1993. This was a well-produced and objective proceeding. This is much better than the earlier mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald broadcast in America by Showtime. Pepper won that mock trial. Pepper’s second major achievement in representing Ray was getting a civil trial against a man named Lloyd Jowers, who was an active participant in the assassination, in 1999. The jury in that civil trial found that Jowers was responsible, along with other unnamed parties, including the U.S. government, for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. Naturally, of course, the media failed to report in any substantive way, on what should have been seen as an Earth-shaking outcome. In fact, they sent Gerald Posner on a media tour to try and belittle and discount the result of the trial. But yet, no less than Coretta Scott King stated: “There is abundant evidence of a major, high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband.” Did that make any headway? Nope. Institutional media didn’t want the story. 

    John Barbour and Len Osanic have made this a fine tribute to an accomplished and driven man. Pepper didn’t stop after Ray died. When Larry Teeter died, he later took over as Sirhan Sirhan’s attorney, the accused assassin of Robert Kennedy. The energy that kept Pepper on track is clearly evident in his exchanges with Barbour as they explore some of the details of the conspiracy that Pepper uncovered, involving both state and federal military authorities. As with his films with Jim Garrison, the conversation is the star, and it is an invaluable contribution to history. The film will be of interest to anyone looking for the truth.

    One last note.

    A few days ago, as this is written, RFK Jr. made the decision to back Donald Trump for President. I don’t wish to unpack that here, but as a result of this, his former friend Greg Palast wrote an essay blasting him. It is a startling essay for several reasons, but one paragraph stood out to me.

    Palast writes: 

    His father was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who assassinated Bobby Senior because of RFK’s vociferous, militant support of Israel. Sirhan committed the killing on television. The murder is right there on film. Yet, Bobby Jr. could not believe his own eyes and that of a million horrified witnesses. To this day, he insists Sirhan did not kill his dad. Maybe it’s some kind of denial mechanism—having to watch your own father’s head blown apart. I don’t know, I’m a scribbler, not a shrink.

    Palast has done some good work in the past. His books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse are both worthwhile, and he wrote well about voter fraud and the Bush v Gore case. This isn’t Gerald Posner or Malcolm Gladwell or something. But for an otherwise seemingly cogent journalist to write a paragraph as uninformed and frankly idiotic as that should be impossible.

    It points to Barbour’s frequent theme of his films: the continued failure of virtually all the media to deal with its skeletons. Palast is an American who allegedly moved to England to work for the BBC so he could write honestly about the U.S. And this is his level of insight?

    When people ask “Why are you guys still going on about JFK? Or MLK? Or RFK?” This is why. Even the reporters who are supposed to be worth a damn often aren’t. Good on John Barbour and Len Osanic for continuing the fight.

    John Barbour’s film may be viewed by clicking here.

  • Kamala Harris : Our Accidental Candidate

    Kamala Harris : Our Accidental Candidate

    The rather unprecedented events of the last two months have elevated Vice-President Kamala Harris to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the November election. After President Biden’s disastrous performance in his June 28th CNN debate against Donald Trump, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi led the charge to have him step down as president. Her argument was that he would likely lose to Donald Trump and also place control of the House and Senate in GOP hands. Many commentators agreed with that analysis and the MSM became an echo chamber for their concerns.

    About one month later, July 21st, Biden decided to take the advice. This was the first time since Lyndon Johnson dropped his re-election bid in mid-stream in 1968 that such a thing had happened. Biden now endorsed his Vice-President Harris to replace him. Yet at this time, there was less than one month until the convention. Reportedly, only Marianne Williamson even tried to explore contesting Harris. But since there was an early ballot roll call two weeks before the convention, this made it even harder to rally any kind of challenge. So there was no state by state delegation pitch by alternative candidates. There was simply no time. Kamala Harris became the appointed candidate. There was no debate, no opposition, no public interview by the media and no questions asked why the DNC accepted such a will-nilly process which allowed no opposition. After all, in 1968, both Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy ran against Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.

    Because of the memory of the violence in Chicago in 1968, the DNC arranged a huge police force outside the convention floor so protestors could not become visible on camera. They also allowed no Palestinian/American to address the huge congregation on the Israeli invasion of Gaza with its thousands of civilian casualties. Perhaps that would have been a flashback to the Vietnam protests at the Chicago 1968 convention. Meanwhile, Harris has tried to track left on domestic issues, like housing.   But she seems to be more or less another Biden or Hillary Clinton on foreign policy. There is no urgency to end the wars in Ukraine or the Middle East. One could create a lot of housing with the tens of billions America is supplying for those wars. And let us not forget: it was Harris as Attorney General of California who opposed a retrial for Sirhan Sirhan in the death of Robert Kennedy.

    Years ago, when she first ran for president, this author did a review of her record at the time, which included the RFK case. We reprint these here as a reminder of who she was and is.

    Read Part One

    Read Part Two

  • Maureen Callahan Goes over the Edge-Along with Megyn Kelly Pt 3

    Maureen Callahan Goes over the Edge-Along with Megyn Kelly Pt 3

    As I have shown in Part One, Maureen Callahan’s three sets of eyes on her cover—Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette—are really a portentous charade. In Part Two, I explained why Mimi Alford is not credible; Leo Damore is not reliable on Chappaquiddick and third, how she turns the innocent into the guilty in the cases of Michael Skakel and William Kennedy Smith. She manages this by consistently using very questionable and biased sources. She is so consistent on this that it suggests a lack of objectivity from the start.

    But even after all of the above, we are still not done scrubbing Callahan. There is the case of Arabella Kennedy. This was a child who Jackie Kennedy delivered stillborn in 1955. It’s true that John Kennedy was not there for his wife, but it is also true that the child was born prematurely by about five weeks. And, unlike Callahan, I do not trust George Smathers as a source about John F. Kennedy in this case. (Callahan, p. 37; for Smathers, see Don McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, 193-218) In fact, I could not find any notes to this episode in her references section. Yet, in spite of this, she actually rebuilds dialogue.

    Then there is Diana DeVegh. This is a woman who revealed she had an affair with John Kennedy rather late in life. She first wrote about it sixty years after it happened. I have no doubt if she had waited 15 more years, Callahan still would have printed it.

    There was no way Callahan was going to leave alone the tragedy of Rosemary Kennedy. She was the first daughter to Joe and Rose Kennedy. No one knows what the real problem with Rosemary was. It may have begun with Rose’s difficult birth of her, done without her normal doctor. But most observers think that this uncertainty was the beginning of the spiraling road downward.

    Whatever the basis of the problem, her rages and tantrums grew worse and worse upon her return from England in 1940. She became uncontrollable. As one writer described it, Rosemary would pace “up and down the halls of her home…like a wild animal, given to screaming, cursing, and thrashing out at anyone who tried to thwart her will.” She even physically assaulted her 78 year old grandfather, to the point she had to be restrained. (Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, “The Miracle Cure” at The Literary Hub)

    Joseph Kennedy—the less we write about what Callahan says about him the better—finally became desperate. He consulted with two doctors at George Washington University Hospital. They recommended what was then called a leucotomy, something being sold as a cure all for violent anti-social behavior. We know this today as a prefrontal lobotomy. And it was a terrible mistake for all involved, most of all Rosemary. She became an invalid and was sent to a convent in Wisconsin. There she lived in a private home and had full time care. (ibid, Lieberman)

    II

    But as noted above, a serious problem with Callahan is her selectivity. For example, if the Kennedys were so pathological in their relations with the opposite sex, then a couple of obvious questions are: 1.) Why was Ted Kennedy’s second marriage to Victoria Anne, ambassador to Austria, so successful? 2.) Why was Bobby Kennedy’s marriage to Ethel so enduring? (As I have shown, the stuff she writes about Bobby through Jeanne Carmen is rubbish) And if one is going to use Kick Kennedy as a strike against the mother Rose Kennedy, then why not bring up the facts of the very successful and lengthy marriages of say Eunice Shriver and Jean Kennedy Smith? I think to most objective people this pattern betrays an agenda.

    But none of the above bothered Megyn Kelly. And before Kelly gave her so much time, as far as I can see, the book was not doing very well. But not only did Kelly give her a lot of time, she whole heartedly endorsed all that is in the book. But, beyond that, on her YouTube channel she actually labeled what Callahan wrote about Jackie as “Shocking new reporting”. Having read through all Callahan wrote about Jackie Kennedy, and taken many notes, I am still wondering how any of it is new. And if any of it is new, as I noted, I failed to see references.

    On that same channel Kelly actually said that Mary Jo Kopechne was killed by Ted Kennedy. As I explained in Part 2, this is simply not the case. It was an accident pure and simple and Ted Kennedy tried to save her. But since Callahan was working an agenda through the flawed author Leo Damore, like a ringmaster, Kelly follows it word by word.

    Here is the very serious professional problem with this. Kelly started her career as a lawyer, with a degree from Albany Law School. She then worked as a practicing attorney for ten years. So she understands the rules of evidence and testimony. Any good lawyer would have sliced and diced this book into pieces.

    Now here is something else that the reader should understand about these Kelly/Callahan You Tube interviews. Kelly is worth tens of millions. She was very well paid at Fox for 13 years. She then jumped to NBC News where she was again very well paid for two years, reportedly at about 15 million per year. When NBC terminated her she collected about 30 million. (The question should have been: why did NBC ever hire her?)

    Now, let us give Kelly the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did not know anything about this material. But if Kelly was not cognizant of any of the problems I have sorted through, what was to stop the millionairess from hiring a fact checker? Callahan’s book is less than four hundred pages.   So it would have taken a fact checker maybe a month to hand in a thorough and annotated report. Total cost would have been maybe 12-15 thousand dollars; a proverbial drop in the bucket for Kelly.

    Was there a reason for that lack? There are indications there were. Because if you were looking for some balance, some questioning, some kind of cross examination from the former lawyer, forget it. Kelly pretty much accepts everything in the book and then leads Callahan on from point to point, with nothing asked or overturned.

    For anyone in the know, their interview on the Marilyn Monroe mirage is actually ludicrous. As many Jackie Kennedy biographers have noted, the reason she was not at the 1962 Madison Square Garden birthday/fundraiser is that she did not like doing those kinds of events. That fundraiser featured 17 entertainers, one of which was Monroe The reason Jackie went to Dallas/Fort Worth is because her husband had allowed her to take a cruise with her sister after her miscarriage with Patrick. When Callahan starts talking about some kind of ultimatum that Jackie gave JFK over Monroe, we are in sci fi land. Except Kelly doesn’t realize it.

    But wait, wait, then it gets worse. Callahan says that this “ultimatum” then caused JFK to cut off his “relationship” with Monroe. Still more. It was this alleged curtailment that caused Monroe’s death. And Callahan can’t help herself. She adds this for the road: the Kennedys probably had a hand in her passing.

    What does lawyer Kelly say in reply to all this? She actually says that Bobby Kennedy was in LA on the day Marilyn died. As I noted in Part One, this is provably false. (Susan Bernard, Marilyn: Intimate Exposures, pp. 184-87). And Callahan’s so called evidence would be demolished by the photographic proof in Susan Bernard’s book. But then Kelly adds something that is probably just as bad. That somehow, even if Bobby did not kill her, it was the Kennedys who somehow ruined Monroe. Well, ringmaster Kelly has just cued up Callahan. Callahan says the brothers tossed her around like a sexual plaything. As Don McGovern and Gary Vitacco Robles have shown, there is no evidence at all that Bobby Kennedy ever had any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with Monroe. (Don McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, pp. 177-87; pp. 236-37) There is evidence of perhaps one encounter with JFK, but Vitacco Robles even disputes that. So this is more mythology, which Kelly encourages and then let slide. Some lawyer.

    Now let us get out of sci fi land to the facts. The LA suicide prevention squad that investigated Monroe’s death —made up of Dr. Norman Farberow, Dr. Edwin Shneidman and Dr Robert Litman—reported that she had tried to take her life on four prior occasions. Since 1955 she had been through three different psychoanalysts: Margaret Hohenberg, Marianne Kris and Ralph Greenson. Kris had her institutionalized in 1961 since she felt she was suicidal.(The Marilyn Report, 2/11/2002) She had been married and divorced three times by the time she was 35. There is no doubt that Monroe was a pill freak, and this was before she ever met Bobby Kennedy. She suffered from insomnia, depression and many commentators understand it today as bipolar disorder. This caused her to escape via alcohol and chemical abuse. (Dr. Howard Markel, PBS News, 8/5/2016)

    To leave all of that out, and more, is simply irresponsible writing and journalism. And Kelly’s interview with Callahan was for me at the level of tabloidism. Whatever credibility Kelly had as a journalist—and for me it was not much—has now dissolved into cheap grandstanding.

    III

    If one looks at her references, these are some of the sources Callahan uses.

    Sy Hersh

    Hustler

    National Enquirer

    Dominick Dunne

    Peter Collier

    David Horowitz

    Leo Damore

    David Heymann

    Kitty Kelley

    Richard Burke

    Ron Kessler

    Thomas Reeves

    James Spada

    To go through and analyze what is wrong with these sources would, in and of itself, take another essay. But the fact that she uses them without qualification, I believe, suggests what her intent was.

    When one reads the book, there are indications that, as with Hersh, this is partly a political book. Some of the things that Hersh tried to do were so off the wall wrong—like involving the Kennedys in the assassination plots against Castro—that the only way one could explain them was through a political agenda. Well, there are indications of that with Callahan.

    This begins quite early when she says that somehow John Kennedy Jr. was wrong to insist that his father was not going to escalate in Vietnam. (Callahan, p. 6). She actually calls the idea that President Kennedy was going to disengage a “post assassination myth”. Can the woman be for real?

    The declassifications of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) proved beyond a doubt that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his assassination. The records of the May 1963 Sec/Def meeting proved definitively that Kennedy had ordered Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to request schedules for withdrawal from all major agencies: CIA, Pentagon, and State Department. When McNamara was in receipt of them he replied that they were too slow. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3 pp. 18-21) These documents were so convincing that even the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer ran stories about them, billed as Kennedy’s plan to get out of Vietnam.

    So the question becomes: If that meeting took place five months before the assassination, how could this be a “post assassination myth”? And one should add that McNamara’s initial request for this withdrawal action took place in May of 1962. Which is 18 months before Kennedy was killed. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 119-21). When McNamara made this original request the Vietnam commanding general’s chin figuratively hit the floor. General Paul Harkins was shocked. This, and more, all culminated of course in National Security Action Memorandum 263 in October of 1963. That was the order for an initial withdrawal of a thousand advisors, and a complete withdrawal by 1965. (Douglass, p. 180). Again, I hate to tell Callahan, but that is about six weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. So, again, how could it be a ”post-assassination myth”?

    This was all reversed by Lyndon Johnson in the space of about three months. Culminating in National Security Action Memorandum 288 in March of 1964, which mapped out an air war against North Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August was essentially a declaration of war. (JFK Revisited, James DiEugenio, pp. 216-217) So what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ accomplished in nine months. It is hard to ignore something as sweeping as that. But Callahan manages to do so.

    But then there is this: somehow the Missile Crisis was a catastrophe of Kennedy’s own making. (Callahan, p. 289) Again, this is simple nonsense.

    To anyone who knows anything about that much studied event, it was not Kennedy who caused it. Kennedy had made it clear to the Soviets that he would allow defensive weapons in Cuba but not offensive ones. (The Kennedys Tapes, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, p. 35) And, in a letter, Nikita Khrushchev had told Kennedy:

    We have stated on many occasions, and I now state again, that our government does not seek any advantages or privileges in Cuba. We have no bases in Cuba, and we do not intend to establish any. (Ibid, p. 34)

    This might have been the case in the spring of 1961. But it was not the case a year later. In March of 1962, Khrushchev began haranguing Kennedy about Berlin becoming a demilitarized free city. (ibid, p. 35) Which the Russian leader knew was a sensitive spot with JFK, as he saw it as the nexus of the Atlantic Alliance. In July there were reports of “Soviet freighters steaming for Cuba with what appeared to be military cargo on board.” There were accompanying reports of military equipment arriving at Cuban ports and moving to the interior under Soviet escort. (ibid). CIA Director John McCone was the first to suggest that the Soviets were sending in offensive medium range ballistic missiles. And as early as August, Kennedy “raised the question of what we should do in Cuba if Soviets participated a Berlin crisis.” (ibid, p. 36)

    This was in all likelihood correct. Because the size and scope of the atomic armada betrayed any kind of defense against a Cuban exile invasion. There were 40 land based missile launchers, with 60 missiles in five missile regiments. There were both medium and long range missiles, the long range missiles could fly a distance of 2,400 miles. There were also 140 air defense sites to protect the launchers. In addition to this there were 40 nuclear armed IL-28 bombers. The third leg of the triad was a nuclear armed submarine pen consisting of seven atomic launching subs with one megaton payloads. That would be five times the power of the Nagasaki bomb. But further, the Russians provided a wing of MIG-21’s, and 45,000 men in motorized divisions. In other words, the Soviets had a protected first strike that could hit over 100 American cities with ferocious atomic power. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 66)

    It was Kennedy who was confronted with this out of the blue. And when he called in the Soviet foreign minister, Andei Gromyko, he was lied to. (May and Zelikow, p. 169) Kennedy now felt he had to take some kind of action to remove the threat. He decided on the least aggressive act, the blockade. And this worked toward a settlement for which he went around his advisors, sending his brother Robert to negotiate with the Russian ambassador. One reason he did this was because most everyone else wanted either an invasion or a bombing run on the missile siloes. (DiEugenio, p. 64) And this included not just military men but congressmen. Because of the Russian forces on the island either of those options would have created many casualties. And if there was an invasion it very well might have resulted in atomic holocaust since the Russians had given Castro two varieties of tactical nuclear weapons, short and long range.

    How Callahan can say that Kennedy created that first strike armada is beyond me. But there can be little doubt that Kennedy was the most important person on the American side in avoiding atomic war. For whatever reason, Callahan wants to reverse that.

    IV

    We have seen how Callahan distorts two important Cold War military issues, one in Cuba and one in Vietnam. Many commentators think those areas loom large in the violent fate of the brothers. Since, as for example, John Bohrer proves, Bobby Kennedy was even more liberal in 1967-68 than his brother was in ‘62-63. (See his fine book, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy)

    In my opinion one can draw a dotted line between her treatment of those two huge issues and the assassinations of Bobby and John. The first is explicit and the second is indirect. In dealing with the assassination of Robert Kennedy, she writes that there were 3 gunshots. (p. 113) And that Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy by himself. (ibid)

    Any amateur investigator in that case rushes straight into the problem that there was much solid evidence to betray many more than three shots being fired that night at the Ambassador Hotel. Lisa Pease perhaps has the best study on that case, and through some very detailed and revealing work from the UCLA archives, she believes that there more like 14 bullets fired. (Pease, A Lie too Big to Fail. p.265) She furnishes prolific evidence for those findings including pictures and illustrations of the walls and the swinging door opening into the pantry where Kennedy was shot. In addition to this there were injuries to other victims. (See for example, pp. 258-63) She has also unearthed other suspects like Michael Wayne (Pease, p. 313-14) and Thane Eugene Cesar. They were in much better positions to shoot Kennedy than Sirhan was. Sirhan was in front of the senator, slightly off at an angle, yet all the bullets that struck RFK came from behind, at extreme upward angles, and fairly close range. in fact the fatal shot to the skull was at contact range 2-3 inches. (Pease pp.68-69) Sirhan was never that close. Cesar was. But further, although Cesar said he had a gun similar to the one used in the assassination, he said he had sold it prior to that event. This was later proven false. He had sold it after the assassination.(Bill Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, p. 166)

    So what Callahan says about the murder of RFK is wrong on all counts.

    In her reference section, Callahan lists the Warren Report. (p. 337). I assume she read it. Therefore she knows that the Commission concluded that Oswald fired all the shots that struck President Kennedy, Governor John Connally and bystander James Tague. And since Oswald was allegedly inside a building behind the limousine, all the shots came from that direction. This is the major conclusion from the Warren Report. No one who reads it can miss it.

    Yet early in the book, in describing the Dallas assassination scene, Callahan first tells us about Jackie leaning out the back of the car after the fusillade in order to retrieve a part of her husband’s skull. (p. 25). She then tells us that, as Secret Service agent Clint Hill jumped on the car from the trunk, he saw through the back of Kennedy’s skull. (ibid). Yet she never comments on this paradox with the Warren Report. If the Commission was correct, then how could Kennedy’s skull eject backwards out of the car. Secondly, how could there be a large hole in the rear of his skull. Entrance holes are usually small and neat, it is exit holes that look like what Hill saw. In other words, Callahan has just shown the Warren Report is dubious. But she does not want to dwell on that, so she passes it over like its not important. When in fact it is crucial.

    V

    In her prologue, when Callahan says her book is not ideological or partisan, these claims ring hollow due to the evidence adduced above. Further, in her stream of consciousness style, she says that Jackie Kennedy realized that all the claims made about JFK at the tenth anniversary were lies, among them being he was a good man who would have been a great president, (Callahan, p. 227). Again, can she be serious?

    This is undermined by her interview with Theodore White for Life magazine, and blasted into orbit by the book Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. That volume was so valuable in its insights about her husband’s policies that Monika Wiesak used it in her fine analysis of Kennedy’s presidency, America’s Last President.

    After writing this 3 part analysis, one that Megyn Kelly was averse to doing, contrary to Callanan’s plea, I think the book is ideological and partisan. No one could have so consistently used the sources she did as a haphazard decision. By chance, no one could have been as selective as she is in her use of evidence. No one could have been so eager to rush to such questionable conclusions in each case if they were at all trying to be objective.

    In fact, right at the beginning, she makes this clear by going after Robert Kennedy Jr. and his presidential candidacy. She calls him “a prominent conspiracy theorist and anti vaxxer who has made racist and antisemitic comments…” (p. xii) She prefaces this by saying that “The Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force, both in our politics and our culture.” Well if you leave out JFK’s withdrawal from Vietnam, and his masterful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, you can say that.

    But beyond that, this completely clashes with historical fact. Because in Larry Sabato’s book, The Kennedy Half Century, the author did interviews with focus groups on this subject. The public came to a contrary conclusion. The vast majority thought that Kennedy’s assassination changed the country. It took away America’s innocence and it was, in retrospect, an unthinkable act.

    Those alive at the time can attest to the deep depression that set in across the country, as the optimism that had mainly prevailed since the end of World War II seemed to evaporate. …Kennedy’s murder, marked the end of an era of peace and prosperity.. (p. 416)

    It seem to me that Callahan’s agenda, like Sy Hersh and Thomas Reeves before him, is to do what she can to somehow alter that public consciousness. In fact, its pretty clear from her prologue that this is her intent. Which is probably why Megyn Kelly and then Fox have supported her. And Kelly has had her on more, this time to go after Kamala Harris. Which kind of gives the game away. A pseudo journalist, teaming with a pseudo historian to attack the woman who endangers the GOP nominee.

    Especially in light of the following. Donald Trump has been in court twice over a sexual assault charge from advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. And he lost both of those cases. In the second one he defamed her and was ordered to pay over 80 million. Trump had an affair with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, while he was married to his current wife Melania. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, McDougal said that Trump tried to pay her after sex, their relationship lasted ten months and she saw him dozens of times. She was paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer in order to kill that story for political purposes. Trump also has been adjudicated as to paying to have sex with Stormy Daniels, a porn star—while his wife was pregnant–and then trying to conceal that act, again for political purposes. He also began an affair with Marla Maples-his future wife– while he was married to his first wife Ivana.

    For someone like Kelly, and for Fox, Callahan’s book creates a nice diversion from their man’s serious character problems. Which, unlike say Marilyn Monroe, are real and actually adjudicated as true.

    Read Part One

    Read Part Two

  • Sylvia Hyde Hoke Dies

    The sister of Ruth Paine, Sylvia Hyde Hoke, has passed on. Read more.

  • How JFK Tried to Prevent our “Lesser Evil” Elections

    How JFK Tried to Prevent our “Lesser Evil” Elections

    Many Americans feel disenfranchised and are tired of voting for the “lesser evil.” But why does every election cycle offer so few decent options? While many factors are at play, perhaps the reason for this lack of choice that supersedes all others is money in politics. After all, if political officeholders were accountable to the American people rather than to their donors, then the policies they implement would align far more closely with the interests of the average American. One man tried admirably to address this issue.

    John F. Kennedy felt deeply that the duty of the American president was to “serve as … the defender of the public good and the public interest against all the narrow private interests which operate in our society.” [1] He understood the grave challenges that money in politics placed on that obligation. And he made it clear that he would not succumb to those financial pressures. In a May 1961 press conference, he declared:

    I made it clear in the campaign and I make it clear again … that while we’re glad to have support, no one should contribute to any campaign fund under the expectation that it will do them the slightest bit of good and they should not stay home from a campaign fund or dinner under the slightest expectation that it will do them a disservice. [2]

    He understood, however, that such strict ethical adherence would be much easier achieved if financial pressures were taken off public officials. As such, he added to his statement that the U.S. needed “to try to work out some other way of raising funds for these presidential campaigns … and as long as we can’t get broader citizen participation, I think it ought to be done through the national government, and I would support that strongly if the Congress would move in that direction.” [3]

    To help guide Congress, JFK created a Commission on Campaign Costs in October 1961 to review and recommend alternate ways of financing campaigns. In his announcement of the commission, he proclaimed:

    To have Presidential candidates dependent on large financial contributions of those with special interests is highly undesirable, especially in these days when the public interest requires basic decisions so essential to our national security and survival.

    … Traditionally, the funds for national campaigns have been supplied entirely by private contributions, with the candidates forced to depend in the main on large sums from a relatively small number of contributors. It is not healthy for the democratic process—or for ethical standards in our government—to keep our national candidates in this position of dependence. I have long thought that we should either provide a federal share in campaign costs, or reduce the cost of campaign services, or both. [4]

    In April 1962, the commission issued its findings. [5] On May 29, 1962, JFK wrote a letter to the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House, stating, “It is essential to broaden the base of financial support for candidates and parties. …” JFK indicated that this could be accomplished via an incentive system. He specifically recommended a tax incentive that would give each taxpayer the choice of receiving a 50 percent tax credit on their contribution amount, up to $10 annually (valued at approximately $100 in 2024), or a reduction in taxable income, up to $750 annually. If that was not acceptable to the legislators, he suggested that the government match all contributions under $10. So, for every $10 donated by a citizen, the government would contribute another $10 to the citizen’s chosen candidate. He also requested that all large donors be required to disclose their donations. [6] He resubmitted a similar letter to the Senate and the House on April 30, 1963, declaring, “The people of the United States are entitled to know their candidates for public office and to be free of doubts about tacit or explicit obligations having been necessary to secure public office.” [7] He urged them again to consider his proposed legislation.

    JFK opposed setting contribution limits, not because he felt they were unnecessary, but because he thought that practically, they could never be enforced. The commission explained to him that placing limits would only increase the number of political action committees (PACs). PACs are generally formed by corporations, labor unions, trade associations, or other organizations or individuals. [8] They fund campaign activities and are subject to federal limits. Super PACs are independent expenditure-only political committees that raise money to influence elections through advertising and other efforts. They cannot directly contribute to or work with a campaign. Their donations are not subject to federal limits. [9]

    The commission pointed out that “there is doubt whether individuals could be prohibited from making certain expenditures, instead of contributions, if the latter were effectively limited, in view of constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression.” [10] In place of limits, JFK proposed the “establishment of an effective system of disclosure and publicity to reveal where money comes from and goes in campaigns.” He declared that in the commission’s view “full and effective disclosure … provides the greatest hope for effective controls over excessive contributions and unlimited expenditures.” [11]

    JFK proposed these legislative changes in 1962 and again in 1963. There is no guarantee that he would have been able to pass the legislation, but he would likely have continued to try, and it is not uncommon for legislation to take several years to be enacted into law successfully. When considering that JFK’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, may have been elected as president after him, had he not been assassinated while running for the presidency in 1968, it is pretty likely the legislation would have eventually passed. Instead, we got the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which set hard limits on financial contributions and did not create an incentive system to encourage vast numbers of small, federally financed donations. The act had the end result of accomplishing what the commission predicted such policies would accomplish: a vast increase in the number of PACs and multiple Supreme Court decisions striking down parts of the law as unconstitutional. [12] It failed to broaden the base of political contributions or remove the influence of wealth on political campaigns.

    The first Supreme Court decision to strike down parts of the Federal Election Campaign Act was Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976. The court declared that placing limits on campaign expenditures was unconstitutional as it infringed on the right to political speech. The court upheld the limits on campaign contributions, saying that individuals could still contribute independently, outside the official campaign, preserving their free speech rights. One can promote a candidate without contributing to his official campaign. [13]

    In the 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case, the Supreme Court determined that laws preventing corporations or unions from using their funds for independent “electioneering communications” violated the First Amendment. [14]

    Had JFK lived, his proposed campaign finance laws would likely have passed in place of the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. His legislation would have led to a much broader base of campaign contributors. This, in turn, would have led to the election of officials who were more pressed to serve the small donor, which would have spawned policy decisions that were beneficial to the average American. Wealth would have still greatly influenced campaigns but less so than today. There would have been some degree of balance.

    Notes

    1. Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street (New York, NY: Sheridan Square Publications, 1994), 19.
    2. News Conference 11, May 5, 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-press-conferences/news-conference-11.
    3. News Conference 11, May 5, 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-press-conferences/news-conference-11.
    4. Office of the White House Press Secretary Press Release, October 4, 1961, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Departments and Agencies, Commission on Campaign Costs, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkpof-093-002#?image_identifier=JFKPOF-093-002-p0029.
    5. News Conference 31, April 18, 1962, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-press-conferences/news-conference-31.
    6. Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House Transmitting Bills to Carry Out Recommendations of the Commission on Campaign Costs, May 29, 1962, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-president-the-senate-and-the-speaker-the-house-transmitting-bills-carry-out-0.
    7. Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House Transmitting Bills to Carry Out Recommendations of the Commission on Campaign Costs, April 30, 1963, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-president-the-senate-and-the-speaker-the-house-transmitting-bills-carry-out.
    8. Michael Levy, “Political Action Committee,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-action-committee.
    9. “How Does Campaign Funding Work?” Caltech Science Exchange, https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/voting-elections/campaign-funding-finance-explained.
    10. Report of the President’s Commission on Campaign Costs, pg 17, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Departments and Agencies, Commission on Campaign Costs, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkpof-093-002#?image_identifier=JFKPOF-093-002-p0018.
    11. Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House Transmitting Bills to Carry Out Recommendations of the Commission on Campaign Costs, April 30, 1963, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-president-the-senate-and-the-speaker-the-house-transmitting-bills-carry-out.
    12. Clifford A. Jones, “Federal Election Campaign Act,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Federal-Election-Campaign-Act.
    13. Clifford A. Jones, Buckley vs. Valeo, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Buckley-v-Valeo.
    14. Brian Duignan, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Citizens-United-v-Federal-Election-Commission.
  • Maureen Callahan Goes over the Edge–Along with Megyn Kelly Pt. 2

    Maureen Callahan Goes over the Edge–Along with Megyn Kelly Pt. 2

    There was no way that someone like Maureen Callahan was not going to use Mimi Alford. And Callahan used her in two different sections of her book. Even though she presents a myriad of problems.  Greg Parker did a nice job outlining the origin problems with Robert Dallek’s surfacing of the story. (Article by Parker at reopenkennedy case.net of 2/7/2012) As he points out there was no ‘intern” program being run out the White House by press officer Barbara Gamarekian–who was Dallek’s original source for Alford. This was likely a term Dallek wanted to use to make a parallel with Monica Lewinsky. Secondly, at first no one recalled Alford, even when Dallek first brought her name up. As Parker notes, after Dallek’s book came out, reporters pieced together a story of her being at the Bermuda summit with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. (Time magazine, May 26, 2003) How do you piece together something from 1961 in 2003? Especially when no one recalled her at first?

    Plus the Alford claim is she did not start at the White House until 1962. (NY Times 2/11/62)

    But the story is actually worse than that. And Callahan knows it but she just discounts it. Mimi claimed she was in the White House during the Missile Crisis. (Callahan, p. 289) And also that JFK sent his wife and kids away so he could be with her. (Sunday Times, 2/12/12) 

    As biographer Randy Taraborrelli shows, this is more malarkey. Jackie Kennedy refused Secret Service agent Clint Hill’s request for her to go to a bomb shelter in the East Wing. (Taraborrelli, Jackie: Public, Private, Secret, p. 100) She refused to relocate elsewhere. The reason she gave was that average American citizens did not have that opportunity so she should not either. During the entire two week episode, she was gone for only two days.  And this coincided to times when her husband was also gone.  And when this happened, it was JFK who called her and said he was returning, so she should also come back. (ibid, pp. 101-02) Jackie clearly stated that if she was going to perish in an atomic war she would do so with her husband and kids. (ibid, p. 104)

    But the most jocular part of the Alford story is her statement that not only was she there during the Missile Crisis, but Kennedy told her “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” (The Guardian, 2/10/12)

    How can any informed person keep a straight face while reading such rubbish? Kennedy went on national TV and warned the Russians that any missile launched from Cuba would be considered an attack from Russia.  He considered the secret installation of a first strike force in Cuba to be a Russian ploy in order for Moscow to make a play for Berlin.  And that is where Kennedy had drawn a line in the sand. And any historian can tell that from the preceding year’s Berlin Crisis. Furthering that line in the sand was OPLAN 316, a huge joint Pentagon operation that was designed for land, sea and air operations against Cuba. Thank heaven that did not occur since the Russians had given Castro tactical nuclear weapons with which to incinerate any incoming invasion.

    Kennedy’s open determination to go to the brink was part of his masterful diplomacy that saved us from incineration. It has always been part of the conservative agenda to somehow demean Kennedy’s stellar achievement.

    II

    Callahan’s approach was not going to spare Ted Kennedy.  Even though many Republicans called him the most effective Democratic senator of the era.  Who can forget his attack on Judge Robert Bork? Kennedy’s call in the night was a warning against that The Federalist Society was hijacking our judiciary system in broad daylight, something that Donald Trump completed, with loathsome results.  Equally memorable was his eloquent, unforgettable concession speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention, which seemed to sum up the whole reason d’etre of the party.

    Well Callahan can. And she  does her usual rigging of the schema. She discounts credible and objective biographies of Kennedy by accomplished biographers like Neal Gabler and John Farrell. Instead she references and uses a book about him by a guy named Richard E. Burke. (p. 361) I strongly recommend the reader go to Amazon and compare the number of books and biographies published by Gabler and Farrell and the number by Burke. You will see many by the first two, I could only find one by the last: the Kennedy book.  With likely good reason.

    As reviewer Theo Lippman, who wrote a book about Kennedy,  said, he got all of Teddy’s staff to talk to him except Burke.  Lippmann learned that Burke was a gofer.  And he made up stuff like Kennedy sharing cocaine with his children. But what some journalists dug up was that what caused Burke to write the book was a combination of personal bankruptcy, drug dependence and serious emotional problems. (Greensboro News and Record, 10/24/92). It was a sizeable bankruptcy, $875, 230.00.  According to another report , numerous people’s names in the book were changed, and composites were used. (Sharon Isaak, Entertainment Weekly, 10/30/92)

    Is this the way to write biography? Well, I guess its okay for Callahan.

    In addition to Burke, she also says that the late Leo Damore’s book about the Chappaquiddick tragedy is the best on the subject. (Callahan, p. 348)  Yet Senatorial Privilege was rejected by its original publisher, Random House. Even though they had given Damore  a $150,000 advance. This ended up in a court action since Random House wanted their money back. Damore said this was all caused by pressure from the Kennedy family. The judge in the case stated that that there were no extenuating circumstances: that is, the Kennedy family exerted no pressure. He also said the publisher had acted in good faith rejecting the manuscript. Another problem was that Damore was accused of practicing “checkbook journalism” paying off a witness, i.e. Bernie Flynn. (Read Lisa Pease’s discussion of Damore.)

    So what happened to Damore’s book after this? Rightwing literary agent Lucianna Goldberg came to the rescue.  She found him a home at the conservative house Regnery.   One of the most bizarre aspects of Damore’s book is that he suggests that the drowning victim, Mary Jo Kopechne, survived for hours after the crash due to an air pocket in the car. And she appears to borrow this. (Callahan, p. 106) This is utter nonsense. Because three of the windows in the car were open when the car hit the water. (Chappaquiddick: The Real Story,  by James Lange and Katherine DeWitt, p.41) Also, Damore all but dismissed the effect of hypothermia in this case.

    Another problem with Damore is his use of Joe Gargan, a Kennedy cousin, as a witness.  Gargan had a falling out with Ted Kennedy in the early eighties.  As Pease notes, even the NY Times took issue with this: “What undermines Mr. Damore’s account is that these accusations, while seeming to come from a firsthand source, are not direct quotes from Mr. Gargan, nor are they attributed directly to the 1983 interviews.”  The accusation is that Kennedy wanted Gargan to say that it was him driving the car.  The problem is that there is no evidence in the original record that Kennedy ever said or even implied such a thing. (op. cit. Pease)

    But the worst part of Damore’s book was its title.  Because as James Lange and Katherine DeWitt point out, Ted Kennedy did not get any special treatment as a result of this case. Lange was a personal injury lawyer, and he concluded that Kennedy got what any other person who could afford a good lawyer would. He had to pay a combined indemnity to the Kopechne family of in what is today well over a million dollars, he got his license suspended, and a two month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident.  (Lange, p. 151, pp. 160-62)

    Callahan, I think borrowing from the cheapjack film that was made of this tragic episode, tries to say that Ted Kennedy really did not need the neck brace he was wearing . (Callahan, p. 121) Again, this is malarkey. Both doctors who examined Kennedy told him to wear that brace due to cervical strain. That would be Dr. Watt, a trauma specialist, and Dr. Broughan, a neurosurgeon. (Lange, p. 51, p. 120) I think they know something more about such injuries than Callahan.

    In fact they both concluded that, among other injuries, Kennedy suffered a concussion so severe that he had both retrograde amnesia and post traumatic amnesia. (ibid, pp. 120-21) In fact Brougham wanted to do a lumbar puncture, popularly called a spinal tap.  This was a dangerous operation at the time; but he suspected there was blood leaking into Kennedy’s brain. (ibid, p. 51, p. 72)

    Kennedy had almost always used a driver to get him around.  That night was about a one in a hundred exception.(Lange, p.195)  And this was the first time he had even been on the Chappaquiddick Island.(Lange, p. 191)  In fact, he had been driven to the cottage where the Robert Kennedy memorial cookout was taking place.(Lange, p. 201)  In his original statement given to the police it is revealed just how unfamiliar he was with Mary Jo. (p. 100) He could not spell her name correctly. (Callahan notes Mary Jo was not wearing panties;  she should have noted that she was wearing slacks. Lange, p. 42).

    Callahan also tries to imply that Kennedy was drunk and speeding at the time. She says he had four coke and rums.  He had two all evening. (Lange, p. 138, p. 205) As for speeding he was driving around 20 miles per hour upon entry to the main road and slowed down to about 7-8 MPH as he took the right turn onto Dyke Bridge, which was the wrong turn and on a bridge with no lights and no  guard rails. (Lange, p. 201)

    Kennedy made numerous efforts to save Mary Jo.  But the current was so powerful he was unsuccessful. (Lange, p. 87, p. 208-10)  The same thing happened when he enlisted Gargan and Paul Markham to help.

    The third book that Callahan uses is a biography of Ted Kennedy’s first wife Joan.  The book was written by Joan’s administrative assistant for three years, Marcia Chellis.  What I thought was interesting in this book is that although Callahan criticizes Ted for being a cheater, its pretty clear from Chellis’ descriptions that Joan cheated on Ted also. (Living with the Kennedys, p. 47).  What is also interesting is that Ted supplied Joan with a lot of help in the house, maid, cook etc.  And somehow, that is supposed to be a bad thing? (Ibid, p. 38)

    Finally, that book closes with Joan’s recovery from alcoholism and her return to normality after the finalization of her divorce from Ted Kennedy.  The implication being that it was all Ted’s fault and Joan would now go on to fulfill her potential both personally and professionally.

    Chellis spoke too soon. That is not what happened. In 1988 her car crashed into a fence on Cape Cod. This earned a 45 day license suspension, with an order to go to meetings about her alcoholism. Three years later, she was arrested for drinking vodka straight out of a bottle while weaving her car along an expressway. She was later sent for rehabs at McLean Hospital and also at St Luke’s in New York.  The latter specializes in celebrity treatments. She said she finally felt free around this point. (Boston.com, “The Fall of Joan”, 5/15/2006)

    Then in 2006 she was found with blood on her face trying to get up after a fall on a Beacon Street sidewalk. Someone called for an ambulance.  She sustained a concussion and a broken shoulder. Her blood alcohol was above the legal limit. This episode eventually led to her three children setting up the equivalent of a conservatorship over her affairs and assets.  For one thing, she was hiding her addictions from her own caretaker. (ibid)

    Just recall, 2006 was well over 20  years after her divorce from  Ted Kennedy.

    III

    Maureen Callahan’s book is so imbalanced, so agenda driven, that even if you are a Kennedy relative who is  innocent, you are guilty.  A good example of this is the William Kennedy Smith/Patricia Bowman incident from 1991 . Callahan touches on this case in passing three times. (p. 180, pp. 268-69, pp. 313-14)  And she clearly sides with the accuser Bowman without describing any of the evidence that caused the jury to acquit Smith. In March of 1991, the two met at a bar in Palm Beach, Florida and  according to Smith, Bowman offered to drive him home. Smith was the nephew of Senator Ted Kennedy, the son of Jean Kennedy Smith who was appointed ambassador to Ireland in 1993. What happened after they arrived at home was a subject of dispute. It was finally decided in court over a broadcast by the Courtroom Television Network, their first jury trial. Bowman’s claim was that Smith sexually assaulted her; Smith insisted that it was consensual sex.  Smith said this happened on the beach. Bowman said it happened near the pool closer to the house; there he tackled and assaulted her. Smith called her story an outrageous lie. (Miami Herald, 5/12/91)

    At first it was believed that there would be no trial since Bowman’s case largely  consisted of her word against Smith’s. But prosecutor Moira Lasch decided  to file charges. This did not occur until May 12, almost six weeks later. (ibid) Smith told his cousin Patrick Kennedy that he felt he was being set up.  And the fact that the woman took an urn and framed photograph out of the house suggested to Patrick that such might have been the case. (Miami Herald, 5/15/91)

    The problem with Lasch’s case was simple.  Defense attorney Roy Black took apart Bowman’s key corroborating witness. Anne Mercer met  Bowman at the Kennedy estate that following morning. Mercer’s story was shown to be a bit inconsistent. For example, in prior statements Mercer said that the victim told her she had been assaulted twice, on the beach and inside the estate. She also said that Ted Kennedy had been watching the first time. (ibid) It came out on Black’s cross examination that she had sold her story to A Current Affair for 40,000 dollars and, with that money, she had taken a trip to Mexico with her live in in boyfriend. This was after she was in receipt of a subpoena for the trial, and after the jury had been selected. Some observers felt this was a turning point in the proceedings. Another fascinating factor Black brought out was this: the accuser was able to find her way to Mercer’s home afterwards–even though this was the first time Mercer said she had ever been there. Black’s cross-examination of Mercer was so effective that legal commentators ended up calling her “his witness”.

    Forensically, Black called  Charles M. Sieger, an architect who examined the house for acoustic properties. He concluded that noises would travel far inside the confines of the home. But the accuser previously said that she screamed that night about 15-20 feet from the property. But none of the dozen people inside heard her. Sieger said, on the contrary, he heard a conversation from the second floor coming from the beach area.(Miami Herald, December 8, 1991) Forensic scientist Henry Lee testified that he could find no grass, or  mud stains or major damage on the accuser’s clothes, which he expected to be there from a struggle on the lawn. He even used a microscope. (Chicago Tribune, 12/8/91).

    In fact, and a point which Black accentuated,  when Mercer arrived to pick her up, the accuser was in the house at the top of a stairs.  She had not run away, or locked herself in her car.

    But here was the real problem with Lasch’s case.  Bowman had removed both her shoes and pantyhose before she entered the house. Black effectively used this fact during his cross examination of both Mercer and Bowman: the suggestion being that she intended to have relations with Smith from the start. We will never know if, as Smith told his cousin Patrick Kennedy, he was being set up. But Black managed to put the possibility out there.

     In a bit over an hour, the jury acquitted Smith.  Needless to say none of this is mentioned by Callahan.

    IV

    The problem with the Smith acquittal can be explained in two words: Dominick Dunne. Dunne was writing  for Vanity Fair and editor Tina Brown at that time. She allowed him to write a story in the March 1992 edition of that magazine saying that Smith was acquitted because of the Kennedys’ “pageant of piety in Palm Beach”.  It was this belief that formed part of the motive for his years long crusade to convict Michael Skakel in the cold case of Martha Moxley’s 1975 murder in Greenwich, Connecticut. Skakel was a nephew to Ethel Kennedy, the widow of murdered Senator Robert Kennedy. Callahan spends about 17 pages on the Moxley case.  But she does not even begin to describe the true roles of Dunne and LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman. (Callahan, pp. 180-196). To anyone familiar with that massive and prolonged media event, this is startling.  Because without those two men, in all probability, there would have been no trial of Michael Skakel

    Callahan suggests that somehow the leaders of Greenwich had little interest in the wake of 15 year old Martha Moxley’s bloody murder during Hell Night in 1975. She also implies that one of the elite was involved.(Callahan, p. 186)   There is an evidentiary problem with that implication.  There was no hard evidence in the case to convict anyone: no matching blood samples, no DNA, no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses, no shoeprints. Therefore, prosecutor Donald Browne did not file charges. But he did commission inquiries.  The two main suspects were Ken Littleton–the Skakel family tutor—and Michael’s older brother, Tom Skakel.  Tom was allegedly having some kind of an affair with Martha and was the last known person to see her alive. But—and it’s a big but– on Hell Night, Halloween Eve, there was and is a large influx of youngsters on the streets and in alleys who party, imbibe in liquor, and smoke dope. (Robert Kennedy Jr, Framed, p. 19).  

    Dunne would have none of this. How bad was Dunne in both cases, i.e. the Smith and Moxley cases?  During the former case, he dropped a rumor that William Kennedy Smith had been in Greenwich the night Moxley was killed, and that Browne wanted to do forensic tests on him. This was false, but it indicates the jihad that Dunne had against the Kennedys. (Vanity Fair, October, 2000)

    Another point that Callahan leaves out: in 1993 Dunne wrote a novel, A Season in Purgatory, based on the Moxley case.  It featured a cover up by the police caused by a wealthy family’s power. Incredibly, the killer is a camouflaged John Kennedy Jr.  Between the rubbish about Smith and this incendiary novel, could Dunne make his intention any more clear?  Also ignored by Callahan: the novel was then made into a mini-series in 1996, and this gave Dunne an even larger platform on the Moxley case.

    In addition to downplaying Dunne’s rabid crusade and erasing Fuhrman, Callahan does not mention Tom Sheridan.  Yet it was through Sheridan that Michael now became a suspect.  It was attorney Sheridan who talked Michael’s father Rushton into doing “purposely prejudicial” inquiries into Tommy, Michael and Littleton on the Moxley case. Sheridan edited those files to spin them against Michael. (Kennedy, pp. 145-46) It was Sheridan who requested that, after a DUI and accident, that his father place Michael in a kind of bootcamp reform school called Elan. Michael was regularly beaten up there, and he tried to escape more than once. He ended up suffering from PTSD because of this house of horrors. Not noted by Callahan: That school was eventually closed down, partly due to the efforts of former students. (Ibid, p. 138)

    Dunne- with help from the late rightwing literary agent Lucianna Goldberg–was rehabbing Fuhrman after his calamity in the O. J. Simpson trial.  The pair convinced the former detective to write a book on the Moxley case. Fuhrman visited this school and he found some of the people who said they knew Skakel. No surprise, they said he confessed to the Moxley killing.  Two of them testified at Skakel’s trial. Michael’s defense was so bereft that the school  administrators were not summoned. One of them, Mr. Ricci, called this testimony preposterous. He never heard about it and he should have. He then would have called in the attorneys. (p. 193) One of the trial witnesses named a corroborator.  When this person was finally found, he said it was all invented.  He then called the two trial witnesses liars. (ibid, pp. 199-200) Callahan uses these witnesses. (Callahan, p. 192)

    The inquiries paid for by Rushton eventually got out to at least three people.  This included Dunne, and he gave them to Fuhrman to write his book, Murder in Greenwich. Dunne also wrote a long article based on them for the October 2000 issue of  Vanity Fair. If you are counting, that is a novel, a mini-series, a non-fiction book, a major magazine article and –we should not leave it out– there was also a broadcast film made out of Fuhrman’s book. Plus both Dunne and Fuhrman made TV appearances. Finally, Dunne gave the files to the investigator on the case, Frank Garr.

    Under this unremitting pressure from outside forces the local authorities succumbed. (Hartford Courant, November 14, 2002, article by Roger Catilin) They indicted Michael using a one man grand jury, they rewrote the statute of limitations, and they tried him as an adult, even though he was a juvenile when the crime occurred.  To top it all off, Michael had a defense attorney, Mickey Sherman, who was somewhat less than zealous, yet he charged Rushton 200,000 dollars for media appearances. (Kennedy, p. 222) Surprisingly, although charging a 2.5 million overall fee, Sherman did not hire a jury selection expert. With this kind of defense, with Dunne and Fuhrman infesting the new DA’s office, and the media arrayed against him, in 2002 Michael was railroaded to conviction.

    In an appeal for a new trial, Skakel was paroled in 2013. His conviction was overturned in 2018 on the grounds that Sherman did not provide an adequate defense. In the appeals process an alibi witness was found for Michael who proved he was not at the scene of the crime. Callahan spends one sentence on this witness. (Callahan, p. 195) The DA could have retried the case. They declined.  Again, Callahan left that out.

    She also does not mention the following: Michael Skakel has filed a lawsuit against both the town of Greenwich and lead investigator Frank Garr.  The primary grounds are malicious prosecution and violation of legal rights. Part of that lawsuit states that  Garr threatened witnesses, hid evidence, and was attempting to profit from a book and movie deal. (CNN report of January 4, 2024 by Syllla and Sabrina Souza) Michael’s lawyer termed what happened to his client a “railroad job”. He called Michael an innocent man who never committed the crime.  (News 12 Connecticut, January 3, 2024)

    For Callahan to not fully reveal this side of the story is inexplicable.  Perhaps because if one does, in tandem with the Smith case, it counters her thesis. The indications are the two men were prosecuted because they were Kennedy related.

    In baseball, there is a term called “taking the collar”.  That means a batter goes zero for four in a nine inning game. That is  he got no hits or walks in four trips to the plate.  As the reader can see, from parts 1 and 2, Callahan has gone zero for seven. Which is more like  the equivalent of taking the collar in a double header. Quite a negative achievement.

     In Part 3:  Former lawyer Megyn Kelly cheerleads Callahan’s trashy book.

    Read Part One

    Read Part Three

  • Maureen Callahan Goes over the Edge—Along with Megyn Kelly Pt 1

    Maureen Callahan Goes over the Edge—Along with Megyn Kelly Pt 1

    Many years ago, at the end of 1997 to be exact, I wrote a two part essay for Probe Magazine entitled “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” This was done in reaction to the publication of Sy Hersh’s horrendous book on Kennedy, entitled the Dark Side of Camelot. That book was so bad, so intellectually problematic that it was almost universally panned; even in the MSM. The most notable instance was by Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books. And Wills was no fan of JFK.

    In that essay, I went through a collection of books that had arisen in what I called the anti-Kennedy category; thus tracing the origins of Hersh’s debacle. This included works by authors like, among others, John Davis, Thomas Reeves, and the writing duo of Peter Collier and David Horowitz. I stated that by the time of the Reeves book, A Question of Character, in 1991, the field had become voluminous enough that an author could just rely on the accumulated secondary sources to do a compendium styled book. Which is what Reeves did. Even to the point of including the utterly fatuous Kitty Kelley article in People magazine in 1988. In that piece, bylined by Kelley, Judith Exner said that she had been a messenger between the White House and Chicago Don Sam Giancana in the plots to kill Castro. For Hersh she said that Bobby Kennedy was cognizant of this and commented on it to her. (Hersh, pp. 307-08). Somehow Hersh missed the fact that on a 1992 program with Larry King, the fraudulent Exner said she never even talked to Bobby Kennedy, at the most she ran into him at a rally in LA. In other words, Exner uttered so many fabrications she could not keep track of them. This is just an inkling of the quicksand one can fall into by implicitly trusting the rabid anti-Kennedy literature.

    II

    Maureen Callahan had no inkling and no trepidations about what had happened to Hersh. After all, as she later reveals, her mother urged her on. Also perhaps because she worked for Rupert Murdoch at the New York Post for two decades. In fact, Callahan just leaped into the morass—headfirst. She has now pretty much done what Reeves did. And, unembarrassed, she includes both Reeves and Hersh in her bibliography. But, her volume more accurately resembles the Collier/Horowitz book, The Kennedys: An American Drama. Why? Because that book did not just focus on John Kennedy. It covered, in large part, the entire Kennedy clan. As I pointed out in my essay, Collier and Horowitz were migrating from the left—they had both worked at Ramparts in upper level positions—to the right. And their Kennedy book was so bad—in every way—that it seemed to provide their golden key to the conservative kingdom. And from all appearances, it did. In other words, theirs was really a political book. Which is why the two former journalists and scholars decided to use Kelley as a source. As we shall see, one can conclude the same for Callahan, who also uses Kelley.

    The title of Callahan’s book is Ask Not. And on the cover there is a set of three eye shots, easily discernible as Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette. I think this is supposed to do two things. First to suggest a “deer in the headlights” pose and second, of course, to mock Kennedy’s famous inaugural address. Since Bessette never knew JFK, and as we shall see, there is very little evidence for any kind of an affair between Monroe and JFK, that heavily suggestive cover and title is pretty much bombast. Let us take the three cases up in order.

    I would have thought that any serious author today would have known better than to jump into the Monroe mess using writers like Tony Summers and Donald Wolfe. Yet Callahan sources them, uses them and does not issue the unsuspecting reader any qualifications. Today that alone should put her book on the reject list. Why? Because both men not just trusted the proven liar Robert Slatzer but, according to Monroe scholar Don McGovern, both referenced Slatzer literally scores of times in their books. (McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, p. 76) Why is that important in understanding Callahan?

    Because in order to sell a book Slatzer made up a story about being married to Monroe in Mexico. That story is so full of holes that it is hard to keep a straight face while reciting it. But McGovern spends 18 pages taking it apart piece by piece. (McGovern, pp. 48-66). Other writers, like April VeVea, have also shown that Monroe could not have been in Mexico at that time since it is proven through photographic and handwriting evidence that she was in Los Angeles. (McGovern, p. 48, p. 100) This fake marriage is just one of several inventions by Slatzer. Which includes bribing someone to lie for him about his manufactured wedding, namely boxer/actor Noble Kid Chissell. Slatzer then welshed on the bribe. Summers used Chissell to validate Slatzer. (McGovern, pp. 98-99)

    In addition, those books also utilized other dubious witnesses like the late wiretapper Bernie Spindel, detective Fred Otash, policeman Gary Wean, and trick golfer Jeanne Carmen. Like Spindel, Callahan says that Monroe’s house was bugged. (Callahan, p. 209; all references to E book version) This issue has been negated twice. The first time was by the 1982 Los Angeles DA Ron Carroll inquiry. (McGovern, p.445) The second source was author Gary Vitacco Robles who got access to the records from the phone company and devoted a whole chapter to this mythology, concluding there was no evidence of such tapping. (Icon, Chapter 24)

    Callahan uses the oft repeated cliché that Monroe’s phone records were somehow concealed. (Callahan, p. 208, p. 319, p. 353) Again, Vitacco Robles shows this was not true. The original LAPD inquiry had the Monroe records. And the Carroll inquiry in 1982 went even further by trying to find every phone Monroe could have possibly used in the last months of her life. (Icon, Chapter 24) All her calls to Bobby Kennedy went through the main switchboard at the Justice Department and were brief. As Gary points out, she was very likely seeking help for her termination by the studio at that time over her last film, Something’s Got to Give. RFK knew the chairman of the Board of Directors at Fox. There are documents and credible testimony from Monroe’s publicist, Rupert Allan, that indicate this point. (Icon, Pt 2 pp. 535-36)

    As one would suspect by now, Callahan also uses two other pernicious myths in her writing on Monroe and the Kennedys. The first is the idea of some kind of diary that went missing after her death.(Callahan, p. 320) Like the discredited wiretapping, this has also been exposed as a Robert Slatzer hoax. (McGovern, p. 558) Monroe did have an address book that was on a table next to her bed when she died. But it was Slatzer who invented the diary myth for his first book, The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe. There he has Monroe reading to him from it. Slatzer actually wrote that RFK was running the Bay of Pigs operation for his brother. Anyone can investigate—through authors like Peter Kornbluh– and find out that Bobby Kennedy had nothing to do with the execution of that operation. It was a CIA project from first to last, and the two men running it were Director of Plans Dick Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. As Don McGovern notes, and was proven later, what Monroe kept was not a diary but more like a set of notebooks that was found years after her death. It was published as a book called Fragments. And it does not at all resemble what Slatzer and others, like Lionel Grandison, describe. (Grandison is too ridiculous to even note, but for the curious reader see McGovern, p. 359, p. 560)

    As Don McGovern notes, President Kennedy and Monroe met, at the most four times.(McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, pp 176-183) In only one instance is there any evidence of a dalliance, and Gary VItacco Robles has even brought that into question. Need I add that Callahan writes that Monroe had an abortion about a month before she died. (p. 319) Unbelievably, she even suggests it was Bobby Kennedy’s child. (Which, as we shall see, is impossible.) This is more mythology. Monroe pathologist Thomas Noguchi found no evidence of any recent abortion. And her gynecologist Leon Krohn said she never had one. (McGovern, pp. 523-24)

    One of the tawdriest aspects of this tawdry book is its use of Jeanne Carmen. And the use of her pretty much gives Callahan’s Machiavellian game away. Today, no rational, objective commentator can believe the deceased Carmen. She has been taken apart piece by piece by so many writers—April VeVea, Don McGovern, Gary VItacco Robles—that anyone who uses her today renders themselves the gravity of a SNL sketch. But this is how hellbent Callahan is to involve both Robert Kennedy and Peter Lawford in the death of Monroe, or to at least for them to be at her home on the day she died, manhandling her. (Callahan, pp. 209)

    Which is all provably false. Bobby Kennedy, a few members of his family, and several other people were all about 350 miles north, in the San Francisco area on the day Monroe died. This is proven by a series of pictures. The ten photographs cover the entire day. (Susan Bernard, Marilyn: Intimate Exposures, pp. 184-88). Those pictures, plus the matching testimony, are the kinds of evidence one can submit in court. Thus exposing Carmen as a liar. And blowing up Callahan’s credibility in the process.

    As per Lawford: again, the evidence is probative that he was not at Monroe’s home the day she died. He was trying to get her out of her house and to a dinner party at his Santa Monica home. The guests were talent manager George Durgom, and TV producer Joe Naar and his wife Dolores. She declined. (Vitacco Robles, Icon, Pt. 1, p. 394) But Lawford was worried because of her speech pattern, plus he was aware of her serious drug problem. Lawford called back but could not get through. He phoned his agent Milton Ebbins and told him to call Monroe’s lawyer Milton Rudin. This got through to Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s housekeeper who—not knowing about her slurred speech to Lawford—said Monroe was alright. (Ibid p. 398, p. 403) Lawford still wanted to go over and get her. But Ebbins told him not to, since Murray would say the same thing. Ebbins later revealed he had a secret agenda: he knew about Monroe’s drug problem and how bad it would look if the president’s brother in law, his client, was at her home when the paramedics arrived. Ebbins told Tony Summers that Lawford never mentioned Bobby Kennedy that evening or even after he told him she was dead. (ibid, p. 413)

    Randy Taraborrelli, a biographer of Marilyn Monroe, has written that the evidence indicates that the relationship between RFK and Monroe was platonic. In his work he found only three instances where they even met in person. And each time was in public. (McGovern, p. 237). Predictably, Callahan uses a very dubious witness, the late Jeanne Martin—Dean Martin’s former wife– to dispute this. Without saying what a wild outlier she is. None of the witnesses at the Lawford dinner parties corroborate her and its not even proven she was there when RFK was. And at one of those dinners, Bobby brought his wife. (McGovern, p. 181)

    Finally, as both San Francisco pathologist Boyd Stephens and the late Pittsburgh forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht agree, Marilyn Monroe was not murdered. The drugs she took were ingested, not injected. (Vitacco Robles, Icon Pt.2, pp 351-61; McGovern, pp. 494-95). Again, this blows Callahan’s ersatz witness Jeanne Carmen off the stand and into the Pacific Ocean. Which is where she belongs. (Carmen once said that Johnny Roselli killed Sam Giancana over Marilyn; 13 years later while Johnny was in retirement in Florida?)

    I could go on since I have rarely seen so much junk on Monroe piled into a relatively compact space. But I think the above is enough to show that, as far as the portentous shot of Marilyn’s eyes on the cover, Callahan has zero to back it up. In fact I would call it less than zero, since what she fails to reveal demolishes her own sources and statements.

    III

    The second set of eyes belongs to Jackie Kennedy, and this really puzzled me. Why? Because to anyone who reads any reputable biography of the woman, marrying John Kennedy was probably the best thing that ever happened to Jacqueline Bouvier. Before she married Kennedy she was working for $42.50 per week–about 650 dollars today–at a newspaper called the Washington Times Herald. She was doing man on the street interviews as a photojournalist. Questions being things like “Is your marriage a 50-50 partnership?” and “Would you like to crash high society?” (Donald Spoto, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onasis, p. 81). That newspaper was purchased in 1954 by the Washington Post and was then discontinued.

    After her husband was killed in 1963, Jackie had a trust fund that, in today’s dollars, was worth about two million per year. She then borrowed money from Robert Kennedy to buy a home in Georgetown. She then leveraged that into a New York City, 14 room townhouse on Fifth Avenue, and according to Bobby, she did not pay him back. (Randy Taraborrelli, Jackie: Public, Private Secret, p. 196).

    In 2006 that townhouse sold for 30 million.

    She deserved it all. Why? Because Jackie Kennedy revolutionized the office of First Lady. She took it to a point that, in my view, went even beyond Eleanor Roosevelt. As her stepbrother said about her, “Being the First Lady wasn’t just her job. It was who she was.” (Taraborrelli, p. 178) The woman spoke five languages. So when President Kennedy would visit Italy, France or South America, she would be voicing his message in those foreign tongues. In her own right, she was well read and intelligent. So she helped Senator Kennedy in the making of what I still think is his greatest speech: his 1957 Algeria address on Third World nationalism, which put him on the map for the 1960 election. (Spoto, p. 112) She, along with David Ormsby Gore of England, convinced Senator Kennedy that “tactical nuclear war was an illusion and that disarmament was the only sane road to lasting peace.” This was another policy that Kennedy then pursued in the White House. (ibid) After her husband’s death, Jackie took the notes of his last meeting, where he mentioned poverty six times, to Bobby Kennedy. RFK had them framed and put on his wall. (Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America, p.92, p. 96)

    The First Lady was well aware of the influence that Edmund Gullion, ambassador to Congo, had on her husband. It was Gullion who JFK tasked with stopping the secession of the breakaway Katanga state and keeping Congo one nation against the forces of European imperialism. (Monika Wiesak, America’s Last President, p. 40) She also understood what Kennedy was trying to do with his Alliance for Progress in Latin America. When the newspapers pictured her visit to an orphanage in Venezuela and wrote how she allowed the children to kiss her when she departed, both Kennedys despised the reporting. Since it indicated what an inferiority complex American policy had bestowed on the area. (ibid, pp. 63-64) When she visited Cambodia in 1967, Prince Sihanouk had written a speech to greet her which, in its original form, said the Vietnam War would not have happened if her husband had lived.

    And we know what happened when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had dinner with her in New York. He notes how Jackie had become depressed and critical over the fact that Lyndon Johnson had altered Kennedy’s Indochina policy. In fact, she visited wounded Vietnam vets in hospitals. (Spoto p. 252) When discussing a poem by Gabriela Mistral–which reminded Jackie of her husband–she grew very tense and could barely speak. She suddenly exploded in rage. She then began to pound him across the chest “demanding that I do something to stop the slaughter.” (McNamara, In Retrospect, pp. 257-58). All of this, and more, indicates that the First Lady knew a lot about what her husband’s policies were, and how they were changed later.

    If any reader can find any of the above in Callahan’s book, please let me know.

    So what does Callahan give us instead? Well, what does one expect from a writer who relies on the likes of Sy Hersh and Jeanne Carmen? She uses the late David Heymann and Peter Evans. After the multiple exposes that have been done on the former this is simply fruity. As Donna Morel and David Cay Johnston have shown, Heymann was a pathological liar. He not only made up quotes, he made up people. And this was proven about one of the Heymann books she uses as a source. But further, in order to libel Bobby Kennedy, Heymann even made up police departments. (Click here).

    In Bobby and Jackie, a book Callahan sources in her bibliography, Morel discovered that Heymann likely made up Secret Service reports. (ibid) Lisa Pease did a coruscating review of that same book, in which the author claimed to have been nominated for a Pulitzer three times. He was never once nominated. He also claimed to have had a ten year long relationship with John Kennedy Jr. As Pease shows, this is another falsehood. Lisa also shows that, as Heymann was apt to do, he fabricated witness testimony after the witness was dead. Heymann had Mary Harrington, a neighbor, watch from above as Bobby had his hand on Jackie’s breast at the Kennedy Palm Beach estate. As a local real estate agent noted this was not possible as the entire estate was walled. (Click here).

    I won’t even go into the other book Callahan uses on Jackie. Suffice it to say that Lisa thinks that Nemesis may be a black book, inspired by Robert Maheu. (Click here).

    She even uses the Kitty Kelley story that somehow JFK’s affairs drove her to seek shock treatments in a sanitarium. (Callahan, p. 144) Which is ludicrous. As both Spoto and Taraborrelli note, Jackie did not seek any such counseling until after the assassination. And that was due to the fact that she was clearly suffering from PTSD. She also sent her daughter Caroline for counseling. (Spoto, p. 217, Taraborrelli, pp. 384-85)

    But Kitty Kelley is not the worst concerning Callahan and Jackie Kennedy. The author is intent on somehow demeaning Jackie’s admirable behavior after the assassination, both at Parkland Hospital and the return to Washington. So she has her performing fellatio on his corpse at Parkland. (p. 42) I actually wrote “WTF” in my notebook when I saw this. I could not find any reference to it in her notes section, which is very loose and would not pass muster in any history department. Not only is this not in either Spoto or Taraborrelli, but its not in the hour by hour chronicles of the assassination by either William Manchester or Jim Bishop. The Bishop book is actually a minute by minute account of the day of the murder, and he spends several pages on this Parkland episode in his chapter entitled “The Afternoon Hours”. And in his introduction, called “For the Record”, one can see that he is no big fan of either President Kennedy or his wife. In fact, Jackie did not want him to write the book.

    When I saw this, I dialed back to Callahan’s introductory notes. There she said that her subjectivity is no less or more than that of any other historian. (p. xi) She then said that she had taken some creative license in the book.(p. xv) Can the woman be real? As we shall see, the last thing anyone should characterize Callahan is as historian. Not with this kind of referencing. And historians do not use creative license.

    In sum, and in the real world, Jackie Kennedy became the most famous First Lady in history, a worldwide political symbol, a fashion icon, and ultimately a millionairess due to her wedding to John Kennedy.

    Second dud for Callahan

    IV

    In 1968, after Bobby Kennedy’s murder, which frightened and sickened her, Jackie agreed to marry Aristotle Onassis. He was a Greek shipping magnate who had his own island off the coast of Greece with a security detail. (Spoto, p. 236). But the problem was she wanted her children raised in New York. So she ended up splitting time between the two places.

    John Jr. understood his mother’s PTSD so he covered up pictures of her in Dallas before she could see them. (Taraborrelli, p. 401). He attended Brown University for his undergraduate degree and while there organized seminars on South African apartheid, a situation which horrified him. (Elaine Landau, John F. Kennedy Jr, p. 78). He then worked a year at the Office of Business Development in New York, becoming the deputy director of the 42nd Street Development Corporation in 1986. He was interacting with developers and city agencies. (Michael Gross, New York, 3/20/89) He did this for $20,000 a year. After this, he headed up a nonprofit group called Reaching Up which, among other things, provided education and other opportunities for workers who aided disabled persons. (Click here.) This last clearly reflects the things his father, his Aunt Eunice and his Uncle Robert were attempting to do. Which is probably why Callahan brushes it aside.

    He attended NYU Law school and passed the BAR on his third try. He was in the Manhattan DA’s office for four years. And according to those he worked with, he took cases no one else wanted, and then won them in court. (Michael Gross, in the A and E Biography, John F Kennedy Jr: The Death of an American Prince; Taraborrelli, p. 421). Contrary to what Callahan implies, his mother was not all that excited about JFK Jr starting George, his political/cultural magazine. She thought he should continue in his law career in which she saw him carving an estimable niche. (Taraborrelli, p. 421)

    In no uncertain terms Callahan tries to demean John’s work at George. Really? At its inception, in 1995, George was a startling success, achieving about a 500,000 circulation. What makes that even more remarkable is that this was when the online revolution in publishing was taking place. Yet George was a print magazine. For a point of comparison, David Talbot started Salon online that same year. It peaked at about 100,000 subscribers, 1/5 the circulation.

    So in light of all the above, for her to say that John Kennedy Jr was a middle aged man with no accomplishments, this says much more about Callahan and her agenda than it does Kennedy Jr. But that’s not all. Callahan is so monomaniacal, so freight train in her intent, she even trashes John’s wedding to Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia. Callahan throws in a line criticizing Carolyn’s wedding gown and adds that the metaphoric picture of John kissing her gloved hand was a lie. (Callahan, p. 273, p. 275)

    Again, there are pictures and films of this wedding, and in her book Once Upon A Time, Elizabeth Beller spends ten pages describing what a joyous event this was and how exuberant everyone felt afterwards. (pp. 139-148) In honor of JFK’s and RFK’s work on civil rights it took place at the First African Baptist Church. The guest list was small and the couple tricked the media by saying they were going to Ireland. They did not want the paparazzi there, and they succeeded. In fact, there was only one phone at the inn they rented. People were dancing, singing and reciting poetry.

    But that is not the worst part. Apparently, Callahan wants to attack John Jr from beyond the grave. She writes that somehow Carolyn was going to be buried separately from John. This allows her to close a chapter with this: “In death, as in life, they never considered Carolyn Bessette a real Kennedy.” (p. 284 )Stunned, I wrote, “Look this up!’ Any junior high school student can google “ burial of John\ Kennedy Jr.” You will see that all three people who died in the plane crash of July 1999, that is John, his wife and his wife’s sister Lauren, were buried at sea.(Beller, p. 280). There was a very nice memorial service on July 23rd, no cameras allowed, and 315 people were invited. Then there was another the next day for all three in Greenwich. (Beller, p. 284) Can she really not have known about all of this? I find that very hard to believe.

    There was an incredible outpouring of grief exhibited by the enormous number of mourners who assembled outside the townhouse the couple lived in, with the flowers and gifts they brought to the curb. Maybe there was a subconscious reason for this remarkable display. As some writers have noted, and as revealed in JFK Jr. The Final Year, John was going to run for governor in 2002. But even further, as researcher Don Jeffries has written, John Jr, was an avid reader of books about his father’s murder. (Hidden History, Chapter 7)

    In fact, according to a high school girlfriend, Meg Azzoni, “His heartfelt quest was to expose and bring to trial those who killed his father and who covered it up.” Jeffries got corroboration for this from a second source who wished to remain anonymous. The message was that John “was keenly interested in and knowledgeable about his father’s assassination, and often talked about it privately.” According to Steven Gillon, John told him that Bobby knew everything. (People Weekly, 7/3/19, article by Liz McNeil)

    If so this may shed light on an enigma about the night of the crash. Although the story was that the weather was hazy, according to Jeffries, the last message that John conveyed about the conditions was that all was well. And the man assigned to write the FAA report, Edward Meyer, strongly disagreed with the weather conditions being depicted as hazy. (See Jeffries Substack of 7/18/24)

    Those people gathered outside the townhouse understood something that Callahan’s country mile agenda cannot bring herself to address. This tragedy deprived them of their hope for another JFK and Jackie.

    Read Part Two

    Read Part Three

  • The Missing Calls of Officer Mentzel Pt. 2

    The Missing Calls of Officer Mentzel Pt. 2

    The question thus arises about whether the West Davis accident call of 1:07pm was part of that set up. First as a signal to Mentzel that things were ready, and second as a pretext for Mentzel to separate from Tippit.

    Per the tape, Mentzel labors the call. He in fact determines an accident officer is on the way, accident Officer Nolan, call sign 222. There was no need for Mentzel to go. The DPD had four specialist squads which dealt with motor accidents and there were 32 such officers on duty that day (CE5002), C.T. Walker included, call sign 223.

    Indeed, Officer Summers, call sign 221, responded to a traffic call at 600 W Jefferson 25 seconds before Mentzel called clear at 1:03pm from the 400 block of W Jefferson. Mentzel didn’t go to that call then. Similarly, Summers didn’t get called for the 800 block of West Davis, despite 600 West Jefferson being closer to 800 West Davis than Mentzel – whose job it wasn’t anyway.

    Speculative question: did Mentzel know all of what was going to happen next to Tippit? Another such question: Was Mentzel duped into tricking Tippit? To consider that requires looking at what Mentzel did as well as what he didn’t do after Tippit was shot.

    A transcribed call was made to Mentzel by dispatch immediately after Temple Bowley’s call of approximately 1:11pm. There is no answer. At approximately 1:16 pm Mentzel signals “91 clear”, and the dispatcher said “91, have a signal 19 [a shooting] involving a police officer at 400 East Tenth. Suspect last seen running west on Jefferson. No description at this time”. Mentzel replies “10-4”.

    Mentzel was given information over the radio at 1:16 pm about the shooting incident as if he’d been incommunicado until he got to Tyler, hence had missed all the calls of the prior 5 minutes – those calls making it clear it was Car 10, Tippit.

    But Mentzel doesn’t do what someone incommunicado might do. He didn’t ask who the officer was, nor did he reveal anything of his or Tippit’s movements in vicinity of E 10th the minutes before Tippit was shot. He also said to the HSCA that he didn’t know the victim was Tippit until he arrived at E 10th: Which suggests a distinct lack of curiosity. Not least given that he told the HSCA he didn’t know Tippit was even in district 91 when shot. The first question should be “Who was it and what were they doing there?”

    As well as that, why would attending a traffic accident that he said was a “minor fender bender” be a reason to stop hunting for Oswald?l Mentzel’s HSCA account of the accident being a ‘minor fender bender’ reads like a trivial brush off, just like any excuse that has seen better days.

    This all leads to another speculative question: Did Mentzel not ask who the victim was because he already knew?

    Shortly after that the dispatcher calls Mentzel to tell him:-

    DIS: 91.

    Mentzel 91: 91.

    DIS: Suspect just passed 401 East Jefferson.

    Mentzel 91: 10-4.

    Unknown: Where did he just pass?

    DIS: 401 East Jefferson.

    Approximately 3 minutes after that (1:22pm) Mentzel calls:

    Mentzel 91: 91.

    DIS: 91.

    Mentzel 91: What was the description besides the white jacket?

    DIS: White male, thirty, five feet eight, black hair, slender build, white shirt, black trousers. Going west on Jefferson from the 300 block.

    [Note. Oswald did not have black hair, but Larry Crafard did.]

    The statement in Warren Commission Exhibit 2645 is ambiguous as to whether Mentzel heard the 1:11pm Bowley call, or the call to Mentzel at 1:16pm.

    Mentzel says he went to the Beckley and Jefferson intersection, but nowhere on the tape is Mentzel told to go to the Beckley and Jefferson intersection. In fact, no one is dispatched there, and by the tape Mentzel isn’t dispatched anywhere.

    Non-assigned traffic accident officer Charles T Walker was also in Oak Cliff on E 10th Street, 2-3 short blocks from where Tippit was shot. None of his radio calls prior to the murder of Tippit are transcribed either. His immediate reaction to the news of the downtown shooting of Kennedy was to go to a fire station to watch what was unfolding on TV (WC Vol VII page 34). He said he then went downtown, and then headed back to Oak Cliff when he heard of the shooting of Tippit.

    By the time Walker had arrived at the Tippit murder scene witnesses had said that the assailant had run south down Patton and headed west along Jefferson. But Walker put out the radio call saying the assailant was in the public library several blocks to the east along Jefferson. The posse of officers was thence sent in the wrong direction.

    A relevant point of geography is that the intersection of Jefferson and Beckley, is 70 yards from the alley that runs parallel and between Jefferson and 10th. From behind, 410 E 10th (it is the alley continuation of Lansing Street), it crosses Patton, Crawford, Storey and then Cumberland to reach Beckley. It then crosses Beckley and Zang and runs to behind the Texas Theater.

    That alley was the last place any suspect was seen, by Mrs Brock, at the Bellew Texaco Garage at E Jefferson and Crawford. She said she saw him walking quickly across the parking lot (FBI Report of 22 January 1964). That would have been approximately 1:10 pm.

    II

    The Warren Commission Testimony of Warren Reynolds of 22 June 1964 (WC Vol 11, page 434) is consistent with that: –

    Mr. REYNOLDS. I looked through the parking lot for him after. See, when he went behind the service station, I was right across the street, and when he ducked behind, I ran across the street and asked this man which way he went, and they told me the man had gone to the back. And I ran back there and looked up and down the alley right then and didn’t see him, and I looked under the cars, and I assumed that he was still hiding there.

    Mr. LIEBELER. In the parking lot?

    Mr. REYNOLDS. Even to this day I assume that he was.

    Mr. LIEBELER. Where was this parking lot located now?

    Mr. REYNOLDS. Corner of Crawford

    Mr. LIEBELER. It would be at the back of the Texaco station, that is on Jefferson where they found his coat. They found his coat in the parking lot?

    Mr. REYNOLDS. They found his coat there.

    Mr. LIEBELER. So that he had apparently gone through the parking lot?

    Mr. REYNOLDS. Oh, yes.

    Mr. LIEBELER. And gone down the alley or something back to Jefferson Street?

    Mr. REYNOLDS. Yes. When the police got there, and they were all there, I was trying to assure them that he was still there close. This was all a bunch of confusion. They didn’t know what was going on. And they got word that he was down at a library which was about 3 blocks down the street on the opposite side of the street.

    Mr. LIEBELER. Down Jefferson?

    Mr. REYNOLDS. Down Jefferson. And every one of them left to go there.

    If that isn’t evidence of the police not trying to find someone, then what is? The reality appears that some officers did know what was going on. Enough to confuse the rest. The ringleader of the confusion was likely CT Walker.

    From when the assailant was seen at the Texaco garage there was no sighting of the assailant until the incident at Hardy’s Shoe Shop, at about 1:40 pm on the basis of someone “looking funny”. This triggered the calling of the police for the arrest of Oswald on the premise that the person had run into the Texas Theater, opposite Hardy’s.

    But for that journey there were no witnesses on the way, not even crossing the six-lane road at Zang nor the four-lane road at Beckley. Police meanwhile were sent to the wrong places, by Walker, they east, and then Westbrook sent people north of the crime scene.

    Mentzel was local to the Oak Cliff district. From 10th at Beckley to the alley behind the garage at Jefferson and Crawford is 380 yards. Mentzel would have a shorter distance to travel than Tippit and he had the advantage of speed. It may even have been Mentzel that suggested that Car 207 went into the same alley behind 410 E 10th.

    III

    A white Eisenhower jacket was found in the parking lot at Bellew. Mary Brock hadn’t mentioned anyone taking it off there when the assailant passed her. Why would someone on the run holding a gun restrict their movement by taking a jacket off whilst holding a gun when someone is looking at them and they are about to do a disappearing trick? Jackets can be difficult to take off in normal times, even more if holding a gun.

    As Oswald in the Texas Theater wasn’t wearing such a jacket, that disposal was ill thought through, and it was never clear which officer had found it. The found jacket was announced by Officer Griffin over the radio at approximately 1:21 pm as being a white one. It is highly unlikely that this jacket was really Oswald’s. It had two laundry tags. The FBI, checked 424 laundries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and 293 laundries in the New Orleans area. They were unable to match either the tag or the laundry mark to any them. (See WC Documents, 993 and 1245) The Bureau’s examination of Oswald’s clothing showed not a single laundry or dry cleaning mark or tag. And although the jacket was size medium, all of Oswald’s other clothing was size small. As author Henry Hurt noted, the Warren Report does not entail any references to this extensive effort to trace the laundry marking. By doing so the Warren Commission could say the jacket belonged to Oswald, when that was very unlikely. (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt.)

    There is a catalogue of events which fit with improvised framing of Oswald for Tippit’s impromptu murder alongside the intended framing of Oswald for Kennedy’s murder.

    The gun used to kill Tippit was announced over the DPD radio as an automatic. The Oswald revolver wasn’t. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 273) The cartridges thrown at the scene were marked as standard practice with initials by Officer Poe. Those marks then disappeared after the evidence chain was broken by taking gun related evidence to Captain Westbrook’s office. (Hurt, pp. 153-54)

    Archived TV footage discovered in 2013 (the ‘Reiland film’) shows police officers examining a wallet at the scene outside 410 E10th before the arrest of Oswald. That wallet was then never mentioned again as an official find at that scene. (McBride, Into the Nightmare, pp. 466-67) Instead, a wallet was supposedly – for evidence purposes – taken from Oswald.

    That is consistent with the ill thought through planting of the wallet, which by virtue of the address it had in it, triggered police to arrive at 1026 N Beckley just after 1:30pm. And according to the landlord Gladys Johnson, the FBI was there also. (Sara Peterson and K. W. Zachary, The Lone Star Speaks.) That time ran against the official line that 1026 N Beckley addressed wasn’t known about until DPD Officers and County Sheriffs arrived at Oswald’s family home in Irving, and that wasn’t until after 3:30pm. But two wallets would have made it transparently obvious Oswald was being framed.

    In all there was a break in the chain of custody of: cartridges, the gun supposedly taken from Oswald, the jacket and the wallet that was found and then unfound.

    IV

    Things continued to be irregular after that. Let us contrast Mentzel’s lack of inquisitiveness to that of Sergeant Owens.

    Owens is probably the least discreet officer on the tape, meaning he asks rational questions. He said at around 1:30 pm of Tippit.

    Owens 19. Do you know what kind of call he was on?

    DIS: What kind of what?

    Owens 19: Was he on a call or anything?

    DIS: No.

    Owens 19: 10-4.

    The dispatcher saying “No”, is yet more evidence the instructions to Tippit and Nelson at 12:45pm call was a fake. But again, Mentzel hasn’t answered to reveal that he and Tippit were working together.

    Some minutes after that Owens then said this:

    Owens 19: Is Sgt H Davis 80 in service?

    DIS: Sgt H Davis 80.

    Owens 19: I think he was sent down to Elm and Central. We need somebody to notify that officer’s wife.

    DIS: Sgt H Davis 80.

    Davis doesn’t respond. But Owens’ linking Davis as the person who should tell Mrs. Tippit suggests Davis was the Sergeant commanding Tippit.

    This is Owens in an FBI memo of 20 May 1964, supplied to the Warren Commission on 5 June 1964 (CE1976) and not followed up by the Commission in its published findings.

    According to Sergeant OWENS, Officer TIPPIT had gone home to eat lunch, which was a normal and approved procedure, at about noontime.

    Sergeant OWENS advised he could not furnish any information as to when or how TIPPIT’s assignment from District 78 had been changed as he, OWENS, had gone to lunch and had not returned during the time that TIPPIT’s assignment had been changed.

    Mr. Ely. Were you on duty on November 22, 1983?

    Mr. Owens. I was.

    Mr. Ely. And what was the nature of your assignment on that date?

    Mr. Owens. Acting lieutenant, Oak Cliff substation.

    Mr. Ely. Because you were acting lieutenant in the Oak Cliff substation, would that mean that Officer Tippit would be under your supervision?

    Mr. Owens. That’s true.

    Mr. Ely. Off the record. (Discussion off the record between Counsel Ely and the witness Owens.)

    Mr. Owens. I don’t know what district Officer J. L. Angel [sic:Angell] was working, but it was my understanding that he also went to Elm and Houston.

    Mr. Ely. Well, he was working somewhere in the Oak Cliff area, was he?

    Mr. Owens. Yes; he was working in the Oak Cliff area under the same sergeant that Officer Tippit was working under

    So, by that, Tippit (78), Angell (81) and Mentzel (91) were working under the same district Officer. By Owens’ Warren Commission Testimony and Exhibit CE 2645, that Officer was Sergeant Hugh F Davis who was supervising 80’s and 90’s patrol districts, hence supervising Nelson (87) as well. Davis was a southwest supervising officer, who then reported to Owens the acting Southwest Commander who was in also in supervisory charge of patrol districts 60’s and 70’s, hence Tippit (78). But whilst at lunch, sometime before 12:30pm, (CE1976) Owens was replaced as supervisor of Tippit by Davis. Owens could not give the reason as to when or how that had occurred, despite having been the acting Commander, and having made all patrol district allocations for the start of that day.

    Bearing in mind that a bullet had been removed from Tippit’s body by 1:30 pm and an autopsy request signed, it’s remarkable that there needed to be any discussion about telling Mrs. Tippit after that. This after all was a police force that had been able to send officers to minor traffic accidents minutes after a president had been shot.

    There was clearly sensitivity. A conversation listed in the first transcript – CD-290 – disappeared in the next two versions CE-705 and CE-1974.

    531 [Despatch] ” “210 was dispatched to notify Mrs Tippit”,

    CD-290 puts this sometime before 1:40pm. It’s missing from CE-705 and the earliest mention in CE-705 to that matter is a call between 1:40 pm and 1:43pm and that transmission used the word ‘wife’ not ‘Mrs. Tippit’. The tape transcripts show that even after 2:00 pm Mrs Tippit still hadn’t been told even though it’s appearing on TV.

    At 1:53 pm there was this exchange.

    DIS: We had a shooting of a police officer which was DOA at Methodist. The suspect has been apprehended at Texas Theater and en route to the station.

    3 (Deputy Chief Stevenson): 10-4. Thank you.

    Mentzel 91: Mentzel 91 clear.

    DIS: Mentzel 91. 1:53.

    At 1:54pm there is this exchange:

    Gerry Hill (550/2): 550/2

    DIS: Gerry Hill (550/2). 550/2 (CT Walker) 223 is in the car with us. See if someone can pick up his car at the rear of the Texas Theater and take it to the station. It’s got the keys in it.

    DIS: 10-4.

    DIS: Mentzel 91. 91

    Mentzel 91:  91.

    DIS: Report back to the Texas Theater. Get CT Walker car and lock it up.

    Mentzel 91: 10-4.

    And a minute later:

    Mentzel 91: 91.

    DIS: 91.

    Mentzel 91: What do you want me to do with the keys after I lock that car up?

    DIS: Just keep them until you can contact CT Walker.

    Mentzel 91: 10-4.

    Mentzel was also told to “report back” to the Texas Theater, and his Warren Commission account via the FBI was that he had gone there, “then [Mentzel] was dispatched to the Texas Theatre, where the suspect was reportedly hiding” and the tape supports that. Mentzel’s HSCA account was that he didn’t go there.

    Added to that, Mentzel at the time felt it was more important to worry about CT Walker’s car than telling Mrs Tippit. As McBride notes in his milestone book in one version of Marie Tippit’s story, her husband left very quickly after lunch because so many officers were downtown due to the motorcade. As McBride then notes, this could imply ”that TIppit already might have suspected, before any trouble occurred downtown, that he would be needed to fill in for other officers vacating Oak Cliff” and that could suggest some knowledge in advance about Oswald. (McBride, p. 510) After all, based on the testimony of Edgar Lee TIppit, the officer’s father, Mentzel and he were looking for Oswald, and Mentzel told the widow that. (McBride, p. 427)

    Recall, although Mentzel was patrolling two districts in Oak Cliff, the dispatcher did not call him to be at large for any emergency that might come in—as were Nelson and TIppit. (ibid, p. 428) Was he at Luby’s when he learned of the assassination, or was that a “cover story for other unacknowledged activities.” (ibid, p. 429). As McBride writes,

    The confusion in this HSCA interview report nearly fourteen years after the events occurred, perhaps is an attempt to rationalize Mentzel’s erratic, somewhat mysterious whereabouts in the 8 minutes between the accident call and the officer’s belated report to the police dispatcher that he was “clear”. (ibid)

    V

    Mentzel’s misrepresentations are consistent with other discrepancies in Warren Commission testimonies, in particular those of Captain Westbrook, Reserve Sergeant Croy and Sergeant Jerry Hill. Time is easier to lie about than location.

    The Russian intelligence network concluded that they’d put the assassination down to a right-wing plot assisted by rogue elements of the Dallas Police Force. If so there would need to be covert movements of police officers and other devices to assist in it. This article doesn’t suggest that any DPD Officers were directly involved in shooting the President, pulling triggers. Quite the opposite.

    What does need to be considered is whether assistance was given to 1) ensure safe getaway of professional assassins, 2) move Oswald as the fall-guy operating under a duped pretext by car to the Texas Theatre where he would be shot.

    It is car 207 that was seen in the rear driveway of 410 E10th at the time Tippit was shot. It was not a random location as Virginia Davis said he was there so often she thought he lived there.

    Mentzel’s calls and self-account before Tippit are highly suggestive for that scenario. The accident call could be genuine. But against that is the fact that none of it was transcribed for any of the three transcripts. No accident would account for Mentzel abandoning “hunting down Oswald”, a fender-bender is hardly a priority in the face of that.

    A rational answer would be “I have something else on”

    The circumstances regarding what and when the Tippit family was told things also stick out like a sore thumb.

    The fact that the Warren Commission would never answer the questions about Oswald and Tippit straightforwardly is obvious. The Warren Commission work outline was largely based on the Nicholas Katzenbach memo to Bill Moyers, an assistant to President Johnson, written just two hours after zenOswald had been killed.

    President Johnson and FBI Director Hoover followed Katzenbach’s memo to a tee, disregarding any other leads that led to a conspiracy.

    Deputy US Attorney Nicholas Katzenbach’s memo:

    It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy’s Assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have been told and that a statement to this effect be made now.

    The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.

    Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right–wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat — too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.

    The matter has been handled thus far with neither dignity nor conviction. Facts have been mixed with rumour and speculation. We can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the Dallas police when our President is murdered.

    I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination. This may run into the difficulty of pointing to inconsistencies between this report and statements by Dallas police officials. But the reputation of the Bureau is such that it may do the whole job.

    The only other step would be the appointment of a Presidential Commission of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the evidence and announce its conclusions. This has both advantages and disadvantages. It [sic] think it can await publication of the FBI report and public reaction to it here and abroad.

    I think, however, that a statement that all the facts will be made public property in an orderly and responsible way should be made now. We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.

    Read Part One

  • Author Interview: Monica Wiesak

    Jeff Sachs interviews Monica Wiesak about her excellent book about JFK, America’s Last President. Read more.