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JFK Assassination Records—The Picture is Getting Clearer

I have written a series of articles for Kennedys and King regarding the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”). The main focus of the previous articles has been the failure of agencies and the Executive Branch to timely release all assassination records by October 26, 2017. That was the mandated date under the JFK Act for final declassification of all assassination records. This article will focus on the actual steps taken by agencies and the Executive Branch to delay the process of declassification since 2017. We will also examine what can be done to ensure compliance with the JFK Act at this point in time.

In recent months, I have been working with a group of skilled lawyers in an effort to determine why, in 2021, the American public still does not have access to tens of thousands assassination records. Let me say that again. In 2021, agencies and the Executive Branch are still classifying tens of thousands assassination records: almost 58 years after the Kennedy Assassination. Even worse, we do not have a valid explanation from the Executive Branch as required by the JFK Act. We will get back to that point later in the article.

Brief Early History of the JFK Act and Declassification Efforts

Congress overwhelmingly passed the JFK Act in October of 1992. Only one member of Congress did not vote in favor. The JFK Act required the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB): an independent panel of academics, archivists and/or attorneys to begin the declassification process. In the opening declarations of the JFK Act, Congress made its intent very clear. Congress stated that all assassination records carried an immediate presumption of disclosure, and that only in the rarest of cases would continued postponement be possibly warranted. Remember, Congress declared that in 1992, almost 30 years ago.

The ARRB did a tremendous amount of work between 1994 and 1998. The result was declassification of thousands of assassination records, which was a significant step for American citizens and researchers who seek to understand the history of the Kennedy Assassination. It is worth noting that the “Public Interest” was a compelling reason for the creation of the JFK Act. The JFK Act itself states that the “Public Interest” means the “compelling interest in the prompt public disclosure of assassination records for historical and governmental purposes and for the purpose of fully informing the American people about the history surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

The ARRB, by Congressional mandate, completed its term by 1998. Congress then left further declassification efforts in the hands of agencies and the Executive Branch. That is where we start to see the problem.

The JFK Act required agencies to engage in a process of “periodic review” after the winding down of the ARRB. Even if the ARRB had initially determined that an assassination record warranted postponement under the evidentiary standards of the JFK Act, agencies were still required to review those determinations from the 1990’s and “address the public disclosure of additional assassination records.” The purpose of the “periodic review” by agencies was to continue the downgrade and the declassification of protected assassination records. Further, for any records initially approved for postponement by the ARRB, agencies were required to deliver to the Archivist (and publish in the Federal Register) an unclassified written description of the reason for continued postponement.

Brief Explanation of the Mandated Deadline—October 26, 2017

Agencies and the Executive Branch were given 25 years to complete the declassification process for JFK Records. As discussed above, this started with disclosures to the ARRB and requests for continued classification. Then, the agencies had between 1998 and 2017 to complete the declassification process through periodic review and additional disclosures to the Archivist. As of October 26, 2017, precisely 25 years after the passage of the JFK Act, only the President had authority to postpone the release of certain individual records, based on specific standards in the JFK Act. Specifically, President Trump was required to certify that 1) continued postponement was made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and 2) the identifiable harm was of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

What happened instead? On October 26, 2017, President Trump authorized a six (6) month “temporary” postponement for government offices and agencies to comply with final disclosure under the JFK Act. We do not know exactly what President Trump reviewed, or did not review, in terms of actual assassination records that posed an apparent “concern” for agencies.   We do know that President Trump did not issue a record-specific certification for each record that agencies and/or the Executive Branch sought to postpone, as required by the JFK Act.

We also now know that a legal rationalization for “temporary postponement” was provided to President Trump on October 26, 2017. That rationalization was in the form of a legal opinion from Curtis E. Gannon, who was then an Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. The rationalization proposed, in contravention of the Act, a delay of only “a few months.” In apparent reliance on the Gannon Memo, President Trump issued an order authorizing a 6-month delay for agencies to complete their review and disclosure obligations and comply with the JFK Act. As explained in this article, the Gannon Memo does not correctly interpret the JFK Act as written and was, from the outset, clearly designed to justify a certain outcome desired by agencies who wish to continue withholding assassination records from the American public.

Brief Review of the “Temporary Postponement” Period

Following the 6-month postponement discussed above, the President should have been in a position to authorize the release of all assassination records. At the very least, the President should have been in a legal position under the JFK Act to certify postponement of a handful of records and with record-specific explanations. That is not what happened. In fact, matters became far worse. On April 26, 2018, President Trump then authorized an additional three year period for agencies to “re-review” withheld assassination records and report to the Archivist on their continued requests for postponement. In that same executive memorandum of April 2018, President Trump established a new deadline of October 26, 2021 for the Archivist and the President (now President Biden) to make final decisions on the release of assassination records. Yes, you read that correctly – October 26, 2021. The 6-month delay, and the multi-year delay, were completely unwarranted under the JFK Act, and mark a clear departure from law.

It is now clear that President Trump’s decisions in October 2017 and April 2018 were based on the October 26, 2017 Gannon Memo. The Gannon Memo concluded that a delay of a “few months” was warranted based on purported concerns of the Archivist in terms of agencies not following the procedural and evidentiary requirements of the JFK Act. The Gannon Memo did not, however, discuss the Archivist’s concerns in any detail, nor did the Gannon Memo provide the complete written report or findings of the Archivist. Regardless, even if the 6-month delay in October 2017 was arguably warranted based on legitimate concerns of the Archivist, there is no legal justification for the President’s decision in April of 2018 for a multi-year postponement of legal obligations under the JFK Act.

The Gannon Memo Explored

Gannon’s analysis is contrary to the provisions of the Act. There is no authority in Section 5 of the JFK Act for a “temporary certification” authorizing postponement. Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act clearly states that all assassination records were to be disclosed in full by October 26, 2017. The President only had authority to postpone release of records past this date with a written certification “as required by this Act.”

The words “as required by this Act,” as cited in Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act, are critical to a proper legal interpretation of the JFK Act and explicitly require that Section 5(g)(2)(D) be read in context with the JFK Act as a whole. Starkly absent from the Gannon Memo is any reference to the applicable provisions in Sections 5, 6, and 9 of the Act, which set forth the specific requirements and standards under which the President may authorize postponement. Specifically, when the JFK Act was enacted in 1992, each Government office was promptly required to: 1) determine whether its assassination records, and particular information therein, were covered by the standards for postponement of public disclosure; and 2) specify with particularity, in an identification aid, the applicable postponement provision contained in Section 6 of the Act. An identification aid is a standard form for identifications or findings for use with each assassination record subject to review under the JFK Act.

In addition to the process referenced in the preceding paragraph, Section 5 of the Act then required a specific reporting action from affected agencies for any continued postponement. Again, this was required in the early 1990’s. In 2017 and 2018, agencies had no basis to request continued postponement without providing written and unclassified reasons for postponement under the Act. Specifically, under the agencies’ periodic review obligations, Section 5 of the JFK Act required:

[A]n unclassified written description of the reason for such continued postponement. Such description shall be provided to the Archivist and published in the Federal Register upon determination.”

In other words, without the unclassified reporting from agencies for each record sought to be postponed, the President was required to release the remainder of the protected JFK collection on October 26, 2017. The “temporary certification” of an unspecified group of records, as recommended by the Gannon Memo, can only be viewed as the Executive Branch acquiescing to last-minute appeals from agencies that did not follow the standards of the JFK Act.

Gannon Memo Prevents a “Premature” Release Based on a
“Strong Likelihood of Sensitivities”

Notwithstanding the clear requirements and procedures set forth in Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the Act, the Gannon Memo, twenty-five (25) years after the creation of the JFK Act, speculated that President Trump was somehow authorized to order a “short-term” postponement necessary to avoid a “premature” release of records. It was further supposed that said “premature” release would constitute the “identifiable harm” which would satisfy President Trump’s decision under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act—although there is no clear evidence that President Trump was even aware of what specific records were being withheld and what the identifiable harm was with regard to such withheld records. A vague presumption of a “premature” release is not a specified identifiable harm under the JFK Act. However, that appears to be the legal justification given to President Trump.

Further, the Gannon memo presupposed a “strong likelihood” that many of the records in question would implicate the kinds of sensitivity about national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs contemplated by the JFK Act.

One searches in vain for any factual or legal basis in the Gannon Memo for such a sweeping presumption. Instead, the unsupported assertion of any such “strong likelihood” that the withheld records pose an identifiable threat stands contrary to both the spirit and letter of the JFK Act.

The Gannon Memo Creates an Escape

Finally, and most notably, the Gannon Memo hypothesized that President Trump could satisfy Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act by determining that a “group” of records somehow warranted postponement, but that the President was not required to articulate record-specific justifications for further postponement of each individual record. Again, a proper reading of Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the Act does not support the “temporary postponement” certification for an unspecified “group” of records.

The JFK Act is void of any authority for a “short-term postponement,” or any postponement at all without the evidentiary findings required by Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act. Agencies had an obligation of periodic review starting with the enactment of the JFK Act in 1992, which “served to downgrade and declassify security classified information.” By 2017, according to a tacit admission in the Gannon Memo, each record already had gone through “an extensive and individualized multi-year review process to verify that public disclosure would have been harmful in the 1990’s and would continue to be harmful through October 26, 2017.” The Gannon Memo acknowledges that the ARRB and responsible agencies had already gone through the scrutinizing review process required by the Act, but at the same time the Gannon Memo recommended a “temporary postponement.” Even worse, President Trump in April of 2018 authorized an additional multi-year extension for final compliance with the Act, relying on the same Gannon Memo.

The bottom line is that, by October 26, 2017, the Executive Branch should have had at its disposal anything necessary to certify a record-specific postponement based on clear and convincing evidence and unclassified explanations filed in the Federal Register. Yet, as acknowledged and admitted in the Gannon Memo, there are still approximately 31,000 assassination records (an indeterminable number of pages) withheld in full or in part. The President has an obligation to either release the JFK assassination records or certify the specific reasons for continued postponement, even if agencies did not fully meet their declassification obligations under Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act. The evidence for postponement is available to the President based on the findings of the ARRB and a 25-year obligation for periodic review by agencies, and the American public is entitled to an unclassified certification for any records that may warrant continued withholding under the standards of the JFK Act. President Trump, according to the Gannon Memo, had the data necessary in order to issue the proper record-specific certification under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act.  President Biden presumably has access to the same data and the authority to ensure compliance with the Act.

As of the date of this article, we have not seen anything from the White House or Office of Legal Counsel in terms of resolving the purported “significant concerns” of the Archivist. Under President Trump’s executive order of April 26, 2018, all agencies were required to report back to the Archivist by April 26, 2021 on their efforts to properly continue declassification of withheld records. Any such reports’ existence should be a matter of public record. What is of public record, is a letter dated March 26, 2018, from the Archivist, David S. Ferriero, to then President Trump, wherein he clearly stated that, “I further recommend that you only certify further postponements through 26 October 2021, contingent upon any further recommendations for postponement being made in writing, on a document-by-document basis, by 26 April 2021 (to allow sufficient time for review by NARA and consideration by the President).” The Archivist recommended that a postponement certification by the President be contingent on a document-by-document review of a written request. The Archivist’s statement strongly suggests that he had an interpretation of the Act that departed from the conclusions in the Gannon Memo. The Archivist’s statement is the correct interpretation of the Act.

If the agencies did not fully or properly perform what was required under the Act, their neglect (whether intentional or not) should not be rewarded with unwarranted postponements. This in turn places President Biden in the position of having to issue yet another executive order that does not comply with the JFK Act.

Crucial Difference between FOIA and JFK Act

Unlike the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—and this is a key point—the burden under the JFK Act is on the government offices and agencies to meet their evidentiary burden on each assassination record before continued classification is legally warranted. Regardless of the Gannon Memo’s interpretation of the President’s certification authority under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act, the American public is entitled to a record-specific and unclassified explanation of the reasons for postponement under the JFK Act. A broad and unsubstantiated assumption that the withheld records could contain sensitive information, is contrary to the historical and legal foundation of the JFK Act. The operative mandate of the JFK Act is that the relevant records are presumed to be declassifiable.

The Gannon Memo concludes, however, that President Trump was authorized, under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act, to issue a temporary postponement of a “group” of records without record-specific explanations. The rationale in the Gannon Memo is that Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act is “silent” as to whether the President must make a certification regarding each individual record, or whether he may make a certification applicable to a group of withheld records that raise an unspecified identifiable harm.

Again, the rationale in the Gannon Memo fails to account for the entirety of Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act. The entire purpose of the Act is to require declassification and public disclosure of all related assassination records based on specific standards. Those standards are set forth in Section 6, and the specific statutory reason for postponement must be in unclassified form and available to the American public even if postponement is properly authorized. Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act cannot be interpreted in a vacuum, as was attempted in the Gannon Memo. Doing so would unjustifiably allow the President to authorize postponements in perpetuity based on vague and opaque requests from agencies that seek to maintain secrecy, contrary to the express purpose and provisions of the Act.

An example of the crucial difference from FOIA, and an abuse of the JFK Act by agencies, is found in an identification aid discovered by our group of lawyers. This particular record we found listed section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act as the grounds for postponement. The evidence apparently provided was “Approval by the CIA.” Let that sink in. This is one of the most egregious things I have seen in my research of the JFK Act. What this means is that records have been withheld upon “approval by the CIA.” That is not the legal standard under the JFK Act! Only the ARRB had the legal authority to approve postponements in the 1990’s, and only the President had the authority to approve postponement in October of 2017. And if the President did authorize postponement, such a decision required unclassified written descriptions from the agencies under the JFK Act.

Continuing Effect of the Gannon Memo

In the broader scheme of the JFK Act, it would be completely antithetical to the entire purpose of the JFK Act to simply abandon all of the required grounds for postponement under section 6, and the detailed procedural, reporting and transparency requirements under sections 5 and 9 of the Act. However, that is exactly what the Gannon Memo did. Such a scheme has encouraged the various agencies to wait out the clock on the release deadlines, and then seek to postpone the release of the records on an ongoing basis for perpetuity. This is what happened at the October 26, 2017 statutory deadline, and also the April 26, 2018 and April 26, 2021 “deadlines” authorized by President Trump. Such actions are in flagrant disregard of the general purposes and the specific procedural requirements of the JFK Act, and contrary to the will of the American people as expressed by Congress when the JFK Act was enacted.

Conclusions and Remedies

Congress made its intent very clear in the Declarations of the JFK Act. Specifically, Congress declared that the “legislation is necessary because Executive Order No. 12356, entitled National Security Information, has eliminated the declassification and downgrading schedules relating to classified information across government and has prevented the timely public disclosure of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

Executive Order 12356 was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, in the middle of the Cold War. Classification levels included “Top Secret” information, “Secret” information, and “Confidential” Information. Under this Order, the President and agency heads were given classification authority under one or more of these classification levels, all on the grounds of “national security.” A broad assertion of “national security” is not sufficient for classification under the JFK Act. In the JFK Act, Congress clearly declared that historical executive orders have prevented the timely disclosure and declassification of assassination records, and that legislative action was required to ensure proper and timely declassification.

Section 11 of the JFK Act is also crucial for a proper legal review of the President’s obligations under the JFK Act. Specifically, Section 11(a) of the JFK Act states:

When this Act requires transmission of a record to the Archivist or public disclosure, it shall take precedence over any other law (except section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code), judicial decision construing such law, or common law doctrine that would otherwise prohibit such transmission or disclosure, with the exception of deeds governing access to or transfer or release of gifts and donations of records to the United States Government.

In other words, when evaluating the government’s obligations for accounting to the Archivist and disclosing assassination records to the American public, Congress declared that the JFK Act is the law of the United States with only very few and extraordinary circumstances.

The President can and should meet his legal duty to either 1) release the assassination records in full (now almost 60 years from the date of the assassination), or 2) order agencies to comply with the law and certify continued postponement only in the rarest of cases and based on record-specific findings and the “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard in the JFK Act. Failure to do so would be an abuse of power and contrary to the intent and clear language in the JFK Act.

I believe it is appropriate and legally warranted that President Biden rescind any prior executive orders or memoranda issued by President Trump, with respect to the JFK Act, since October 26, 2017. There is clearly a legal basis for rescission of those orders. Regardless, President Biden should take the appropriate measures to release all assassination records without further delay; or comply with the clear and express language of the JFK Act and issue record-specific and unclassified reasons for continued postponement, based on clear and convincing evidence, as required by the JFK Act.

August 4, 2021
Oliver Stone to «Paris Match»: It was the CIA that shot Kennedy

Oliver Stone: “It was the CIA that shot Kennedy”

Paris Match | Posted on 07/31/2021 at 5:25 a.m. | Updated 07/31/2021 at 7:08 p.m. From our correspondent in New York Olivier O’Mahony

In 1991, in “JFK”, director Oliver Stone tackled the Dallas conundrum. Today, he relies on declassified documents to revive the thesis of the CIA-led operation. For “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass”, which he just presented at Cannes, he couldn’t find funding in America. He tells Paris Match about his fight to transmit this appetite for truth to young people.

PARIS MATCH: Why go back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, almost thirty years after the release, in January 1992, of your film “JFK”?

OLIVER STONE: Because what happened in November 1963 was a monstrosity that changed America forever. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, reading the book by Jim Garrison, the prosecutor who inspired my film, that I got involved in this investigation. The immense success of “JFK” subsequently led to the declassification of a number of documents. With this new documentary, I do not pretend to achieve the same result, but I hope to inspire the younger generation – to which it is dedicated – to take up the torch.

What more do we learn from this new documentary?

I rely on documents declassified after the release of “JFK”, and on interviews with members of the latest Commission of Inquiry [Assassination Records Review Board, ARRB] charged with revisiting the tragedy. Forty people are reported to have seen JFK’s corpse at Parkland Hospital immediately after the assassination that the official photos shown do not match him, which means they have been tampered with. Forty people! All claim to have seen a gaping wound in the back of the skull, caused by a bullet coming from the front and not from the back. This calls into question the thesis of the lone killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, posted on top of a book depot behind the president’s car …

You say Lee Harvey Oswald may not even have fired a bullet …

Yes. According to the official thesis, he used a sniper rifle he had just bought at the Klein’s store. Except that the one found on the spot, in Schoolbook Depository, does not correspond to the model in question. Oswald’s fingerprints should have been found there as well, but there were none.

What was Oswald’s role in this case?

The documentary sheds light on his personality and behavior on November 22. Lee Harvey Oswald was actually a patriot and admirer of John F. Kennedy. He made contact with pro and anti-Castro circles; he was both on the side of the Communists and on the side of troubled far-right figures like Guy Banister, a CIA agent.

A double agent?

Rather a provocateur, whom the CIA hired in the demonstrations to distribute leaflets …

According to the official thesis, he fled immediately after the assassination.

Except that we found witnesses who said the opposite. Three of his female colleagues, who feature in the documentary, say they were on the stairs right after the drama. However, they did not meet him there. And Oswald always claimed he was on the second floor, not the sixth. Before being killed by Jack Ruby, two days after the assassination, Oswald denied everything. He claimed to be the patsy of the case, the one who was going to be blamed.

Do you believe in this version?

Yes. He was not alone. There were several “Oswalds” scattered all over the United States. We tell that, before Dallas, John F. Kennedy was targeted by at least two failed assassination attempts [one in Chicago, the other in Tampa, Florida] and quite similar from an “operative” point of view, each time with a patsy with a profile strangely resembling that of Oswald. In the case of the Chicago attempt, the person in question was Thomas Arthur Vallee. In Tampa, it was a Cuban exile, Gilberto Policarpo Lopez.

There is also the infamous “magic bullet” which is said to have first hit JFK before hitting John Connally, the governor of Texas, who was also in the limo. Are you questioning this assumption?

This bullet is in direct contradiction with the results of the autopsy, which show that JFK was hit in the third vertebra from the neck. In the Warren Commission report, that same bullet suddenly “shot up” at the back of the neck to match the path you want it to take, through the throat. At the autopsy, it is mentioned that Kennedy was hit at this point by a “penetrating” bullet. In reality, it was an “in” bullet, coming from the front. The Warren report holds that three bullets were fired. I think there were at least five, some coming from the front.

You maintain that JFK’s doctors were asked to be silent after his death…

Yes. I found the testimony of JFK’s personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, who said he was ready to testify, before retracting …

How did you come across him?

After investigating the autopsy. It was the members of the ARRB commission who raised the hare, in particular one of them, Douglas Horne, who testifies with exemplary precision in the documentary. He explains that the autopsy was “made up” and that John Stringer, the official photographer, supposed to have taken the photos of JFK’s brain which are in the file, did not recognize the images that were shown to him, nor even the type of film used … From there, the investigators, intrigued, sought to approach Doctor Burkley, who had seen it all and signed the death certificate. He agreed to cooperate at first, before changing his mind. After his death, his daughter did exactly the same. And this doctor is not the only one. We also bring to mind Dr Perry, who years after the tragedy told a friend of his that he was “absolutely convinced” that the wound in his throat was from a bullet coming in, and therefore coming from the front. He began by testifying in this sense before saying the opposite …

JFK’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom you interview, doesn’t believe in the lone killer thesis either.

Yes, just like his father, JFK’s Attorney General, who lost all power in the aftermath of the assassination. The first thing Lyndon Baines Johnson, the new president, does is appoint the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. Among its members, Allen Dulles, ex-director of the CIA. Fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he had every reason to hate him. Remember that John F. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, decided to bring the CIA to heel.

In your opinion, Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission before becoming President of the United States, also did not believe in the Oswald trail.

Indeed, he opened up to Valéry Giscard d´Estaing, which was revealed in 2013. “We were sure it was a set-up,” he said. But we didn’t find out who rode him. ”

You’re clearly pointing the finger at the CIA. On what basis?

It should be remembered that John F. Kennedy, after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, had decided to bring the CIA in line with, in particular, frank cuts in its budget. All of his foreign policy was against the interests of the CIA.

What do you mean?

JFK was a man of peace. He is the last American president to have sincerely acted in this direction. In this case, we are focusing too much on one question: how could all this be possible? My documentary reveals why it happened. JFK, this veteran, decorated for his acts of bravery during the Second World War, was going to change the world. He had seen the horrors of war, the disastrous role of the CIA in action at the Bay of Pigs, and then that of the US military during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was not impressed by the generals who advised him to attack the Soviet Union or Laos in 1961 or Cuba in October 1962. Not only did he resist their wartime spirit, but he signed, in 1963, an unprecedented agreement with the Soviets. John F. Kennedy did not want a “pax americana” imposed on the rest of the world. He wanted genuine peace. A bit like General de Gaulle who preferred to see France leave Algeria rather than endless conflict, which earned him an assassination attempt by the OAS, possibly supported by the CIA … Everyone claims that JFK started the war in Vietnam; This is not true, he wanted to repatriate the “military advisers”.

You give the CIA a lot of influence!

I note that Lyndon Johnson did the opposite of JFK. He bolstered the CIA and increased American engagement in Vietnam. He did nothing to fight colonialism, which Kennedy opposed. It is also this truth that I wanted to reestablish: everyone claims that JFK started the war in Vietnam; This is not true, he wanted to repatriate the “military advisers”.

How do you explain that your documentary was refused by Netflix?

The country has become very conservative. I had to look for funding abroad, in Great Britain. Already, my film about Edward Snowden, a hero in my opinion, could only be made with money from France and Germany. So I came to the Cannes Film Festival to promote this documentary in a Europe more open to such projects. But I am convinced that I will eventually find an independent platform that will allow me to broadcast it in the United States.

Is this lack of interest due to weariness over an over-rehashed subject or, rather, a truth America does not want to see?

There is no weariness. Simply put, America is a country on the decline and on the defensive. George W. Bush was probably our worst president. Obama was just a transitional president: he did nothing to turn the tide, and Joe Biden is in his wake. Censorship has imposed itself. I’m shocked by the way that social media has silenced Trump. Kennedy was killed by forces which exceeded him and which, since, frightens all his successors.

You have been accused of pro-Russian sympathies for asking soothing questions of Putin in one of your films. Your answer?

I don’t need to hate anyone: I’m a director, I have my own signature. No one scares me. Neither Putin, nor Castro, nor Chavez. In my films, I transcribe what they feel and think. I had no reason to tell Putin, who confided in me his views on Syria, Bush or Iran, among others, that he was wrong. Especially since nothing was wrong …

Do you think the truth about the JFK assassination will ever be known?

But we already know the truth! It was a conspiracy. He was killed by forces which exceeded him and which, since, frightens all his successors. The culprit was a Communist, a typical scenario of a “black op” set up from scratch by the CIA.

Trump had promised to declassify the archives but did not. Are you going to ask Biden to do it?

I should, but it’s a waste of time. If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes the letter for me, it might have more impact. What is certain is that there is nothing more that can be done for the people who still believe in the Oswald Lone-Assassin Thesis. They live in Disneyland!

August 2, 2021
A Presumption of Innocence: Lee Harvey Oswald, Part 2
Part 1

CE 399

How does one go about verifying the authenticity of Commission Exhibit 399? That is a very important question. Had Lee Harvey Oswald survived long enough to see a public trial, no doubt one of the most important pieces of evidence against him would have been the nearly pristine bullet found on a stretcher at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital in the wake of the president’s murder. One of the most important aspects of any criminal case is verification of physical evidence which is being presented in a court of law. This high-profile murder case is no exception; therefore the provenance of CE 399 must be explored if we are to make a determination as to its authenticity. This exploration begins through the study of the variety of documentation and witness statements relating to this core evidence. This legal doctrine behind this exploration is termed ‘chain of possession.’ In relation to CE 399, we want to determine:
1. Who found the bullet?
2. Who took possession of the bullet?
3. What documentation and markings exist in relation to the bullet?
4. What do the witnesses say about the bullet?
The discovery of the bullet is credited to Parkland maintenance employee Darrell C Tomlinson. Mr Tomlinson was in the process of moving a stretcher which was blocking an area in front of an elevator in the hospital’s emergency department. Tomlinson stated before the Commission that:

Mr. TOMLINSON.  I pushed it back up against the wall.

Mr. SPECTER.      What, if anything, happened then?

Mr. TOMLINSON.  I bumped the wall and a spent cartridge or bullet rolled out that apparently had been lodged under the edge of the mat.

(Testimony of Darrell C Tomlinson)

Upon the retrieval and inspection of this bullet, Tomlinson handed it over to Mr. O. P. Wright, who was Parkland’s personnel director. Mr Wright was a retired Dallas deputy chief of police, in charge of patrol division in the 1950’s. Upon close inspection of this bullet, Wright sought out a Secret Service agent. That agent was Richard E Johnson. Agent Johnson kept in his possession the Parkland bullet until he had flown back to Washington D.C. with the slain president’s body. Once in Washington, Johnson handed over possession of the bullet to chief of the Secret Service, James Rowley. In turn, Rowley handed the bullet over to FBI agent Elmer Lee Todd. Todd, who is alleged to have placed his markings upon the bullet, handed the bullet over to Robert Frazier of the FBI crime lab. That is the official explanation as to how the bullet found in Dallas ended up in Washington D.C. on 11/22/63.   Let us examine some of the participants in this chain:

Tomlinson => Wright => Johnson => Rowley => Todd => Frazier

Darrell C Tomlinson

Tomlinson appeared before the Warren Commission on March 20th, 1964. Amazingly, Mr. Tomlinson was not shown CE 399 during his hearing and consequently was not asked to ID it as the bullet that he found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital on 11/22/63. This is strange behaviour from the Commission as Mr. Tomlinson was an important witness to the identification of this key piece of evidence.

According to one memo (Commission Exhibit 2011, p.2), on June 12, 1964, Darrell C. Tomlinson, maintenance employee, Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas, was shown Exhibit C1 (CE 399), a rifle slug, by Special Agent Bardwell D. Odum of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To quote from that report, “Tomlinson stated it appears to have been the same one he found on a hospital carriage at Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963, but he cannot positively identify the bullet as the same one he found and showed to Mr. O. P. Wright.” Did Tomlinson at least concede that CE 399 resembled the bullet he held in his possession that day?

O P Wright

As incredible as it sounds, Mr. Wright was not called to testify before the Commission. According to an FBI Memo which was printed in the Warren Commission hearings (Commission Exhibit 2011, p.2), on June 12, 1964: “O. P. Wright, Personnel Officer, Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas, advised Special Agent Bardwell D. Odum that Exhibit C1 (CE 399), a rifle slug, shown to him at the time of the interview, looks like the slug found at Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963. He advised he could not positively identify C1 (CE 399) as being the same bullet which was found on November 22, 1963.” But does the evidentiary record support the notion that Wright conceded that the Parkland bullet looked like CE 399?

In November of 1966, Josiah Thompson visited Tomlinson and Wright at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Thompson later asked Wright to describe the bullet he got from Tomlinson on 11/22/63. Wright described the bullet he obtained as having a “pointed tip.” (Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)

In reference to an earlier re-enactment done with Tomlinson, Wright stated to Thompson that the stretcher bullet looked “like the one you got there in your hand,” referencing the .30 calibre projectile used for the re-enactment. (Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, p. 24)

This description from Wright must bring into question Wright’s alleged concession to Odum that CE 399 looked like the bullet he had in his possession that day. When Thompson showed Wright a picture of CE 399, similar bullets from Oswald’s alleged rifle and CE 606, similar bullets from Oswald’s alleged revolver, Wright denied that any of these resembled the bullet Tomlinson found on 11/22/63.

Thompson stated that later, while getting ready to leave Parkland, Wright approached him and said, “Say, that single bullet photo you kept showing me … was that the one that was supposed to have been found here?” Thompson replied “Yes.” Thompson states that Wright “looked right at me, his face expressionless, and said, ‘Uh…huh.’ Then Wright turned and went back to his office.” (Last Second in Dallas, p. 26)

To Thompson, Wright had rejected CE 399 as the bullet Tomlinson handed over to him that day. Tomlinson also could not identify CE 399 as the bullet he found on the stretcher on 11/22/63.

In a declassified document dated 6/20/64 from Gordon Shanklin, SAC Dallas, to FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, Shanklin states: “Neither Parkland’s DARRELL C. TOMLINSON, nor O. P. WRIGHT, can identify this bullet.”

So as of June 20^th 1964, the FBI knew that neither Tomlinson nor Wright could identify CE 399 as being the bullet which came from a stretcher at Parkland Hospital on 11/22/63.

Richard E Johnson

Richard E Johnson was another important witness whose testimony the commission neglected to hear. Maybe it is because, contained within the document CE 2011, we find the following information with regard to his identification of CE 399:

On June 24, 1964, Special Agent Richard E. Johnson, United States Secret Service, Washington, D.C., was shown Exhibit C1 (CE 399), a rifle bullet, by Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Johnson advised he could not identify this bullet as the one he obtained from O. P. Wright, Parkland Hospital, Dallas Texas, and gave to James Rowley, Chief, United States Secret Service, Washington D.C., on November 22, 1963. (Commission Exhibit 2011, Volume XXIV, p. 412)

James Rowley SS Chief

On June 24, 1964, James Rowley, Chief, United States Secret Service, Washington, D.C., was shown exhibit C1(CE 399), a rifle bullet, by Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd. Rowley advised he could not identify this bullet as the one he had received from Special Agent Richard E. Johnson and gave to Special Agent Todd on November 22, 1963. (Commission Exhibit 2011, Volume XXIV, p. 412)

Elmer Lee Todd

On June 24^th, 1964, Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd, Washington D.C. … identified C1 (CE 399), a rifle bullet, as being the same one he had received from James Rowley, Chief, United States Secret Service, Washington D.C. … on November 22, 1963. This identification was made from initials marked thereon by Special Agent Todd at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory upon receipt, November 22, 1963. (Commission Exhibit No. 2011, Volume XXIV, p. 413)

So according to CE 2011, SA Elmer Todd was able to identify CE 399 because of the initials Todd had placed upon the bullet to establish chain of custody.

Well respected Kennedy researcher John Hunt wanted to establish if the bullet which sits in the National Archives today in fact bears the marking of Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd. Hunt “managed to put together an illustration using photographs of CE -399.” He was then “able to track the entire surface of the bullet using four of NARA’s preservation photos.”

As Hunt states in his fine essay on this subject:

There is no question but that only three sets of initials appear on CE -399. There is likewise no question that they have all been positively identified: RF was Robert Frazier, CK was Charles Killion, and JH was Cortland Cunningham … It can be stated as a fact that SA Elmer Lee Todd’s mark is not on the historical CE -399 bullet.” (Phantom Identification of the Magic Bullet: E. L. Todd and CE-399)

We also find further collaboration for Hunt’s work from Dr David Mantik. At NARA in June 1994, Mantik and astronomer Steve Majewski confirmed that Todd’s initials are not on the historical CE 399. In an email communication with me, Mantik stated, “The other initials are precisely as described by John Hunt.”

Robert Frazier FBI

Another of John Hunt’s masterclasses comes in the form of the essay, “The Mystery of the 7:30 Bullet.” Hunt discovered through his examination of Robert Frazier’s detailed notes that the Parkland bullet was recorded as “Reed Elmer Todd, 11/22/63 – 7:30 p.m.” According to Frazier himself, he took custodianship of the bullet from Todd as of 7:30 p.m. on 11/22/63.

However, upon further analysis of the documentation, Hunt came across an envelope which was filled out by SA Elmer Lee Todd upon receipt of the bullet from Chief Rowley. This documentation states:

Received from Chief Rowley, USSS, 8:50 p.m. 11/22/63 E. L. Todd. (The Mystery of the 7:30 Bullet)

Question: How could Todd have given Frazier the stretcher bullet at 7:30 p.m. when Todd had not yet received that bullet from Chief Rowley until 8:50 p.m.? This discrepancy further casts the authenticity of the prosecution’s evidence into the most serious doubt.

Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson Track Down Odum

Dr Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson tracked down former FBI agent Bardwell Odum. The following encounter is well documented in their fine essay, “The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?” (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 282-84)

On September 12^th 2002, Aguilar phoned Odum and the two conversed about various things, but naturally the discussion turned to the assassination of John Kennedy. Odum agreed to look over various documents for Aguilar. Mr. Odum was sent three separate documents. The three were CE 2011, which states that Odum had shown CE 399 to Tomlinson and Wright at Parkland, the FBI airtel dated June 12, 1964, and the three-page FBI memo dated July 7, 1964. After a few weeks, Aguilar phoned Odum back. During that second phone call, Bardwell Odum then made the following statements: “Oh I never went to Parkland Hospital at all. I don’t know where you got that?” When Gary Aguilar asked Odum about CE 399, Odum replied, “I didn’t show it to anybody at Parkland. I didn’t even have any bullet. I don’t know where you got that from, but it is wrong.” (The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?)

Mr. Odum then went on to state that he never even saw CE 399, let alone had it in his possession. What makes it all worse is that Mr. Odum was a personal friend of O. P. Wright. Surely if Odum had at any time taken possession of this important piece of evidence relating to the murder of President Kennedy and presented it to his friend for identification purposes, then Odum would have remembered, would he not have?

Summary

It is pretty clear that CE 399 would have been an evidentiary debacle for a prosecuting attorney trying Lee Oswald. In order for evidence to be ruled as admissible in a court of law, the item must have an intact chain of possession. If a certain piece of evidence does not meet that standard, then this evidence is wide open to serious questioning by a defense attorney. Why would any prosecutor want Tomlinson, Wright, Johnson, and Rowley to testify that CE 399 was not the bullet each of them took possession of that day? Why would the prosecution want Todd testifying that he had indeed marked the Parkland bullet, when the historical CE 399 which sits in evidence today does not bear his marked initials? Why would the prosecution want Frazier to take the stand and testify under oath that he had received the bullet from Todd at 7:30 pm, when the bullet from Dallas wouldn’t be received by Todd until 8:50 pm?

Mark Lane, quoting Mark Twain, summed it up best: “Who so clinging from a rope by his hands severeth it above his hands must fall. It being no defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound.”

C 2766 Palm Print

Leaving behind CE 399, I now would like to turn our attention to another piece of evidence which is cited against Lee Oswald: the alleged presence of his palm print upon the rifle claimed as the murder weapon of John Kennedy. This alleged discovery of the print was made by J. C. Day of the Dallas police on 11/22/63. Even at that early stage it is alleged that Day had tentatively identified the palm print as coming from the main suspect, Lee Oswald. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 123) Is there any photographic evidence in existence of the print on C2766? The shocking but unsurprising answer to that question is there is no contemporaneous photographic evidence. Standard practice is to photograph a lift before an attempt at its removal is made. This step is taken to safeguard against the possibility of losing the print. Take, for example, the statements of FBI Fingerprint Expert Sebastian Latona: “Primarily, our recommendation in the FBI is simply in every procedure to photograph and then lift.” (Meagher, p. 123) The absence of any contemporaneous photograph of the print on the rifle is even more dumbfounding when we learn that Lieutenant Day attended an advanced latent print school conducted in Dallas by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Meagher, p. 123)

There are photographs of other partial prints taken by Day which were found on the exterior of the rifle. These prints were found to be valueless by the FBI. Day claimed that he had taken these photographs around 8 p.m. on 11/22/63.

Day claimed that he did not take a photograph of the most important latent palm print because he was given orders by Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry to “go no further with the processing.” However, prior to his Commission testimony, Day related to the FBI that he received these orders from Curry shortly before midnight. So by his own admission, Day had almost 4 hours to photograph the print he identified as Oswald’s before receiving the orders from Chief Curry. (Commission Exhibit 3145)

Why, then, did he not photograph the latent print? He must have known that this would be important evidence in any trial of Oswald. Not only is there no evidence that the palm print was ever present on the rifle, but when the FBI received the weapon and tested it for prints, they found no evidence of any fingerprint traces and no evidence of a lift ever being performed. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 107) Day testified that “the print on the gun … still remained on there … there was traces of ridges still on the gun barrel.” (WC Vol. 4, pp. 261-62) Which is in stark contrast to the findings by the FBI.

There is also no independent collaboration to Day’s alleged lifting of the print, as Day claimed to be alone when he attempted the lift. (CE 3145)

Day also apparently neglected to inform FBI agent Vincent T. Drain. Drain transferred the rifle to Washington D.C. on 11/23/63. Day said he informed Drain he had indeed found a palm print on the rifle which he believed was Oswald’s. As Henry Hurt wrote, Drain clearly disputes this: he says Day never showed him any such print or left any indication on the rifle where to look for it. (Hurt, p. 109)

Once the rifle arrived in Washington D.C., FBI hair and fibre expert Paul Stombaugh examined it, stating, “I noticed immediately upon receiving the gun that this gun had been dusted for latent fingerprints prior to my receiving it. Latent fingerprints powder was all over the gun.” (Meagher, p. 121)

In Accessories After the Fact, Sylvia Meagher states, “How could powder survive on the gun from Dallas to Washington, but every single trace of powder and the dry ridges which were present around the palm print on the gun barrel under the stock vanish?” (Meagher, p. 122)

Now when Capt. Will Fritz was asked on Saturday, November 23, if Oswald’s prints were found on the rifle, he stated “No sir.” Chief Curry also made no mention of this important discovery to the media. (Meagher, p. 124) In fact, the first mention of a palm print discovered on the rifle was announced on 11/24/63 by Dallas DA Henry Wade. (Hurt, p. 108) This was after the rifle was back in Dallas and after Oswald was murdered. The following is very hard to swallow: Day allegedly informed Fritz and Curry on 11/22/63 that he had found a palm print on the rifle which allegedly was used in the killing of President Kennedy and that he had tentatively identified the palm print as coming from the main suspect, Lee Oswald. (Meagher, p. 124)

With this powerful information in their arsenal, neither Fritz, Curry nor Wade, who were guilty of making many fraudulent and prejudicial statements of “fact” against the accused, offered not once to the assembled media on 11/22 or 11/23 that the existence of Oswald’s palm print had indeed been found on the suspected murder weapon.

The statements emanating from law enforcement officials were so prejudicial against Oswald that they warranted comment from various sources, one of these being Attorney Percy Foreman. According to the St Louis Post Dispatch, Foreman suggested that “authorities are running a serious risk of jeopardizing their case against Oswald by failing to observe his constitutional rights.” He went on to state: “Officials may have already committed reversible error in the case by permitting the accused to undergo more than 24 hours of detention without benefit of legal counsel.” Citing grounds for reversal, Foreman further asserted: “Under recent decision of the United States Supreme Court, Federal procedural guarantees must be observed in state prosecutions. Their abridgment can be grounds for a reversal or even a conviction. This is a new law. They could get a conviction in Texas and get it thrown out on appeal, but it takes a long time for these dim-witted law enforcement officers to realize it.” (St Louis Post Dispatch, 11/24/63)

After Oswald’s murder, all the evidence pertaining to the murder of President Kennedy was transferred from Dallas to Washington for good on November 26^th. Day’s alleged lift of the palm print on the rifle did not reach Washington until November 29^th. Why did this important piece of evidence not arrive with the others? (Meagher, p. 123)

In his book Reasonable Doubt, Henry Hurt interviewed retired FBI agent Vincent T Drain. Remember, Drain was the man who transferred the rifle from Dallas to Washington in the early hours of 11/23/63. When Drain was asked about the authenticity of the palm print, he replied: “I just don’t believe there was ever a print.” He noted that there was increasing pressure on the Dallas police to build evidence in the case. Asked to explain what might have happened, Agent Drain said, “All I can figure is that it (Oswald’s print) was some sort of cushion because they were getting a lot of heat by Sunday night. You could take the print off Oswald’s card and put it on the rifle. Something like this happened.” (Hurt, p. 109)

From Latona’s testimony it appears that the FBI never did find any of Oswald’s prints on C 2766. Latona confirmed Oswald’s prints from pictures supplied to him by the Dallas Police on November 29^th. (WC Vol. 4, pp. 24-25). To put it mildly, any accomplished defense attorney would have moved for what is called an evidentiary hearing prior to any trial of Oswald on both these pieces of evidence. He would likely have had both declared inadmissible. If not, he would have demonstrated to any jury that they were worthless as evidence since no chain of custody existed with either one. Beyond that, people were lying in order to create the illusion of a chain.

Part 3
July 31, 2021
Last Second in Dallas, part 2

Another dispute Thompson had with Vince Salandria was the author’s theory about the small hole in JFK’s throat. On the day of the assassination, Dr. Malcolm Perry said to the public that this appeared to be an entrance wound. Thompson’s idea is that it was a piece of either brain or metal ejected from Kennedy’s skull. And he includes a diagram of this on page 98. The trajectory of this projectile is hard to fathom, especially since it would be traveling through soft tissue. But also, once it went into the throat area, it would be entering into all kinds of small bones and thicker cartilage. So in addition to the trajectory, it found an exit path through that maze?

Thompson takes Howard Brennan at his word. (pp. 98-99) Which he also did in his previous JFK book. I am not going to go into the myriad problems with Brennan as a witness. That would be redundant of too many good writers. Let me say this: today, the best one can say about Brennan is that he was looking at the wrong building. The worst one could say is that he was rehearsed and suborned. As Vince Palamara wrote in Honest Answers, Brennan refused to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Beyond that, he would not answer written questions. When they said they would have to subpoena him, he replied he would fight the subpoena. Does this sound like a straightforward, credible witness? (Palamara, pp. 186-89)

To supplement the dubious Brennan, the author uses the testimony of the three workers underneath the sixth floor. Vincent Bugliosi used one of them in a mock trial of Lee Oswald in England in 1986. I addressed the serious problem with using these men––in Bugliosi’s case it was Harold Norman––in my book The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. (pp. 54-55) To make a long story short, after they were interviewed by the FBI, their stories were altered by the Secret Service. At that mock trial, Norman could have been taken apart and spat out if defense lawyer Gerry Spence had been prepared––which he was not. (For a long version of how and why this happened, see Secret Service Report 491)

Let me add one key point about this. One of the Secret Service agents involved in this mutation was Elmer Moore, a man who––since the declassifications of the ARRB––has become infamous in the literature. There is little doubt today, in the wake of the declassified files, that Moore was an important part of the coverup. (DiEugenio, pp. 166-69) Therefore, in my view, Thompson missed another pattern––one which could have been indicated to him by Gary Aguilar or Pat Speer, in addition to myself.

The middle part of the book narrates much of the case history from the early to late seventies. For Thompson, this means the first showings of the Zapruder film by Bob Groden at conferences, then the big national showing on ABC in 1975. This was one of the factors that spurred the creation of the HSCA in 1976. Thompson says that he was invited to the so called HSCA “critics conference.” He says this was where he first heard of the dictabelt tape of a motorcycle recording of the assassination. He takes the opportunity to tell us how the HSCA actually recovered the tape. He also explains how it worked and some of the technology behind it. (pp. 147-51) Keeping with his personal journey aspect, in this part of the book he also tells us how he decided to give up his professorship at Haverford and become a private investigator.

From 1979 until 2006 the author tells us he was very little involved with the case. (pp. 182-83) This is kind of surprising when one thinks about it. Thompson all but leaves out the yearlong furor that took place over the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Which is odd, since that was the largest period of focused attention the case got since 1975. All he says is that he was called to testify by the Assassination Records Review Board about their purchase of the Zapruder film. And he testified, properly I think, that once the Secret Service knew about the film it should have gone to Abraham Zapruder’s home and taken possession of it right there as a piece of evidence in a homicide case. (pp. 189-90) About any of the rather startling disclosures of the ARRB, I could detect little or nothing.

He spends several pages on a conference organized by Gary Aguilar in San Francisco which featured Eric Randich and Pat Grant. It was these two men who broke open the whole mythology of Vincent Guinn’s Neutron Activation Analysis, today called Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis. I was at that conference and Thompson does a good enough job summing up their scientific findings. (pp. 190-96). As the author notes, this “junk science” had been important to the HSCA in its findings that somehow Oswald alone did the shooting, and the acoustical second shot from the front missed.

II

In the second half of the book Thompson more or less forsakes the personal journey motif. He concentrates on what he sees as three important pieces of evidence, which he figures are crucial to the case. I will deal with each of these as candidly and completely as I can.

Thompson devotes Chapter 16, well over twenty pages, to the medical evidence in the JFK case. He begins this part of his book by declaring that the JFK autopsy was “botched,” in other words, whatever shortcomings there were in that procedure, they were not by design. I was rather surprised by this supposition, for the simple reason that Dr. Pierre Finck said under oath at the trial of Clay Shaw that the reason the back wound was not dissected is because the military brass in the room stopped them from doing so. He also said that James Humes, the chief pathologist, was not running the proceedings. They were being so obstructed that Humes literally had to shout out, “Who’s in charge here?” Finck testified that an Army general replied, “I am.” Finck summed up the situation like this:

You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officials, military people with various ranks, and you have to coordinate the operations according to directions. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 300, italics added)

The Department of Justice––among other groups––was monitoring the Clay Shaw trial in close to real time. When Carl Eardley, the Justice Department specialist on the JFK case, heard this, he almost had a hernia. He called up another of the pathologists, Thornton Boswell, and sent him to New Orleans, since they now had to discredit Finck for revealing what had happened. Eardley later thought better of this, probably because by any standard measure, Finck had better qualifications as a forensic pathologist then Boswell did. (ibid, p. 304)

One cannot overrate the importance of this testimony. To give just one indication of its importance: I did a pre-interview with Dr. Henry Lee for Oliver Stone’s new documentary on the JFK case. I asked him this specific question, directly related to Finck’s testimony: Can you figure out a firing trajectory without a tracking of the wound? He said that under those circumstances, it was very difficult to do. Here is a man who has worked about 8000 cases all over the world and is recognized as one of the best criminalists alive.

The same situation applies to the skull wound, except in this case, the situation is more complex. If one talks to Lee or Cyril Wecht they will tell you there is no evidence of a brain sectioning. But the Review Board did an inquiry into this subject, and Jeremy Gunn and Doug Horne came up with some evidence that such an examination may have been done. Under the scope of this particular review, this is not the place to do an expansive analysis of their evidence. Suffice it to say I found Thompson’s excuse for this lack rather strained: the doctors did not have the time to do so such a thing. (Thompson, p. 259) Yet in the Commission’s volumes there is a brain examination, dated 12/6/63. (CE 391) And there is no mention of sectioning; two weeks was not long enough? Yet without sectioning, how can one determine the bullets’ paths? On this matter, Lee was quite animated. He put his right hand up in front of his face and said words to the effect: You have this bullet coming in at a right to left angle: it then reverses itself and goes left to right? The lack of dissection in this instance is even more perplexing because the head wounding was how Kennedy was killed. And this is why Lee’s hand was piercing the air in bewilderment.

III

Thompson wrote something later that stunned me. On page 258 he says that the first time the autopsy doctors learned of a tracheostomy over the anterior neck wound was when they read about it in the next day’s newspapers. That passage is undermined by Nurse Audrey Bell’s 1997 testimony to the Review Board. Bell told them that Dr. Malcolm Perry complained to her the next morning (on Saturday, November 23rd) that he had been virtually sleepless, “because unnamed persons at Bethesda had been pressuring him on the telephone all night long to get him to change his opinion about the nature of the bullet wound in the throat, and to redescribe it as an exit, rather than an entrance.” (See DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 167-68; also this discussion)

In a very late discovery by writer Rob Couteau, Bell’s testimony was both certified and expanded. In the days following the assassination, many reporters were milling around Dallas, and some found their way to Malcolm Perry’s home, for the reason that he and Dr. Kemp Clark had held a press conference on the day of the assassination where Clark said there was a large, gaping wound in the back of Kennedy’s skull, and Perry said the anterior neck wound appeared to be one of entrance. One of the reporters who migrated to Perry’s home was from the New York Herald Tribune and his name was Martin Steadman. He asked Perry about this issue and Perry was frank. He affirmed that it was an entrance wound. But beyond that he said he was getting calls through the night from Bethesda. They wanted him to change his story. He said that the autopsy doctors questioned his judgment about this and they also threatened to call him before a medical board to take away his license. (See further “The Ordeal of Malcolm Perry”) To put It mildly, I disagree with Thompson’s next day thesis on this point.

Another surprising aspect of this chapter is that Thompson agrees with the Ramsey Clark Panel. That panel’s findings were released on the eve of the Clay Shaw trial. They upheld the original autopsy’s conclusions about two shots from behind; but they made about four major changes that were rather bracing. One of them was that they raised the entrance wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull 10 mm upward, into the cowlick area. (Thompson, p. 248)

The way Thompson mentions this in passing was, again, jarring to the reviewer, one reason being that, in all likelihood, it was Six Seconds in Dallas which caused both the Clark Panel to be formed and the rear skull wound to be raised to the cowlick area. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination, p. 150). As Russell Fisher, the panel’s chief pathologist later said, Attorney General Ramsey Clark got hold of an advance copy of Six Seconds in Dallas. On page 111 of that book, Thompson shows that Kennedy’s head––as depicted in the Warren Commission to illustrate the fatal wound––is not in the correct posture as shown in Zapruder frame 312. The Commission had the film; therefore, all the indications are that they fibbed about this key point.

How did the Clark panel elevate that wound into the cowlick area? Since Thompson does not show the anterior/posterior X-ray, the reader is in the dark about this point. The answer is they largely based it on a disk-shaped white object in the rear of the skull that stands out plain as day on the X-ray. The problem with this piece of evidence is that none of the autopsy doctors, or the two FBI agents in attendance, saw it on the X-rays in the morgue the night of the autopsy; and it is not in the 1963 autopsy report. All of which is incredible, for two reasons. First, it is by far the largest fragment visible; and second, its dimensions of 6.5 mm precisely fit the caliber of ammunition Oswald was allegedly firing. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination, pp. 153-54)

I could go on from there, but I won’t. As the reader can see, I did not find this chapter at all satisfactory.

IV

One of the key points Thompson wants to make in this book is something he has been talking about for a rather long time. It is the work of Dave Wimp on what the author calls “the blur illusion.” In fact, Thompson calls Chapter 14, “Breaking the Impasse: The Blur Illusion.” Since I took Thompson at his word about this, several years ago, at a JFK Lancer conference, I mentioned Wimp and his work. I said the forward bob by Kennedy preceding the rearward head snap did not really exist. Almost immediately after I finished my address, first Art Snyder and then John Costella disagreed with me. Snyder disagreed with me on the mathematical analysis Wimp had done. Costella disagreed on whether or not this was really an illusion. In other words: did Kennedy’s head really bob forward before jetting backward? The two disagreements gave me pause. Why? Because both men are physicists.

Back in the sixties, Thompson first learned of this forward bob between Zapruder frames 312-313 from one of the earliest students of the film, Ray Marcus. (See page 112 of Six Seconds in Dallas, footnote 2) The author and Vince Salandria then studied this in combination with the more dramatic and lengthier rearward slam at the Archives. (Six Seconds, pp. 86-87) The issue is one of the most interesting aspects of Thompson’s first book. He goes through a few explanations of how this could have occurred. He then decides on a term that became rather famous in the critical community––the “double hit” or “double impact.” (pp. 94-95) In other words, two projectiles hit Kennedy’s skull almost instantaneously: one from behind and one from the front. The first moved him forward, the second rocked him backward. He then adds that S. M. Holland had told him the third and fourth shots sounded like they were fired almost simultaneously. He backs this up with other witnesses who heard the same thing. Thus the double impact was credible.

Why did Thompson change his tune on this point? There seem to be three reasons for this. The first is that he felt his first thesis allowed for too precise a synchronization of the shots. No firing team could be that well trained. The second and third are complementary: Dave Wimp’s work coincided with his gravitation towards the acoustics evidence.

Since Thompson decided to go with the acoustics, he had to dump the “double hit” he wrote about in his earlier book, because the acoustics evidence allows for only one shot from the front at Zapruder frame 312. The following shot comes from behind at Zapruder frame 328. Dave Wimp aided this new scenario by somehow making the forward bob disappear, being dismissed as an illusion.

But if such was the case, then why did the two physicists disagree with my statement about the Wimp thesis? Snyder objected to it on mathematical grounds. He did not think that Wimp’s work had absolutely proved his thesis. He told me that there was about a 20% chance Wimp was wrong. Snyder turned out to be correct, because in a reply to Nick Nalli’s review of Last Second in Dallas, Wimp admitted his calculations were not correct. He wrote:

That I have a blur illusion hypothesis is the result mostly of people failing to distinguish between what people are saying and what people are saying people are saying, which seems to be a pervasive problem. The issue is not about illusions but rather about bad methodology.

Today, Wimp now seems to admit that Kennedy’s head did go forward by about an inch. Evidently, Thompson oversold this idea to at least one person: me. And since he still insists on it in his book, perhaps others.

Costella explained why Wimp made an error in a more practical, applicable sense:

Wimp has always made a valid observation about trying to measure the position of a single (rising or falling) edge, in the presence of blur. That is fraught, especially in the presence of unavoidable nonlinearities. What he never seems to have considered, as far as I can tell, is that if you have two opposite edges (rising then falling, or vice versa) of an object, then it is quite simple to align the center of mass of the object between any two frames, even if the edges are blurred. You can do this even if the two frames are blurred differently––that’s effectively what all stabilized versions of the film do (including his own!). It’s even simpler if you either deblur the blurred 313 to match 312 (like I did back in the day, per my animation on my website), or else blur 312 to match 313 …. What I never did is put an exact number of inches on the forward head movement. I have no idea if his smaller number is accurate or not, because I didn’t quantify. What is certain, just from the visuals, is that the head moves forward in the extant Z film. (Email of 6/15/21)

How proficient is Costella in his study of the film? After he approached me at JFK Lancer, he took out his cell phone and showed me how he had deblurred Zapruder and the forward head bob was still there. Yes, John is a man who carries his work with him.

G. Paul Chambers, another physicist, probably has the most sensible explanation for this aspect of the case. He has told Gary Aguilar that what likely happened is that the first shot through Kennedy’s back likely paralyzed him. When the car began to brake, his limp body then went forward. (Phone call with Gary Aguilar, 7/18/21)

V

“Jim, there is no motorcycle where the HSCA says there is.”

The above quotation is taken from a phone conversation in 1994 between this reviewer and the late Dick Sprague. I chose to lead this part of my review with it because, as with the head bob, I once believed in the acoustics evidence. So when the famous photo analyst Dick Sprague said the above to me, I was surprised.

Let me explain why I had that reaction. When I visited the now deceased HSCA attorney Al Lewis at his office in Lancaster Pennsylvania, he told me about something his former boss had done in the early days of that congressional committee. Chief Counsel Richard A. Sprague had arranged a day-long study of the photographic evidence in the JFK case. There were three presenters on hand: Bob Cutler, Robert Groden, and Dick Sprague. They went in that order. Before Cutler began, the chief counsel turned to those in attendance and said, “I don’t want anyone to leave unless I leave, and I don’t plan on leaving.” As Lewis related to me, Cutler’s presentation was about 35 minutes. Groden’s was over 90 minutes, close to two hours. Dick Sprague’s went on for four hours. By the end of Sprague’s demonstration, 12 of the 13 staff lawyers believed Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy. (James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 57)

Such was the photographic mastery of Dick Sprague. At that time, no one had a more expansive collection of films and photos than he did. In that phone call, he told me that Robert Blakey, the second chief counsel, only called him once. It was to ask him if there was a motorcycle where the acoustics experts said there had to be one. Dick spent a lot of time going through his massive collection. He eventually replied that no, there was not. It was Groden who said that there was.

To this day this issue has not been settled to any adequate degree. And there is simply no papering it over. Because the motorcycle has to be at a precise point near the intersection of Houston and Elm for the acoustics evidence to be genuine. Modern experts on the motorcade, like Mark Tyler, insist that Sprague was correct. And Mark argues that point effectively at the Education Forum. (See his post of June 9^th) What I found severely disappointing about Thompson’s book is this: he barely deals with the issue at all. This is what he says about the highly controversial but crucial point: he writes that he and author Don Thomas found the correct motorcycle in the films of Gary Mack. Afterwards, they had a few beers and called it a night. (p. 304)

I could hardly believe what I was reading. I actually wrote “WTF” in the margin of my notes. Somehow, this trio, not experts on the photo evidence, easily accomplished something that Dick Sprague––who was the leading authority in the field––could not do? The cavalier way Thompson deals with this important point––throwing in the phrase “having a few beers and calling it a night”––underscores just how unconvincing his treatment of it is. If it was this easy to locate and demonstrate, then why is there no picture of the proper motorcycle in proper context to accompany the “few beers and calling it a night”––straight out of Sam and Diane at Cheers––motif? I was so puzzled by this carelessness, leaning toward avoidance, that I went back and read up on the acoustics evidence.

These sound recordings first entered the legal case during the days of the HSCA. They were offered up by Texas researchers Gary Mack and Mary Ferrell. Thompson does a good job in explaining the rather primitive technology which the Dallas police used in these recordings. There were two channels being recorded that day, simply labeled Channel 1 and Channel 2. The latter used a Gray Audograph powered by a worm gear which drives a needle into a vinyl disk. (Thompson, pp. 304-06). Channel 1 “was done by a Dictaphone that used a stylus inscribing a groove onto a blue plastic belt called a Dictabelt mounted on a rotating cylinder.” (Thompson, p. 148). Channel 1 was used for basic police operations. Channel 2 was for special events, like Kennedy’s motorcade. Back at headquarters, the dispatcher would announce each minute that passed, and each time the dispatcher spoke to a unit he would announce the time. (p. 149)

The HSCA did two tests of the acoustics. The first was by a company called Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. The main scientist on this was James Barger, who supervised a reconstruction test in Dealey Plaza. After doing this, Barger said that there was about a 50% chance of a shot from the Grassy Knoll. The HSCA then gave those results to another team of acoustic experts: Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy . After examining this data they decided there was a much higher probability, 95%. The HSCA announced this in their final days.

Because he is wedded to this evidence for the finale of his book, Thompson has nothing but scorn for what is today called the Ramsey Panel. The Department of Justice asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the work of the HSCA. They set up a committee named after Harvard physicist Norman Ramsey. Alvarez ended up serving on this committee. Alvarez told Barger that no matter what he said he would vote against him. (Thompson, p. 287) The panel was biased from the start and the author does a good job proving that point. For Thompson, this is why they ended up rejecting the HSCA result.

But I want to note two things about the closing 80 or so pages of Last Second in Dallas and how an author making himself a character in his book is a double-edged sword. Thompson mentions a 2013 debate he did for CNN moderated by Erin Burnett; his opponent was Nick Ragone. (p. 276) If one can comprehend it, Ragone brought up Gerald Posner’s discredited book Case Closed. Thompson says he did not do well since he did not have any new evidence to reply with. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but if I had been there, I would have had a lot of new evidence to throw back. This is how I would have replied:

Nick, that book came out in 1993. Which was one year before the ARRB was set up. They declassified 2 million pages of documents. Have you read them? I read a lot of them, and here is what they said.

When asked the old chestnut, “Well why didn’t someone squeal?”, Thompson could have mentioned Larry Hancock’s book Someone Would Have Talked. He then could have said: “Larry shows that two people did talk, Richard Case Nagell and John Martino. If you don’t know about them, that is a failure of the MSM.” As a point of comparison, when Oliver Stone and I did an interview this past June with Fox, I brought about eight of these new ARRB documents with me. Fox filmed me showing them while I described what they said. They then had me send them in email form. Whether or not they will exhibit them on the show, I don’t know. But I had enough rocks in hand to play David with his slingshot.

VI

But the reason I think Thompson plays up the CNN experience is that he wants to show that if the acoustics evidence had been reexamined, he could have mentioned that. As noted, Thompson harshly critiques the Ramsey Panel, and much of this is warranted. But he only briefly mentions how the Weiss/Aschkenasy ––hereafter called WA––verdict was rather hastily granted a stamp of approval by the HSCA.

What makes this kind of odd is that the author mentions Michael O’Dell more than once in the book. But he does not go into O’Dell’s rather bracing criticism of WA. O’Dell is a computer scientist and systems analyst. O’Dell wrote that the WA conclusion was based upon a motorcycle rider having his Channel 1 microphone button stuck open for a continuous five minute period. This was thought to be H. B. McLain, who first said it was and then said it was not him. What O’Dell was trying to do was to replicate what WA had done, except with much more powerful computer tools, not available back then. He wrote a report called “Replication of the HSCA Weiss and Aschkenasy Acoustic Analysis.” In his report, he found that:

Numerous errors have been found with the data provided in the report, including basic errors involved in the measurement of delay times, waveform peaks and object position. Some of the errors are necessary to the finding of an echo correlation to the suspect Dictabelt pattern. The Weiss and Aschkenasy report does not stand up to even limited scrutiny, and the results it contains cannot be reproduced. (p. 2)

O’Dell revealed that WA had relied on a millimeter ruler and string to map out their bullet paths on a map of Dealey Plaza. O’Dell used Adobe Photoshop to scan the same map as WA and transferred the measurements into pixels after lining them up in Excel. He found multiple critical errors in WA’s work, including those of distance measurement of buildings from other objects like the stockade fence. (See p. 3) O’Dell wrote that the microphone was positioned in the wrong place by WA. (p. 9) There were errors in the original paperwork independent of a transfer to a virtual model. For the buildings list in Dealey Plaza, items 16 and 20 were described as the same object. (p. 4) He also found out that one of the bullet paths was supposed to rebound off of object 23, yet there were only 22 structures WA had listed. (p. 5). There were objects listed in the WA table that O’Dell could not find on the map. (p. 8) But perhaps the most bracing criticism O’Dell made was that

… the values presented in Table 4 for the Dictabelt pattern do not appear to be valid measurements of the peaks in the recording. A test that supposedly identifies a gunshot on the Dictabelt recording must, at a minimum, correctly measure the sound being tested on the Dictabelt. (p. 11)

I could go on. But before anyone comes back at me by saying, “Why would you use something like this after what Dale Myers did with his phony cartoon based on the Zapruder film?” After all, Jim, Myers went on ABC TV and said the single bullet theory was really the single bullet fact. All I can do is reply with the following. I used O’Dell because Thompson used him. In communicating with the man I found out that Thompson had signed him to a non-disclosure agreement about his book. It ended when the work was published.

Another series of problems with this evidence was written about by Charles Olsen and Lee Ann Maryeski in June of 2014 for Sonalysts, Inc. out of Waterford, Connecticut. They stated that although McLain had claimed he had opened up his cycle to a continuous high speed after the shooting, that is not what they determined by placing the sound on a graph: “What Figure 1 shows is a motorcycle that variously speeds up and slows down and idles during this latter period.” (6/6/2014, Olsen and Maryeski, pp. 3-4)

Let me add one other comment. As both O’Dell, and especially Dave Mantik have pointed out, one of the virtues attributed to this evidence is the so called “order in the data.” Or as Don Thomas puts it in his book, the best test matches correspond to a topographic order in Dealey Plaza and with the dictabelt. (Hear No Evil, p. 583) But as Mantik informed me, if one looks at Thompson’s own table, if the HSCA had chosen the bullet sound at the 144.90 point in the tape, they would have had two matches to the School Book Depository that very closely matched the one to the knoll area. (Thompson, p. 155) The same thing occurred at 137.70; the TSBD could have been chosen over the knoll. (interview with Mantik, 6/26/21)

In addition to all the above, Thompson essentially brushes over the issue of heterodyne tones. (p. 296) This is an important point that the Sonalyst report examined. It’s important because it can result in words being scrambled in pronunciation as one listens to them. Meaning that they can sound like one phrase to one person and another phrase to someone else. And this has happened. (Olsen and Maryeski, p. 9)

Even his heralded discovery, that voices saying “Hold everything” and “I’ll check it,” occur around the assassination is odd. First, the object is to show whether or not the bullet echo correlation is real, not the voices. Also, to get a more distinct peak for “I’ll check it,” Richard Mullen, Barger’s protégé, used a narrower sampling PCC (Pattern cross correlation) window of 64. Therefore Thompson concludes this is what should have been used from the start. Yet for “Hold everything,” a wider sampling window of 512 yielded a larger net peak than did a smaller sampling window of 64. Thompson offers no explanation for this seeming paradox. (See Figures 22-6 and 22-7; 6/26/21 interview with Mantik)

If the “Hold everything secure” phrase is at the time of the assassination, then the acoustics is invalid, since this is spoken after the assassination. “I’ll check it” would be around the time of the shots. So the two phrases are in conflict if both were valid. The first phrase is at the wrong time, the latter one is at the right time. So Thompson argues that the “Hold” phrase has been altered and is really an overdub. (Thompson, pp. 345-47)

This has also been placed in doubt by O’Dell. (See Dictabelt Hums and the “hold everything secure” Crosstalk) The “Check” phrase, as has been argued by many, is not really crosstalk at all. The same sound does not appear on both channels. (Email communication with O’Dell, 7/25/21). And further, Sonalysts showed that the spectrograms of the phrase differ on Channel 1 and 2. (Olsen and Maryeski, p. 6)

I could go on. But I think the point has been made. There are simply too many uncertain variables with the acoustics evidence to rely on it as having a 95% probability. Much of this is due to the innate poor quality of the recordings themselves.

When we were making JFK Revisited, producer Rob Wilson asked me to incorporate a section on the acoustics evidence. I recommended against it. I simply noted that with all the above problems with that evidence we would be making ourselves into a bull’s eye on a target range; a whole gallery of persons would take out their bows and arrows and start unloading their quivers on us.

As I said in Part 1, there are good things in Last Second in Dallas. And as a responsible critic I have described them. In my opinion, they are important and valuable and have stood the test of time. But it is also my opinion that there are a lot of things which seem to me to be liabilities, including what the author thinks is the culminating arc of his book––and I have described those deficits also. This is why Last Second in Dallas is a decidedly mixed bag.

Return to Part 1

July 26, 2021
Jim DiEugenio on the Assassinations of the 60’s, Parts 1 & 2

Jim DiEugenio speaks with Michael Welch about the four big domestic assassinations of the 1960s, and about the new Oliver Stone documentary (the first two of four interviews).

July 23, 2021
CounterPunch Whiffs Again!

On July 15^th, CounterPunch did it again. The occasion was an article comparing the final withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan with the American debacle in Indochina. Author David Schultz used the famous line, this time attributed to Hegel, that the only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. He wrote that as the Taliban now takes over some of us “wonder if this is not Déjà vu all over again and that what we thought we had learned from the Vietnam War proved to be a fleeting lesson.”

Schultz goes on to note the Kent State shooting, helicopters over the embassy in 1975, the domino theory, over 58,000 dead American soldiers, tens of billions wasted. He then mentions some of the literature on the Vietnam War. First off is Francis FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake which tried to accent how different the culture of Vietnam was and how the American military did not understand it. Then, of course, since this is CounterPunch, Schultz has to mention David Halberstam and The Best and the Brightest.

Here is how Schultz quantifies Halberstam’s book. He writes that it pointed to:

….the arrogance of the Kennedy administration in failing to understand that Vietnam was more about colonial independence than it was about communism and Cold War rivalry.

As I have indicated too many times to enumerate here, this misses two major points about Halberstam. First, Halberstam completely revised his view of Vietnam between his first book, The Making of a Quagmire, and his second book on the subject The Best and the Brightest. In that first book, Halberstam criticized Kennedy for not being militant enough in Vietnam. In 1965, Halberstam said that Kennedy should have gotten America in earlier. In fact, that book is an utterly coruscating critique of American policy in Vietnam until 1965. The hero of the book is Colonel John Paul Vann. Why? Because Vann knew how to win the war! (See Chapter 11) Halberstam is even more explicit about this later when he declares, “Bombers and helicopters and napalm are a help, but they are not enough.” (p. 321) He then gives us his Schultzian lesson about Vietnam: “The lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that we must get in earlier, be shrewder, and force the other side to practice self-deception.” (p. 322)

Halberstam’s role model in 1965, Vann, thought that if America was going to win the war, American troops were needed. (See the Introduction to the 2008 edition by Daniel Singal, p. xi) Well, Lyndon Johnson gave Vietnam about 500,000 American troops and it did not work out very well. Since Halberstam started writing The Best and the Brightest in about 1968, when this had all clearly turned out to be a disaster, the author decided to cover his tracks. Back in 1963, Kennedy did not like what Halberstam and Vann were trying to do––which was move toward escalation by criticizing what they saw as JFK’s timidity. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 261) So therefore, even though America had been involved in Vietnam for eleven years prior to Kennedy’s inauguration, Halberstam focused a large part of 1972’s The Best and the Brightest on the years 1961-63, virtually ignoring what the Eisenhower administration had done to secure a commitment to Vietnam. Eisenhower had, in fact, created a new country there, one that had not existed prior to 1954. And since America had created it, then America was obliged to defend it.

By relying on Halberstam’s museum piece, Schultz gets the other part he writes about wrong also. President Kennedy did comprehend what the Vietnam war was about. He understood the true circumstances because of his association with Edmund Gullion going back to Saigon in 1951. (Click here for details) This is why he refused to commit combat troops in theater. During the crucial debates in November of 1961, Air Force Colonel Howard Burris took notes. They are contained in James Blight’s book, Virtual JFK (pp. 282-83)

Kennedy argued that Vietnam was not a case of aggression as was Korea. Therefore, America would be subject to intense criticism from even her allies. He then argued that the French had spent millions there with no degree of success. He also argued that the circumstances were such that even Democrats in Congress would have a hard time defending such a commitment. Further, one would be fighting a guerilla force, “sometimes in phantom-like fashion.” That would mean whatever base of operations American troops had would be insecure. Burris noted that during the debate, Kennedy turned back attempts by Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Lyman Lemnitzer to derail his train of thought.

I don’t see how one can locate a more defining moment, or show how well Kennedy really understood what the facts of the war were than this. One can argue that Ed Lansdale had been the first person to suggest inserting combat troops into Vietnam, something Kennedy refused many, many times. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, first edition, p. 20; Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 52) After Kennedy’s death, when Lansdale returned to the White House, he recommended sending John Paul Vann back to Vietnam. Vann did return in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson overturned Kennedy’s policy by sending tens of thousands of combat troops into Vietnam. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 384). Using David Halberstam today as any measure of what happened in Vietnam would be like cranking up a Model T Ford to make a cross country trip. Halberstam was the author who called 1964, the “lost year” in Vietnam. Geez Dave, wasn’t the Tonkin Gulf Resolution kind of important? (For more on Halberstam click here”>)

Another issue with the article is its comparison with how America got into Vietnam and how America got into Afghanistan. Schultz writes that America got into the latter as a result of the attacks of 9/11. Which is only partly true. America was involved even before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979. President Carter had allowed the CIA to operate in the country at his National Security Advisor’s request. The late Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that such aid would likely induce a Soviet invasion and that would give the USA an opportunity to hand Russia its own Vietnam. (January, 1998, interview with Le Nouvel Observateur) As most people know, the CIA now began to back the struggle of the Islamic radicals against the Russians. This included Osama Bin Laden. Much of this aid went through Pakistan. And in return, America agreed to look the other way as that country built a nuclear weapon. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 386)

Unlike America’s commitment to Vietnam, the Russians never had more than 120,000 troops in theater. Mikhail Gorbachev recommended a peace agreement before the Russians formally withdrew in 1989. The concept was to leave behind Mohammad Najibullah as president and he would form a coalition government with some of the more moderate tribes. The goal was to marginalize the Islamic fundamentalists. For whatever reason, the USA would not sign onto this sensible agreement. (The New Yorker, 9/29/2009, article by Steve Coll) There were warnings from people like the late Benazir Bhutto that were quite frank and accurate. She said, “You are creating a Frankenstein.” (Newsweek, 10/1/2001, article by Evan Thomas)

Bhutto was correct. Unlike the Tom Hanks depiction of the late congressman Charlie Wilson, the congressman backed this decision. (DiEugenio, p. 387) America actually gave aid to some of these deplorable fundamentalists, e.g., Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The one decent tribal leader in the area, Ahmad Shah Massoud, only got a fraction of what those two men received. (Alternet, 12/20/2007, article by Melissa Roddy)

As Bhutto and Gorbachev predicted, the country descended into a horrifying civil war. After three years, Najbullah was dislodged. Pakistan then sent in its own charges, the Taliban, who backed Sharia Law. Najbullah was taken prisoner, mutilated and killed in late 1996. Massoud held out for years until he was assassinated two days before the 9-11 attacks.

This is not just an interesting story for what it says about Tom Hanks and his cartoonish movie Charlie Wilson’s War. But also because, after Massoud’s demise, the Taliban took over the country. It became a hiding place for Osama Bin Laden. More specifically, the Battle of Tora Bora, featuring American special forces, took place there in December of 2001. The result was, again for whatever reason, Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan.

On October 7, 2001, George W. Bush launched his invasion of Afghanistan, which dislodged the Taliban. President Obama reduced this operation significantly. And now President Biden will, perhaps, finally end it.

One can argue that, in all this, America was still fighting the Cold War, except this time it was in Afghanistan, not Indochina. But was there really a reason to do this? Especially in light of Gorbachev’s peace offering? To me, that is the real resemblance of the two situations. In the first instance, America created a country in the name of the Cold War. In the second, America decided to radically Islamize a country in the name of the Cold War.

In the first instance, we know Kennedy did not agree with the policy and was withdrawing at the time of his death. With what this author has discovered about Kennedy and the Middle East, I doubt very much he would have sided with the radical Moslems. (Click here as to why )

But that is a story CounterPunch could never tell.

July 22, 2021
Last Second in Dallas, part 1

This will be a decidedly mixed review of Josiah Thompson’s new book on the JFK case, Last Second in Dallas. I hope it does not discourage anyone from buying or reading it. There are some good things in the volume. And I will try to be as fair as I can about what I think they are. But I will also not shrink from what I believe to be the book’s shortcomings.

I

Thompson has fashioned the book as a kind of one man’s journey into a labyrinth. He begins the book even before the Warren Report was issued. On the day Kennedy was killed, Thompson heard that a doctor performed a tracheostomy over a throat wound on President Kennedy. But yet all the news stories said that the alleged assassin worked at the Texas School Book Depository, which was behind the motorcade. In what is, in retrospect, a monumental piece of unintentional humor, Thompson went to the local FBI office to alert them to this paradox. (Thompson, p. 6)

When the Warren Report was issued, it was received in the press and broadcast media with almost universal praise, but Thompson noticed that a curious and pesky young Philadelphia lawyer disagreed with the unanimous chorus. That was the late Vincent Salandria. Thompson, who was now a newly made professor of philosophy at Yale, decided to check up on Vince’s work. So, he consulted the Commission’s volumes of evidence and found out that Vince was correct.

This gave him a bit of a shock. The author now tries to fill in a bit of his conservative Republican background to explain why. This is where I had my first perturbance with the book. The author writes that he thought Alger Hiss was innocent in that case. He then adds that when Allen Weinstein’s MSM endorsed book on Hiss came out, he changed his mind and agreed with Weinstein that Hiss was guilty. (Thompson, p. 9)

For several reasons, this was puzzling to me. For one, Weinstein was later sued and settled with one of his interviewees. (Click here for details) He also promised to show some of his evidence to other Hiss scholars—he never did. He later became a sexual predator, while supposedly doing his job as chief archivist of the United States. He was protected from legal liability by the George W. Bush administration. (Click here for details) In fact, there are three relatively recent books that pretty much show that Weinstein was really a hired gun and that is how he got the job at the National Archives. One is by Joan Brady, one by Martin Roberts, and one by Lewis Hartshorn. The last shows that Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s accuser and a man who Weinstein took at his word, was surely a pathological liar. I will return to this political aspect with Thompson later.

During a Vietnam protest in the Philadelphia area, the author was arrested. The ACLU lawyer sent to bail him out was Salandria. Vince now introduced Thompson to the critical community. They went to NARA to view the Zapruder film and look at 35 mm slides. (Thompson, p. 10). He then visited Dealey Plaza with an Abney level tool and figured out that the angle through John B. Connally was a 27 degree down slope, which he figured most likely came from the Records building. (Thompson, p. 15)

On the strength of this visit to Dallas, Thompson was signed by the Bernard Geis publishing company. He got a rather small advance, though they agreed to pay his expenses, but Geis knew some people at Life magazine. And they had decided to do a reinvestigation of the JFK case based on the critiques of the Warren Report by Mark Lane and Edward Epstein. (Thompson, pp. 16–17)

What is next tells the story of Thompson’s field investigation in Dallas. This is where the author encountered witnesses in Dealey Plaza and at Parkland Hospital. Thompson interviewed hospital employees Darrel Tomlinson and O. P. Wright about the discovery of the Magic Bullet, aka CE 399. From here, he pieced together the chain of custody that linked the transport of the bullet to Washington and then the FBI lab. This led to one of the most sensational discoveries in the early days of critical research. Wright insisted that CE 399 was not the bullet he turned over to the Secret Service. The bullet he turned over was sharp nosed, not a round nosed bullet. And since Wright had worked in law enforcement for many years prior to his occupation as a security officer at Parkland Hospital, he knew the difference. (Thompson, p. 25)

At Parkland, Thompson made another stunning discovery. This one was about the location of CE 399 when it was discovered. In all probability, it was not on Governor John Connally’s stretcher—which is where it had to be located if the Commission’s Single Bullet Theory was to hold any water. In all likelihood, it was found on a child’s stretcher and his name was Ronnie Fuller. (Thompson p. 24. For a more complete explanation, see Six Seconds in Dallas, pp. 156–65)

From here, the book describes the witnesses in Dealey Plaza. First off are Bill and Gayle Newman who were to the limousine’s right, at the base of the grassy knoll. They were never called by the Commission, but filed affidavits and were interviewed by the FBI. (Thompson, p. 30) They may have been the closest witnesses to Kennedy’s shooting. The couple said the shots came from behind them and Kennedy was hit in the right temple, which would be clear evidence that a rifleman was behind the picket fence. But in addition to the Newmans, Thompson adds Abraham Zapruder and Emmett Hudson, who were in the same area, to this list. He later notes that it appears the FBI altered Hudson’s original statement to the Secret Service. (Thompson, p. 43) Hudson was the first witness Thompson located who indicated that there was another shot after the fatal head shot.

II

The author transitions over to witnesses who were further away from the limousine or not in as good a position to see or hear what had happened to JFK, but whose testimony is still important. In the cases of the motorcycle escorts, he notes that it was Bobby Hargis and B. J. Martin who were struck with blood and tissue from the fusillade. The significance of this is that they were riding to the left of Kennedy. Hargis told a reporter he was splattered with blood and the impact was so hard he thought he himself might have been hit. Later, while walking to the Sheriff’s Department, a colleague told him he had something on his lip: it was a piece of Kennedy’s brain and skull bone. (Thompson, pp. 55, 56) Martin’s cycle was also splattered with blood and flesh and he said that the left side of his helmet was also hit. In this profusely illustrated book, one can see that Martin was looking toward the president right before the firing sequence began. (Thompson, pp. 50, 58) Some have said this kind of evidence is eyewitness testimony. I disagree. It qualifies as physical evidence which indicates directionality.

Officer Joe Smith smelled gunpowder near the underpass, but this testimony was then altered by the FBI. Smith also said he met up with a Secret Service agent, which was not possible as they were all at the hospital. (Thompson, pp. 58, 59)

The author then proceeds to two men who have become famous to both the public and in the JFK case: Lee Bowers and S. M. Holland. Although Thompson says that Holland was more important, I believe they are of equal importance.

Bowers was made famous by Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Memorably played by actor Pruitt Taylor Vince, in a riveting sequence he described how three cars came into the area behind the picket fence, circled around and then left by about 12:25. One of the men seemed to have some kind of electronic communication in the car. Bowers said that at the time of the shooting, something out of the ordinary, some commotion, occurred in the area behind the picket fence—where Elm Street dips down at the underpass. To be mild, Joseph Ball of the Commission did not do a good job in pursuing this line of inquiry, so Mark Lane took it up later for his film, Rush to Judgment. Bowers said he saw a flash of light or smoke “which caused me to feel like something out of the ordinary had occurred there.” (Thompson, p. 66)

Bowers died in August of 1966. It was later discovered, through Debra Conway of JFK Lancer, that there was more to Bower’s story. Bowers had actually seen someone holding the trunk of a car open, placing something in it, and driving off. This was told to her by Olan DeGaugh, a supervisor a couple of levels above Bowers. Barney Mozley was a colleague of Bowers who replaced him on the later shift. Mozley said that Bowers was very fearful of telling all he knew: to the point of having to place a lock on his tower door so no one could interview him. But he told Mozley something which coincided with what he told DeGaugh: at the time of the shooting Bowers saw someone coming around the wooded area in a trench coat and what looked like a rifle underneath. Clearly Bowers was petrified of telling anyone about everything he witnessed.

Holland was standing on the overpass at the time of the shooting. In his original affidavit, Holland said he heard four, perhaps five gunshot sounds. (Thompson, p. 68) Two of the shots were extremely close together. The sound came from the grassy knoll area and as he turned in that direction he saw smoke rising, so he and three companions ran there. Holland was looking for shells. What they found were a series of footprints at one end of a car. These were accompanied by muddy spots on the bumper and cigarette butts on the ground. In other words, it was as if someone was behind the fence and waiting for the motorcade. (Thompson, pp. 70–72) An obvious question was: Why would someone view the motorcade from behind the fence? (Thompson, p. 79)

Thompson and his partner, Ed Kern, were impressed by Holland. The witness drew them a diagram of what he saw when he got to the scene. (Thompson, p.77) The episode is capped by Thompson’s photo comparison of Holland standing at the position he was that day, behind the fence, with an anomalous shape in the famous Mary Moorman photo taken from across the street looking toward the knoll. They appear to match. (Thompson, p. 80) Since the author found out that there were no trunks searched, he concludes the chapter with a postulation as to what happened: the rifleman (men) could have just opened the trunk, thrown the rifle in, milled around for a few minutes and later just walked away. This scenario would correspond with what Bowers saw.

The next step in the Life inquiry was an interview with Dr. Charles Gregory, one of the two doctors who performed surgery on Governor John Connally; who was sitting in front of President Kennedy in the limousine. Gregory, along with his colleague Dr. Robert Shaw, both concluded that the bullet that hit Connally did not strike anything previously. They deduced this from the clean edges, and also since no cloth fibers were carried into the governor’s back wound; yet “his wrist wound was fouled with numerous fibers from his wool suit.” (Thompson, p. 85) The other key development was that Gregory thought the shot that did hit Connally came in approximately at Zapruder frames 237–240. Which again, separate it from the shot that hit Kennedy, since the timing was too late. Gregory was very accomplished. He was a field physician in the Korean War and had spent much time studying gunshot wounds.

Thompson was disappointed by the essay eventually printed in Life. It was called “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt” and was published as the cover story on November 25, 1966. Featuring frames from the Zapruder film, which Time-Life owned, the piece was largely based upon John Connally’s estimation of when he was hit versus when JFK was. In other words, all the material reviewed, thus far, was eliminated (e.g. Bowers, Holland, the Newmans, Gregory, the splatter pattern, etc.). Beyond that, there was space given to Arlen Specter to respond and the ending included a roundup of Kennedy assassination books described with snide and smug remarks. The only book that was recommended was Edward Epstein’s Inquest, which, as most of us know, was not at all a comprehensive critique of the Commission’s evidence. What is striking about this article is that, although it stated at the end the case should be reopened, it did not include the evidence the magazine had that likely would have reopened it: the backward head snap of JFK which begins at Zapruder frame 313. As Thompson points out, it also mistakenly said that the bullet angle through Kennedy’s body matched up to Connally’s, which was not remotely true. (Thompson, p. 90).

From here, Thompson relates his retirement by Life and his determination to create a book out of his materials. Life made it difficult by suing him over artist renditions of the Zapruder film in what became Six Seconds in Dallas. But the judge upheld his right to do so.

III

In this reviewer’s opinion, the approximately first hundred pages of Last Second In Dallas represent the best part of the book. Its combination of witness testimony, professional observation, and physical evidence is compelling. And this presentation is combined with another virtue. Thompson is an accomplished writer. He has a simple, supple style that is quite easy to read. He also knows how to carve out “scenes” in prose. As noted, like Six Seconds in Dallas, the book uses illustrations adroitly. For example, in addition to the one with Holland, the picture comparing the condition of CE 399 to two bullets fired into tubes of cotton is quite effective. (Thompson, p. 22)

After giving the author his due, I must add that I did have some reservations with this part of the book. Some of it emerges from Thompson’s point of view, which is pretty much a first-person journey. Therefore, he cannot help but describe the shutting down of Life magazine’s inquiry into the JFK case. He only mentions in passing that the New York Times had fielded an inquiry and also shut it down. (Thompson, p. 92)

There was an interesting crossover between the two inquiries. His name was Tom Bethell. Bethell ended up being a pal of Dick Billings. Billings was the member of the Life team who told Thompson the inquiry was being closed down. (Thompson, p. 91) Bethell was the Englishman who ended up working for Jim Garrison, but not before he journeyed to Texas to live and hang out with Penn Jones. Billings had been part of the infamous Bayo/Pawley raid into Cuba, an event which the author does not mention. The two B’s agreed that there was not a covert effort by the government, the Commission, or the FBI to conceal the truth in the JFK case. They also agreed that Life did not really suppress the Zapruder film, since interested parties could see it at the National Archives. This seems a bit ridiculous in light of what happened when the film was nationally viewed in 1975.

Both Billings and Bethell were cognizant of the New York Times inquiry. Bethell said that in November of 1966 he had met up with Times reporter Martin Waldron in Dallas. Waldron had a 4–5 page questionnaire of items they were looking into as problems with the Commission. Many of these questions were about New Orleans and they focused on David Ferrie. This was independent of Jim Garrison. (Click here for details)

This is important in two ways. Apparently, Thompson was unaware that around the time he was retired, early February of 1967, Billings was also in New Orleans. He had been tipped off by Life stringer David Chandler that Jim Garrison was investigating the JFK case. Garrison had agreed to share information with Billings in return for some photographic services. This links directly to the following quote:

What Patsy [Swank] and I did understand was that there was a level of the Life investigation beyond our participation or understanding. I never knew what [Holland] McCombs was supposed to be doing, and it was apparent that I was not supposed to know. (Thompson, pp. 26–27)

With the help of British researcher Malcolm Blunt, we now can shed some light on what McCombs was doing. As noted above, it seems that when the Times started delving into New Orleans, they decided to drop the case. That parallels what happened with Life. McCombs retired Ed Kern and Thompson, but Billings and Swank stayed. In fact, Swank was writing reports to McCombs on the case well into 1968. (Swank to McCombs 7/16/68) With Kern and Thompson gone, McCombs now began to turn his guns on Garrison. Why? Because as Blunt has shown, he was best of friends with Clay Shaw. (See letters of 3/9/68, 3/22/68, 6/20/68, 7/31/68 and beyond) McCombs now began to work with and encourage the likes of hatchet men like Chandler and Hugh Aynesworth. (See letter of 5/13/67 to Duffey McFadden)

What makes this even more interesting is that, in February—around the time Thompson and Kern were cashiered—Billings had received a telegram marked confidential. It said Ferrie had been seen by two witnesses at White Rock Airport in Dallas in October and November of 1963. They also discovered a pilot in Dallas who knew Ferrie and flew to New Orleans to meet with him in 1964. (message of 2/26/67) Therefore, like the Times, Life now had interesting information about Shaw’s friend Ferrie. And make no mistake, Chandler knew of this relationship. His son emailed this reviewer in the early part of the millennium and said that his father knew that Shaw and Ferrie were friends. By May, McCombs was referring to Life’s reopening as a joke. (McFadden letter)

In June, it got worse. McCombs was in direct contact with Ed Wegmann, Shaw’s lead lawyer. (See letters of 6/14 and 7/25/67) By 1968, Shaw was congratulating McCombs on making speeches against the critics of the Warren Report. About reading their works, Shaw wrote: “It is almost unbelievable how much nonsense I have had to absorb.” (Letter to McCombs, 6/20/68)

The evidence adduced by Blunt would indicate that McCombs was there to ensure that what he labeled Life’s “so called reinvestigation” did not stray too far from the homestead, which was Rockefeller Center in New York City. In addition to these two inquiries, which were clearly neutered, there is a third parallel with what happened at CBS. Through the late Roger Feinman, we know those circumstances in detail, since Roger worked there. In that case, the middle level employees like Dan Schorr wanted to do a real investigation into what happened to President Kennedy. They were turned back by upper level management like Dick Salant, Bill Paley, and Frank Stanton. And then, as in the case of McCombs, John McCloy was employed as a secret consultant for the program. I know Thompson has this article since I sent it to him. (Click here for that essay)

I bring this up for two reasons. In this book, Thompson says he and Kern were retired because Time-Life did not want to pay for a continuing inquiry plus the time to educate its reporters on the case (Thompson, p. 92) With what we know today, this is rather underplaying it, especially with Swank and Billings staying in place. I think I understand why Thompson underplays what I believe was a significant pattern. At a conference in Chicago back in 1993, we were both on a panel focusing on the media. As I recall it, he was the only person arguing that there was no broad pattern of editorial coercion on the JFK case. At that time, he chalked it up to the fact that there were too many editorial levels in the chain. When one has people like McCombs as a circuit breaker, one does not need such an institutional hierarchy.

IV

As Thompson transitions out of Life magazine and into the production of Six Seconds in Dallas at Bernard Geis, another rather awkward note is struck. That is this: somehow the critical community has gone off on a wild tangent and he has become isolated. Predictably, Jim Garrison gets the back of his hand. (Thompson, p. 112) He then writes the following about Vince Salandria:

Vince Salandria, my mentor and guide to all this, was behaving like a wigged-out conspiracy theorist, rethinking raw facts to make them mean what he wanted them to mean. (Ibid)

Since both Garrison and Salandria have passed on, I would like to say a few words in their defense. Back in late 1967, when Thompson was on his book tour, he did an interview with Pacifica radio. He said that he had just heard Garrison saying that Kennedy’s murder was really a coup d’état. Thompson then said that a coup was a shift in power and that there was precious little evidence to back that up. He then added that a good reporter could make Garrison look foolish on this point. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, 2^nd edition, p. 381)

What makes this odd is that Thompson refers a few times in this book to his attendance at Vietnam protests, yet he does not make any connection between the sudden escalation of the war and JFK’s murder. Jim Garrison was the first critic to do this. In the view of several intelligent and documented studies, and the declassified record, he was correct: there was a shift between JFK and LBJ on Indochina. (For example, see books by David Kaiser, James Blight, John Newman, Howard Jones, and Gordon Goldstein.) Further work by scholars like Richard Mahoney, Greg Poulgrain, Robert Rakove and Philip Muehlenbeck have furthered Garrison’s thesis into areas like the Middle East and Indonesia. I have little problem referring to Kennedy’s murder as Garrison did today. (Click here as to why)

As per Salandria, Vince was one of the very, very few people who predicted that if Robert Kennedy won the California primary he would be assassinated. I don’t think that portrays him as being “wigged out.” And I can pinpoint when he began to disagree with Thompson. The first or second time I met Vince at his home in Philadelphia, he escorted me into his study and pulled down a copy of Six Seconds in Dallas. He immediately turned to page 246 and pointed out lines he had blocked off in brackets. After a space break in the text, Thompson says that what he had written in the book did not prove a conspiracy and it did not prove Oswald was innocent. After Vince pulled the book away, he said: “Jim, that is just what he spent almost 250 pages doing! And now, in the last sentences of the text, he denies what he just did?”

I had to admit: Vince had a point, one which got buried in all the photos and illustrations and sketches which made Six Seconds in Dallas unique. To further elucidate where Vince was coming from, by the end of the Clay Shaw trial, he had seen enough of what the likes of Holland McCombs, Dick Salant, and Punch Sulzberger were up to. And he now differed in his approach from other critics. Vince had started the whole field of micro studies in the JFK case. His early articles for Liberation and The Minority of One, were milestones in the field. (For an example, click here)

By 1969, he did not see any further point in doing that kind of thing. Salandria had supervised the Dealey Plaza portion of Shaw’s trial where, among other things, Pierre Finck had imploded and spilled the beans on what happened at Bethesda the night of Kennedy’s autopsy. In his opinion, that part of the case was now obvious. The questions for Vince were: Why was Kennedy killed, and why in such an execution style at high noon manner, with hundreds of spectators in attendance? To Vince, it was to show that, no matter how many explications one made exposing the official story, it did not matter. Democracy had ended. The CIA and the Pentagon were now running things. To him, the escalation in Indochina and the following murders of Malcolm, King and RFK proved that, especially since the RFK case was even more obviously a conspiracy than the JFK case. Agree or disagree, I understood the position. I did not think it was “wigged out.” There was nothing wrong in trying to configure the Big Picture.

V

The narrative picks up with the infamous 1967 four-part CBS special and Luis Alvarez. Again, Thompson introduces this in a rather puzzling way. He writes that, “The whole CBS program was so unconvincing that I just let it slide.” (Thompson, p. 117) Which makes me wonder: Did Thompson or his editors look at Six Seconds in Dallas? That book has an appendix entitled “A Critique of the CBS News Documentary, ‘The Warren Report’”. It is written in small print, but in normal size lettering it would probably be about 5–6 pages long. This is letting CBS slide?

But it is through this program that Thompson brings into the story the figure of scientist Luis Alvarez. There can be very little doubt that the author does a nice job in portraying him as a quite pernicious character in the JFK case. And it was not just with CBS. Alvarez’ participation in the case extended past the years of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, into the eighties. Through this long portrait, we understand a theme that Gary Aguilar and Don Thomas have written about. Namely, that for several scientists, the JFK case was not really science. Politics trumped the science they were supposed to be applying, e. g. Vincent Guinn, Tom Canning, Michael Baden. The Alvarez case is extraordinary, because of the blatancy of the falsehoods he told and because he entered into areas that he knew little or nothing about. It did not matter to Alvarez, it was all about saving the Warren Commission verdict.

Therefore, to explain away the very fast backward movement of Kennedy’s body in the Zapruder film, Alvarez dreamed up the so-called “jet effect” theory. Thompson shows that Alvarez, to put it mildly, cooked his research on this and then lied about it. (Thompson, pp. 124–29) This was the infamous shooting of the melons experiment. It was meant to show that Kennedy’s head rocketed backward because of the explosion of blood and tissue toward the front. Alvarez announced that he did not use the Edison method in this experiment. That is, he did not try and try and try over and over until he got the desired result. But then, years later, it was revealed that this is what he did.

At another time, to limit the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza to just three shots, he created something called the jiggle effect. This meant that there were just three places in the Zapruder film where Abraham Zapruder “jiggled” his camera. Therefore, there were only three shots fired in Dealey Plaza. There was a big problem with this: it was false. There were six places. And Alvarez must have known it. (Thompson, p. 121) He clearly had an innate bias, since he once wrote to the author that “the critics are a bunch of nuts and that the Warren Report is essentially correct.” (Thompson, p. 119)

But even here, I beg to disagree with some of the nuances which he uses to portray Alvarez. He writes that “no single individual ever played a more central role in preserving a mistaken view of the shooting.” (Thompson, p. 115) He says that this is not an understatement and he does not qualify it by confining it to the field of science. What are we to make then of the roles in this case of Arlen Specter, Dan Rather, Larry Sturdivan and David Belin? Rather worked on several CBS specials that were all rigged to back up the Warren Report and all appeared at certain crucial times: e. g. anniversaries, during the Church Committee inquiry, right after Oliver Stone’s JFK appeared.

Later he writes that, “Powerful forces did not contact Alvarez and ask him to come up with his theory.” (Thompson, p 121) This seems contradicted by the work of Roger Feinman. Feinman, working from pilfered files out of CBS headquarters, showed that what happened is that the secret executive committee running CBS—the CNEC—rejected the idea of a fair and objective look at the Kennedy case. CBS President Richard Salant then sent two high level CBS employees, Les Midgley and Gordon Manning, to the San Francisco area. They met with two powerful attorneys, Bayless Manning and Edwin Huddleson. It was these two lawyers who suggested the program concept be switched around to an attack on the critics. And it was Huddleson who suggested they use Alvarez to do so. (Click here for that essay)

It was not Alvarez who created that awful series. He was an appendage to a larger Establishment enterprise. Is it just a coincidence that, in 1971, Bayless Manning left Stanford to became the first president of the Council on Foreign Relations?

Go to Part 2

July 17, 2021
The Death of the Tumbling Magic-Bullet Theory: the Governor’s Shirt, the President’s Shirt, and the Overlooked Dr. Robert Shaw

In the vast collection of JFKA literature and research, some of the simple truths have been buried, including veracities that refute that a lone gunman armed with single-shot rifle could have inflicted all the wounds, or fired as quickly, as seen Nov. 22 in Dallas.

So, let us ponder anew the shirts worn that fateful day in Texas by President John F. Kennedy and Governor John B. Connally and then observations of Connally’s attending surgeon, Dr. Robert Shaw.

And as we review, the tumbling single magic-bullet theory will die.

First, consider the Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission. Though little noticed even in the JFKA community, back in 2013, the commission featured a display of John Connally’s suit and clothes worn on Nov. 22, and prepared an online photo exhibit.

And here is the photo of Connally’s shirt with a bullet hole in the back, described as 3/8^ths by 3/8^ths of an inch, and possibly torn along the thread lines adjacent to the spot where the bullet entered. More on the thread lines later.

The Connally Shirt

Of course, right away there is a problem—the Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 rifle fires a large slug, actually 6.77 millimeters in diameter, or a little more than 1/4 inch in diameter and 1 and 1/4 inch in length.

That size of the Mannlicher-Carcano slug, manufactured by Western ammo, means that the resulting hole in Connally’s shirt was but 1/8th of an inch larger than the diameter of the slug, or a mere 1/16th of an inch on all four sides, assuming the slug was centered in the hole.

If the magic bullet that struck Connally was tumbling, that is, hit Connally sideways rather than nose-on, how did it make such a small hole, as in 3/8^ths of an inch square? And not a hole 1 and 1/4 inch long?

Yet here is a depiction by researcher John Lattimer, positing the path and yaw of the “tumbling” bullet:

Lattimer’s Tumbling Bullet

But with the re-introduced evidence of Connally’s long-forgotten shirt, it is plainly impossible that the tumbling magic-bullet struck Connally sideways.

(There are additional complications with Connally’s shirt, but all of which point to an even smaller original hole. The straight edges on the top and bottom of the bullet hole in Connally’s shirt may be the result of fabric removed for testing. Unbelievably, Connally’s shirt and other clothes were sent to a cleaning service directly from Parkland. The FBI indicated it was not able to find metallic traces around the bullet hole, due to the cleaning. It is not clear whether the FBI removed cloth from near the bullet hole, as they did with a hole in JFK’s shirt. In any event, the FBI lab work would have only enlarged the final hole in Connally’s shirt.

Oddly, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) chose to describe the Connally shirt rear bullet hole as “1.3 centimeters (1/2 inch) in transverse diameter.” Transverse diameter meaning diagonally—and those who remember Pythagoras Theorem can compute that 1/2 inch is a diagonal of a square about 3/8^ths by 3/8^ths inch. It appears the HSCA was trying to make the Connally shirt hole, already possibly artificially enlarged by the FBI lab, as large as possible, in its report.)

Also, in the evidence of the shirt President John F. Kennedy wore in the motorcade, the single-magic-bullet theorists posit JFK was actually leaning a bit forward when struck from behind, meaning that the shot from sixth-floor of the Texas School Book Depository struck him cleanly and nearly at a right angle to his body.

But here is JFK’s shirt from that day:

Kennedy’s Shirt (1964)

Kennedy’s Shirt (1993)

We quickly see a puzzle. The bullet hole in JFK’s shirt is about the same size as the hole in Connally’s shirt. Yet, there is also some uncertainty about this hole in JFK’s shirt. As stated, the squarish cuts on the top end of the hole also may have been made by FBI lab technicians removing cloth to be examined for metallic traces.

There is a second image of JFK’s shirt, curiously showing an even larger, seemingly double hole.

There are additional fudge-factors in the Connally shirt, such as possible wrinkles or bunches in material at moment of impact, but all of which would have made the resulting hole larger, rather than smaller.

In any event, the rear hole in Connally’s does not indicate a sideways hit by a 1 and 1/4-inch long tumbling bullet and is similarly sized as the hole in JFK’s shirt.

But there is more.

Dr. Robert Shaw

Dr. Robert Shaw was the surgeon who attended to the injured Connally on Nov. 22 at Parkland Hospital, and the Governor was immensely lucky in that regard.

Not only did Shaw have superb credentials—a veteran practicing physician, a professor at the University of Texas—but during Shaw’s WWII service he had personally worked as a surgeon on more than 900 wartime patients who had suffered bullet and shrapnel wounds.

Dr. Shaw, upon viewing Connally, “found that there was a small wound of entrance (in Connally’s back), roughly elliptical in shape, and approximately a centimeter and a half (5/8^th of an inch) in its longest diameter.”

Connally’s elliptical or oval wound, below his right shoulder, was 5/8^ths of an inch along its vertical axis, that is, aligned with Connally’s body or pointing “north-south,” so to speak.

The vertical elliptical or oval shape of the original wound is a tell, close to conclusive.

From PathoilogyOutlines.com, in an article entirely unrelated to the JFKA: “Oval shape: suggests an acute angle of fire with respect to the skin.”

A clean non-tumbling shot, entering Connally’s back from behind and above, such as from the Texas School Book Depository or the Dal-Tex building roof, would leave a vertical elliptical shape, which is precisely the original wound that Connally had.

The length of ellipse would vary, depending on whether Connally was leaning forward or back at the moment of impact. Connally was almost certainly leaning back, as will be explained later, which would tend to lengthen the resulting elliptical wound.

In contrast, a tumbling slug might make a ragged hole, as when the bullet’s butt-end struck the body sideways. Such a hole could be largely sideways to the body, or at a three-quarter angle, or oddly shaped in 100 different ways.

In his testimony to the Warren Commission (WC), and to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Shaw said he thought the rear entrance wound on Connally likely resulted from an unobstructed shot from above, a conclusion bolstered upon his review of the Zapruder film and discussion with the Governor.

Here is Dr. Shaw’s sketch indicating the vertical, elliptical shape of Connally’s wound—that is, up and down, not horizontal.

Connally’s Back Wound

There are other indications that Connally was struck by a non-tumbling bullet. For example, Shaw told the HSCA in 1977 that “there was a tunnel made by the missile in passing through (Connally’s) chest wall.”

A “tunnel?” Do tumbling bullets make “tunnels”? Yes they do, but according to Dr. Shaw that is not what happened in this case.

Connally’s Coat

But there is even more and Shaw was almost certainly correct in his assessment of the wound, for we have a photo Connally’s jacket from Nov. 22 featuring the exit hole the bullet made.

Connally’s Coat Exit Hole

And we see a small hole in the front of Connally’s jacket, exactly as if the bullet had cleanly exited. Note the size of the button, for reference.

Thus, the tumbling single-bullet theory just gets deader and deader.

To sum up: the tumbling-magic-bullet theorists posit the bullet struck JFK in the upper back, then exited Kennedy’s neck so straight and cleanly that it left a small hole below Kennedy’s Adam’s apple—a hole so small that attending doctors in Parkland Hospital thought it an entrance wound.

Then (the magic-bullet theorists posit) the bullet tumbled after exiting Kennedy, although it somehow made a small hole in Connally’s shirt, and a small elliptical wound, and then stopped tumbling to tunnel through the Governor. And then the bullet exited exactly nose first, leaving a small hole in Connally’s coat.

At the risk of piling on, there is even more evidence the shot Connally received that day in Dallas was not tumbling.

Blundering Pathologists and Lawyers

Proponents of the single-magic-bullet theory posit the bullet must have tumbled upon leaving President John Kennedy’s neck and then entering Connally. Why?

That tumbling, proof that the magic bullet passed through JFK’s neck, is why the single magic bullet left a large wound on Connally’s back, the reasoning goes.

However, the original wound on Connally’s back was not a large one, as is sometimes erroneously asserted, including, embarrassingly, by not only the HSCA’s top lawyer, but also by its top pathologist!

As stated, Dr. Shaw clearly informed the WC and the HSCA that Connally’s original wound was a small vertical elliptical (or oval shape) injury 5/8^ths of an inch long.

Some of this ground has been covered previously in an excellent article by Millicent Cranor, “Trajectory of a Lie,” at History Matters.

As noted by Cranor and in the record, Shaw explained to the WC and the HSCA that in order to clean and debride (cut away devitalized tissue) the wound, he enlarged the injury to twice its original size, to a final 3.0 centimeters long (1 1/4 quarter inch long).

OK, so the final surgically enlarged wound is a one-a-one-quarter inch long, on Connally’s back.

Here is how Michael Baden, who was chairman of the HSCA Forensic Pathology Panel, described Connally’s back wound in a book he authored: “He (Connally) removed his shirt. There it was—a two-inch long sideways entrance scar in his back. He had not been shot by a second shooter, but by the same flattened bullet that went through Kennedy.”

Huh?

So, the original wound, as described by the surgeon Shaw, was a vertical elliptical injury 5/8^ths of an inch long.

But the final scar is a “two-inch long sideways entrance scar,” according to the triumphant Baden, and that means the bullet that struck Connally in Dallas had been tumbling?

How can Baden, a medical professional, bungle truth and common sense so badly? Had he never considered the small entrance hole in Connally’s shirt? Did he never read the reports by Dr. Shaw?

And how did a one-and one-quarter-inch final, surgically enlarged wound, as explained by the surgeon Dr. Shaw, become “two-inch long sideways entrance scar” in Baden’s version?

Even worse, Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, fell into the same inexcusable misdiagnosis, also asking Connally to remove his shirt, and also describing the size of scar he had witnessed on the Governor’s back as proof of a tumbling bullet, and thus verifying the single-magic-bullet theory.

Were the topic not so grave, Team Inspectors Clouseau comes to mind.

But there is more.

Dr. Shaw also believed the bullet that coursed through Connally could not have struck a body beforehand, or “it would not have had sufficient force to cause the remainder of the Governor’s wounds.” After tunneling through five inches of Connally’s rib, the bullet then struck and shattered Connally’s wrist before burrowing onto Connally’s left leg.

But then, what did Shaw know? He had only worked on 900 bullet- and shrapnel-victims during WWII, and then another couple hundred such victims in Dallas.

Nevertheless, Baden and Blakey would have the final wording of the HSCA report, a type of indelible excrement on the committee’s escutcheon.

What the Connallys Said

But there is even more.

Governor Connally testified resolutely before the WC, and in many other forums (and has been recorded) that there were three shots that day in Dallas: The first shot struck JFK; the second shot struck the Governor in the back and immediately incapacitated him, and the third shot also struck JFK, with awful and fatal result. In other words, three shots, three hits, no tumbling.

(There may have been and likely were more shots that day in Dallas, but the gunfire may not have been audible in the Presidential limousine, variously due to simultaneous fire, silencers, or use of a pneumatic weapon. In addition, non-simultaneous shots can be heard simultaneously if shooters are at different distances from ear witnesses.)

Connally’s wife, at his side in the presidential limo, confirmed her husband’s account of the shot pattern many times. Secret Service agents Clint Hill and Sam Kinney, and presidential aide David Powers, all close at the scene on Nov. 22, also all say there were three separate shots that struck JFK and Connally that day, among many other witnesses.

As Connally stated: “Beyond any question, and I’ll never change my opinion, the first bullet did not hit me. The second bullet did hit me. The third bullet did not hit me.”

But Governor Connally, like Dr. Shaw—what does he know?

Zapruder Film

The Zapruder film almost certainly confirms the Connally’s version.

Here is Zapruder film frame 226, as JFK emerges from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. JFK appears to have been struck, perhaps just before or while he was behind the sign. Jackie Kennedy looks concerned. Connally is blurry, but sitting upright.

Z-Film Frame 226. Kennedy is struck; Connally is upright.

Here is Z-film frame 245. Connally is halfway through a turn over his own right shoulder, just as he has recounted to the WC. Note, in order to turn around, Connally is leaning back. (Note: Try this yourself. Try to look over your own right shoulder at someone sitting behind you. Try leaning forward, and then leaning back, to look over your right shoulder.)

Z-Film Frame 245. Connally is turning around.

In the process of leaning back, Connally exposed his back at a more-acute angle to an elevated gunman, resulting in the original small elliptical wound described by Dr. Shaw.

This is Z-film frame 280. Note Connally has made a near-180-degree turn in his chair. The WC and HSCA and magic-bullet theorists posit this about-face by Connally happened after he has been shot through the chest and suffered a fractured wrist.

Connally and his wife said the Governor was trying to catch a glimpse of JFK, given commotion and gunfire, and this is before Connally has been shot. The Connally version appears to be true, beyond reasonable doubt.

Z-Film Frame 280. Connally has made an 180-degree turn in his seat.

This is Z-film frame 290. Unable to catch a view of JFK, who has slumped out of view, Connally is now returning to face forward.

Z-Film Frame 290. Connally turns to face forward.

And then Z-film frame 296. This appears to be when Connally was struck. Unfortunately, we cannot see Connally’s torso, but his face begins to grimace.

Z-Film Frame 296. Connally is struck.

And this is Z file frame 300. Connally appears to be in agony.

Z-Film Frame 300. Connally is in pain.

Z-film frame 313 follows, and shows a head shot to JFK.

The elapsed time between frame 296 and frame 313 is less than eight-tenths of one second, and by all accounts, a single-shot bolt action rifle requires a bare minimum of two seconds to even operate between shots, let alone aim and fire.

Conclusion

The reasonable, indeed nearly inevitable and all but certain conclusion is that a bullet did not tumble before striking Connally, and that the timing between shots cannot be explained by a lone gunman operating a single-shot bolt-action rifle.

The tumbling bullet theory was a desperate fiction invented to give support to the idea that single bullet caused all of Governor’s and the President’s neck wounds on Nov. 22. Otherwise there are too many shots to have been accomplished by a lone gunman with a single-shot bolt-action rifle.

But from the too-small hole in the rear of Connally’s shirt, to the small elliptical wound in Connally’s back, to the Connally’s testimony, to the observations of Dr. Shaw, and from a review of the Z-film, it is abundantly clear that the Governor was struck by a clean and separate shot.

Addendum

Recently, in the oft-excellent pages of the Education Forum, the WC testimony of Dallas Sheriff Seymour Weitzman was reprised in an interesting post by John Butler.

The relevant passage, in this context, regarding Nov. 22:

(WC Attorney) Joe Ball: How many shots did you hear?

Seymour Weitzman: Three distinct shots.

Joe Ball: How were they spaced?

Seymour Weitzman: First one, then the second two seemed to be simultaneously.

But like Connally and Dr. Shaw, what did Weitzman Know?

Second Addendum

Interestingly, Dr. Shaw even suggested more than one bullet might have struck Connally. Why?

The entrance wound on Connally’s wrist was on the side that most people wear the wristwatch, that is the non-palm side, also called the dorsal side. The bullet then exited through the palm side of the wrist.

Dr. Shaw wondered how Connally could hold his arm so the bullet would pass through his chest and then through the wristwatch-side (or dorsal side) of his wrist. And indeed, try sitting down, and then try to touch the face of your wristwatch (worn on the right wrist) to your chest. You can’t do it. You can place the palm side of your wrist against your chest easily.

One deduction is another bullet struck Connally’s wrist directly.

And indeed, Connally testified before the WC that bullets were entering the Presidential limousine as if from “automatic” weapon fire.

Yet the WC and HSCA posit the magic bullet passed through Connally’s chest, and then through dorsal, non-palm side of his wrist, a nearly impossible scenario, anatomically speaking.

July 16, 2021
Jonathan Chait meets Michael Kazin

Almost any notice in the media about John F. Kennedy will supply an excuse for someone in the MSM to write a derogatory article about him. As we have seen, Michael Kazin used the occasion of a recent book about Kennedy to do a hit piece on him in The New York Review of Books. (Click here for details) Recently, a panel of scholars for C-SPAN did a poll ranking past presidents, including Donald Trump. Journalist Jonathan Chait didn’t like it. Why? Because Kennedy ended up in eighth place. Chait thinks this was unwarranted. Therefore, New York Magazine let him do a Kazin: that is a hit job on the slain president. (June 30, 2021)

What is immediately noticeable about these rants is this: None of the writers knows very much about Kennedy or his presidency. But they pretend they do. For instance, Chait writes that Kennedy made some promises on civil rights in his presidential campaign, but abandoned them when he saw this would offend southern conservatives. The thinking being that it would stop the passage of his other domestic programs.

As I have explained before, this is a liberal orthodoxy that has a serious problem with it. It isn’t true. This author spent months studying the issue for a four-part series about the Kennedys and civil rights. (Click here for that series)

Kennedy did not abandon civil rights at all. He was advised by his specialist on the issue, Harris Wofford, that it would be very difficult to pass an omnibus civil rights bill in his first year and probably even in his second year. After all, there had been nine different attempts to pass such a bill since 1917 and they all failed. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 39) Wofford therefore advised Kennedy to issue executive orders and also to rely on the court system, through the Attorney General, to further the cause. The hope being that this would create a furor over the issue that would tilt the balance in the House and Senate. That would then make it possible to pass such a bill.

That is what Kennedy did; and that is what happened. Anyone can read about this in more than one book (e.g. Wofford’s Of Kennedys and Kings, or Irving Bernstein’s Promises Kept). (Bernstein, pp. 40–41, 48–50)

To list all the things that Kennedy did for civil rights in just his first year illustrates the utter fallacy of what Chait is trying to sell. Right out of the chute, JFK and his brother intervened in the New Orleans school segregation court case, something that President Eisenhower had avoided. (Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 122) Eisenhower’s failure to act allowed the state legislature to pass laws attempting to curtail and avoid the court’s decision to implement Brown v Board. When Bobby Kennedy got the news about this scheming he replied, “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” (Bass, p. 131)

The Kennedy administration did something that the Eisenhower administration would never have dreamed of doing. The Attorney General filed charges against the state Secretary of Education, Shelby Jackson. The idea was to stop the governor’s attempt to cut off funding for integrated schools. (Bass, p. 135) When a trial date was set, Jackson backed off and said he would not interfere. This episode began in February of 1961, a month after Kennedy’s inauguration.

A similar case occurred in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Due to scheming by the governor and legislature, Prince Edward County had no schools to attend. Again, Eisenhower said he could not do anything about it. Shockingly, he even said states were not required to maintain a school system and, therefore, the president was “powerless to take any action.” (Brian Lee, Ph. D. thesis, A Matter of National Concern, p. 50)

Again, the Kennedys reversed Eisenhower’s course. The president now began to remake the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals governing Virginia and nearby states. (Lee, p. 6) But the Kennedys also began doing two things that were, again, unprecedented. First, they joined the NAACP lawsuit as a plaintiff, not a friend of the court. Secondly, realizing the court reworking would take time, they appointed family friend William Vanden Heuvel to raise a large amount of money. The idea was to build, from scratch, a free school system to educate the African American students, so they would not fall further behind. (Lee, pp. 145–50)

Did Chait miss all of this? Well, no surprise, since he also missed those two executive orders that Kennedy signed for affirmative action. The first was written in his first year, which again, no president had ever done before. (Bernstein, p. 56) Finally, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy made it a point to speak at the University of Georgia Law School. He spent half the address talking about civil rights. He said he would enforce the Brown v. Board decision. As historian Carl Brauer wrote, this was the first time anyone could recall an Attorney General speaking out on the issue in the South. (Carl Brauer, John F Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, p. 95)

That was in May of 1961. Again, we are to assume that Chait missed all of this, which is weird, since it was all unprecedented in the field. But that was just the beginning of a crescendo that led to the submission of Kennedy’s omnibus civil rights bill in February of 1963. (For the rest of the story, click here)

Chait leads off his article by saying that Kennedy was elected due to his youth and his campaigning about the missile gap. He leaves out the fact that there was only a four-year difference in age between himself and his opponent Richard Nixon. Considering his second point, in Kennedy’s acceptance speech in Los Angles at the Democratic convention, there was no mention of a missile gap. He talked about things like separation of church and state, racial discrimination, the plight of the poor, and said this was no time to try and uphold a status quo that was not working. (Click here for the address) At a famous speech in September, which he gave before the Liberal Party in New York, again one will find no mention of a missile gap. But one will find the following: Kennedy tried to define what he thought the word liberal meant in a political sense, as opposed to how the Republicans defined it:

But if by a Liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if this is what they mean by a Liberal, then I’m proud to say that I’m a Liberal.

Kennedy went on to say that he also believed “…in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities.” He continued by saying that when government “has a job to do, I believe it should do it.” This was then exemplified by his above actions in his first year on the civil rights issue, which, as I showed, were starkly different than Eisenhower’s. (For the whole speech click here)

One of the nuttiest things that Chait writes is that Kennedy was a man out of his time period, because he thought there were no great problems to solve, no great dragons to slay, and no great compromises to be made. That Chait could borrow that comment from one of the worst biographers of Kennedy, the late Richard Reeves, tells you just what his game is, because Kennedy says just the opposite in both of these speeches. A constant refrain is his haranguing the GOP for not facing up to the problems as he perceives them: of the urban poor, of dispossessed farmers, of creating an imaginative foreign policy. And he clearly implies that a party of Coolidge, Hoover, and Taft simply could not really do anything about these dilemmas. He contrasted that with people like FDR, who chose to act in a time of crisis. And he compared the 1960 election to that of 1932. In other words, the Democrats could do something and would use government to solve problems.

Chait tries to define Kennedy’s foreign policy by using the Bay of Pigs as an example. He then says, in regards to the Missile Crisis, that the president bungled his way into a nuclear showdown over Cuba. I hate to confront Mr. Chait with the facts, but I must. It was the Russians who placed a first strike capability in Cuba. This featured all three arms of the nuclear triad: long and medium range missiles, bombers, and submarines. In addition, they had 45,000 troops on the island and had also given Fidel Castro tactical atomic weapons. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 66) These would have annihilated any large invading force. This was all done in secret, knowing that Kennedy had insisted there be no offensive weapons in Cuba. And when, due to U2 photography, Kennedy inquired about them, the Soviet foreign minister lied to him about their presence. (Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, p. 169) When it came time to confront the situation, Kennedy chose the least provocative action: no invasion, no air strikes, but a blockade. Choosing that option gave each side time to resolve the crisis peacefully. Anyone can read the transcripts of these taped conversations. Clearly, Kennedy was keeping the hawks at bay almost throughout. For a good example, read the record of his meeting with the Joint Chiefs, especially note their derisive comments about the president after he leaves the room. (May and Zelikow, pp. 173–88)

As we can see, Chait’s article, like Kazin’s, is not factually based. His real point is to try and reverse the concept that somehow there was a step down in class and achievement from Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson. For instance, he writes that two programs that Kennedy was trying to get passed, but could not, were federal aid to education and health care for the elderly. As Irving Bernstein has written, Kennedy did get federal aid to education through the senate in October of 1963. (Bernstein, p. 241) Kennedy failed to get a Medicare bill through in 1962, but what Chait leaves out is that Kennedy was bringing it back for consideration through powerful congressman Wilbur Mills in 1963. And on the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy’s congressional liaison, Larry O’Brien wrote that “with Mill’s objections met, the passage of Medicare was assured.” (Bernstein, p. 258) In other words, Kennedy had set the table for Johnson on these two bills.

This meme is continued when Chait lists the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the War on Poverty as Johnson’s achievements, giving no credit to Kennedy or anyone else. As I have mentioned several times, the idea that Johnson got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed is a myth supported by establishment figures like Robert Caro. Clay Risen, who wrote a book about the passage of the act, has shown why it is a myth. (Click here for details)

President Johnson told Martin Luther King that he could not get the Voting Rights Act passed on his own. The only way he could so was if King did something to give him the torque to implement it. King did so by staging the Selma demonstration, which he was already arranging before Johnson told him this. (Louis Menand, “The Color of Law”, The New Yorker, 7/1/2013)

The War on Poverty began after Kennedy read Dwight MacDonald’s review of Michael Harrington’s The Other America. (Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, pp. 242–43) In June of 1963, JFK was already thinking past the Civil Rights Act he had submitted to congress. So he called in his chief economic advisor, Walter Heller, and they began to formulate a plan to counteract pockets of poverty. After Kennedy was assassinated, Heller told Johnson about this plan he and Kennedy had formulated. In other words, the War on Poverty was not Johnson’s concept. It was Kennedy’s. In his jihad to inflate LBJ and downgrade Kennedy, this is how anti-historical Chait becomes.

If one can comprehend it, Chait even tries to elevate LBJ at Kennedy’s expense over what became Johnson’s disaster in Indochina. With all we know about Vietnam today, I would have thought no one would even think of doing this. But one should never underestimate the stubbornness and perversity of the MSM. Chait begins by saying that it is an unproven assumption that Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam. That worn out standby is not sustainable today. With all the information that the Assassination Records Review Board declassified, combined with the work of writers like Gordon Goldstein, Howard Jones, David Kaiser, Jim Douglass, James Blight, and the revised version of John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, there is little or no question about the issue: Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. We have a veritable cornucopia of evidence to prove it. And he was going to enact that withdrawal around the 1964 election. (Click here for details)

Johnson was aware of this plan and within 48 hours of the assassination he started to reverse it. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310; also see Chapter 23 of the 2017 version of Newman’s JFK and Vietnam.) Contrary to Kennedy, Johnson’s concept was to work his escalation plan around the 1964 election. In other words, as he was saying things like he wished no wider war and he did not want to send American boys to die in a war that Asian boys should be fighting, he was arranging to do just that. This has been proven by too many scholars to belabor the point here. But to name just three: Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War, and Edwin Moise’s Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.

Chait now writes that Kennedy’s policies laid the groundwork for Johnson’s escalation; due to the calculation that no Democrat could lose a territory to communist expansion. I threw my arms up at this one. If Kennedy was withdrawing at the time of his death and Johnson stopped that withdrawal, planned on going to war in Indochina, effectively declared war on Vietnam, and then invaded the country with hundreds of thousands of combat troops—how did Kennedy lay the groundwork for that? In November of 1961, with NSAM 111, Kennedy drew the line: he refused to send combat troops to Indochina. He never crossed that line. There was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day he was killed than on the day he entered office. Johnson not only sent half a million combat troops there, he also initiated one of the largest American air wars ever devised, Rolling Thunder, to try to bomb North Vietnam into submission. Does any credible person think that Kennedy would have countenanced these things, let alone allowed them to happen?

This relates to Chait’s other point about the fear of “losing Vietnam.” Kennedy simply did not think that Vietnam was worth going to war over. Just like he did not want to commit combat troops to Laos, even though Eisenhower had advised him he might need to do so. (Newman, p. 9) Kennedy was a more sophisticated thinker about the Cold War than Johnson was. For him, Berlin was a flash point, since he was not going to let the Atlantic Alliance be challenged, but Vietnam was simply not worth the price. And this indicates how uninformed Chait is about JFK. Kennedy understood just how hopeless an imperial conflict would be in Vietnam. He comprehended this due to his relationship with diplomat Edmund Gullion in Saigon way back in the early fifties, where he saw firsthand the doomed French effort to recolonize the area. (Click here for details) He also understood the problem from his Ambassador to India, John K. Galbraith who wrote him a memo to counter the hawks who wanted him to intercede in 1961. (Click here for more)

Compare that to LBJ. Johnson actually said that, if he left Vietnam, he would be doing what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich with Hitler and Mussolini. He then compared losing Vietnam to losing China and that the former would be even worse than the latter. He concluded that reverie with the following:

Losing the Great Society was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that. (Blight, p. 211)

Can anyone conceive of Kennedy saying such things? There is no evidence for it. In fact, as I noted in my review of John Newman’s revised version of JFK and Vietnam, Kennedy told many people that Vietnam was a hopeless struggle, which America could not win. Therefore, he was getting out. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 183) What is so incredible about Chait’s abomination is that, at the end, he concludes that Kennedy’s rating in the poll is due to a lack of analysis. We have just seen what analysis does to Chait.

Make no mistake, Chait’s handiwork is not an accident. As Jeff Morley wrote in his recent e book about his lawsuit against the CIA, no one ever got ahead in the journalistic world trying to expose new facts about Kennedy’s assassination. Well, since 2013, the same figure applies to Kennedy’s presidency, especially in light of the fact that we now know what happened in Indochina as a result of his death. And since that switch in policy came so fast, perhaps—just perhaps—the two events were related. And if such was the case, how could the MSM have missed it with such completeness?

As noted at the start, I recently wrote about Michael Kazin’s similar hatchet job about Kennedy’s presidency, disguised as a review of Fredrik Logevall’s book JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century. Well, if one looks back to 2013, Kazin did the same in the pages of The New Republic. At that time, he was allegedly reviewing Thurston Clarke’s book JFK’s Last Hundred Days. (July 15, 2013) As was the case of Kazin with Logevall, it was a review that was not a review. It was a way to downgrade Kennedy and wonder out loud: Geez, why does anyone pay any attention to this guy at all? The title of the article was: “On the Fiftieth Anniversary of JFK’s Assassination Don’t Bother with the Tributes.”

As I have written before, the MSM drive to conceal who Kennedy really was has become as systematic and assiduous as the attempt to cover up the circumstances of his assassination. As noted above in regards to Vietnam, it’s pretty obvious as to why.

Mr. Chait meet Mr. Kazin. Future employment for both is secured.

Action suggested:

Contact at twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathanchait

The editor of New York Magazine is David Haskell, david.haskell@gmail.com

See also Brian E. Lee’s Ph.D. thesis from 2015 on the Kennedy administration efforts to restore public education to Prince Edward County, VA.

July 11, 2021
In Memoriam: Priscilla Johnson McMillan, 1928–2021

Jim DiEugenio wrote about Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who interviewed Oswald in Russia then worked with his widow after the JFK assassination. (Click here for details)

July 11, 2021