Read Jim’s article at CovertAction magazine.
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James Saxon and John Kennedy vs. Wall Street
In this author’s opinion, the best book ever written about President John Kennedy’s economic policies is Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street. It was first published in hardcover in 1994. It was re-released in 2014 in a trade paperback edition. Before addressing my main subject, I would like to review a bit of that important book. The main reasons being:
- It is relatively rare, and
- No other book I know of equals its thoroughness of subject matter.
As Walter Heller, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, stated, Kennedy was very interested in the details of economic policy and he was a good student of worldly philosophy. One of his major goals as president was to attain higher rates of growth and productivity. (Gibson pp. 6, 20) As early as 1961, Kennedy said that he supported “long range planning for national economic growth.” (ibid p. 21) This included a multipronged program of tax policy, trying to balance the budget, investment in technology and education, and the use of fiscal policy for capital improvements.
In the decades since, the Republican Party has tried to use Kennedy’s tax cut proposal—achieved after his death by Lyndon Johnson—as intellectual support for the whole Arthur Laffer/supply-side economics concept. There are many, many problems with this faulty comparison. First, any economist should know that Kennedy was a Keynesian, not an apostle of what we call today, the Austrian School, best represented by the late Milton Friedman. (Heller had nothing but disdain for Friedman, considering him something of a clown.) As Heller later said, Kennedy chose the tax cut option as a stimulant, because he knew it would be an easier sell to congress and it would cure the mild recession faster than a capital investment program. (Gibson, p. 21) Once the recession danger had subsided, he would then begin a capital investment program.
Further, as Timothy Noah pointed out in 2012, when congressman Paul Ryan was selling this false comparison, there was a distinct difference between the Kennedy/Heller tax cut and the Mitt Romney/Ryan proposal. The latter was an across the board cut. The Kennedy proposal was weighted toward the middle and especially the lower classes. (The New Republic, 10/11/2012) As Noah wrote, this, in itself, demonstrates that it was a demand, not supply, oriented cut. As Noah also pointed out, Ronald Reagans’ 1981 tax cut was also supply-side oriented, since the higher ratio of tax cuts went to the upper class. Budget director David Stockman later admitted that the upper-class cuts were the point of the act. But it was hard to sell ‘trickle-down economics.’ So, they dressed it up with a new term: ‘supply-side’. (Ibid) And let us not forget: at the time JFK entered office, the top marginal rate was 91 percent. Kennedy was proposing to cut it to around 71%. When President Reagan was done with it, that top rate was eventually reduced to 28 per cent. In other words, Reagan cut it by more than 60 per cent. There can be little doubt that this colossal cut for the already wealthy contributed to the very serious problems of income inequality and the bankruptcy of the treasury.
As Gibson points out, that marginal cut was only part of Kennedy’s tax reform program. He also wanted to encourage investment in plant and technology, so he provided an investment tax credit for corporations to do so. (Gibson, p. 21) Kennedy added a caveat to this: it was only good on materials located in the USA and had an operative life of six years or more. In other words, it was aimed at improving domestic production in the long term. One of the specific aims of this incentive was to make American goods more competitive in world markets by increasing productivity. (ibid, p. 22) In other words, it was a nationalist program.
Related to this, Kennedy wanted to end the policy of tax deferral for companies investing abroad, especially in low tax countries and places like Switzerland. His tax reform program would move to eliminate these kinds of tax breaks. (The only exception to this was to preserve certain tax breaks if a company invested in a developing country emerging from colonialism, e.g. Indonesia.) As Gibson comments, Kennedy’s overall program was not anti-business. It was really pro-production and nationally oriented.
II
Kennedy’s tax proposal was also aimed at securing for the treasury billions of dollars “in income from interest and dividends going unreported and untaxed each year.” (Gibson, p. 23) His proposal was to use an annual withholding tax, as with middle class income. For dividends, he proposed a higher rate of tax on families with incomes over $180,000 per year—almost two million today. He also proposed tax code alterations to prevent the wealthy from concealing income garnered through advantages like investing in holding companies.
As Gibson notes, many of these proposals—and others—did not make it through congress or to the ultimate revenue bill passed in 1964. It’s not possible to predict if Kennedy would have brought them back if he had lived. But even in their raw proposal state, they would indicate where Kennedy was headed. And that would be on a notably liberal—today the word is progressive—pathway. Kennedy felt that wealth should be acquired and used through productive investments that benefited society as whole. He was not in favor of profits accrued through financial speculation and inheritance. As Gibson notes, Kennedy’s overall program was trying to guarantee that the
…search for profit would not end up destroying rather than creating economic prosperity for the country. In this he was very clear, consistent and coherent. (p. 24)
Kennedy did not like running deficits, but if they were necessary, he would utilize them in aid of economic expansion and low unemployment, in other words, for Keynesian aims. (Gibson, p. 27) Part of that aim was to prepare a stand by program to prevent future economic downturns. A future downturn was to be alleviated through a combination of tax cuts, capital improvements—including direct grants in aid to cities and states—and expanded unemployment insurance. In this regard, and as we should all be cognizant of today after CV 19, JFK seems to be granting options to himself from the domain and prerogatives of the Federal Reserve. (Gibson, p. 29)
The program as a whole was to be greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, Kennedy meant to have it perform in a synergistic fashion. As Gibson wrote, “each specific policy would reinforce and intensify the other initiatives.” (ibid, p. 30) Kennedy wanted to shift capital from non-productive to productive investments. He was specifically interested in expanding low cost energy production. (Gibson, p. 24)
The above program, combined with Kennedy’s policies overseas (which this site had reviewed at length), made the president rather unpopular with the corporate aristocracy. The early sixties were the maturation of the multinational corporation. But beyond that, Kennedy had made himself a target for big business by his stand in the U.S. Steel case in 1962. As the late John Blair wrote about that conflict, it was “the most dramatic confrontation in history between a president and a corporate management.” (Blair, Economic Concentration, p. 635)
Kennedy had taken much time to negotiate a freeze on both wages and prices in the steel industry, in order to head off an inflationary spiral in the economy. After he thought this had been accomplished, on April 10, 1962, Roger Blough of U. S. Steel requested a personal meeting with the president. This was about ten days after the agreement had been signed. Blough flew into Washington and handed the president a press release saying that his company would announce a 3.5% price increase in six hours. (Gibson, p. 10)
Kennedy was outraged that Blough would turn on him at the last minute. He perceived that what the steel companies were trying to do was to humiliate him and cripple leadership of his economic program in public. Most readers of this site know how this turned out. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had FBI agents serve subpoenas on the chief executives of the steel consortium in the wee hours of the morning for suspicion of collusion and price fixing. JFK went on national television to condemn their actions. In no uncertain terms he said that the:
…simultaneous and identical actions of United States Steel and other leading steel corporations increasing steel prices by some $6 a ton constitutes a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest. (Click here for details)
Beyond that, he then went even further in his priority of the pubic good over corporate greed. He stated that the American people would find it hard to accept,
…a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives, whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility, can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185,000,000 Americans.
Within hours, one by one, the steel companies capitulated. (Gibson, p. 11) I don’t have to ask the reader the last time he recalls a president speaking up like this for the interests of the common man over the Wall Street oligarchy. In fact, Fortune magazine theorized that Blough may have been acting as an emissary for the corporate class to discourage the Kennedy example of cooperation between government and business. (Fortune, May, 1963) That article said that this hidden motive could explain the bizarre timing and inherent disdain of Blough’s audience with JFK. The article also stated that it was almost as if the intent was to provoke the maximum friction between the new president and the business world. Author Grant McConnell agreed that Blough’s awkward move was meant as a direct challenge to Kennedy. (Steel and the Presidency, 1962, pp. 6–7) McConnell then developed this idea further:
Acceptance would have had the result of forcing the administration to abandon any hope of dealing actively with economic issues, which was of course, one of the chief desires of many business leaders.
III
There are indications that Blough was representing more than himself in his conflict with Kennedy. One such indication was the continual attacks on Kennedy and his administration in what many have called the Lucepress, that is Henry Luce’s Time-Life-Fortune magazine empire. In fact, one of the earliest and most lasting assaults on Kennedy was published in Fortune magazine. Fortune was a business-oriented monthly publication at that time, e.g. publishing the annual Fortune 500 and Fortune’s Investors Guide. It was designed for the Wall Street, high-end investor class to inform them about business directions and places where capital could be increased through speculation.
Yet, in September of 1961, reporter Charles Murphy was allowed to publish an article called “Cuba: The Record Set Straight.” It was not at all a business article. Without exaggeration, it was an all out attack on Kennedy’s foreign policy. And it was not actually written by Murphy; he was the ghostwriter. It was actually designed by Howard Hunt, under the supervision of Allen Dulles. Hunt himself spent two days working on the formal composition with Murphy. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 54) That Luce would allow his flagship business magazine to be used in such a way tells the reader how highly he valued Dulles and, inversely, what he thought of Kennedy.
The article is written in pure Hunt/Dulles, heightened Cold War style. Although its title refers to Cuba, it attacks Kennedy for seeking a neutralist solution in Laos and for not backing Ngo Dinh Diem strongly enough in Vietnam. It then leaps to the conclusion that because of those weak policies, Kennedy had to resort to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It was this article which began the whole myth of the cancelled D-Day air strikes. The idea that, on the morning of the actual landing of the Cuban exiles, there was a scheduled air strike from Guatemala intended to knock out the last remnants of Castro’s air force and thereby allowing the invading force to land freely and proceed up the beach uncontested.
At the time this article was being composed, President Kennedy had already decided to terminate Dulles as CIA Director. His brother Robert had served on the Taylor Commission, the White House inquiry into the Bay of Pigs debacle. RFK had the opportunity to examine Dulles and he had concluded that Dulles had lied to his brother about the operation’s chances of success and certain crucial elements of its staging. (DiEugenio, pp. 42–43) It was Robert who then motivated his brother to terminate Dulles for this subterfuge.
As we know today, and as President Kennedy knew back then, there were no such D-Day air strikes scheduled from Guatemala or anywhere else except Cuba. Both the CIA and Kennedy understood that the president wanted further sorties to be flown from a secured air strip on the island. (DiEugenio, p. 45) As Bobby Kennedy later concluded, Dulles knew the operation would fail on its own. He was gambling that Kennedy would send in the Navy to save the expedition, rather than sustain a humiliating defeat. Dulles was wrong. Kennedy found out about his scheme and decided to relieve him. Through his friend Luce, Allen Dulles now had Hunt and Murphy covering for him. He would blame the failure of the Bay of Pigs on Kennedy.
In 1963, Fortune opened up on Kennedy’s general economic policies. They scored his Keynesian approach to the economy. The editors said the real wise men of economics were monetarists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. They also criticized JFK for running budget deficits to create growth. As Gibson observes, “Fortune was among the leaders in rejecting virtually every major aspect of Kennedy’s domestic economic program.” (ibid, p. 59)
But that was not all. Charles Murphy wrote another article in Fortune in March of 1963. It was entitled, “Billions in Search of a Good Reason.” This one went after Kennedy’s foreign aid program. Murphy criticized Kennedy’s efforts to try to promote industrialization and growth in the Third World. He concluded that this process had gotten out of hand.
Murphy also criticized Kennedy’s attempts to deal with these nations directly in bypassing international organizations, e.g. the World Bank. Murphy also scored his failure to stipulate that aid must be linked to agreements to purchase goods from America. This seems to be partly a reaction to Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which offered direct aid from the Treasury to Latin American nations. As Walter LaFeber notes in his book Inevitable Revolutions, that program was stripped down under Lyndon Johnson. When Nixon became president, he assigned Nelson Rockefeller to write a report on the program. Once Rockefeller’s report was submitted, the president eliminated the alliance. (Click here for details)
Murphy concluded his article by saying that a large and important part of the banking community was against Kennedy’s foreign aid program. He specifically named the chairman of the board of Chase Manhattan and the president of First National Bank of Chicago. To even have Murphy writing these articles was clearly a conflict of interest on a personal level. Because once Kennedy had read the 1961 article on the Bay of Pigs, he was so angry that he stripped Murphy of his Air Force reserve status. In a letter to Edward Lansdale, Murphy said this did not bother him that much. Why? For his true loyalty was not to President Kennedy but to Allen Dulles. (DiEugenio, p. 46)
As anyone who knows what Kennedy was trying to do in places like Congo and Indonesia, it would be fitting that the banking community would be opposed to his reformist policies. As John Perkins outlines in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the aim of the international banking community was and is to keep emerging nations in debt so that they can control investment, thereby substituting imperialism for colonialism. Kennedy actually mentioned his opposition to this policy in his Inaugural Address: “…we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.” To this writer, that statement—and Kennedy’s policies in places like Indonesia and with the Alliance for Progress—seems to be in opposition to the emerging globalist agenda of the American banking community. As the European colonial era was ending, Wall Street saw an opening for American imperialism to take its place.
IV
Douglas Dillon was ambassador to France as part of the Eisenhower administration. He was quite familiar with the Rockefeller family, since he attended the elite private school of Pine Lodge in New Jersey with three of the Rockefeller brothers: Nelson, Laurence, and John. After the war, he became chairman of his father’s firm, Dillon, Read, and Company, a large investment bank on Wall Street. He was a lifelong Republican, who aided Dwight Eisenhower in his campaign to secure the GOP nomination in 1952. He was also a large contributor to Ike’s general election. As many authors have pointed out, John Kennedy did not really appoint his own cabinet. His brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and, to a lesser extent, Ted Sorenson and Phil Graham of the Washington Post organized a search list, which they then brought to Kennedy. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p.132) According to Arthur Schlesinger, it was Paul Nitze who first suggested Dillon as Treasury Secretary. Then Graham and Joe Alsop pushed him on Kennedy. What made this even more odd is that Dillon had contributed to Nixon’s campaign in 1960. (ibid, p. 135) When Schlesinger pointed this out, Kennedy replied he really did not care about that issue. What he wanted to know was if Dillon was able and would he go along with his program?
Dillon was able, but if Kennedy had demanded a bit more research, he would have found out that Dillon was a questionable enlistee in his program. For instance, from before he was elected, it was clear that Kennedy was going to support the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba in an independent Congo. Dillon had backed the Allen Dulles view that Lumumba was in the arms of Moscow—which he was not. He also feared Lumumba’s powers of oration to rally the army about him. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 379–80) Another African leader that Kennedy favored was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Dillon thought that Nkrumah was a Castroite and, therefore, Kennedy should not aid Nkrumah’s pet project, the Volta Dam. (Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, pp. 84–85)
As Donald Gibson notes, one of the things that many of his critics were disturbed about was Kennedy’s willingness to loan what they called “easy money” for credit purposes. Which, of course, is what the Alliance for Progress was about: low interest or no interest loans for infrastructure and capital improvement. By 1962, Dillon seemed to have gone over to the side of Kennedy’s critics on this and other issues. For example, he was pressing for less government spending, except for defense expenditures. The Wall Street Journal, another consistent critic of Kennedy, wrote in 1963 that the activists in the administration, like Heller, had gained the upper hand over the conservatives like Dillon. (Wall Street Journal, 10/3/63, article by Philip Geyelin) The article said that Kennedy did not want to rely on monetary policy to cure a balance of payments problem. And, in fact, the president had come to think that such problems were too important to be left to bankers. He also did not agree with another of their notions, namely letting interest rates rise. (Hobart Rowen, The Free Enterprisers: Kennedy, Johnson and the Business Establishment, p. 179)
By 1963, there was a split within the administration over general economic policy. There was on one side the activist Kennedy group which included JFK, Heller, and Franklin Roosevelt Jr. of the Commerce Department. On the other side was Dillon, the Federal Reserve, and their outside backer David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan. (Gibson, p. 74)
V
One way that it appears that Kennedy tried to get around this logjam was through James Saxon. Saxon was Kennedy’s Comptroller of the Currency. That position charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and, back then, thrift institutions. It also had control over branches and offices of foreign banks in America. I first recall reading about Saxon in the late Jim Marrs’ book, Crossfire. As Marrs described it, Saxon had been:
…at odds with the powerful Federal Reserve Board for some time, encouraging broader investment and lending powers for banks that were not part of the Federal Reserve System. Saxon also had decided that non-Reserve banks could underwrite state and local general obligation bonds, again weakening the dominant Federal Reserve banks. (p. 275)
From here, Marrs went on to the controversy surrounding Executive Order 11110, where Kennedy authorized printing silver certificate currency out of the Treasury. I believe Marrs was wrong about that issue, as many others have been. (Click here and scroll down to EO 11110) But he was correct about James Saxon’s struggle.
In November of 1963, Saxon granted an interview to US News and World Report. The interview was given before the assassination, but not published until after Kennedy’s death, in the issue of 11/25. In the introduction to the interview, the editors wrote that:
A little-known federal banking agency suddenly has burst into the news, stirring controversy. James J. Saxon, Comptroller of the Currency, who has shaken up many banking regulations, now finds himself at odds with the Federal Reserve Board and some of this country’s leading bankers. The Comptroller approved scores of new national banks, and branches, spurred key mergers, revised outmoded rules. Result: Keener competition for deposits and loan customers.
In this interview, Saxon explained why he was taking these rather exceptional measures. He attacked the banking establishment for not doing all they could to fulfill their customers’ needs; whether they be individuals or businesses. He specifically criticized low interest rates on saving accounts and the shortage of installment loans. He also complained about the reluctance of banks to make loans to farmers. He added that some of this was due to over-regulation, but he was also clear that banks “ought to be out working with all sorts of businesses, with industry, with farmers finding ways to be helpful. Many haven’t been doing it.” Saxon noted that he was attempting to relax rules in certain areas in order to encourage more widespread granting of credit. He said that he was very well received among commercial entities interested in borrowing.
Saxon went on to say that his reform agenda had run into opposition within the banking industry itself, mainly from bankers of the older generation. He also specifically said he had problems with the Federal Reserve Board. He mentioned the Chairman of the Board, William McChesney Martin, as being in disagreement with him. The interviewer stated that when Saxon went to congress, Martin opposed all of his reform suggestions.
Saxon thought the Fed had too much power over what banks could offer as interest rates on accounts and also too much control over loans on large construction projects. In regards to that, he specifically stated that the Fed should not determine how money can be used. In the interview, he said that Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan had too much sway with the Fed. Saxon wanted more competition in banking and he wanted more new banks in more communities, since he felt banks had much to offer to the life of a community, no matter how small. I encourage everyone to read this remarkable interview.
At the end, he clearly implies he had John Kennedy’s backing and no one had resisted his policies from above. In reading the interview, one wonders if Saxon was the man Kennedy sent forward to duel with Chase Manhattan, since Dillon would not. It turns out that Kennedy and Saxon had a common problem, namely Dillon.
After Kennedy’s death, on May 18, 1964, Saxon sent Dillon a memo. It was really more of a complaint. Saxon’s office had sent three bills to Dillon to pass on for approval to congress. They all coincide with the tenor of the Saxon interview. The first was to expand the comptroller’s office powers over foreign banking and financing corporations. The second was to clarify requirements of reports on conditions of national banks. The third was “to remove the power of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to examine National Banks.” Saxon was quite upset that Dillon had stalled on all three, to the point that he felt his office was being discriminated against. He complained that his views were being ignored, especially when the Federal Reserve took a contrary opinion, which they likely did in regards to the third bill he mentioned to Dillon. One has to wonder if, with Kennedy dead, Dillon felt free to marginalize Saxon.
At the end of Part 6 of his “Creating the Oswald Legend” series, Vasilios Vazakas points to the upper levels of the American Power Elite as to where the final approval over JFK’s assassination came from. As Gibson points out, and as I have tried to indicate here, the economic powers in America had been pushing for a globalist agenda even during Kennedy’s presidency. They wanted European colonialism to be replaced by American imperialism, which would allow American business entities to be shipped abroad. They also wanted old-fashioned tight-money monetarist rules in banking. Kennedy opposed both.
As David Talbot notes in The Devil’s Chessboard, Doug Dillon supervised the Secret Service back in 1963. Even Howard Willens of the Warren Commission was surprised as to how Dillon managed to escape a real grilling, including refusing to turn over certain Secret Service records. (Talbot, p. 584) Willens later found out that Dillon had enlisted Warren Commissioner John McCloy in his cause and McCloy had gone to President Johnson to give Dillon more backup. McCloy was employed at the time by the Wall Street law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy. McCloy’s office was located in New York, at Rockefeller Center.
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Neil Sheehan: In Retrospect
Neil Sheehan passed away on January 7th. His death would have attracted more attention if it had not occurred the day after the Trump/Giuliani inspired insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC. We will give his death more than passing notice because, in a real way, the Establishment-honored Sheehan represented much of what was wrong with the New York Times, and big book publishing in general. So if our readers are looking for an adulatory or commemorative eulogy for Sheehan, they should go over to the NY Times. It won’t be found here.
Sheehan was born of Irish parents in Holyoke Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1958. After his military service he went to work for UPI in Tokyo. He spent two years as UPI’s chief correspondent covering the Vietnam War. It was at this time––1962-64––that he became collegial and friendly with the Times’ David Halberstam. And he was then employed by the Grey Lady.
As the reader can see from the picture above, Sheehan and Halberstam rode in helicopters with the military to cover the war. From the looks on their faces, they appear to have enjoyed the assignment. In fact, in the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series The Vietnam War, Sheehan said he found these helicopter sorties exciting to be involved with.
The commander in Vietnam at that time was General Paul Harkins. Since those two reporters were intimately involved with the actual military operations, they knew things were not going well. Yet Harkins insisted they were going fine. As author John Newman wrote in his milestone book JFK and Vietnam, this rosy outlook was an illusion perpetrated by both military intelligence and the CIA. It was carried out by Colonel James Winterbottom with the cognizance of Harkins. (Newman, 1992 edition, pp. 195-97). In a 2007 interview that Sheehan did, he said that he and Halberstam had a conflict with Harkins over this issue of whether or not Saigon and the army of South Vietnam (the ARVN) was actually making progress against the opposing forces in the south, namely the Viet Cong. He said that their impression was that Saigon was losing the war. Their soldiers were reluctant to fight, the entire military hierarchy was corrupt, and as a result, the Viet Cong forces in the south were getting stronger and not weaker.
There is one other element that needs to be addressed before we move further. It is something that David Halberstam did his best to forget about in his 1972 best-seller The Best and the Brightest, but Sheehan was more open about in his 2007 interview. The smiles in the picture above were genuine because Sheehan and Halberstam truly believed in winning the Vietnam War. At any and all costs. As Sheehan further explicated about the duo:
… we believed it was the right thing to do. We believed all those shibboleths of the Cold War, all of which turned out to be mirages : the “domino theory” that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of––Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia––they were all going to fall one by one. We believed the Vietnamese Communists were pawns of the Chinese and the Russians, they were taking their orders from Moscow and Bejing. It was rubbish. They were independent people who had their own objectives, and they were the true nationalists in the country. We didn’t know any of this really, but we did know we were losing the war.
I was quite fortunate to find this interview. Because I had never seen Sheehan or Halberstam be so utterly explicit about who they were and what they were about at that time. In his entire 700 page book, The Best and the Brightest, and later in his career, I never detected such a confessional moment from Halberstam. The simple truth was that Sheehan and Halberstam were classic Cold Warriors who wanted to kick commie butt all the way back to China. They saw what America was doing as some kind of noble cause. They felt that we and they––that is, all good Americans––were standing up for democracy, liberty and freedom. As far as political sophistication went, they might as well have been actors performing in John Wayne’s propaganda movie, The Green Berets. They wanted a Saigon victory with big brother America’s help. Which is the message of the last scene of Wayne’s picture. And they didn’t think Harkins was up to the task. In fact, they did not even know what Harkins was up to with his attitudinizing about America winning the war.
II
Neither Harkins nor Winterbottom was unaware of the true situation on the ground. In fact, as Newman shows in his book, Winterbottom would simply create Viet Cong fatalities out of assumptions he made. Harkins understood this and went along with it. (Newman, p. 224) The idea was to control the intelligence out of Saigon in order to bamboozle Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. (Newman, p. 225) There were honest records kept. But throughout that year of 1962, whenever McNamara would report back to President Kennedy after one of his SecDef Meetings––a conference in the Pacific of all American agency and division chiefs in Saigon––he would deliver to the president the same rosy message he had just heard. And that message was false in two senses: the number of Viet Cong casualties was exaggerated, and the number of ARVN casualties was being reduced. (Newman, p. 231)
This intelligence deception was happening in the spring of 1962. In November of 1961, with his signing of NSAM 111, Kennedy had agreed to raise the number of American advisors and ship more equipment to Saigon. Therefore, the true results on the battlefield in the spring of 1962 would denote that this was not really helping the war effort. As Newman wrote, the Viet Cong “had been quick to alter their tactics to counter the effectiveness of the helicopter: quick strikes followed by withdrawal in fifteen minutes to avoid rapid reaction … .” (p. 233)
At about this time, in April of 1962, President Kennedy sent John Kenneth Galbraith to visit Robert McNamara in Washington. He told Galbraith to give him a report that JFK had requested the ambassador to India write about the American situation in Vietnam. Kennedy knew that Galbraith was opposed to increased American involvement in Indochina, since he had voiced those doubts to the president before. As James Galbraith, the ambassador’s son, said to me, Kennedy fully understood that what Galbraith would write would counter the hawks in his cabinet. (phone interview of July, 2019) Kennedy wanted the report to go to McNamara since the Defense Secretary could then begin to withdraw the (failed) American military mission. Galbraith did so and he then told JFK that McNamara got the message. (see this article)
One month later, McNamara had a SecDef meeting in Saigon. After that meeting, he instructed Harkins––and a few others military higher ups––to stick around for a few minutes. He told them, “It is not the job of the U.S. to assume responsibility for the war but to develop the South Vietnamese capability to do so.” (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 120) He then asked them to complete the ARVN training mission and to submit plans for a dismantling of the American military structure in South Vietnam. He concluded by telling Harkins:
… to devise a plan for turning full responsibility over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference. (Douglass, p. 120)
To me, and to any objective person, this has to be considered quite important information. First, the message is quite clear and unambiguous: McNamara is saying we can only train the ARVN. Once that is done, we are leaving; we cannot fight the war for them. Second, it is multi-sourced: from both Galbraith, and the people at the SecDef meeting in Saigon. In addition, when word got out that Kennedy had sent the memo to McNamara, a mini war broke out in Washington over what was happening. (Newman, pp. 236-37). Then in May of 1963, the withdrawal schedules were delivered to McNamara at another SecDef meeting. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 366)
Now, here is my plaint to the reader: try to find this step by step by step milestone in Halberstam’s book. That is, from:
- Galbraith visiting Kennedy, to
- Galbraith seeing McNamara, to
- McNamara ordering Harkins to begin the dismantling of the American mission, to
- The withdrawal schedules being presented to McNamara.
If you can find it, let me know. Because even though I read the book twice, I could not locate any of it. Also, try to find it in any of the many interviews that Sheehan did that are online. On the contrary, both men always spoke of the “inevitability” of the Vietnam War. You can only maintain such a stance if you do not reveal the above information. In fact, it can be fairly stated that, in 700 pages, Halberstam essentially gives the back of his hand to the influence of Galbraith on Kennedy. And he also completely reverses the roles of McNamara with Kennedy in Vietnam. Halberstam wrote that it was McNamara who went to Kennedy, “because he felt the President needed his help.” (Halberstam, p. 214) He then says, on the next page, that McNamara had no different ideas on the war than Kennedy did.
Let us be frank: This is a falsification of the record. It was Kennedy who, through Galbraith, went to McNamara. And it was not for the purpose of promoting the ideas of the Pentagon on the war. Now, if the alleged 500 interviews Halberstam did were not enough to garner this information, there was another source available to him: the Pentagon Papers––which Halberstam says he read. Moreover, he says they confirmed the direction he was going in. (Halberstam, p. 669)
Either Halberstam lied about reading the Pentagon Papers, or he deliberately concealed what was in them. Because in Volume 2, Chapter 3, of the Gravel Edition of those papers, the authors note that because progress had been made, McNamara directed a program for the ARVN to take over the war and American involvement to be phased out. That phasing out would end in 1965. Is it possible for Halberstam to have missed this? The information appears in the chapter explicitly headed, “Phased Withdrawal of US Forces, 1962-64.” That chapter is forty pages long. (see pp. 160-200)
III
At that time period when the two reporters were in Vietnam, not only did they both want to urge America and Saigon to victory. They thought they found the man to do it. That was Colonel John Paul Vann. In fact, before he wrote The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam wrote another book on Vietnam, called The Making of a Quagmire. It is a book that he wished everyone would forget. Unfortunately for the deceased Halberstam, it’s still in libraries. In that book, Halberstam criticized every aspect of the Saigon regime as led by America’s installed leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. Halberstam writes toward the end that “Bombers and helicopters and napalm are a help but they are not enough.” (p. 321) He then adds, “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) In other words, at that time, Halberstam and Sheehan wanted direct American intervention; as did Colonel Vann.
What this reveals is something important about the trio: They had no reservations about the war America had involved itself in. America got in by its backing of France. When France was defeated, the USA took its place. America then violated the Geneva Accords peace treaty that ended the war. The USA would not hold free elections in order to unify the country. America created a new country called South Vietnam, one that did not exist before. And they installed their own handpicked leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, to rule over it. Diem’s early regime was stage-managed by General Edward Lansdale. According to the first chapter of Sheehan’s book about Vann, A Bright Shining Lie, Lansdale was Vann’s hero.
Both Sheehan and Halberstam fell in love with Vann. They were completely unaware of what was happening in Washington, how Kennedy had decided to take Galbraith’s advice and begin to remove all American advisors. They wanted to win, and they both felt it was only through Vann that the war could be won. They both maintained that he was the smartest man for Harkins’ position.
There was a serious problem with the approach of these three men in 1965. None of them ever raised the fundamental question of what America was doing in Vietnam, or how we got there. Lansdale was not building a democracy. He was building a kleptocracy. He also rigged elections so Diem could win by huge margins. (Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, p. 85) He was constructing the illusion of a republic when, in fact, none existed. Diem was soon to become a dictator. (Jacobs, p. 84) For Vann to make Lansdale his role model is a troubling aspect of the man.
One of the reasons Kennedy decided to get out is simple: he did not think Saigon could win the war without the use of American combat troops. Or as he told Arthur Schlesinger:
The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier.” (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 63)
Kennedy said the same thing to NSC aide Michael Forrestal: America had about a one-in-a-hundred chance of winning. The president said this on the eve of his going to Dallas in 1963. He then added that upon his return there would be a general review of the whole Vietnam situation, how we got there, what we thought we were doing, and if we should be there at all. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 183)
The point about it becoming a white man’s war and the whole French experience echoes back to Kennedy visiting Saigon in 1951. There he met with American diplomat Ed Gullion who told him France would never win the war, and the age of colonialism was coming to an end. (Douglass, p. 93) That visit and the meeting with Gullion had a profound effect on Kennedy’s world view. He now saw nationalism as the main factor in these wars in former European colonies. He also thought that anti-communism was not enough to constitute an American foreign policy. America had to stand for something more than that. (For the best short discussion of this, see James Norwood’s essay on the subject.)
And there was a further difference between JFK and the Establishment on Third World nationalism. Kennedy did not see the world as a Manichean, John Foster Dulles split image. Unlike President Eisenhower, he did not buy into the domino theory. It was no one less than National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy who said this about Kennedy in an oral interview he did in 1964. (Goldstein, p. 230) This is why, as Gordon Goldstein wrote in his book about Bundy, Kennedy turned aside at least nine attempts by his advisors to commit combat troops into Vietnam during 1961.
IV
It’s very clear from the interviews that Sheehan did later in his life that, like Halberstam, he had a problem with admitting Kennedy was right, and he, Halberstam and John Paul Vann were wrong about Vietnam. To fully understand Sheehan, one has to refer to the first chapter of A Bright Shining Lie, his book about Vann. That chapter is called “The Funeral”. It describes the ceremony preceding Vann’s burial. Consider this assertion about 1961:
The previous December, President John F. Kennedy had committed the arms of the United States to the task of suppressing a Communist-led rebellion and preserving South Vietnam as a separate state governed by an American sponsored regime in Saigon.
If Kennedy had thus committed himself, then why had he told McNamara in 1962 that he was to start a withdrawal program? And it’s no use saying that ignorance is an excuse for Sheehan. Peter Dale Scott understood such was not the case when he wrote about Kennedy and Vietnam originally back in 1971. Kennedy simply did not see South Vietnam as a place the USA should pull out all the stops for. John Paul Vann did see it as such. So did Halberstam and Sheehan.
Sheehan also describes Ted Kennedy arriving late at the funeral and sitting in a back pew. He writes that Ted had turned against the war that his brother, “John had set the nation to fight.” Nothing here about President Eisenhower creating this new nation of South Vietnam that did not exist before. He then adds that John Kennedy wanted to extend the New Frontier beyond America’s shores. And the price of doing that had been the war in Vietnam.
I think we should ask a question right here: Why not mention Bobby Kennedy’s antagonism against the war in Vietnam, which was clearly manifest during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency? In fact, as author John Bohrer has written, Robert Kennedy had warned President Johnson against escalation as early as 1964. (The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, p. 70). Kennedy had told Arthur Schlesinger that, by listening to Eisenhower, Johnson would escalate the war in spite of his advice. (Bohrer, p. 152)
When Halberstam heard about this, he now began to criticize RFK. How dare Bobby imagine that he was smarter than Johnson and Ike on the war. What did Robert Kennedy think? You could win the war without dropping tons of bombs and using overwhelming force? Again, this exchange exposes who Halberstam and Sheehan really were in 1965. If I had been that wrong, I would have excised it also.
As per extending the New Frontier beyond its borders, this is contrary to what Kennedy’s foreign policy had become after his meeting with Gullion. JFK was trying for a neutralist foreign policy, one that broke with Eisenhower’s, and tried to get back to Franklin Roosevelt’s. And as anyone who reads this site knows, this is amply indicated by his policy in places like Congo and the Dominican Republic.
What Sheehan is doing here is pretty obvious. He is transferring his guilt about who he was, and what he did while under Vann’s spell, onto Kennedy. In fact, Kennedy was opposed to what both Halberstam was writing and what Vann was advocating for about Vietnam. As proven above, JFK did not want America to take control of the war––to the point that President Kennedy tried to get Halberstam rotated out of Vietnam. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 261) I also think this is the reason that Sheehan never acknowledged that Kennedy was withdrawing from Indochina in any interview I read with him. And considering some of these interviews were done after the controversy over Oliver Stone’s film JFK, that is really saying something.
V
There are two other highlights to Sheehan’s journalistic career with the Times. One concerned his association with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg had been in Vietnam on a voluntary tour under Ed Lansdale from 1965-67. He went there from the Defense Department in order to see what the Vietnam War was really like. He spent six weeks being shown around Saigon by Vann. (Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous, p. 77) As he notes in his fine book Secrets, Ellsberg came back a different man. He could not believe how badly the war was going, even though President Johnson had done what Kennedy refused to do: insert combat troops. By 1967 there were well over 400,000 of them in theater. This certified what President Kennedy had told Schlesinger about making it an American war and ending up like the French.
When Ellsberg returned, he went to work at Rand Corporation. This was a research and development company in Santa Monica. Robert McNamara was getting ready to leave office. One of his very last acts was to commission the secret study called the Pentagon Papers. Since Ellsberg had worked in the Pentagon, he was asked to work on the study. He then decided that the Pentagon Papers were so powerful in exposing the lies behind the war, he needed to get them into the public record. So he and his friend Anthony Russo decided to copy the study and make it public.
Since the Pentagon Papers were classified, Ellsberg and Russo faced legal problems if they themselves gave the documents to a newspaper or magazine for publication. Therefore, Ellsberg approached four elected officials to try and get them entered into the congressional record. That would have protected them legally since representatives and senators have immunity while speaking from the floor. The problem was that for one reason or another, all four refused to accept the documents. (Ellsberg, Secrets, pp. 323-30, 356-66)
Ellsberg got in contact with Sheehan, whom he had met in Vietnam in 1965. Ellsberg had a teaching fellowship at MIT at this time. So Sheehan drove up from New York to Cambridge in March of 1971. Ellsberg made a deal with Sheehan: he could take notes on the documents and copy a few pages. He could then show those notes to his editors and they could make up their minds if they would publish the actual papers. Ellsberg left Sheehan a key to the apartment where he had them stored. Without telling his source, Sheehan ended up copying the documents with his wife and taking them to New York. (Ellsberg, p. 175)
The Times did publish three days of stories from the papers before they were halted by a court order. What is interesting about this Times version of the Pentagon Papers––which was later issued as a book––is that it differs from the later edition previously mentioned. For Senator Mike Gravel did read from a portion of the documents on the senate floor. In his version, later published by Beacon Press, as noted above, there is an entire 40 page chapter entitled “Phased Withdrawal 1962-64”. In the Times version of the papers, the section dealing with the Kennedy administration goes on over 200 pages. (The Pentagon Papers, New York Times Company, 1971, pp. 132-344) There is, however, no section on the phased withdrawal, and the transition from John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson concludes with the declaration that somehow, Johnson had affirmed Kennedy’s policy and continued with it. I cannot say that this was purposeful, since the Gravel edition of the papers is longer than the one the Times had. But whatever the reason, today that statement looks utterly ludicrous.
Everyone who reads this site is aware of the My Lai Massacre, which occurred in March of 1968. An army regiment slaughtered hundreds of innocent women and children at the small hamlet of My Lai. The incident was covered up within the military by many high level officers, including Colin Powell. But it finally broke into the press in 1969. It was an indication that the US military was disintegrating under the pressure of a war that could not be won.
The exposure of My Lai caused many other veterans to come forward and tell stories about other atrocities. In 1971, Mark Lane helped stage what was called the Winter Soldier Investigation. This was a three day event held in Detroit and broadcast by Pacifica Radio. There, many others told similar stories about what had really happened in Vietnam.
The Nixon administration was not at all pleased with the event. White House advisor Charles Colson, with the help of the FBI, went to work on discrediting the witnesses. (Mark Lane, Citizen Lane, p. 218) Since Lane helped with the event, he knew many of the men and interviewed them. He turned the interviews into a book called Conversations with Americans. Some of the veterans expressed fear of reprisal for what they told the author. So in the introduction, Lane explained that some names had been altered to protect the witnesses from the military. (Lane, p. 17) Lane then placed the actual transcripts with the real names at an attorney’s office in New York; a man who had worked for the Justice Department. (Citizen Lane, p. 219)
Six weeks after the book was released, the New York Times reviewed it. The reviewer was Sheehan. In cooperation with the Pentagon, Sheehan now said that a number of the witnesses were not genuine and Lane had somehow fabricated the interviews. (Citizen Lane, p. 220) Sheehan did this without calling the lawyer in New York who had the original depositions with the real names. It is hard to believe, but Sheehan did a publicity tour for his article. Yet he refused to take any of Lane’s personal calls or answer any of his letters. When Lane finally got to confront Sheehan on the radio, Sheehan said that in three years of covering the war in Vietnam he had never found any evidence of any such atrocities. When Lane asked him about My Lai, Sheehan said these were just rumors. (Citizen Lane, p. 221) Recall, this was very late in 1970 and in early 1971. The story had broken wide open in late 1969, including photos of the victims in Life magazine and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
In his 2007 interview, Sheehan said he became disenchanted with the war in 1967. But as the reader can see from the above, he was still covering up for the military in 1971. One of the worst parts of the 2007 interview is when Sheehan talks about his tour in Indonesia in 1965 before returning to Vietnam. He says that this was an enlightening experience for him. Why? Because he says the communists had tried to take over the government, but they got no aid from Moscow or Bejing. He then adds that this showed him that communism was not a monolithic movement, and the domino theory was not really applicable.
What can one say about that statement? Besides him learning in 1965 what Kennedy knew in 1951, there is this: There was no communist insurrection in Jakarta in 1965. And any reporter worth his salt would have known that––certainly by 2007. General Suharto used that excuse to slaughter over 500,000 innocent civilians. But in keeping with this, A Bright Shining Lie was an establishment project. Peter Breastrup supplied the funds through the Woodrow Wilson Institute to finish the book. Breastrup worked for the Washington Post; he was Ben Bradlee’s reporter on Vietnam for years, and he always insisted that the Tet Offensive was really misinterpreted and blown out of proportion by the media. The book was edited by the infamous Bob Loomis at Random House. Loomis was the man who approached Gerald Posner to write Case Closed, a horrendous cover-up of President Kennedy’s assassination.
Since the war had turned out so badly, Sheehan could not really make Vann the hero he and Halberstam had in 1963-65. So they dirtied him up. His mother was a part-time prostitute, he cheated on his wife, and he was a womanizer in Vietnam who impregnated a young girl. This was supposed to be part of the lie about Vietnam. But Sheehan really never got over Vann, because in later interviews he said that it was really Vann who, at the Battle of Kontum, stopped the Easter Offensive. Which is a really incomprehensible statement. The tank/infantry assault on Saigon by Hanoi in 1972 lasted six months and was a three-pronged attack. It was finally stopped by Nixon’s Operation Linebacker, which was perhaps the heaviest bombing campaign in Vietnam until the Christmas bombing of 1972.
What Sheehan did––with his so-called inevitability of the war, disguising of Kennedy, his promotion of Vann, his misrepresentation of Mark Lane––is he helped promote a Lost Cause theory of Vietnam. This was later fully expressed by authors like Guenther Lewy in America in Vietnam, Norman Podhoretz in Why We Were in Vietnam, and more recently, Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken. The last pretty much states that Lansdale, Vann’s hero, should have been placed in charge. If so America likely would have won.
So excuse me if I will not be part of the commemoration of Sheehan’s career. In many ways, both he and Halberstam represented the worst aspects of the MSM. After being part of an epic tragedy, they then did all they could to promote a man who very few people would have ever heard of without them. At the same time, they did all they could to denigrate the president who was trying to avoid that epic tragedy.
That is not journalism. It is CYA. And it is CYA that conveniently fits in with an MSM agenda.
Listen to Jim DiEugenio being interviewed on this subject The Late Neil Sheehan, The New York Times, Vietnam, and Daniel Ellsberg Pt. 1 w/ Jim DiEugenio.
Listen to Jim Naureckas being interviewed on this subject The Late Neil Sheehan, The New York Times, Vietnam, and Daniel Ellsberg Pt. 2 w/ Jim Naureckas.
Jim Naureckas writes ACTION ALERT: What Can ‘Now Be Told’ by NYT About Pentagon Papers Isn’t Actually True.
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Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 6
- A WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS
The Man Who Knew too Much
Jim Garrison called Richard Case Nagell the “most important witness there is.” A detailed examination of Nagell’s actions is not within the scope of this essay, since he has been the subject of extensive research, beginning with Dick Russell’s books The Man Who Knew Too Much and On The Trail of the JFK Assassins. Other books that document his life and actions are Larry Hancock’s Someone Would Have Talked and Jim DiEugenio’s second edition of Destiny Betrayed.
What is important to take away from the Nagell story is that both he and Oswald appeared to have some similarities and that Nagell had come very close to unraveling a plot concerning the assassination of John Kennedy. Not only had Nagell met Oswald in Japan while both were stationed there, he had also visited the American Embassy in Mexico City on September 28, 1962, where he stated that he was “bitter, disgusted, disillusioned and disaffected” and that he might go to another country. He returned to the Embassy, on October 1, 1962, to ask what would happen if he renounced his United States citizenship and what the penalty would be if he would go to a country behind the Iron Curtain.[1]
His behavior was very similar to Oswald’s, when the latter tried to renounce his citizenship and defect to the Soviet Union during his visit to the American Embassy in Moscow.
Nagell claimed that it was in Mexico where he was recruited by a CIA official who he had met previously in Japan and was given the mission to work as a double agent. Larry Hancock believes this was Henry Hecksher and his job was to establish contact with the Soviets and KGB officers in Mexico. His real task was to feed disinformation to the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis.[2] The Soviets, on their turn, gave him another mission, to find out about a violent anti-Castro group, Alpha 66, that was plotting to assassinate the American president; and to keep tabs on a certain Lee Harvey Oswald who was not a stranger to the Russians, since he had defected and lived in the Soviet Union.
Nagell discovered that the Cuban exiles were plotting to assassinate Kennedy in Miami and later in Los Angeles. In California, the scapegoat was Vaughn Marlowe who, like Oswald, was involved with the FPCC: he was an executive officer of the Los Angeles branch[3]. However, these alleged plots did not come to fruition.
Before Oswald moved to New Orleans, Nagell visited the city and began investigating people who later came up in the Jim Garrison investigation, specifically Eladio Del Valle, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and David Ferrie.[4] He then discovered that the Cuban exiles had learned of the secret back channels of communication between Kennedy and Castro and felt betrayed. They now wanted to avenge Kennedy and were planning to assassinate him. Oswald was being set up by the Cubans and the CIA. Among those setting him up were David Ferrie and the two strange Cubans who visited Sylvia Odio, Leopoldo and Angel. Nagell claimed to be in possession of a tape recording of four men plotting to kill President Kennedy. One was Arcacha Smith and another was identified as “Q,” probably Carlos Quiroga, who was Arcacha’s right hand man and had very likely supplied Oswald with pro-Castro literature.[5]
What makes that interesting is that when Garrison polygraphed Quiroga, he asked him if Arcacha Smith knew Oswald and if he had seen any of the guns used in the assassination. Quiroga’s answers to both questions were negative; but the polygraph test indicated that he was trying to be deceptive.[6] Garrison had asked Nagell to testify at Clay Shaw’s trial, but Nagell decided that it was not a good idea when a grenade was thrown at him from a speeding car in New York.[7] Garrison tried to extradite Arcacha back to New Orleans, but he was denied his request. Any real investigation would have revealed that Arcacha was Howard Hunt’s man while trying to set up the CRC in New Orleans, was identified by Rose Cheramie and Mac Manual, and also was one of the men who accompanied Rose and had knowledge of the upcoming hit in Dallas. Additionally, as we saw in Part 5, Arcacha was involved in gun running and the drug trade.
In this regard, it is appropriate to link to Nagell’s first interview with Jim Garrison’s office, where he specifically mentioned Sergio Arcacha Smith. To show how important the Agency thought both Garrison and Nagell were, the reader should keep this in mind: William Martin, the interviewer for Garrison in who Nagell confided, was CIA.
Nagell then found out that Angel and Leopoldo were trying to recruit Oswald to help them assassinate Kennedy in Washington D.C. This was to be done sometime in late September. They passed themselves on to Oswald as Castro G-2 intelligence agents and reasoned that they wanted to retaliate for Kennedy’s efforts to assassinate the Cuban leader. So Nagell met with Oswald in New Orleans and tried to convince him that Angel and Leopoldo were not Cuban agents, but were anti-Castro Cuban exiles working in accordance with CIA and wanted to kill Kennedy to provoke an invasion of Cuba to avenge his death by Castro. (Click here for more details)
Oswald denied there were discussions to kill Kennedy and that he was a friend of the Cuban revolution.[8] It is possible that Oswald, whose role was to infiltrate subversives and Castro sympathizers, had found out about the plot and was trying to spy and monitor the Castro agents in a desperate effort to stop the attempt. As to how important Nagell was in the JFK case and how much corroboration his testimony had, I refer the reader to Jim DiEugenio’s discussion of the second edition of Dick Russell’s book about the man.
Nagell believed that Oswald did pull a trigger in Dealey Plaza, but he could be excused on this point. Nagell was not aware of the information that researchers have in their possession today. For example, the near certainty that Oswald was not on the sixth floor makes it impossible for him to have fired those shots. The latest research indicates that Oswald was probably on the first floor during the shooting and possibly outside the building watching the parade.[9]
So, if Oswald was not the culprit, who were the shooters in Dealey Plaza and who organized the ambush in such a way to ensure its success and the safe escape of those involved without being caught?
Nagell’s allegations about Angel’s and Leopoldo’s attempt to set Oswald up as a patsy corroborate John Martino’s claims that the “Anti-Castro Cubans put Oswald together.” Larry Hancock in his recent e-book “Tipping Point”[10] presents such a case where CIA Cuban exile teams in JM/WAVE were trained to kill Castro, but later shifted their focus to Kennedy after they learned that JFK was secretly negotiating to restore relations with Castro. To them, this constituted the ultimate betrayal. It is likely that such information would have been passed down from William Harvey to Johnny Roselli. Therefore, in this scenario, those most likely involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy were Roselli, Harvey, David Morales, Rip Robertson, Felipe Vidal Santiago, Roy Hargraves, John Martino, CIA paramilitary officer Carl Jenkins, and Cubans like Chi Chi Quintero, Felix Rodriquez, Carlos Hernandez, Nestor Izquierdo, and Segundo Borgas.
Researcher William Kelly holds a similar view and believes that the operation in Dallas was based on the “Pathfinder” plan, which was a covert contingency plan to assassinate Castro with a high-powered rifle from a high building as he drove in an open jeep. When the Kennedy brothers rejected “Pathfinder,” it was re-directed from Castro to assassinate John Kennedy instead.[11]
The above theories are prevalent today and many researchers believe that they come close to the truth. However, there are other suspects and theories regarding the shooters. One of them implicates the French paramilitary group OAS and/or the French intelligence service SDECE in the assassination.
Dinkin’s Prognostication
The story of Private First-Class Eugene Dinkin has been told by Noel Twyman in his book Bloody Treason and Dick Russell in his book The Man Who Knew Too Much. Dinkin was a cryptographic code operator stationed in Metz, France and he had concluded that there was a plot being prepared to assassinate Kennedy involving “some high-ranking members of the military, some right-wing economic groups, with the support of some national media outlets.”[12] Dinkin tried to warn many different people about the conspiracy, but no one really believed him. He claimed to have written a letter to Robert Kennedy before the assassination to warn him:
…that an attempt on President Kennedy would occur on November 28th, 1963; that if it were to succeed, blame would then be placed upon a Communist or Negro, who would be designated the assassin…[13]
Dinkin was arrested on November 13, 1963, placed in a psychiatric hospital, and later was transferred to Walter Reed hospital. Many researchers believe that Dinkin had learned about the assassination plot by intercepting and decrypting sensitive military communications. According to an FBI report based on interviews with Dinkin, he found out about the plot after studying the military publication Star and Stripes, where he could detect subliminal information regarding the assassination. This is a hard thing to accept and seems to be an unlikely fit. It is more likely that he decoded messages that revealed the plot, but it was his psychiatric confidant that “forced him” to come up with the military publication explanation.
DA Jim Garrison discovered that one of Dinkin’s duties as a code breaker was to decipher military messages, especially those originating from the French paramilitary organization OAS.[14] Garrison discovered that Clay Shaw was associated with the mysterious company named Permindex, which reportedly had been involved in assassination attempts against French president Charles De Gaulle. Jack Soustelle, a leader of the OAS, was a personal friend to Ferenc Nagy, a founding member of Permindex.
The OAS vs JFK
In 1977, a CIA document dated April 1, 1964, revealed that the French authorities wanted to know why a French national—Jean Souetre aka Michel Roux, aka Michael Mertz—had been expelled from the US at Fort Worth or Dallas 48 hours after the assassination, to either Mexico or Canada.[15] Jean Souetre was a member of the OAS (Secret Army Organization), which was violently opposed to France granting Algeria its independence. This poses the question as to whether or not the OAS provided the shooters in Dallas. The OAS had a motive to kill Kennedy, since he had strongly and openly supported the cause of Algerian independence since 1957.
To mystify things even more, Souetre might have been impersonated by Michael Mertz, a SDECE agent who, in the past had infiltrated the OAS and eventually saved De Gaulle’s life. Mertz was involved in drug trafficking from France to the US, so he was another suspect as being one of the shooters in Dallas. It is possible that neither of these men were involved in the JFK assassination, which would mean someone implicated them in such a way to make it look as if they were in Dallas. The effect would be to draw attention from the real culprits and obscure the truth even further.
In 1988, Stephen Rivele alleged that the Corsican mafia had assassinated Kennedy and an individual named Lucien Sarti was one of the shooters in Dealey Plaza. Later Howard Hunt, in his deathbed confession, implicated Lucien Sarti as being the gunman behind the fence on the Grassy Knoll. Sarti was killed by the Mexican Federal Police in Mexico City in 1972. It was Hunt and Lucien Conein who were the driving forces behind Richard Nixon’s great heroin coup, designed to replace the French heroin network, and ordered the kidnapping and killing of the Corsican mafia members. How convenient it was that Rivele’s allegations and Hunt’s confession implicated their arch enemies, the Corsicans and the old French connection to the assassination of a US President. Before that, it was Edward Lansdale and Lucien Conein who had defeated the Corsicans in Southeast Asia thus clearing the path for Santo Trafficante to control the opium smuggling from the Golden Triangle.
Harvey and ZR/Rifle
It was Bill Harvey who had written in his notes on the ZR/RIFLE program that “Corsicans recommended Sicilians lead to Mafia.” [16] Oddly, Hunt wrote that he was a bench warmer in the plot, in that he did not want to be part of a conspiracy that had anything to do with William Harvey, who was an alcoholic psycho. Hunt was likely deflecting attention from himself by implicating Harvey and his Corsicans in the assassination of Kennedy.
Many theories name William Harvey as the man who selected the assassins from his ZR/RIFLE program and may have designed the Dallas hit. Mark Wyatt, Harvey’s Deputy in Rome, revealed that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963. According to Wyatt, he had bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas sometime before the assassination. When he asked Harvey what was doing in Dallas, he replied vaguely, “I am here to see what’s happening.”[17]
However, to be fair to Harvey, he was not in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Wyatt said that they were both attending a Gladio meeting in Sardinia, Italy, when they heard about the assassination. Later that afternoon, Wyatt found Harvey collapsed in his bed after drinking martinis.[18]
If Harvey was part of the plot, you would have expected him to be in Dallas instead of lying unconscious in bed after heavy drinking. Could it be possible that Harvey’s trips to Miami and his involvement with ZR/RIFLE were unrelated to the assassination and had to do with operations against Castro?
There is something interesting that Malcolm Blunt discussed about Harvey with Alan Dale. The information that in August 1963, Harvey wanted to meet with Clare Boothe Luce, some months prior to the assassination. Again, could it be possible that he did not want to meet her about the assassination, but to discuss her anti-Castro operations? We cannot really be certain if Harvey was involved in the assassination, that he only had prior knowledge, or knowledge at all.
Edward Lansdale in Texas
Some researchers believe that Edward Lansdale was the man who masterminded the Dealey Plaza operation. This is based on Fletcher Prouty’s assertion that Lansdale was in Dallas that day and is seen in a photograph walking by the three tramps.
If that’s the case, there is no way in the world that Lansdale would have accepted to cooperate with Harvey, and vice versa, in such a crucial event. Lansdale remarked about Harvey, “People who ‘d been up against the Soviet types were always very strange to me…I am sure they thought I was strange.”[19] Harvey not only found Lansdale wacky, but he thought he was a security risk. It was impossible for them to communicate about how to bring down Castro during Operation Mongoose. The final break between the pair came on August 13, 1962. Lansdale wrote a memo: “Mr. Harvey: Intelligence, political (including liquidation of leaders), Economic (sabotage, limited deception) and Paramilitary.” Harvey was furious with Lansdale after that and called him to let him know how stupid he was to put such comments in a document.[20]
Then there is the question of where Lansdale’s loyalty was located? To the Pentagon, since he was an Air Force General, or to the CIA? In Malcolm Blunt’s book The Devil is in the Details, Alan Dale, Blunt and John Newman were pondering this question. Blunt brought up Robert Gambino from the Office of Mail Logistics who had written a memo on Lansdale. There he offers the information that although Lansdale was a military man, he was working mainly for the CIA.[21] Then Blunt and Dale mention that Lansdale resigned or retired temporarily from the army in October 1963. A short time later he returned to the army and he was promoted. The man who was pushing for his promotion was none other than Allen Dulles himself.[22] Not only that but Lansdale headed the first mission in Saigon in 1954 and this mission was a CIA creation.[23]
We have established that Lansdale was mainly a CIA guy with an Air Force uniform. But was he in Dealey Plaza as Prouty claims? John Newman found out that after his retirement, Lansdale visited his friend Sam Williams in Denton, Texas, which was near Dallas around the time of the assassination. He discovered a letter from Lansdale to Williams saying, “Hey, I am coming down to see you Sam.”[24] As Newman said, this proves that he was in the Dallas area, but it does not prove he was in Dealey Plaza. A little discussed factor about Lansdale is that he had connections to the Power Elite, specifically to the Kennedy family’s nemesis clan: the Rockefellers. He was Nelson Rockefeller’s clandestine associate in Southeast Asian propaganda activities. Lansdale was an adviser to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund/Special Studies Project and was appointed head of new counterinsurgency office at the Pentagon after the Bay of Pigs.[25]
Deliberate Obfuscation?
Whoever designed the Dealey Plaza scenario seems to have designed a confluence in Dallas that day. Everyone who had a motive to want Kennedy killed was somehow in the area: anti-Castro Cubans, the Mob, right wingers, Minutemen, Pentagon members (James Powell, army photographer), and the Texas oilmen who would distribute hostile flyers containing accusations against the President. It seems the anti-Kennedy universe was in Dallas for the purpose of killing Kennedy.
If that was so, the script writer could ensure that if anyone ever tried to search for the truth, he would encounter such a tangled web of both contradictions and dead ends, that it would be impossible to separate facts from fiction. Then again, the best, most successful disinformation mixes facts with fiction and the truth, which is best hidden between lies. Unfortunately, we do not know the identity of the person who designed this diabolical scenario. It could have been Lansdale, Harvey, David Phillips, Hunt or any other covert action officer. But it’s likely we will never know who orchestrated the Dealey Plaza operation and who the shooters were.
James Jesus Angleton’s favourite phrase to describe the world of espionage was “a wilderness of mirrors.” In the case of the Dealey Plaza assassination, the wilderness of mirrors was reflecting a confusing, distorted picture where everything was possible, but nothing was certain.
Is it possible that Larry Hancock’s theory about the shooters and those involved in Dealey Plaza is the one closer to the truth? The main problem would be that the Cubans talked too much and gossiped around; even the CIA officers would find it hard to trust them with sensitive information. If you add to this the fact that the Cuban exiles were infiltrated by Castro agents, it would have been difficult to keep the assassination plot secret. The same probably happened in the plots against Castro, but that was not a problem if the plots to kill him all failed. After all, to those who wanted Kennedy dead, it would have been in their best interests for the assassination attempts against Castro to fail. As John Newman postulates in his new series of books: “for the plot that was used in the JFK assassination to work, Castro had to be alive after the president’s death.”[26] In the case of the JFK assassination, it was imperative for the plot to succeed, because the stakes were so high. If it was to fail, or if Oswald talked, those involved would face charges of treason.
A better, safer solution that would guarantee absolute secrecy and confidentiality would be to bring in a military or paramilitary team from Laos. That unit could be flown to Mexico or the USA with Air America via the drug trade routes. They would finish the job and return to Laos where they would possibly end up being killed in a risky mission against the Viet Cong. Admittedly, this is speculation and nothing more. But it does indicate a more surefire way of concealment.
- ELITE CONNECTIONS
In part 3, we reviewed Oswald’s appearance on Bill Stuckey’s New Orleans radio show “Carte Blanche”. There, he talked about his political views and debated with Ed Butler and Carlos Bringuier. The result of this interview was a record production by Dr. Alton Ochsner’s INCA, an album with the title, “Oswald: Self-Portrait in Red.” On the front cover was a drawing of Oswald’s face and on the back of the album was the headline “I am a Marxist” with the date of August 21, 1963, at the bottom were photographs of Congressman Hale Boggs, psy war specialist and Ochsner employee Ed Butler, and Dr. Alton Ochsner himself. Ed Butler did not only have connections to the previously discussed American Security Council, but he was also in contact with General Edward Lansdale and CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell.[27]
Dr. Ochsner and the CIA
This is all fitting, because a CIA document of May 23, 1968, has finally been released completely unredacted. It was secured by Malcom Blunt. It reveals that Ochsner was a cleared source of theirs since May of 1955. But also, the CIA had sources inside Ochsner’s large New Orleans clinic. The memo continues by saying that Crescent City CIA officers, Hunter Leake and Lloyd Ray, were both socially familiar with Ochsner. In the document, the CIA admits they are in contact with INCA. The memo concludes with this: “Mr. Edward Butler, Staff Director of INCA, is a contact of our New Orleans Office and the source of numerous reports.” In light of this, we should also note that in about 24 hours, the CIA sponsored DRE put out a broadsheet saying Oswald killed Kennedy for Castro. (Click here for details) As noted, Carlos Bringuier of the CIA sponsored DRE was the other participant in Stuckey’s debate.
Dr. Ochsner was working closely with Butler to fight Communism in Latin America and promote free trade. He had also been President of the American Cancer Society, President of the American College of Surgeons, President of the International Society of Surgeons, and President of the Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation.[28] Ochsner had the reputation of an extreme right-winger: anti-welfare, anti-Medicare, and racist. The truth of the matter is that he was all that and more and he was part of the local aristocracy and the elite establishment. He was the President of the International House (IH) and he was also a member of the International Trade Mart (ITM), where he worked with Clay Shaw, who was once a Managing Director of the IH. There is a photograph of Ochsner with Shaw at the New Orleans Public Library.[29] Ochsner sat on the Board of Directors of the Foreign Policy Association of New Orleans with Shaw. This organization invited CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell to New Orleans to discuss the Communist threat.[30]
Ochsner was also a member of the exclusive New Orleans Boston Club and he had been invited to the secretive west coast Bohemian Club. During his time at Tulane University, he managed to attract financial support from the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations.[31]
Ochsner would count among his friends, Turner Catledge, managing editor of the New York Times, Samuel Zemurray of United Fruit, and Edgar and Edith Stern of the Sears Roebuck fortune. John J. McCloy served as an honorary chairman of the IH, while David Rockefeller was a trustee and Chairman of the IH’s executive committee.[32] Ochsner’s INCA organization was getting financial support from Standard Oil, the Reily Foundation, Mississippi Shipping Company, the Hibernia bank, and ITM.[33]
In the late 1930’s, the New York IH Chairman was Henry L. Stimson, former Secretary of War and former Secretary of State, among his trustees were John D. Rockefeller III and Frederick Henry Osborn Sr.
Osborn, Allen Dulles and the Paines
The last was an interesting individual, well rooted in the upper classes of the Eastern Establishment. He was a trustee of Princeton University and a member of the Rockefeller Institute and the Carnegie Corporation. Osborn was a Director of the Population Association of America, the American Eugenics Society, and of the Association for Research in Human Heredity. He was also an associate of Dean Acheson. Acheson appointed Osborn in 1947 to be one of the US representatives to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.[34] In 1947, John D. Rockefeller III established the Population Council and appointed Osborn the Council’s first Director.[35]
Osborn, along with Wickliffe Preston Draper, founded the Pioneer Fund; the purpose was to advance pro-eugenic research and propaganda. In 1937, Osborn stated that the Nazi’s racial sterilization program was “the most important social program which has ever been tried.”[36]
Like his friend Allen Dulles, Osborn had graduated from Princeton and both worked together to establish an organization called Crusade for Freedom that merged with Radio Free Europe in 1962. There are letters exchanged between him and the Dulles brothers at Princeton University.[37]
It was his son Frederick Osborn Jr. and his wife Nancy who provided character references for Ruth and Michael Paine, when the FBI was investigating them for their close relationship to Marina and Lee Oswald. Why a prominent member of the Eastern Establishment like Osborn would bother to explain to the FBI that the Paines had nothing to do with the assassination is a question that has never been answered.[38] Maybe the answer was that both Ruth and Michael Paine’s families were considered to be upper class, with links to the Eastern Establishment.
Ruth and Michael, the Good Samaritans
Michael Paine’s ancestry goes back to the Boston Brahmins: the Forbes and the Cabot families. His grand uncle Cameron Forbes was the Governor and Ambassador to the Philippines and later joined the board of United Fruit. Michael’s cousin, Thomas Dudley Cabot, was a former President of United Fruit and his brother John M. Cabot was in the State Department discussing with Maurice Gatlin the CIA plan to overthrow the Guatemalan government on behalf of United Fruit. Gatlin was a close associate of Guy Banister. Cabot was also President of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, a CIA front through which David Phillips established Radio Swan.[39]
Michael’s mother, Ruth Forbes, was a very good friend of Mary Bancroft. Bancroft was an ex OSS agent who worked under Allen Dulles in Switzerland. Dulles and Bancroft were romantically involved for a short period, but later remained friends. Bancroft was also a friend of Henry Luce of the Time-Life Empire.[40]
Ruth Forbes divorced Michael’s father and she married Arthur Young. Young was a famous inventor and one of the creators of Bell Helicopter. That connection helped his step-son Michael Paine get a high tech/high security clearance to work at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. Before that, Michael was employed by the Franklin Institute, a CIA conduit.[41]
Ruth Paine had a great fondness for Arthur and Ruth Forbes Young and would regularly ask their opinion on undisclosed topics. She visited them in the summer of 1963 in their home in Philadelphia.[42]
Ruth Paine’s father, William Avery Hyde, and his wife Carol were prominent members of the Ohio Unitarians. Her father had worked for the OSS during WWII and he later became the USAID’s regional director for Latin America.[43]
CIA Agent Joseph Dryer, a friend of George DeMohrenschildt, was asked by the HSCA to identify from a list certain people who might have connections to DeMohrenschildt. Dryer identified two of them. One was Army Intelligence officer Dorothe Matlack and the other was William Avery Hyde.[44] A 1993 CIA declassified file revealed that Ruth’s sister, Sylvia Hyde Hoke, had worked for the Agency as a psychologist. It is worth noting that Sylvia’s husband John Hoke was employed by the USAID.[45] It is also worth noting the following in this aspect: Ruth did some traveling in the summer of 1963. She visited with her sister at her home. Yet, during her grand jury appearance with Jim Garrison, not only did Ruth deny knowing what agency of government Sylvia worked for in 1963, she also pleaded ignorance about where her sister lived at that time. (Click here for details, see pp. 55–62) Obviously, with Ruth drawing a blank, it made it more difficult for Garrison to attain this information, since the CIA was hiding it from him.
On his return from New Orleans, Oswald had applied for employment through the Texas Employment Commission. Ruth Paine had arranged for Oswald to get a job at the Texas School Book Depository and told him about it on October 14th. Oswald was interviewed on October 15th and started work the following day. However, on the 15th, an employee of the Texas Employment Commission phoned the Paine residency and asked for Oswald. He wanted to inform him that they had found him a job at Trans Texas Airport. Ruth Paine answered that he was not home and so they called back the next day to hear that Oswald had taken a job elsewhere. Ruth never informed Oswald about this job, even though it paid about $100 more per month than the TSBD one.[46]
The backyard photographs of Oswald posing with a rifle were found by the police at the Paines’ home. But a week later, another piece of evidence turned up out of the blue— on November 30. It was a note found inside a book incriminating Oswald in the attempted murder of General Walker, which is bizarre since Oswald, for seven months, had never been considered a suspect in that case .[47]
Ruth Paine also provided other evidence: a betting guide and a English-Spanish dictionary that allegedly proved that Oswald had visited Mexico.[48] Ruth was also responsible for discovering the well-known “Kostin letter“ allegedly written by Oswald saying that he met Comrade Kostin (meaning Kostikov) in Mexico City.[49] What makes this odd is that in an FBI phone interview of November 28, 1963, Ruth told agent Don Moore that she had no idea Oswald had been in Mexico. And when Oswald showed up in Dallas, “neither he nor his wife furnished any info to Mrs. Paine to the effect that Oswald had been in Mexico.” That report then concludes with: “In fact, Oswald claimed that he had been in Houston and then had been in Dallas a few days before he called his wife at Mrs. Paine’s.” This is one more disturbing discovery made by David Josephs, who has all but proven that Oswald was not in Mexico City as the CIA says he was. If this is so, then one has to ask: why was it so necessary for Ruth Paine—and then Priscilla Johnson—to turn up evidence that imputed he was?
What makes this doubly odd is that some of these items were discovered after the Dallas Police searched the Paine home and garage—twice! A good example would be the Imperial Reflex camera which was allegedly used to take the backyard photographs. That camera was not on the original Dallas Police inventory list. It was found by Ruth two weeks after the assassination. It would appear from the above information that Ruth Paine was instrumental in maneuvering Oswald and somehow finding certain pieces of a puzzle for a murder he did not commit.
C. D. Jackson and Life magazine
Another person from the Upper Class that left his traces in Dallas post assassination was C. D. Jackson. He was an expert in wartime propaganda, public relations, advertising, publishing, psychological warfare, black ops, and he was an opinion maker. During the Eisenhower Presidency, he was the Special Assistant to the President for International Affairs and he had been an editor-in-Chief of Henry Luce’s Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. Henry Luce was the man who invented the term “American Century,” which involved global American dominance projected by American businesses leading a worldwide economy. Jackson shared Luce’s vision and he had been called Henry Luce’s “designated choreographer” for the “American Century.”[50]
The evening of the assassination Luce’s reporter Patsy Swank called Richard Stolley of Life magazine and informed him that a local clothing maker, Abraham Zapruder, had filmed the assassination. So Stolley contacted Zapruder and arranged to meet him the next morning. He viewed the film and then reported his findings to Jackson who, in turn, ordered him to buy the film. Stolley purchased the original copy as Zapruder claimed to him for $50,000.[51]
When Jackson viewed the film, he “proposed the (Time Inc.) company obtain all rights to the film and withhold it from public viewing at least until emotions had calmed.”[52] On 29 November 1963, Life published a special issue on the assassination that included only thirty-one selected frames, which did not allow the readers to understand the sequence and direction of the shots, especially the fatal head shot.[53]
Marina Oswald was isolated at the Inn of the Six Flags by the Secret Service. James Herbert Martin was the manager and later became Marina’s agent and she even stayed at his home for a while.[54] Martin, who sold the infamous “back yard photos” to Life magazine, also arranged for Marina to pen a book. That was arranged from C. D. Jackson and Life’s Edward K. Thompson, through their Dallas representative Isaac Don Levine.[55] It was Allen Dulles who had urged C. D. Jackson to have Marina’s story written by Levine, but that book never materialized.[56]
C. D. Jackson was indirectly connected to the Pawley-Bayo mission (CIA crypt Operation TILT). This was a sea voyage into Cuba. It was allegedly designed to exfiltrate Soviet scientists who wanted to defect and testify before Senator James Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. That testimony was to state that the Russians still had missiles present in Cuba. Journalist Carl Bernstein believed that in the 1950s Jackson was so intertwined with the Agency that he went so far as to arrange for CIA employees to travel with Time-Life credentials as cover.[57]
Apart from millionaire William Pawley and Cuban exile Eddie Bayo, others that took part in the operation were John Martino, Eugenio Martinez, and CIA agent Rip Robertson. Pawley had asked CIA Deputy Director Pat Carter and Ted Shackley of JM/WAVE to help him with the mission. Pawley would have used his private yacht, while David Morales supervised the mission. Operation TILT failed, since the exile Cubans disappeared on their way to Cuba and were never heard from again.
Peter Dale Scott has written that the real purpose of the mission was to assassinate Castro. Jack Anderson reported the Johnny Roselli story that the assassination team was captured in Cuba and Castro “turned them” and sent them to Dallas to assassinate Kennedy instead.[58] At one point, Bayo had asked for help from a wealthy Kennedy supporter, Theodore Racoosin, who later reported that someone from within the White House—possibly Robert Kennedy—had authorized him to organize meetings with Cuban exiles and learn details of CIA Cuban operations. Scott believes that this operation was used to blackmail the Attorney General, so he would not investigate his brother’s assassination.[59]
Henry Luce had funded the raid and Life magazine was allowed to send a journalist to report and photograph the mission. That journalist was Richard Billings, an in-law of C. D. Jackson. After the assassination, Billings was sent to Dallas to investigate the murder and later pretended to help Jim Garrison in his investigation. But he later turned on Garrison and began a Life campaign to smear and deter Garrison’s efforts.[60]
We can surmise that C. D. Jackson was handling the damage control after the assassination for Life. He could control the Zapruder film and probably influence Marina Oswald’s testimony, to assure that the public would not find out all the facts, thus altering their perception of what happened in Dallas. This would fit a psychological warfare and propaganda expert connected to the CIA.
Shaw, Ferrie and Freeport Sulphur
The connections to the Eastern Establishment would not end with C. D. Jackson. There were more links in New Orleans to be explored. During his investigation, Garrison was contacted by a witness who revealed to him that a Mr. “White” of Freeport Sulphur company had contacted him to discuss a possible Castro assassination plan. The same witness had heard Clay Shaw or David Ferrie talking about some nickel mines in Cuba.[61]
Another witness, Jules Ricco Kimble, told Garrison’s office that a Mr. “White” along with Shaw and David Ferrie had flown in a plane to Cuba to make a deal regarding some nickel mines.[62] Garrison discovered who Mr. “White” was:
“One man whose name we first thought to be WHITE apparently is WIGHT, Vice President of Freeport Sulphur who reputedly made the flight.”[63] It could be a coincidence, but Johnny Roselli testified that he “represented himself to the Cuban contacts as an agent of some business interests of Wall Street that had nickel interests and properties around in Cuba and I was getting financial assistance from them.”[64] This, of course, was when Roselli was associated with the CIA and trying to arrange the murder of Fidel Castro. It would have been interesting if Roselli had named those nickel interests in Cuba, but it may be more than an assumption that he was talking about the same nickel mines involving Freeport Sulphur. What may be more important though was Freeport Sulphur itself.
Freeport Sulphur was established in Texas in 1912 and later moved to New York. The company’s activities were mining sulphur that was essential in the production process of chemicals, papermaking, pigment, pharmaceutical, mining, oil-refining, and fiber manufacturing industries. New York City multi-millionaire John Hay Whitney supported the corporation financially and, for a while, he was the head of the company.[65]
Freeport Sulphur’s Board of Directors included Admiral Arleigh Burke and Augustus Long, Chairman of Texaco Oil Company and Director of the Chemical Bank. It also included Jean Mauze, husband of Abby Rockefeller, who was granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller and a sister to David and Nelson Rockefeller; Godfey Rockefeller, the brother of James Stillman Rockefeller, and Benno C. Schmidt one of the original partners of J. H. Whitney.[66]
As Donald Gibson pointed out, Jock Whitney’s New York Herald Tribune was promoting the Lone Nut theory within 24 hours of Kennedy’s assassination. Finally, the last member of Freeport Sulphur’s Board of Directors was Robert Abercrombie Lovett, a former partner of Brown Brothers Harriman and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and of the Carnegie Corporation.[67] Among his closest friends were Henry Luce, John McCloy, and Dean Acheson. It was McCloy, Lovett, and Acheson that later advised LBJ on Vietnam and recommended escalation of the war.[68]
- A PAWN ON THE GRAND CHESS BOARD
In light of what we know today, Oswald was an expendable pawn in the grand scheme of things. It seems that the Cuban exiles and their Mafia co-conspirators—especially those from the Santo Trafficante and the Nevada Casino group—were manipulated to implicate Oswald in the Kennedy Assassination. They falsely believed that by framing Oswald to make it look like the Cubans and Castro were the driving forces behind him, this would have led to an American invasion of Cuba to avenge the President’s murder.
However, they were betrayed by the real instigators who never had Cuba as their real target. And simultaneously set up both the anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia as false sponsors of the crime. It was J. D. Tippit’s murder that led to Oswald’s arrest and the consequent swearing in by LBJ in Dallas that put a halt to their plans. Certain elements of the CIA and the Eastern Establishment turned around the Bringuier/Butler “Cuba did it” theories and designated Oswald as a lone nut who had acted alone, driven by personal sociopathy. LBJ was not the mastermind of the assassination and it may be that he was not privy to the plot. He might have been informed, but without knowing the details. It is also possible that he was manipulated in such a way to make sure that he would stop the Pentagon from invading Cuba and then force a cover up so the responsible parties would have never been brought to justice. (Click here for details) What is certain beyond reasonable doubt is that LBJ reversed JFK’s foreign policy in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia in general.
Johnson and Vietnam
Kennedy had been preparing to withdraw from Vietnam for months, but a few days after his death LBJ altered NSAM 273 to allow American navy ships to patrol near North Vietnamese waters. In August of 1964, this resulted in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. That provided the excuse for committing both US air attacks and then combat troops into Vietnam. That incident had been preceded in March, 1964, by Johnson’s approval of NSAM 288. This allowed the US Air Force to directly bomb scores of targets in Vietnam.[69] So when Tonkin happened, LBJ just pulled out the target list. In three years, Kennedy would not approve such an agenda. In three months, Johnson had.
Newly released tapes reveal that LBJ told McNamara on February 20, 1964 that “I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise and I just sat silent.”[70] In another tape, LBJ asked McNamara on March 2, 1964, to write a memo explaining that he never meant that he and Kennedy wanted to withdraw a thousand men from Vietnam; it was only a test.[71]
One has to wonder: why the freeze to invade Cuba? After all, there had been efforts through Operation Mongoose to harass Castro and these efforts led some to think it was designed to recover all the lost American business interests that had been damaged by Castro’s policies in Cuba. It is possible that the perpetrators knew they could not invade Cuba without risking a confrontation with Russia. Therefore, the idea was to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
For Moscow, Cuba had become the equivalent of East Berlin. This emotional attachment would have created extreme tension and heightened paranoia in the Cold War arena. Most importantly there was a new territory to advance their business interests, immensely vaster and more profitable than Cuba. That was Southeast Asia. The Cuban exiles and the Mafia were not to be left in the cold and outside of the merry dance. As journalist Henrik Kruger outlined in his book The Great Heroin Coup, they were compensated for their efforts by access to the Golden Triangle and world drug trafficking by replacing the Corsicans and the French network. The drugs would now enter from Mexico to the US instead of Marseilles. Lansky’s Miami and Caribbean banks were given the privilege to launder the profits from the illicit drug trade.
Laos had been a target of American interests. The concept was to take control of its opium fields and after the American intervention it worked splendidly. That area became the third largest producer of opium in the world.[72] Opium, of course, can be refined into heroin.
On August 30, 1959 there was a crisis unfolding in northern Laos near the Vietnamese borders. The Washington Post reported that “3,500 Communist rebels, including regular Viet-Minh troops have captured eighty villages in a new attack in northern Laos.” Later, a UN investigation found out that it was a minor incident and that no North Vietnamese invaders were discovered and that most Vietnamese soldiers had crossed over to Laos to surrender.[73]
The truth, however, was distorted by none other than Joe Alsop, the man who, five years later, tried to convince LBJ to create a presidential commission to investigate JFK’s murder. He arrived in Laos in time to report about a “massive new attack in Laos” by “at least three and perhaps five new battalions of enemy troops from North Vietnam.”[74] Later he wrote of “aggression, as naked, as flagrant as a Soviet-East German attack on West Germany.”[75]
There was more than opium at stake. There were big interests represented by the munitions and oil industries. LBJ’s friends from Texas were to be hugely compensated from the war that the new president was promoting. The Texas located company manufacturing Bell helicopters—where Michael Paine worked—would profit immensely from their use in Vietnam. General Dynamics plane production—located in Fort Worth—would gain huge contracts during that war.
Another of LBJ’s friends who profited from the Vietnam War was David Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository. In early November, 1963, Byrd and his investment partner James Ling bought $2 million worth of stock in Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), a defense company they owned. It may have been a coincidence, but the fact is that the navy awarded LTV the first major contract in February 1964 to construct the A7 Corsair fighter plane for operations in Vietnam. Peter Dale Scott calculated that this sum of money was worth $26 Million by 1967.[76]
LBJ was a close friend to the Brown Brothers, who owned a construction company named Brown and Root. In 1962, a consortium of private American construction corporations made up of Raymond International and Morrison-Knudsen (RMK) were building Vietnam’s infrastructure. But the construction was limited. The original contract was for $15 million. But in the beginning of 1965, the sum had reached $150 million. RMK could not keep up with the demands of construction. They added to their team two large American companies, Brown and Root and J.A. Jones, to form the largest ever consortium, RMK-BRJ.[77] This consortium took the largest share of all Vietnam construction work, around 90 percent of the total. The US Navy granted RMK-BRJ a cost-plus-fixed-fee to quickly prepare Vietnam for a major U.S. military presence.[78]
The Rockefeller brothers also made huge profits, since they had ownership and shares in big defense contractors like Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Boeing, and General Motors. That last company gained more than $1.3 billion in military contracts in 1968.[79] But these were short-term profits for the Rockefellers. The real deal was in reconstructing the infrastructure after the war had ended and financing would be needed to achieve that. Under this mistaken assumption, in 1965, Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank opened a branch in Saigon—a huge fortress with no windows but thick glass blocks and stone walls that could withstand mortar attacks.[80]
A major force behind the Vietnam War was the Rockefeller’s Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADAG). That membership included Rockefeller Brothers Inc., Chase Manhattan Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Standard Oil of Indiana.[81] SEADAG’s Samuel P. Huntington believed that cheap labor created by forced relocation would help Saigon win the conflict.[82] Anthropologist Jules Henry explained that the war would create cheap labor that would be able to compete with the lower productive costs of Chinese and Japanese industry and that “the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside is the first, and necessary, step to the industrialization of Vietnam and nationalization of its agriculture.”[83]
LBJ and Congo
Vietnam was not the only issue among JFK’s policies that the elites were opposing. Kennedy was determined to change Eisenhower’s policy in Belgian Congo and had decided to let the UN bring all opposing armies under control. On his own, and behind the scenes, JFK called the Russians and informed them that he was ready to negotiate a truce in Congo. Clare Timberlake, the US Ambassador to Congo, learned of this and alerted CIA Director Allen Dulles and Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer that Kennedy was selling out to the Russians and breaking away from Eisenhower’s policy.[84] Senator Thomas Dodd was one of the major forces who opposed Kennedy’s Congo policy. He initiated hearings in the senate on the “loss” of Congo to Communism.[85]
Congo, especially its Katanga region, was full of minerals. JFK had agreed with Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba that the riches of Congo should be shared among its people. Also, that more of the profits from the foreign investments should be used to counter unemployment and improve Congo’s standard of living. Lumumba made a critical mistake when he informed US businessmen that he wanted to break away from the Belgians and negotiate directly with the Americans about Congo’s uranium while bypassing the Belgians. Lumumba thought that this would please the Americans. But he did not know that US corporations had a big stake in Belgium’s monopoly of copper and uranium in Katanga province through Tanganyika Concessions Limited: a company in which the Rockefellers were shareholders.[86]
The Rockefellers and the Guggenheims held stocks in the Belgian diamond mining operation in Kasai province, Northwest of Katanga. Their investment was $20 million, while their Belgians partners had invested only $2 millions.[87]
Kennedy’s Treasury Secretary Douglas C. Dillon also had a stake in Congo. He was an investor in Laurence Rockefeller’s textile mill and also in Laurence’s automobile import company in Congo.[88]
Unfortunately, the Belgians and the CIA murdered Lumumba and eventually replaced him with dictator Joseph Mobutu. At around this time, early in 1964, LBJ reversed Kennedy’s policy in Congo. The CIA recruited Cuban exile pilots to fly operations against the Congo rebels involved in the Simba Rebellion. Once the UN withdrew, LBJ sent airplanes, advisors, and arms to the Belgians for support.[89]
Sukarno and Indonesia
An all too familiar situation occurred in Indonesia, where Kennedy was determined to cooperate with the neutralist and left leaning President Sukarno. Kennedy decided to help Sukarno acquire control of the Dutch New Guinea area the Indonesians called West Irian. He assigned his brother Robert to negotiate the return of West Irian to Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule.[90] What Kennedy did not know, but Allen Dulles did, was that West Irian was a region extremely rich in minerals, even richer than Katanga.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Allen Dulles was a lawyer at the giant corporate law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. He represented the Rockefellers there and he knew that Indonesia had huge mineral and oil potential. One of the oilfields in Sumatra exploited by Caltex was the size of similar oilfields in Saudi Arabia.[91]
In 1936, a joint Dutch and American expedition—including explorer/geologist Jean Jacques Dozy—was organized by Allen Dulles through Sullivan and Cromwell. That expedition discovered two enormous mineral deposits in West Irian. The American firms that financed the expedition were two divisions of Standard Oil. One of the two colossal deposits was called the Ertsberg and the other the Grasberg. Both were extravagantly rich in gold, silver, and copper. Just the gold content was much larger than the wealthiest gold mine in the world, then located in South Africa.[92]
In 1962, a second expedition involving Freeport Sulphur’s geologist Forbes Wilson, took place. But neither man revealed the enormous gold content. According to Australian scholar Greg Poulgrain, they both gave the impression that the main mineral was copper with smaller amounts of silver and gold.[93]
Two Rockefeller companies were also doing oil business in Indonesia: Stanvac (jointly held by Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony-Mobil, Socony being Standard Oil of New York); and Caltex, (jointly held by Standard Oil of California and Texaco.)[94]
Freeport Sulphur, a Rockefeller controlled company, would be hugely rewarded by the West Irian mineral mines. As Lisa Pease explained, 1962 was a very difficult year for Freeport. They lost their Cuban nickel mines. And they were planning with Clay Shaw to arrange a scheme to bring in nickel from Canada. They were under investigation about stockpiling surpluses that President Kennedy was determined to make an issue in his 1964 presidential campaign.[95]
When LBJ became president, he quickly reversed Kennedy’s Indonesia policy. As Poulgrain notes in his new book, JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, the State Department and the CIA began planning to replace Sukarno in late 1964. In the summer of 1965, when Marshall Green became the new ambassador, these plans went into operation. Sukarno was overthrown and a huge massacre of the PKI took place. More than a half million were killed. The minerals of West Irian did not go to the Indonesians, but to the new President Suharto and foreign business interests. Later Freeport Sulphur subcontracted Bechtel to handle the engineering aspects of the mining.[96] Freeport was later renamed Freeport McMoran. It became one of the two largest mining corporations in the world. The eventual wealth mined from the two deposits topped 100 billion dollars. (Click here for details)
As Carol Hewett discovered, Allen Dulles was close to the DeMohrenschildt family. According to Poulgrain, Dulles managed to transfer George DeMohrenschildt to West Irian to work on Standard Oil’s drilling since the region had one of the largest oil deposits in Indonesia.[97]
Dulles lied to Kennedy on several occasions regarding the Sino-Soviet split. He told him it was not real, but a Cold war ploy to fool America. It was real and Dulles was using Indonesia as a wedge to further the split between China and the Soviet Union. Both were trying to influence and gain the support of the PKI, Indonesia’s large communist party, which backed Sukarno. Dulles wanted to depose Sukarno and eliminate the PKI. The result would make the Chinese and the Soviets accuse each other of being at fault. Dulles and Henry Kissinger participated in the Rockefeller Brothers Panel Report in 1958–1959, where the Sino-Soviet split was first mentioned.[98] It is worthwhile to note that Anatoliy Golitsyn, the Russian defector who was influencing James Angleton, had convinced him that the Sino-Soviet split was fake. With that nonsense, one has to wonder how genuine a defector Golitsyn was.
Kennedy was planning to visit Jakarta in early 1964. If he had not been killed, he would have met with Sukarno and that would have helped Sukarno consolidate his regime in three areas: social, political, and economic. And Dulles would have seen years of covert work thrown into the trash can. From 1958, his first attempt to overthrow Sukarno, Dulles was planning on regime change. That would have allowed his clients to control the oil, gold, copper, and silver reserves of Indonesia rather than go to the citizenry of Indonesia, as Kennedy and Sukarno had planned. The policy of wedge against China and the Soviet Union would have been disrupted.
Foreign policy was not the only arena in which the Rockefellers would clash with Kennedy. There was a White House state dinner taking place for France’s Cultural Minister Andre Malraux in May of 1962. David Rockefeller was invited. Kennedy asked Rockefeller to write a letter presenting his views on the economy. David responded with a long letter, where he advised Kennedy:
Because of the vital need for increased investment, the requirement of lower taxes and the importance of fiscal responsibility, I would urge upon you a more effective control of expenditures and a determined and vigorous effort to balance the budget.[99]
David also tried to focus on the nation’s tax system and the urgent need to take it apart and re-examine it:
Today the tax burden falls much too heavy on investment—more heavily in fact than any other industrialized country in the world. In my opinion, this tax burden must be lightened, and soon—preferably through a material reduction in the corporate income tax rate.[100]
Kennedy replied that his administration had tried to cut business taxes, reduce tariffs, increase trade, reduce labor cost, and keep the dollar strong.[101] Most importantly he insisted that, “our tax laws should surely not encourage the export of dollars by permitting ‘tax havens’ and other undue preferences.”[102] This point must have angered David, since the Rockefellers had many such tax havens in small Caribbean banks, Swiss Commercial banks, private investment firms in Luxemburg, and stock holdings in foreign companies. American corporations overseas had ‘parked’ profits in foreign commercial banks and in foreign subsidiaries. Kennedy’s 1962 tax bill targeted these tax havens by subsidiary companies. Kennedy published his correspondence with Rockefeller in Life magazine to show that he was on agreement with David on most economic issues. But David Rockefeller was not very impressed with Kennedy’s public relations move.[103]
In November 1963, David’s brother announced himself a candidate for the Republican Party to oppose Kennedy in the 1964 general elections. Nelson accused Kennedy of “jeopardizing the peace and demoralizing America’s allies with a weak foreign policy.”[104] After Kennedy’s assassination Nelson called his loss a “terrible tragedy.” But to his friend Alberto Camargo, he showed his true colors when he said to him: “For Latin America, Kennedy’s passing is a blackening, a tunnel, a gust of cloud and smoke.”[105]
To exemplify what he meant, David Rockefeller met with LBJ in January of 1964. As A. J. Langguth wrote in his book Hidden Terrors, this is something Kennedy would not welcome. Soon after, the coup in Brazil was enacted. Johnson also began to eat away at Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, particularly through his friend diplomat Thomas Mann. As Walter LaFeber notes in Inevitable Revolutions, Richard Nixon then had Nelson Rockefeller write a report on the Alliance. At Nelson’s recommendation, Nixon eliminated the program. That was some blackening tunnel filled with smoke Nelson foresaw.
Unfortunately, we will never know the true identity of those that ultimately decided that President Kennedy had to be erased, thus instigating the assassination. But it probably was not the CIA or the Pentagon per se; they were likely the executive arm of powerful people, among the elites of the United States. The CIA has overthrown foreign governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. But they were urged in those actions by big corporations whose interests had been comprised by new leftist governments. Another way to pose the question is not just by asking, Cui bono? But also, in how many ways did they benefit? Can all these changes going in one direction, can all this and more, be just a coincidence?
It would have been very dangerous for the CIA and/or the Pentagon to have dared to assassinate a US President on their own—not some president from a banana republic. This would have been murder and treason. They were likely first given reassurances from the Powers Elite that a cover up would take place, one that would guarantee their impunity.
It is more likely that those involved in the crime were a mixture of CIA and military elements serving big business interests in a fashion similar to the mentality and ideology of individuals that converged in the American Security Council. However, this should not give the mistaken notion that the American Security Council instigated and executed the assassination. It came from much higher up.
Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2
Go to Part 3
Go to Part 4
Go to Part 5
Go to Conclusion
Go to Appendix
References
[1] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992, pp. 39–140.
[2] Russell Dick, On The Trail of the JFK Assassins, Skyhorse Publishing 2008. p. 160.
[3] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992, chapter fourteen.
[4] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 96.
[5] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 97.
[6] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 184.
[7] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 294.
[8] Russell Dick, On The Trail of the JFK Assassins, Skyhorse Publishing 2008. p. 161.
[10] https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Tipping_Point
[11] JFKcountercoup: PATHFINDER – Parts 1 – 5 The Plan to Kill Castro Redirected to JFK at Dallas
[12] https://kennedysandking.com – The Death of Eugene B. Dinkin
[13] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992, p. 349.
[14] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992, p. 352.
[15] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992, p. 353.
[16] Malcolm Blunt archives, William King Harvey – Google Drive
[17] Talbot David, The Devil’s Chess Board, Harper Collins Publishers, 2015, p. 477.
[18] Talbot David, The Devil’s Chess Board, Harper Collins Publishers, 2015, p. 476.
[19] Martin David, Wilderness of Mirrors, Harper Collins Publishers, 1980, p. 136.
[20] Martin David, Wilderness of Mirrors, Harper Collins Publishers, 1980, pp. 137–138.
[21] Blunt Malcolm, The Devil is in the Details, 2020, p. 102.
[22] Blunt Malcolm, The Devil is in the Details, 2020, p. 102–103.
[23] Blunt Malcolm, The Devil is in the Details, 2020, p. 103.
[24] Blunt Malcolm, The Devil is in the Details, 2020, p. 318.
[25] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 358.
[26] Newman John, The assassination of President Kenendy, vol I, p. xxi.
[27] https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/ed-butler-expert-in-propaganda-and-psychological-warfare
[28] Haslam Edward, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, Trine Day, 2007, p. 169.
[29] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 157
[30] Haslam Edward, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, Trine Day, 2007, p. 183.
[31] Gibson Donald, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up, Krosha Books, NY, 2000, p. 163.
[32] Gibson Donald, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up, Krosha Books, NY, 2000, p. 165.
[33] Gibson Donald, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up, Krosha Books, NY, 2000, p. 167.
[34] Gibson Donald, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up, Krosha Books, NY, 2000, p. 184.
[35] Evica, George Michael, A Certain Arrogance, Trine Day 2011 p. 306.
[36] Evica, George Michael, A Certain Arrogance, p. 307.
[37] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 195.
[38] Evica, George Michael, A Certain Arrogance, Trine Day 2011, pp. 304–305.
[39] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 196.
[40] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 195.
[41] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, pp. 195–196.
[42] Evica, George Michael, A Certain Arrogance, Trine Day 2011, p. 287.
[43] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, pp. 195–196.
[44] Evica, George Michael, A Certain Arrogance, Trine Day 2011, p. 284.
[45] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 197.
[46] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 163.
[47] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 200.
[48] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 203.
[49] Scott, Peter Dale, Dallas ‘63, Open Road Media, 2015, chapter. 2, kindle version.
[50] Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce—A Political Portrait Of The Man Who Created The American Century (New York, Scribners, 1994), p. 217.
[51] Stern John Allen, C.D. Jackson, Cold War Propagandist for Democracy and Globalism, University press of America, 2012, p. 146.
[52] Evica, George Michael, A Certain Arrogance, Trine Day 2011, p. 232.
[53] Evica, George Michael, A Certain Arrogance, Trine Day 2011, p. 234.
[54] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 288.
[55] Hinckle & Turner, Deadly Secrets, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, p. 185.
[56] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 55.
[57] https://spartacus-educational.com/USAluce.htm
[58] Scott, Peter Dale, Dallas ‘63, Open Road Media, 2015, kindle version.
[59] Scott, Peter Dale, Dallas ‘63, Open Road Media, 2015, kindle version.
[60] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 11.
[61] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/david-atlee-phillips-clay-shaw-and-freeport-sulphur
[62] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/david-atlee-phillips-clay-shaw-and-freeport-sulphur
[63] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/david-atlee-phillips-clay-shaw-and-freeport-sulphur
[64] HSCA Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, p. 76.
[65] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/david-atlee-phillips-clay-shaw-and-freeport-sulphur
[66] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/freeport-sulphur-s-powerful-board-of-directors
[67] Gibson Donald, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up, Krosha Books, NY, 2000, p. 169.
[68] Gibson Donald, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up, Krosha Books, NY, 2000, p. 170.
[69] DiEugenio James, Vietnam Declassified, 2017 Lancer presentation.
[70] DiEugenio James, Vietnam Declassified, 2017 Lancer presentation.
[71] DiEugenio James, Vietnam Declassified, 2017 Lancer presentation.
[72] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Marry Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008, p. 240.
[73] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Marry Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008, p. 72.
[74] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Marry Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008, p. 73.
[75] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Marry Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008, p. 73.
[76] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Marry Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008, p. 342–343.
[77] Carter James, Inventing Vietnam, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 158.
[78] Carter James, Inventing Vietnam, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 159.
[79] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 562.
[80] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 562.
[81] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 559.
[82] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 564.
[83] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 564.
[84] DiEugenio James, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/dodd-and-dulles-vs-kennedy-in-africa
[85] DiEugenio James, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/dodd-and-dulles-vs-kennedy-in-africa
[86] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, pp. 325–326.
[87] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 326.
[88] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 326.
[89] DiEugenio James, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/dodd-and-dulles-vs-kennedy-in-africa
[90] DiEugenio James, JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder, 2014 Lancer presentation.
[91] Poulgrain Greg, JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, Skyhorse, 2020, p.44.
[92] DiEugenio James, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/poulgrain-greg-the-incubus-of-intervention
[93] DiEugenio James, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/poulgrain-greg-the-incubus-of-intervention
[94] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jfk-indonesia-cia-freeport-sulphur
[95] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jfk-indonesia-cia-freeport-sulphur
[96] Pease Lisa, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jfk-indonesia-cia-freeport-sulphur
[97] DiEugenio James, https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/poulgrain-greg-the-incubus-of-intervention
[98] Poulgrain Greg, JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, Skyhorse, 2020, p.45.
[99] Life, July 6, 1962, p. 33.
[100] Life, July 6, 1962, p. 32.
[101] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 402.
[102] Life, July 6, 1962, p. 33.
[103] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 403.
[104] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 411.
[105] Colby & Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, Harper Perennial, 1995, p. 416.
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Sirhan’s Upcoming Parole Hearing
Anyone who knows anything about the assassination of Robert Kennedy should understand that his assassination is in some ways even more clearly a conspiracy than the murder of President Kennedy. The true facts of the case were covered up by the local authorities, and the defense team was—to put it mildly—rather less than zealous in their obligations to their client, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. The best analysis of Sirhan’s phony trial is in Lisa Pease’s book A Lie Too Big to Fail. (See pp. 135–95) And in this author’s opinion, that is the best, most comprehensive book we have on the Bobby Kennedy case.
As both Lisa Pease and the late Philip Melanson have noted, Sirhan’s defense was so inept—as we shall see, it may have been compromised—that they let the prosecution’s psychiatrist talk directly to their client. This is something he was not supposed to do and it would appear to be an ethical violation by Sirhan’s lead lawyer, Grant Cooper. What makes this more than just odd is that, as Pease notes, Cooper was accused of bribing a court clerk in order to pilfer grand jury transcripts and then lying to a judge about it. His investigation for these violations was going on at the time of Sirhan’s trial. (See Pease’s earlier article, “Rubik’s Cube”, Probe Magazine, Volume 5 Number 4)
It then gets even more curious. After his inept defense of Sirhan, Cooper got off with a slap on the wrist for this offense: he was fined a thousand dollars. The late Larry Teeter, one of Sirhan’s attorneys, thought the light penalty for the serious violations was a result of Cooper’s rather dubious performance for Sirhan. Teeter voiced this opinion with the author in an in-person interview in late 2002.
Perhaps that is one way to explain the direct interviews that the prosecution’s Seymour Pollack had with Sirhan. Pollack was a forensic psychiatrist from USC employed by the prosecution. That Cooper allowed this to occur was so unethical that defense assistant and later author on the RFK case, Robert Blair Kaiser, tried to say it did not happen. (Kaiser, RFK Must Die!, p. 151) But it did and the forensic psychiatrist spent hours with Sirhan trying to supply him with a motive for why he really killed Bobby Kennedy. What was that motive? Because he was standing up for the Arabs against Israel. (Philip Melanson, The Robert Kennedy Assassination, p. 152) In fact, Pollack went as far as to say that it would be better for his case if he did say this, than to say that he did not really know what his motive was. What is even more remarkable about this is that Cooper’s own psychiatrist, Bernard Diamond, ended up joining Pollack in trying to get Sirhan to say this. In fact, Diamond did this when he had Sirhan under hypnosis. (Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, pp. 417–18)
One of the most oft repeated external indications of this motive was one that was used not just by the prosecution, but again, by the defense. And not just Sirhan’s original team, but later lawyers like Luke McKissack. It consisted of an entry in Sirhan’s notebooks which contained a notation on May 18, 1968, with the refrain “RFK must die”. The original story made up by the prosecution was that Sirhan saw a TV special that day in which candidate Kennedy endorsed a sale of fighter aircraft to Israel made by President Johnson. There is a very large problem with this allegedly incriminating scenario. The TV special did not air on May 18th, but on May 20th. (Philip Melanson and William Klaber, Shadow Play, pp. 136–37). Further, there was no mention of the weapons sale in the program. (ibid) Yet, the tall tale has grown so long, that years later Kennedy was supposed to be endorsing the deal in the program while in a temple wearing a yarmulke. This was a myth meant to supply Sirhan with some kind of motive, since initially he said he did not recall the circumstances of the shooting and did not know why he performed the act.
As anyone who has read Pease’s book understands, not only did Sirhan not shoot Bobby Kennedy, he could not have shot the senator. It is simply a physical impossibility in light of Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy. (See Pease, pp. 65–69; pp. 255–91) All the indications are that Sirhan was under post hypnotic suggestion at the time of the shooting and, further, that he was being manipulated by a young, attractive woman in a polka-dot dress. This woman actually led Sirhan into the pantry after they had drank coffee together. And they were standing next to each other in the pantry while Kennedy was walking through. (Pease, p. 50) She was one of the very few people who actually ran out of the pantry area after the shooting.
That young woman has all the indications of being the same person who Sandy Serrano saw after the shooting. Serrano was a Kennedy worker, who was standing outside the Ambassador Hotel to get some fresh air. The young lady ran down the stairs to the hotel and she yelled, “We’ve shot him! We’ve shot him!” When Serrano asked who she shot, the reply was, “We’ve shot Senator Kennedy.” When newsman Sander Vanocur interviewed Serrano live on national television, he had delayed reaction to what Serrano said. After a delay, he went back and asked, “Did this young lady say ‘we’?” Serrano replied in the affirmative. (Pease, pp. 35–36)
Serrano never testified at Sirhan’s trial. Yet, her testimony clearly denotes some kind of a conspiracy. Combined with the incompatible forensics of the case, Sirhan should have been acquitted. As Pease demonstrates, for many, many reasons, this did not happen. Between the efforts of the LAPD to cover up the case, the incompetence—or worse—of Sirhan’s attorneys, and a rather sickening performance by the media, Sirhan was convicted. But it’s actually worse than that, because of the three monumental cases of the sixties—the murders of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy—that one became known as the “open and shut case”. In other words, you could not even ask any questions about it. When, as I noted earlier, it is the one in which the facts of the case most easily disprove the guilty verdict.
Unfortunately for both Sirhan and justice, the defendant has been in prison since 1969, a total of over 51 years. The reason for this notice is that Sirhan has a new parole hearing that is coming up on March 21st. His current attorney, Angela Berry, is requesting that interested parties write the parole board.
But, and this is important, do not focus on the facts of the case in order to prove his innocence. I have done so here only to try and motivate the reader into writing on his behalf. She suggests instead that the writer of the letter accent things like Sirhan’s age, his spotless record in prison, the fact that the prisons are overcrowded and he is not a threat to anyone.
In fact, he once said that if he ever got out, he would like to live a quiet life somewhere and help people if he could. (Klaber and Melanson, p. 318) One might also add that Sirhan has served a much longer time than others convicted of homicide.
Also, there is a new law (see pages 7 and 9 of Youth Offender Parole, prison.law.com) that says people under age 26 at the time of the crime—Sirhan was 24—should have their youth weighed higher in the parole decision. A key factor in a parole hearing can be public opinion. Hence this appeal for you to write.
Letters should be mailed to:
State of California Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
Board of Parole
P. O. 4036
Sacramento, CA 95812-4936Open with “Dear Parole Board:” and ask them to parole Sirhan in accordance with the fact that he has served his time. Under normal conditions, being a model prisoner, Sirhan likely would have been released in 1985. (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? p. 3)
Thanks in advance. This kind of activism is what this site is about.
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An Open Letter from James DiEugenio
TO:
Joe Scarborough, MSNBC Cable TV host
Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard historian
Fredrik Logevall, Harvard historian
Van Jones, CNN contributor and sometime host
Kevin Young, U of Mass/Amherst historian
Steven Gillon, U of Oklahoma historian, Scholar in Residence, The History Channel
RE: John F. Kennedy and Civil Rights
A reader of our web site, KennedysAndKing.com, recently sent me a clip of Mr. Scarborough’s 12/11/2020 program which featured Professor Gordon-Reed. The concept of the show was to enumerate certain past presidents and what our elected president, Joe Biden, could learn from them.
When Mr. Scarborough got to President Kennedy, he said that Biden could learn from JFK how to “brush back” on the civil rights issue, which President Johnson then had to take up the mantle on. Professor Gordon-Reed replied to this that Kennedy talked to people and eventually came around on civil rights, since he did not want events to overtake him.
On November 22, 2020, on the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, a similar declaration took place. Professor Logevall made an appearance on the radio program Speakola. During that appearance, he said that, until the last year of his life, Kennedy was not really moved by the plight of those who were denied their civil rights; he added that this only came late to Kennedy.
Prior to this, in 2018, on the CNN documentary series, The Kennedys: An American Dynasty, Mr. Jones said that JFK was not really interested in civil rights when he entered the White House and he had to be lectured about the issue.
Going back to May of 2010, Professor Gillon made a speech at the Miller Center in Virginia, where he briefly touched on the civil rights matter. Included in his remarks, he said that LBJ did not think Kennedy was pushing the issue enough and that Kennedy did not submit a bill on civil rights until after he gave his speech the evening of his confrontation with Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama in June of 1963. He concluded by saying that it was only through Johnson’s dogged determination and parliamentary wizardry that the bill passed.
Professor Young might be the most extreme. In a much more recent article, November 21, of this year, at the web site Truthout, he wrote that Kennedy had done virtually nothing for civil rights for almost two and a half years. Only after the Birmingham violence did he finally send a civil rights bill to Congress, which passed the following year. Further, he said JFK only did this because of the threat of economic demobilization generated by a mass movement in the south. (I admit I really do not understand what Young means by that last statement.)
Let me begin by saying that none of this comes close to aligning with the actual record of events. And the fact that four of you are history professors makes this rather embarrassing for your profession.
The idea of making Lyndon Johnson some kind of hero on civil rights is, to be kind, misleading. From 1937–56, Congressman—then Senator Johnson—voted against every civil rights bill that was submitted to Capitol Hill. And this was not done passively. Johnson voiced the southern shibboleth of States Rights, which meant, of course, that there was never going to be any progress on the issue at all.
It was only in 1957 that LBJ began to change his tune on the subject. Why? For two reasons. First, he was contemplating a run for the highest office and he had seen what Richard Russell’s anti-civil rights views had done to his mentor’s aspirations. So he knew he had to begin to alter his previous voting record. The second reason was even more a matter of political expediency. The White House had sent a bill to Congress on the issue. President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon did not care about civil rights themselves. In fact, Eisenhower had advised Earl Warren to vote against the Brown vs. Board case. But Nixon and Eisenhower understood that they could split the Democratic Party geographically on the issue: northern liberals against southern conservatives. Johnson tried to soften the blow to his party. So, he produced a pretty much papier mâché bill. One which Senator Kennedy did not like. In fact, Johnson had to send an assistant to make sure JFK would vote for it. Later, Kennedy wrote a constituent that he hoped the Senate would pass another bill; this time with some real teeth to it.
That Robert Caro makes so much out of this, and the 1960 bill, is a classic example of the old adage: if you have lemons, make lemonade. As Harris Wofford wrote, the newly minted civil rights advisory commission, the new department of civil rights in the Justice Department, and the collection of voting data were all pretty much useless. For the simple reason that Eisenhower and Nixon had designed it that way; and LBJ went along with it. It was all a fig leaf to disguise the damaging facts that the White House did not support Brown vs. Board and Eisenhower had allowed Governor Orval Faubus to create a weeks long insurrection at Central High in Little Rock. Wofford should know, since he was the attorney for the Civil Rights Commission.
As Judge Frank Johnson of Alabama later said, this all changed under Kennedy. He said that when Kennedy and his brother entered office, it was like an electric current going off in the south. As noted above, virtually all of you have said that President Kennedy waited until his third year to do something, since he needed wise counsel on the issue. This is simply false. I don’t see how you can act faster than on the first day of your presidency, which is what Kennedy did. After watching his inauguration ceremony, Kennedy made a call to Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon that evening. He asked him why there were no black faces in the Coast Guard parade. Dillon said he did not know why. Kennedy told him: Find out.
Following from that, at his first Cabinet meeting Kennedy asked the members to bring in statistics on how many minority employees were in each department. Kennedy was quite disappointed when he heard the numbers. This caused him to write America’s first affirmative action executive order on March 6, 1961. In other words, far from waiting for two and a half years, Kennedy was acting right out of the gate. In a bit over six weeks, he had done what none of his predecessors had. Kennedy later extended this order to include all federal contracting and all federal programs concerning loans and grants. In other words, if you ran a textile mill in North Carolina which made uniforms for the Army, you now had to hire African Americans to work in your mill or you risked closing your doors.
I will not go through each of Kennedy’s actions as I did the above, since this letter would get too long. Let me just list some of them:
- The administration filed charges against the Secretary of Education in Louisiana for scheming to dodge court orders under Brown vs. Board. This was in February of 1961.
- When the state of Virginia refused to fund local education in Prince Edward County, the Kennedys assigned William Vanden Heuvel to attain private funds in order to create from the bottom up an entirely new school district.
- Attorney General Robert Kennedy spoke at the University of Georgia Law Day. For the first time in anyone’s memory, he spoke about civil rights in the South. He concluded by saying he would enforce the Brown decision. This was on May 6, 1961.
- RFK did this in part to aid the Fifth Circuit Court in the South. That federal court was made up of moderate to liberal judges on the issue. He would use that court in his future civil rights cases after losing in lower court.
- By September of 1961, the administration successfully petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to integrate travel between states.
- In his first year, Bobby Kennedy filed twice as many civil rights cases as the Eisenhower administration did in eight years. By 1963, the Department of Justice had quadrupled the number of lawyers in the Civil Rights Division.
- The Kennedy administration was the first to raise private funds to finance large voting registration drives in the south. In today’s currency, the sum would be well over seven million dollars.
- Kennedy was the first to get the FBI to detect voting rights violations and to use that information to grant African American voters suffrage in Alabama and Louisiana. This was before the Voting Rights Act.
- Kennedy tried to get a voting rights bill through congress in 1962. That effort failed due to filibuster. It evolved into the 24th amendment eliminating the poll tax.
- Kennedy established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which evolved into the EEOC to protect civil rights in hiring, employment and firing.
- Kennedy was the first to use federal contracts and grants to force private universities in the south to integrate, e.g., Tulane and Duke.
- The administration worked through the Fifth Circuit to sue the public universities of Mississippi and Alabama to force integration.
I could go on. Yet, just that list is more than FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower did put together. (See part 3 below) But let me add: Kennedy did not submit a wide-ranging civil rights bill to Congress after the confrontation with Wallace or after the violent confrontations in Birmingham. He submitted his bill in February of 1963. And as Clay Risen notes in his book length study of the bill’s passage, it did not owe its success to Johnson. The four major players who got it through were JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Senator Thomas Kuchel. In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy began what was probably one of the largest lobbying programs in contemporary history. He brought in over 1500 people from professional groups all over the country: lawyers, mayors, and clergy to convince them to back the bill. It was the last group that Richard Russell later said ultimately forced the collapse of the filibuster.
Further, as most of us know, it was not Johnson who got the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. He told Martin Luther King he probably could not do so by himself. So King began the Selma demonstration, in order to give Johnson the torque to do so. And it was not Johnson who got the expansion of Kennedy’s housing act through either. He actually could not. It was the occasion of King’s assassination that allowed it to pass.
No post Civil War president ever did as much for civil rights as President Kennedy did. That is not conjecture, it is the undisputed record. And I demonstrated it in Part 3 of my series, which I attach below. The only reason he did not pass an omnibus civil rights bill sooner is that it would have been filibustered as his narrower bill was in 1962. And it was LBJ who advised him not to even try.
For historians and TV hosts to parrot a compilation of rightwing and leftwing myths in the place of this historical record is simply irresponsible. It is, in fact, pernicious to the public. Lyndon Johnson commandeered a ruinous presidency. Contrary to what Mr. Gillon said in his talk, LBJ could not have won the nomination in 1968. After New Hampshire, his campaign started to collapse on every leg in Wisconsin. He was given the word he was going to lose in a landslide. Contrary to what President Johnson had said, he did not “continue” what President Kennedy had begun, not in foreign policy and not in domestic policy. (See my Part Four below) He did not just wreck his own presidency. He ripped asunder the Democratic party. Staffer Carl Marcy wrote to Senator William Fulbright after the senator had discovered Johnson had lied to him about American invasions of both Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Marcy wrote that what these dishonest interventions had done was:
… turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration. … We have tried to force upon the rest of the world a righteous American point of view which we maintained is the consensus that others must accept. Most of the tragedies of the world have come from such righteousness.
It was this false righteousness that polarized the Democratic Party and paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon.
I would like to conclude by drawing your attention to a recent article in the Washington Post. It is entitled “Hijacking the Electoral College: the Plot to Deny JFK the Presidency 60 years ago.” Donald Trump was not the first to scheme to sabotage the electoral college. The electors from Alabama and Mississippi decided not to vote for Kennedy in 1960, even though he defeated Nixon in those states. They agreed to halt their scheme to negate the election results, if Kennedy would switch positions on the ticket with Johnson. In other words: Johnson would be President and Kennedy Vice-President. Kennedy had endorsed Brown vs. Board twice as a Senator, once in New York and once in, of all places, Jackson, Mississippi. These deep southern segregationists understood who JFK was in 1960. They had seen him up close. So should you.
(I did not annotate the above letter since my material is properly referenced in the series attached below)
The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 1
The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 2
The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 3
The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 4
Listen to Jim being interviewed on this subject on AM 1480 WLEA News.
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Jerry Ray Sounds Off
From the July-August, 200 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe
(Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)
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Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View Of Marilyn Monroe’s Death
Don McGovern has transformed his fine book about Marilyn Monroe’s death into a web site. This is the best, most complete, and most up to date treatment that there is of the subject. It is a first rate antidote to the likes of Donald Wolfe, Anthony Summers, and Robert Slatzer. Not only does he expose the myths, he shows how they started. Strongly recommended.