L-R: Dr. Robert McClelland, Dr. Paul Peters, and Dr. Kenneth Salyer, all of Parkland Hospital.
L-R: Dr. Charles Crenshaw, Dr. Richard Dulaney, and Nurse Audrey Bell, also all of Parkland Hospital.
HBO is near a deal with Playtone that will turn Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,632-page book “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy” into a miniseries.
Ten-parter will debunk long-held conspiracy theories and establish that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
HBO is wrapping up a deal to finance and air the mini, which will depict Oswald’s journey to becoming an assassin and his subsequent murder on live TV by Jack Ruby.
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| L-R: Hanks, Paxton and Goetzman |
Playtone’s Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman will exec produce along with their “Big Love” star Bill Paxton.
The network will make a companion documentary special, with Bugliosi addressing myriad conspiracy theories, including those involving the Mafia, the KGB or Fidel Castro in JFK’s assassination.
Project was hatched after Hanks, Paxton and Goetzman had a conversation about the shooting. They decided to look at Bugliosi’s book, published last month by W.W. Norton, as the basis for a possible project.
“I totally believed there was a conspiracy, but after you read the book, you are almost embarrassed that you ever believed it,” Goetzman said. “To think that guys who grew up in the ’60s would make a miniseries supporting the idea that Oswald acted alone is something I certainly wouldn’t have predicted. But time and evidence can change the way we view things.”
Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson and wrote the book “Helter Skelter,” was moved to write “Reclaiming History” after prosecuting a mock trial of Oswald for a British TV special. He walked away feeling the Warren Commission got it right and then spent the next two decades gathering evidence to prove it.
“Many more people will see the miniseries than will read the book,” Bugliosi told Daily Variety. “With the integrity that Tom, Gary and Bill bring, I think that we will finally be able to make a substantial dent in the 75% of people in this country who still believe the conspiracy theorists.”
Project comes along as Playtone nears a wrap on the seven-part HBO miniseries “John Adams” and preps for an Aug. 27 production start in Melbourne on “The Pacific,” the 10-part WWII mini for HBO that Hanks and Goetzman are exec producing with Steven Spielberg. The Playtone-produced series “Big Love” begins its second season on HBO this Monday.
Playtone is in the early stages of developing as a series the Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” the novel about a 41-year-old hermaphrodite that just became the latest choice of the Oprah Book Club.
Bugliosi’s deal was made by PMA Literary’s Peter Miller.
Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi claims to be “Reclaiming History” from the riffraff of conspiracy theorists in his massive new book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The term “conspiracy theorist” is practically married to the assassination, tossed about the way the House Un-American Activities Committee used to throw around “Communist sympathizer.” One size fits all!
But according to Bugliosi, conspiracy theorists are the reason more than 75 percent of Americans don’t believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the crimes. Bugliosi’s intent is to expose its critics as “fraudulent” on the way to resurrecting the conclusion of that panel, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
The first question to Bugliosi must be, “Who cares?”
For more than 40 years, every wingnut outside the city limits of Roswell, N.M., has gravitated to the Kennedy case, and Bugliosi attempts to list them all.
For instance, in a footnote, he skewers someone named Nord Davis Jr, who apparently believes 21 bullets were fired in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza and that Parkland Hospital doctors confused police officer J.D. Tippit’s body with that of Kennedy.
Or take the case of James Fetzer, Ph.D., who, Bugliosi points out, has been on a crusade for the past decade to prove that the Zapruder film “is a complete fabrication” put together by some shadowy intelligence agency.
Many historical events draw wacky theories. The proper response is to ignore them; it is not to write a 1,660-page book exposing their wackiness.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the Kennedy case is remarkable in that the growth of conspiracy theories has come to obscure the basic evidence. It is as if opinions and wacky theories have grown like a fungus into the basic pattern of facts.
From the outset, this growth threatened serious research into what actually happened in Dealey Plaza. Bugliosi has performed a useful function by scrubbing away a number of nutty theories that have surfaced since Nov. 22, 1963.
But what about Bugliosi’s more serious intent — to resuscitate a variant of the Warren Commission’s account of the assassination?
In 1993, another lawyer, Gerald Posner, tried the same thing in his book Case Closed. Yet Bugliosi cites numerous examples of Posner’s “distortion” and “misrepresentation.” He quotes approvingly a Washington Post review of Posner’s book, which criticized him for presenting “only the evidence that supports the case he’s trying to build, framing the evidence in a way that misleads readers.”
But this is exactly what Bugliosi does. Like any experienced prosecutor, he highlights the evidence that furthers his case while ignoring or confusing contrary evidence. Examples of this approach can be found almost everywhere in the book.
Take his spirited defense of Warren Commission junior counsel Arlen Specter’s “single-bullet theory.” Bugliosi agrees that this theory — that Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally were hit by the same bullet — is necessary to conclude that Oswald acted alone. He also acknowledges that the theory was developed by Specter and other commission staff members in the spring of 1964 to save the single-assassin conclusion. He also notes that when the time came to approve it, the commission split down the middle.
To his credit, he tells us Connally denied from first to last that he was hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy. His wife, Nellie, testified that she heard a shot and saw the president react to being hit. Only then did she see and hear a second shot crash into her husband’s back.
Bugliosi tells us Nellie Connally was “confused” and that her husband relied upon her confusion. However, you will find nowhere in Bugliosi’s book the fact that no witness in Dealey Plaza could attest to both men being hit by the same shot or that the FBI’s review of the Zapruder film led them to conclude Connally and Kennedy were hit separately. He tells us that Dr. Malcolm Perry at Parkland Hospital estimated the size of the supposed bullet exit hole in JFK’s throat to be “3 mm to 5 mm in diameter,” but he neglects to tell us that wound ballistics experts at Edgewood Arsenal carried out experiments showing bullets from Oswald’s rifle would cause exit wounds two to three times that size.
Even more egregious is his handling of the trajectory through JFK’s back and neck. A face-sheet on which notes were taken during the autopsy shows the supposed exit wound in the throat to be higher than the entry wound in the back.
When the autopsy photos were finally produced in the 1970s, a medical panel concluded that the course of the bullet through Kennedy was at an upward angle (the accepted number is 11 degrees). So how does Kennedy get shot from the sixth floor of a building when the bullet takes an upward path through his body?
The Warren Commission took the simplest course. The staff let the autopsy doctor instruct a medical illustrator to raise the back wound from the back to the neck. Commission member U.S. Rep. Gerald Ford then corrected a final draft of the panel’s report to read “neck wound” rather than “back wound.” Voila, a “back wound” had become a “neck wound.”
Faced with that 11 degree upward angle, the House Select Committee on Assassinations took a more inventive approach in its 1978-79 investigation. It just leaned Kennedy forward at the time he was shot.
And Connally, who took a shot at a 27-degree downward angle? His body position was leaned back a sufficient amount. Voila, an 11-degree upward angle through one body had become a 27-degree downward angle through a second body, thus a straight line had been maintained.
Like any good prosecutor, Bugliosi admits it was “upward” but never tells us how much. Then he publishes a diagram from the House’s report showing Kennedy bent forward. He says in a caption that the diagram shows “his head tilted forward slightly more than it actually was as shown in the Zapruder film.”
That’s quite an understatement since the Zapruder film never shows Kennedy bending forward at all. He’s sitting erect in the back seat waving to the crowd. Then when the limousine travels behind a sign and emerges three-quarters of a second later, he’s sitting erect but wounded.
The Zapruder frames contained in Bugliosi’s book show Kennedy never took the position he had to take for the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory to work. Bugliosi gets it to work by telling his readers only part of the story and by using a diagram even he admits is inaccurate. This prosecutorial approach infects the whole book and makes it unreliable as a guide to the evidence.
Does Bugliosi offer anything new? Not much.
Three explanations — Bugliosi, the Warren Commission and the House committee — claim Kennedy was shot in the head at Zapruder frame 313. Bugliosi and the commission say Kennedy and Connally were hit simultaneously while the car is behind the sign, frames 207-224.
The committee moves this single-bullet, double hit earlier to frame 190. It also cites four shots in all with two additional misses fired from the grassy knoll at frame 290 and the sniper’s nest in the book depository at frame 160.
The commission found that a third shot missed but cannot determine when it was fired or where it hit. Bugliosi has a first shot fired at frame 160, which misses the limousine entirely.
None of these reconstructions makes much sense. All three require that a large body of evidence indicating JFK was hit in the head from the right front be simply disregarded. All three face the fatal objections to which the single-bullet theory has been subject from the very beginning.
The House Select Committee’s reconstruction requires the putative gunman in the book depository to have fired blindly into a tree when he would have had a clean shot only a second and a half later.
Bugliosi’s minor change to the commission’s reconstruction makes less sense than the original. One would expect the first shot from a sniper to be the most accurate. Why would a shooter miss the limousine entirely on his first shot when it was right below him and Kennedy was large in his sight, then hit Kennedy twice with his next two shots at greater ranges?
As the commission noted, most Dealey Plaza witnesses placed the first shot significantly later. Phil Willis, for example, said the first shot jarred his finger on the shutter of his camera and produced a photo taken at frame 202.
The real scandal of the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination is that no reconstruction of the event makes sense. We know the event happened in one way rather than another. But the evidence is discordant and irreconcilable at a primitive level. The meaning of this discordance is unclear, but the simplest explanation is that not all the “evidence” is really evidence.
What is crystal clear, however, is that more than 43 years after the event we don’t know what happened.
From the very beginning, the event has been left to advocates of one view or another. The Warren Commission put together a case for the prosecution against Oswald. It failed when critics showed its conclusions were not justified by the evidence it considered.
The same could be said for the House Select Committee, which reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of the Warren Commission.
What this case doesn’t need is more advocacy on the part of lawyers like Posner and Bugliosi. They squeeze the evidence into one mold or another, offering opinions on this or that, buttressed by whatever they choose to tell us, ignoring the rest.
What this case does need is some old-fashioned, historical scholarship. It’s a shame and a waste of great time and effort that Bugliosi decided to contribute to the problem and not to its solution.
In a collision of 21st-century science and decades-old conspiracy theories, a research team that includes a former top FBI scientist is challenging the bullet analysis used by the government to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot the two bullets that struck and killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The “evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed,” concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.
The researchers’ re-analysis involved new statistical calculations and a modern chemical analysis of bullets from the same batch Oswald is purported to have used. They reached no conclusion about whether more than one gunman was involved, but urged that authorities conduct a new and complete forensic re-analysis of the five bullet fragments left from the assassination in Dallas.
“Given the significance and impact of the JFK assassination, it is scientifically desirable for the evidentiary fragments to be re-analyzed,” the researchers said.
> Tobin was the FBI lab’s chief metallurgy expert for more than two decades. He analyzed metal evidence in major cases that included the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island.
After retiring, he attracted national attention by questioning the FBI science used in prosecutions for decades to match bullets to crime suspects through their lead content. The questions he and others raised prompted a National Academy of Sciences review that in 2003 concluded that the FBI’s bullet lead analysis was flawed. The FBI agreed and generally ended the use of that type of analysis.
Using new guidelines set forth by the National Academy of Sciences for proper bullet analysis, Tobin and his colleagues at Texas A&M re-analyzed the bullet evidence provided to the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations to support the conclusion that only one shooter, Oswald, fired the shots that killed Kennedy.
Now-deceased University of California at Irvine chemist Vincent P. Guinn. told the committee that he used bullet lead analysis to conclude that the five bullet fragments recovered from the Kennedy assassination scene came from just two bullets, which were traced to the same batch of bullets Oswald owned. Guinn’s conclusions were consistent with the 1960s Warren Commission Report that found Oswald had acted alone. The House assassinations committee, however, concluded that Oswald probably was part of a conspiracy and that it was possible a second shooter fired one shot that missed the president.
Tobin, Spiegelman and James said they bought the same brand and lot of bullets used by Oswald and analyzed their lead using the new standards. The bullets from that batch are still on the market as collectors’ items.
They found that the scientific and statistical assumptions Guinn used — and the government accepted at the time — to conclude that the fragments came from just two bullets fired from Oswald’s gun were wrong.
“This finding means that the bullet fragments from the assassination that match could have come from three or more separate bullets,” the researchers said. “If the assassination fragments are derived from three or more separate bullets, then a second assassin is likely,” the researchers said. If the five fragments came from three or more bullets, that would mean a second gunman’s bullet would have had to strike the president, the researchers explained.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 89, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote about the evolution of the American democratic tradition, served in the Kennedy White House as a “court philosopher” and was among the foremost public intellectuals of his era, died Feb. 28 at New York Downtown Hospital after a heart attack.
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| Schlesinger in the 1960s |
Schlesinger rose to prominence at 28 when his book “The Age of Jackson,” about the democratization of U.S. politics under President Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century, won the 1946 Pulitzer for history. Twenty years later, his book “A Thousand Days,” an account of his role as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, won the Pulitzer in the category of biography or autobiography.
In the 1950s, Schlesinger also wrote three volumes about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Depression-era political and economic doctrine. Published as “The Age of Roosevelt,” the books were considered valuable accounts of a tumultuous period.
Sean Wilentz, a history professor and former director of American studies at Princeton University, said of Schlesinger: “He was certainly one of the outstanding American historians of his generation. He set the terms for understanding not just one or two but three eras of American history — Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It’s enough for most historians to write one book and get recognition for it.”
Schlesinger wrote or edited more than 25 books, most recently “War and the American Presidency,” published in 2004, which called President Bush’s approach to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “a ghastly mess.”
In addition to his best-selling books, Schlesinger was known for essays and articles he contributed to an array of magazines. While serving under Kennedy, he wrote movie and book reviews for the Saturday Review. With his horn-rimmed glasses and perpetual bow tie, he seemed to cultivate a near-caricature of the reserved Harvard University professor he once was, yet he thrived on the gossipy salon circuits of Washington, New York and Boston. He developed close relationships with newspaper publishers such as the Graham family in Washington, writers such as Truman Capote and, of course, the Kennedys.
“It was hard to resist the raffish, unpredictable, sometimes uncontrollable Kennedy parties,” Schlesinger once wrote.
Noticeably absent in his books on the Kennedy clan was a tone of critical and dispassionate historical perspective. Author Gore Vidal called “A Thousand Days” a “political novel.”
Nevertheless, in the earliest books that shaped his reputation, Schlesinger was revered for his engaging and interpretive approach to history. Most intriguingly, Wilentz said, Schlesinger saw Jackson as a man more shaped by East Coast intellectuals and the new labor movement than was previously thought and saw the New Deal not as a fixed set of principles but an evolving experiment.
Schlesinger’s 1978 book “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” which won the National Book Award, also provided one of his more enduring personal analyses of John and Robert Kennedy. “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic,” he wrote. “Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”
Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger was born Oct. 15, 1917, in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Iowa City and Cambridge, Mass. He later changed his middle name to Meier and added the suffix “Jr.” to honor his father, a prominent historian at Harvard.
Although it was never officially confirmed, Schlesinger said that his mother’s side of the family included the 19th-century historian and diplomat George Bancroft, often regarded as the father of American history. Starting in 1834, Bancroft wrote the 10-volume “History of the United States” and also served as secretary of the Navy.
Schlesinger graduated from the private Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and traveled with his family around the world before enrolling at Harvard at 16. He graduated summa cum laude in 1938 and briefly considered a career as a theater critic before his father swayed him to write a book based on his senior thesis. That work, “Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a 19th-century author and cleric, received positive reviews.
After a year studying at Cambridge University, Schlesinger received a Harvard fellowship that allowed him to research “The Age of Jackson.” Published in 1945, the book sold 90,000 copies in its first year, won the Pulitzer and established him as a force among a post-war generation of scholars.
Alan Brinkley, provost of Columbia University and a history professor, said the Jackson book “changed the way people viewed American history generally, because it was a rebuttal of the frontier thesis that [Pulitzer-winning historian] Frederick Jackson Turner made so central to historic interpretation in the 1920s and 1930s. Schlesinger argued that it was not the frontier that created Jackson’s democratic ethos; it was cities, workers.” Furthermore, the book’s focus on the formative decades and spirit of U.S. democracy caught on with the public after World War II.
Schlesinger, who had poor eyesight, spent the war years as a writer in the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA. He joined Harvard’s faculty in 1946 as an associate history professor — a rare accomplishment for someone so young and without an advanced degree.
In 1947, he helped start Americans for Democratic Action, a political group made up of a range of New Deal liberals, including former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, labor lawyer Joseph Rauh, economist John Kenneth Galbraith and future vice president Hubert H. Humphrey. The organizers wanted to counter the influence of the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace, which they saw as Communist-dominated.
Out of the ADA movement came Schlesinger’s 1949 book “The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.” It was credited with providing an ideological basis for practical liberalism during the early years of the Cold War and a philosophical alternative to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, the red-baiting Wisconsin Republican.
Schlesinger wrote in the book: “Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.”
Schlesinger became a full professor at Harvard in 1954. He took consulting jobs for government agencies and ventured into back-room political work. In 1952, he urged W. Averell Harriman to give up his challenge to Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson for the Democratic presidential nomination. He advised Stevenson’s unsuccessful campaigns in 1952 and 1956 and said he was frustrated by the candidate’s cerebral approach to politics at the expense of a more assertive voice that he thought would capture the public’s imagination.
Schlesinger said that even if Stevenson were not the most compelling candidate, he “made Kennedy’s rise possible.” He added: “His lofty conception of politics, his conviction that affluence was not enough for the good life, his impatience with liberal cliches, his contempt for conservative complacency, his summons to the young, his demand for new ideas, his respect for people who had them, his belief that history afforded no easy answers, his call for a strong public leadership, all this set the tone for a new era of Democratic politics.”
During the 1960 presidential election, Schlesinger became a Kennedy partisan and wrote “Kennedy or Nixon: Does it Make Any Difference?,” which threw into sharp relief what he thought was the idealism Kennedy offered and the materialism of the Republican candidate, then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
Starting in 1961, he took a two-year leave from Harvard to work for the Kennedy White House. As special assistant to Kennedy, he was close to the center of power but had a debatable degree of influence.
Although Schlesinger was often described as a general “court philosopher,” Kennedy aides Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers wrote in their 1970 book, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” that Schlesinger was “special assistant without a special portfolio, to be a liaison man in charge of keeping Adlai Stevenson happy, to receive complaints from the liberals and to act as a sort of household devil’s advocate who would complain about anything in the administration that bothered him.”
At one time, Schlesinger wrote a memorandum cautioning against what became the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961. When it was clear that the invasion was imminent, he wrote another memo advising the president to let blame fall on his subordinates.
Kennedy ignored the advice and publicly took “full responsibility” for the failure, and Schlesinger was criticized for telling the media at the time of the invasion that there were 300 to 400 men in the landing force, although the accurate figure was 1,400. He later told Time magazine, “I was lying,” but he said he had no choice if he wanted to stay with the White House. “Either you get out, or you play the game.”
After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Schlesinger transformed his notebooks into “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,” which also won the National Book Award. Largely seen as a flattering account of the president, the book aroused controversy for its depiction of tensions between the president and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Schlesinger briefly stayed on under President Lyndon B. Johnson but felt shunted aside. In 1966, he became the Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at City University of New York, a position he held for almost 30 years.
Meanwhile, he wrote a book criticizing Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War, “The Bitter Heritage” (1966), which faulted the war’s advocates for “seeing the civil war in Vietnam as above all a moral issue.”
Living in Manhattan, Schlesinger became active in then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s (D-N.Y.) bid for the presidency in 1968. After the candidate was killed that June, Schlesinger gave an angry commencement address at CUNY, underscoring the “hatred and violence” he saw around him. Among his later books were “The Imperial Presidency” (1973), which placed allegations of Nixon’s abuse of power in conducting foreign affairs in the context of post-World War II attempts to expand presidential authority.
“The Disuniting of America,” his 1991 bestseller that condemned the rise of “political correctness” as well as ethnic history movements such as Afrocentrism, won him strong reviews in the mainstream media. However, a range of black scholars, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Leonard Jeffries, used highly personal terms to denounce his work.
Schlesinger dismissed much of the attacks. “What the hell,” he told The Washington Post. “You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass.”
The first volume of his memoirs, “A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950,” was published in 2000. An edited version of his 6,000-page diary covering 1952 to 1998 is scheduled to be released this fall by Penguin Press.
His marriage to Marian Cannon Schlesinger ended in divorce. A daughter from that marriage, Katharine Kinderman, died in 2004.
Survivors include his wife of 36 years, Alexandra Emmet Schlesinger of Manhattan, N.Y.; three children from his first marriage, Stephen C. Schlesinger and Christina Schlesinger, both of Manhattan, and Andrew Schlesinger of Cambridge, Mass.; a son from his second marriage, Robert Schlesinger of Alexandria; a stepson, Peter Allan of Manhattan; and three grandchildren.
How did the late Arthur Schlesinger view the matter of conspiracy in the JFK assassination?
In 1967 Raymond Marcus, one of the earliest Warren Report critics, had an opportunity to meet Schlesinger in Los Angeles. Schlesinger was in town for an appearance on a local TV talk show. The program’s host, whom Marcus had gotten to know, called Marcus to invite him down to the studio.
Marcus had analyzed both the Zapruder film and the Moorman photograph, and believed he could use them to demonstrate there had in fact been a conspiracy. The talk show host, he recalled, “suggested that I bring my photo materials…
“When I arrived I was ushered into a waiting area, and there I spread out some of the Zapruder and Moorman photos on a table.” Schlesinger arrived a short time later and the two men were introduced. “Schlesinger glanced at the photos and immediately paled, turned away and said, ‘I can’t look and I won’t look.’ That was the end of our meeting.”
Thirteen years later, Marcus went on, Schlesinger provided an endorsement for Anthony Summers’ book Conspiracy:
One does not have to accept Mr. Summers’ conclusions to recognize the significance of the questions raised in this careful and disquieting analysis of the mysteries of Dallas.
In its December, 1998 issue, Cigar Afficianado magazine featured a cover story by Arthur Schlesinger called “The Truth As I See It,” in which the historian sought to refute “the revisionist version of JFK’s legacy.”
Cigar Afficianado may seem an unlikely forum for a thoughtful defense of the Kennedy presidency. Perhaps to justify the article’s presence, the magazine’s cover was an oil painting of a reflective, reclining JFK, thick stogie in hand. Accompanying the text were photos of JFK lighting up while watching naval maneuvers off the California coast, and puffing away as he watched a baseball game. Schlesinger noted, in the article’s conclusion, that JFK was “never more relaxed than when sitting in his rocking chair and puffing away on a fine Havana cigar.” It could also be that Schlesinger enjoyed the odd Cubano, although he was not identified as a smoker in his brief end-credit.
He was, however, identified as a former special assistant to President Kennedy, and therein lay an obvious conflict, which the author sought to defuse: “I make no great claim to impartiality. I served in JFK’s White House, and it was the most exhilarating experience of my life … I may not be totally useless as a witness.”
Generally, he was not. Schlesinger cited a variety of polls showing that JFK remained an immensely popular figure, so many years after his death — less so among historians, but popular still. Yet Schlesinger sought to dispose of the fanciful notion that Kennedy-era Washington was Camelot. “No one when JFK was alive ever spoke of Washington as Camelot — and if anyone had done so, no one would have been more derisive than JFK. Nor did those of us around him see ourselves for a moment, heaven help us, as knights of the Round Table.”
More substantively, Schlesinger took on a number of what he called “myths” about the Kennedy presidency, starting with the 1960 campaign. Citing the allegation that the Kennedys stole the election in Illinois, he wrote that “Illinois was not crucial to Kennedy’s victory. Had he lost Illinois, Kennedy still would have won by 276 to 246 in the electoral collage.” Furthermore, Schlesinger declared, if there was any vote theft by Democrats in Cook County, Republicans were equally guilty of stealing votes elsewhere in the state.
In the balance of “The Truth As I See It,” Schlesinger:
Schlesinger’s article was replete with citations and opinions that second his own. This was not necessarily a good thing; his faith in the sworn testimony of Richard Helms, for example, that Operation Mongoose was “not intended to apply to assassination activity” is mystifying.
Kennedy certainly made mistakes, including the reappointment of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. But Schlesinger believed that JFK’s achievements were many, though not always quantifiable — as in his challenge to a new generation to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. The country had seen nothing like it since the New Deal. Kennedy was, Schlesinger concludes, “the best of my generation.”
Everette Howard Hunt, a cold warrior whose Intelligence career spanned three decades, died in Miami on January 23 at the age of 88.
E. Howard Hunt was a co-founder of the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two. A strident anti-communist, he proudly took credit for orchestrating a 1954 coup against Guatemala’s elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, and the 1967 killing of Fidel Castro ally Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He also organized the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion
But Hunt’s most notorious act was as one of the masterminds of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate building in Washington, DC. “I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,” Hunt said in 1997. “But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.”
Hunt, a devoted servant of President Richard Nixon, relied on a circle of militant Cuban contacts from the Bay of Pigs invasion to carry out the break-in. The Cuban burglars rifled campaign files and financial records in search of evidence to back Hunt’s suspicion that Castro had given money to Nixon’s rival, Democratic nominee George McGovern.
“I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land,” Hunt told People magazine in 1974. “I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country.”
Hunt spent 33 months in federal prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, pleading guilty to evade what could have been a 35-year sentence if convicted at trial. Two dozen other men also served time for the bungled break-in. Nixon was forced to abandon his second term on Aug. 9, 1974, becoming the only U.S. president to resign.
After his release from prison, he devoted much of his time to writing spy novels, which he had begun producing in the 1940s. He wrote more than 80 books. A memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, is due out next month.
In an interview for Slate magazine in October 2004, Hunt said he had been doubtful of the Bay of Pigs’ prospects for deposing Castro because of State Department interference in the CIA operation and the Kennedy administration’s insistence on keeping it low-key.
Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971.
Many believe Hunt played a role in the Kennedy assassination. In 1978 Spotlight magazine, a publication of the right-wing Liberty Lobby, published an article by former CIA employee Victor Marchetti that linked Hunt to the assassination. Hunt sued for libel and won a settlement of $650,000. That verdict was vacated in 1985. Hunt never received any of the money and declared bankruptcy in 1997.
Some have put forth the theory that Hunt was one of three so-called tramps arrested near Dealey Plaza shortly after the assassination. Hunt always denied it. “I was in Washington, D.C., on November 22, 1963,” he wrote in a 1975 letter to Time magazine, while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base’s prison camp. “It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time.”
Hunt underwent gall bladder surgery in the late 1990s and had a leg amputated after arteriosclerosis developed, spending his last years in a motorized wheelchair. He lived in a modest home in the Miami area with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt. His first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972.
Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children.
Gerald R. Ford, the thirty-eighth President of the United States and last surviving member of the Warren Commission, died the day after Christmas. He was 93 years old.
In announcing Ford’s death, his widow Betty Ford said, “His life was filled with love of God, his family, and his country.”
No cause of death was immediately given, but Ford had suffered a number of medical problems over the preceding year.
Gerald Ford ascended to the Presidency in 1974 following the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. He ran for re-election in 1976 but was defeated by Jimmy Carter.
Ford was an undistinguished congressman from Michigan when Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the Presidential commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. That commission, of course, concluded that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, and that there was no conspiracy in the assassination.
Publicly, at least, Mr. Ford stood by that conclusion for the rest of his life, in spite of overwhelming evidence of conspiracy. In 1991 he said, “I reaffirm the two basic decisions of the Warren Commission are as valid today as they were then. Those were that Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination, and secondly, our commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic…I don’t think we have found any evidence to date that there was a conspiracy.”
In 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board released materials showing that Ford personally altered the wording of some sections of the Warren Report, and in so doing strengthened its lone-assassin case. Probe magazine reported (October 1997, Vol. 4 No. 6) that then-Commissioner Ford edited a draft of the Report, changing the location of one of JFK’s wounds. “By moving the point of entry from the back to the neck,” Probe said, “Ford alters the trajectory of the bullet through Kennedy’s body making the Commission’s [lone assassin] thesis more tenable.”
In 1966 Ford published a book called Portrait of the Assassin, ghostwritten by his assistant John R. Stiles. The book opened with an account of a top-secret Warren Commission meeting in January 1964, in which the Commission heard allegations that Lee Oswald was an FBI informant. “Ford quoted extensively but selectively from what he called ‘discussions among members of the Commission on Monday, January 27,’ 1964,” Harold Weisberg wrote in Whitewash IV: JFK Assassination Transcript. “In other words, he published for personal profit excerpts from this TOP SECRET executive session of January 27, edited to his own liking and advantage and for his own dishonest political purposes.”
Weisberg further asserted that Ford lied about this during his Senate confirmation hearings in 1973.
The early days of Ford’s 895-day administration were touched by controversy when Ford pardoned Richard M. Nixon for all crimes he committed as President. According to conventional wisdom, this may have contributed to his failed re-election bid in 1976. In between the pardon and his defeat, two attempts were made on his life.
On December 27, 2006, CBS Evening News broadcast a videotaped interview with Ford dating back to 1984. CBS informed its viewers that Ford granted the interview with the stipulation it not be broadcast until after his death. In the excerpt CBS showed, Ford recalled reading a draft of his first speech as president, following Richard Nixon’s resignation. “I read it and that phrase, ‘the long national nightmare,’ sort of jarred me. I said, ‘Bob, we really ought not to use that. Let’s not be too harsh.’” Speechwriter Bob Hartmann prevailed. Any other juicy tidbits from that interview? Not yet, and I’m not holding my breath.
It is worth remembering that Gerald Ford’s legacy also includes vetoing a bill to amend the Freedom of Information Act, reportedly at the urging of Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia.
Most initial news reports of Gerald Ford’s death stressed that Ford was the nation’s only unelected President, but those accounts failed to consider current president George W. Bush.
Click here to see a cartoon recalling Gerald Ford’s editing skills.
The used book scalpers must be a little distraught with the release of Paris Flammonde’s The Kennedy Coups d’ Etat, a mammoth revision of Flammonde’s earlier classic, The Kennedy Conspiracy (Meredith Press: New York, 1969). For years, used copies of that long out-of-print volume were being hawked by book resellers for hundreds of dollars. Now with the release of a revised and massively expanded Kennedy Conspiracy the prices for the earlier work could begin to descend from those stratospheric heights.
That earlier tome was subtitled “An Uncommissioned Report on the Jim Garrison Investigation,” and indeed was the only contemporary study to portray New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his assassination inquiry in any kind of positive, objective light. However, calling Flammonde’s newest work a revision of that previous report is hardly doing it justice. Rather, it is an epic three-volume expansion (a fourth volume consisting entirely of an index is on the horizon) modifying his earlier book while collecting new material on the JFK and RFK assassinations to add context. Indeed, in what has to be the longest subtitle in this field, Flammonde’s full title reads: Assassination of America. The Kennedy’s Coup d’Etat. The End of an Era, and Examination of the Jim Garrison Investigations, and the Effects on the Growing Totalitarianism in the Expanding Hegemonic American Empire. Adding further to its already hefty girth, Flammonde has included 30 appendices, covering everything from biographies of the numerous Warren Commission critics to a virtual encyclopedia of major (and some minor) figures in the case. Add in the hundreds of illustrations, documents and photographs and the three books total over 1,400 pages.
Volume 1 is titled “The Deaths in Dallas” and includes introductions by Cyril Wecht, William Turner and Jim Marrs, numerous chapters on Oswald, Ruby, Tippit and other familiar personae, as well as chapters devoted to the ballistic, medical and graphical evidence. Although there appears to be little in the way of new, primary research directly attributable to Flammonde, he nonetheless makes good use of much of the latest developments and evidence in the case.
The second volume “The Masques of New Orleans,” is essentially the revision and expansion of The Kennedy Conspiracy, focusing on the Garrison investigation and the subsequent trial of Clay Shaw. As with Volume 1, Flammonde uses much of the latest research in the field (including this author’s) to enhance his previous groundbreaking investigation. Flammonde spent months (years?) in New Orleans interviewing numerous witnesses and principals associated with the Shaw case and doing much “on the ground” (and groundbreaking) research. Indeed, that “older” information still stands on its own and seems remarkably fresh despite the passage of 40 years. For example, Flammonde’s treatment of the shady Swiss/Italian “trade organization”, PERMINDEX/Centro Mondiale Commerciale, was state of the art in 1967. It still stands the test of time today and begs for further research into that firm’s connections to numerous political murders.
Marshalling all of this new (and old) information, Book 3, “Barren Harvest,” has Flammonde theorizing as to who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit this regicide. As previously noted, this volume closes out with the numerous appendices that cover 30 different subjects — some of the best being a history of the Old Catholic Church (which Ferrie and others had connections to), as well as numerous invaluable reference tools.
Paris Flammonde, who spent years in radio and television production (he was the longtime producer of the popular, long-running Long John Nebel Show), is part of a vanishing breed — a cultured intellectual whose wit and intellect is reflected in his prose.
The work is not without its fair share of errors, omissions and typos and could have used a good proofreader. (For instance, researcher and author Jim Marrs is frequently referred to as “Bill Marrs,” and the cover calls the work a “Projected Encyclopedic Narrative.” Since the work is now published, it doesn’t make much sense to call it “projected.”) Also, the aforementioned writing style may put off some of the more academically inclined readers, but these are nitpicks that in no way detract from the overall significance of this fine work.
All of this notable discourse comes at a cost, though. The hefty price tag of $125 could put off the more budget-minded, but in terms of value received for your money, it’s a bargain.
In November of 2006 the citizens of Dallas elected Craig Watkins their first African-American DA. The 40-year-old Democrat defeated his Republican rival Toby Shook in a close election even though he was outspent by a factor of 18-1. Clearly, Watkins benefited by the wave generated against the Bush administration. But he also ran a reform-minded campaign that clearly appealed to a segment of the population.
Watkins vowed to place as much focus on crime prevention and redemption of criminals as possible. Many in the district attorney’s office resisted this. Many of them worked for Shook. Shook was perceived as the heir apparent to retiring DA Bill Hill. Hill, in turn, represented the legacy of longtime DA Henry Wade. Wade, of course, was the DA at the time of the Kennedy assassination who — within 36 hours — broadcast to the world that he had no doubt Oswald was the killer of President Kennedy. Wade’s office once issued a memo instructing assistant DA’s not to take Jews, Negroes, Dagoes, Mexicans or members of other races on a jury, no matter how rich or well educated.
Unlike many other candidates who promise reform, Watkins has, so far, followed through, to the point where many of the lawyers in the office who backed Shook have left. For instance, Watkins set up a task force to partner with the Innocence Project of Texas to do DNA testing for convicts on death row. Several of them have had their verdicts overturned. He also issued new guidelines on how Dallas DA’s would perform interrogations and how line-ups would be conducted, two procedures with which Kennedy researchers were quite familiar with. He even fired those who were not content with his accent on protecting the rights of the accused.
Now, as the accompanying story details, Watkins has focused his reform attitude on the assassination of President Kennedy. He has made public the existence of a secret stash of both exhibits and 15, 000 pages of documents that his office has been holding for over forty years. The trivial media has made much of a supposed transcript between Ruby and Oswald discussing the murder of President Kennedy on 10/4/63 at the Carousel Club. This document is clearly some kind of play on the dubious testimony of attorney Carroll Jarnagin. Some problems with this testimony are 1.) Jarnagin admitted he was drunk that night 2.) His companion did not recall any such conversation 3.) He failed a polygraph test. (See Seth Kantor, The Ruby Cover-Up, pp. 391-392).
This has distracted from the real question that should be asked about this disclosure. Namely, why did neither Wade nor Hill turn over this evidence in the decades preceding? They could have done it on at least four separate occasions: in 1964 to the Warren Commission, in 1977 to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and in the nineties, to local and federal agencies.
In January of 1992, the Dallas City Council passed a resolution directing the City Manager to collect all documents related to the Kennedy assassination in the Dallas Police Department, Sheriff’s Department and the Dallas DA’s Office. They were to be turned over to the Secretary of the Records Management Division at city hall. There they were archived and indexed by the city archivist Cindy Smolovik. There was much publicity generated by this event since it was the first such collection done in the wake of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. The DA’s office was disobeying the City Council and hiding artifacts from the City Manager. But then later, in 1993, the Assassination Records Review Board was constructed. They actually visited Dallas, held a public hearing, and asked for cooperation from anyone who had any more hidden documents or evidence. Obviously, the DA was not listening or forthcoming. Even though this hidden collection is actually larger than the one archived by Smolovik.
It’s a sorry tale. Over forty years after the fact and the public is still learning that trusted officials are keeping private potentially important records dealing with the unsolved murder of President Kennedy. And pundits and politicians wonder about why the citizenry has grown cynical about the process. At his press conference, Watkins said that he never believed Oswald acted alone. He added, “I believe in conspiracies. I think that’s just too simple of an explanation.”
Finally, after 44 years, the people of Dallas get a DA who thinks like the majority of them do.
