Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: MEDIA

  • Sky News Australia Interview of Jim DiEugenio

    Sky News Australia Interview of Jim DiEugenio

    Please watch the interview here.

    The SkyNews.com.au show notes are available here.

    Interview Transcript

    Well, it won’t be long until the world finally knows the truth about former US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

    Last month, President Trump signed an executive order to declassify the secret files on JFK’s 1963 death.

    Since then, the head of the task force that’s aimed at exposing federal secrets, Anna Paulina Luna, has declared that from what she’s seen so far, she believes the single bullet theory is faulty.

    She believes there were two shooters involved.

    Our first investigation will be announced, but it’s going to be covering on a thorough investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination.

    And I can tell you, based on what I’ve been seeing so far, the initial hearing that was actually held here in Congress was actually faulty in the single bullet theory.

    I believe that there were two shooters.

    And we should be finding more information as we are able to gain access into the SCIF, hopefully before the files are actually released to the public.

    Now, most Americans do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    So what has been hidden away for decades that we’re all about to find out when the JFK files are released?

    James DiEugenio is considered one of the best writers and researchers in America on JFK’s assassination.

    He’s written multiple books on the subject, including co-author of the JFK assassination chokeholds that prove there was a conspiracy.

    And he joins us on Power Hour now.

    James, thank you for joining us.

    We heard Anna Paulina Luna claim that she believes there were two shooters.

    That’s a conclusion, I believe, that you’ve come to as well.

    Can you talk to us about the evidence that support this?

    Yeah, well, I think it’s really good that she’s going to reopen this.

    And I think Trump signing that executive order was another really good thing.

    As per the belief that there was more than one shooter, there’s a Pruder film which shows Kennedy rocketing backwards when Oswald was supposed to actually be shooting from behind him.

    There’s the 42 witnesses at Parkland Hospital and at Bethesda at the morgue who did the autopsy that night who say that there was a big baseball-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head, which is strongly indicative of a shot from the front.

    All right?

    There’s also the fact that there was no sectioning of either wound.

    There was no dissecting of either wound, either the back wound or the head wound, to see if it was a through-and-through shot, if it did actually penetrate the body.

    There’s all this kind of evidence out there today that was not public back in 1963, which indicates that there was more than one assassin.

    And she’s correct.

    The Warren Commission report was, to put it mildly, you know, rather faulty.

    The Warren Commission determined in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    How did it get it so wrong?

    Well, there’s a lot of reasons why the Warren Commission report was faulty.

    You know, one of them was that they relied almost – about 80 percent of their work was based upon the work of the FBI.

    And the FBI, of course, did not do a very thorough investigation.

    To put it mildly, you know, J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, was not in really friendly terms with Bobby Kennedy, who was at that time was about to resign.

    But he was the attorney general, all right?

    And if you recall, you know, this is very interesting.

    That weekend, Kennedy was killed on a Friday.

    That weekend, J. Edgar Hoover went to the racetrack.

    In other words, he didn’t even come into work on Saturday.

    He actually went to the racetrack with his second-in-command, Clyde Tolson.

    So it was not, you know – again, I’m being mild – it was not a very thorough investigation by the FBI for a lot of different reasons.

    Why has some of these files been kept secret for so long?

    The FBI says it’s discovered now 2,400 new documents related to JFK’s assassination.

    What are you expecting from them?

    You know, I’m really glad you brought this up because those 2,400 documents that the FBI has just found, those were not even previously reported.

    You know, everything was supposed to be declassified by 94 to 98 by the review board.

    Apparently, they didn’t even know about these documents.

    I think we’re going to find out a lot more about Oswald in New Orleans, and I think we’re going to learn something about Oswald’s reported visit to Mexico City, which was about in late September, early October of 1963, all right?

    And he was, of course, in New Orleans that summer before going to Mexico City.

    Oswald was, to put it mildly, a very, very interesting character, which the Warren Commission never even scraped the surface of, all right?

    Most people today who have studied this case don’t believe the Warren Commission verdict about him being a communist, all right?

    They think he was some kind of low-level intelligence agent.

    What do you make of the assessments that are out there?

    There are a few that it was a foreign adversary, the mafia, or the CIA.

    You know, seeing a lot of the theories that are exposed and all the research and investigating that you’ve done, what’s your assessment of them?

    I think that the most logical conclusion today, and that which most people who have researched this case believe, that it was kind of like a triangular kind of a plot involving the Central Intelligence Agency at one point, the Cuban exiles at another point.

    And then when Oswald was not killed the day of the assassination, the CIA brought in his ally that has organized crime, you know, who they have been trying to knock off Castro before.

    And they brought in the mafia to go ahead and send Jack Ruby in to silence Oswald.

    Donald Trump promised that he would declassify the files during his first term, but he was visited by the CIA, the FBI, I should say, the FBI, and was told by Mark Pompeo not to open them.

    Why do you think he delayed opening up the files?

    You know, that’s a very interesting question, because a week or so before, Trump had tweeted that I’m looking forward, you know, to declassifying the last of the JFK documents.

    Then the very day he was supposed to do this, he’s visited by the CIA and the FBI, and he backs out of it.

    Now, according to his talk with Andrew Napolitano, he said words of the effect that if they would have shown you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have done it either.

    And Andrew said, who is they, and what was it they showed you?

    Okay, you know, and then Trump said, well, next time I talk to you, and there’s not 15 people around, I’ll tell you what that meant.

    You know, so he’s never explained exactly what it was, all right, that gave him pause.

    The implication is that it didn’t look very good for the Warren Commission, you know, but we don’t really know that.

    But the fact that they both went in there on the last day, and they warned him not to do it, I think that’s a very, very revealing kind of situation.

    Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it?

    It just makes you wonder why the truth was covered up for so long.

    And do you think that trust will be restored in the government when these files are made public?

    Well, I’m sure you’re aware of this. 65% of the public does not believe the official story on the JFK assassination.

    And a lot of social scientists believe that the lack of the belief in government today, which is very low, and the lack of the belief in the media, which is almost as low.

    A lot of them attribute this to the 1963-1964 events.

    You know, they trace the fall of the belief in government and the media because it began in 1964 when the Warren Commission report was first issued.

    And it was so vigorously defended by the mainstream media in the United States.

    And this includes CBS, NBC, and the New York Times.

    So hopefully we’ll get some restoration of this when all these files are finally out there in the open.

    And perhaps when Representative Luna’s investigation takes place in an open environment.

    One of the worst things about the Warren Commission is that it was a closed, all closed hearings.

    You know, so this contributed to the cynicism about their verdict.

    It’s interesting you bring up the media.

    I wanted to get your assessment on what role the mainstream media really played in covering up the truth, I suppose.

    You know, has it been frustrating for you hearing a narrative on repeat that’s possibly not the truth?

    It’s always been my belief that the main obstruction between the American public and the truth about the JFK case is what is termed today the mainstream media.

    Because from the very beginning, you know, from the very beginning, 1963 and 1964, the mainstream media was out there, okay, defending the Warren Commission verdict.

    To give you one very good example, in the fall of 1964, on the day the Warren Commission report was issued, both NBC and CBS broadcast shows endorsing its verdict.

    Now, Gabriella, the Warren Commission report is 888 pages long.

    How could you possibly read that many pages in one day and then report its contents without even referring to the evidence behind it?

    Because that wasn’t released until a month later.

    And this is what I think, I believe, that has contributed to this air of cynicism about the media.

    They’re reporting on something they couldn’t fact check.

    It would be impossible to fact check it.

    It’s interesting, you know, you’re expecting quite a bit from these files.

    Do you think there’s, as you say, 65% of Americans don’t believe that the Warren Commission got it right?

    Is there going to be much in here that’s going to shock us?

    You know, I really, I wish I could say one way or the other, but since I’m supposed to be a responsible kind of a person, without reading this stuff, you know, I can’t really say that.

    Now, I do know people have gone down to Washington, like Andrew Iler, okay, and a lawyer from Canada.

    And he told me that a lot of these closed files deal with Oswald and Mexico City.

    And let me add one last thing about this subject.

    The review board, which expired in 1998, made what is called a final determination on all the documents that they saw, which means that they all should have been declassified in October of 2017.

    If the agency made a final determination, that’s what that means.

    So the question is, why are we here in 2025 still debating about these documents that should have been declassified almost eight years ago?

    This is what gives people an air of cynicism and skepticism about this case.

    Absolutely.

    Look, when we do finally get the truth, what does this mean for RFK Jr., for the whole Kennedy family?

    Well, that’s a very good question also.

    Bobby Kennedy Sr., okay, never believed the official story.

    And as his son, Robert Kennedy Jr., he has never believed the official story about what happened to his uncle.

    And I think that when all this stuff comes out, finally,  you know, they’re going to both be vindicated on this subject.

    Also, I should say one other thing, and this isn’t commonly known.

    John F. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s only son, never believed the official story either.

    And according to an old girlfriend of his that doesn’t like to talk about it, but she does write letters, you know, one of his goals was to enter the political arena and try to find justice for what really happened to his father.

    Now, that’s a very interesting story, which I believe is largely true, that very few people know about.

    Yeah, well, absolutely.

    It’ll be really interesting to see what happens, and importantly for that family.

    The task force aimed at exposing federal secrets is also going to investigate the assassinations of RFK and MLK.

    It’s also going to look at the Epstein client list, the origins of COVID-19, UFOs, the 9-11 files.

    There’s so much that we’re going to learn about.

    What are you expecting from these other cases?

    You know, I thought that was really interesting.

    You know, there’s such a thing as picking up too much that you can carry.

    You know, that’s a lot of very serious cases for one committee to go into.

    You know, can you possibly do justice?

    I think it’s seven or eight cases to all those things.

    You know, but if they do, you know, and if they do find that something is faulty every place, well, then this really gives questions about, A, the mainstream media, and also our American historians, who seem to have been afraid to go into all the details about all of these cases, which the MLK, RFK, and JFK cases were really instrumental in what happened to America in the 60s.

    There would have been no Vietnam War if those three men had lived, which means about 58,000 Americans would be alive today and about 3 million Vietnamese.

    So there’s a whole change, a shift in the historical focus if those three people were killed by conspiracies.

    Where we are today in 2025, we are finally getting some truth, more transparency.

    Do you have faith going forward about the government in the U.S.?

    Do you expect there could be other instances being covered up in the future?

    Well, you know, it depends a lot on this congressional committee.

    You know, if these things are done in the open, and if they’re done with the best information that we have, and the committee members are really honest about their job, I think it might have a significant impact, you know, going forward.

    And I think it’ll be interesting to watch this.

    And, Gabrielle, I think one thing to look for is how much pressure from the outside is put on this committee.

    Because the MSM has a lot to lose if she comes out of the gate really swinging strong.

    Okay.

    Their credibility is going to be on the line.

    So that will be a very interesting tell about how that committee is going to deal with the pressures from the outside.

    They really don’t want this to happen.

    James DiEugenio, thank you so much for your time.

    How can we stay up to date with your work?

    Okay.

    I’m at kennedysandking.com.

    That’s my website.

    And I have a sub-stack under my name also.

    So that’s how you can read the most current information in this case.

    Thank you very much for having me on.

    Really appreciate you coming on the program.

    We’ll speak to you again soon.

    Okay.

    Bye-bye.

  • Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Murder of President John F. Kennedy

    Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Murder of President John F. Kennedy

    The “Sixty Years’ War” is a term typically used by some historians to designate a period extending roughly from the French and Indian War, beginning in the mid-1750s, up to a climax in the War of 1812. There is some disagreement among this; notably, Canadian historians are more apt to give more emphasis to the French and Indian War, although all of these sequential conflicts are essentially colonial disputes over lands that already had Native inhabitants. No surprises there.

    November 22, 2023 is a marker in what has been a different kind of Sixty Years’ War, a war of propaganda and interpretation in which the stakes are not merely historical truth but the shape of future instruction. Oliver Stone memorably referred to his 1991 film JFK as a “counter-myth,” and while one might quibble about that verbiage, to my mind it evokes the counterculture and what that was supposed to represent – the dissent away from frozen attitudes about 1950s America. It is not “my country, right or wrong,” but rather right and wrong dependent on our own intellectual and moral responsibilities.

    The failure of the United States government to produce a coherent investigation in the JFK assassination forced certain individuals to fill the void. The earliest critics – people like Vincent Salandria, Sylvia Meagher, Ray Marcus, Harold Weisberg and many others – started out as amateurs but over time became experts in this new field of study, unpacking state-sponsored domestic murder. The CIA, for its part, labeled this “conspiracy theory” and its adherents “conspiracy theorists.” The major media organizations got the (literal) memo and followed suit. In doing this they became, as in the title of Meagher’s excellent book, Accessories After the Fact. And they have maintained this position, with remarkable consistency, ever since.

    In the teeth of overwhelming opposition, this field of study grew. Researchers emerged in each new generation, dedicated to pursuing truth both in this case and expanding the curriculum as new assassinations emerged: Malcolm, Dr. King, Bobby, and so many others.

    Looming behind all of this activity was “the files,” the last remaining documents that the intelligence agencies have had decades to destroy and/or alter. Some hope remained that one could glean items of interest. One of the supposed selling points for some researchers regarding a potential Trump presidency was that, as an outsider, he might “release the files.” However, most sensible researchers understood that there was a miniscule possibility Trump would follow through, despite his assertions to the contrary. Surely, then, with the election of Joe Biden, an Irish Democrat would finally release these near-60-year-old documents. Of course, he not only didn’t do that, he sealed the matter completely, in an effort to remove the whole debate from consideration.[1] And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

    The latest salvo in this Sixty Years’ War is the expected barrage of nonsense emerging from establishment sources – would it be a ten-year anniversary without another National Geographic special? Or the History Channel? Of course not. And then the usual “new revelations,” in which the major media will glom onto any conspiracy theory – so long as it isn’t the right one. The most recent is Paul Landis, who has made a variety of conflicting assertions over the decades, now reveals that he found a bullet – strongly resembling CE 399 – in the back seat of Kennedy’s limousine and transferred it to the stretcher himself. As researcher Richard Bartholomew points out in his discussion of the story, the only real question is whether this constitutes an admission of guilt on the part of Landis.[2] And as the author rightly points out, Landis’s new testimony is not needed to kill the Single-Bullet Theory, as Arlen Specter’s elaborate ad hoc bit of nonsense was dead before it ever made it into print. Gibberish is not best contested with additional gibberish. Or, to paraphrase my mentor John Judge, jumping into a fight between two skunks is both generally inadvisable and stinky.

    Speaking of John Judge, for me personally that was the great takeaway from the 50th anniversary, as this marked the last Coalition on Political Assassinations conference. Standing outside in the sleet and cacophony, with Alex Jones leading a gang of idiots on the streets of Dallas, John struggled to lift his booming voice above the din. We lost him early the next year. More recently, earlier this year, the distinguished Kenn Thomas, creator of Steamshovel Magazine, left the ranks. A remarkable and fascinating researcher, he was always very kind and went out of his way to help the Hidden History Center and lent his support to John’s work. We also lost Daniel Hopsicker, author of Barry and the Boys and Welcome to Terrorland, who also did some fine work although I didn’t always agree with his conclusions. And JFK researchers felt the loss of David Lifton, an individual whose work is highly valued in some circles. And there were others, of course, as the inevitable years toll on, as more witnesses, researchers, and other figures pass from the scene. Anniversaries by their nature are natural times for reflection, and we all have much to reflect upon.

    BOOKS AND FILMS

    There have been several highly researched books written in the run up to the 60th anniversary, including titles by veterans Vince Palamara (Honest Answers About the Murder of John F. Kennedy) and Dr. Cyril Wecht (The JFK Assassination Dissected). There were also a couple of books by relative newcomers to investigation literature that made a great impact: one by Monica Wiesak, called America’s Last President, and another by Greg Poulgrain, called JFK V. Dulles: Battleground Indonesia. Both of these latter books share a reflective character, as reassessments of historical analysis that sift through old evidence while deriving new conclusions. In particular, there is much in the way of overturning the assumptions that so many academic historians have previously brought to this material.

    Those assumptions go beyond the JFK assassination and to the attitude regarding conspiracy in general. A good example of this can be found in the beginning of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s origin story. In the years 1919-1920, the U.S. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer oversaw an attempt to deport radical leftists from the country. It was known as the “Red Scare” and the A.G.’s actions would become known as the Palmer raids. The Palmer Raids made a great impression on the young Hoover, who would later dedicate much of his life to fighting supposed Communists. Interestingly, Hoover would deny the existence of the Mafia, an actual criminal conspiracy, while chasing a largely invisible Communist conspiracy.

    In October 1962, both The Nation magazine and Time reported former FBI agent Jack Levin’s observation that out of the 8500 members of the Communist Party, 1500 were FBI agents, which meant that “the FBI [was] the largest single financial supporter of the Communist Party.”

    While Hoover’s FBI was busy funding Communists, the Mob built Las Vegas.

    The focus on how the government affects the media and its attitudes about the Kennedy assassination, and conspiracies in general, is taken up by two other recent books: Political Truth, by Joseph McBride, and Burying the Lead, by Mal Hyman. Professorial and clear-headed analysis can be found in both of these works as the authors perform a deep dive into how information has been disseminated and controlled in alphabet networks and their attendant newspaper organizations. There are gems littered throughout both these books. Hyman shows how there were occasionally individuals who wanted to report on the Kennedy assassination and developed solid leads in many cases, but were unable to get them through their editors. He cites the attempts, for example, of Anthony Summers to get both the New York Times and the Washington Post to notice his work. For his trouble, Summers received total silence from Tom Wicker and a flurry of expletives from Ben Bradlee.[3] (Summers seemed to have gotten the message, for in intervening years he changed the title of his book Conspiracy to Not in Your Lifetime, with a similar bowdlerization of the content.) Meanwhile, McBride tells a similar story as Hyman, but from the perspective of an insider, having been a journalist himself working for such entities as The Nation magazine. McBride also draws a connection from the initial coup d’etat in November 1963 to the more recent January 6th attempted coup, stating that one could argue that every presidency since the Kennedy assassination has been “illegitimate.”[4] That is, until that murder is solved, our hands will never wash out that damned spot.

    Even now, the media continues on its merry way, desperately trying to hide a stack of bodies under a tattered blanket. The QAnon phenomenon is blamed, but more importantly blended, with serious researchers to smear all with the same epithets. It is a moronic enterprise, only successful with the least curious among us. Just to take one example, the idea that, say, Peter Scott and the assorted QAnon idiots have anything in common in cognition is a leap into pure fantasy. Trying to group them together is both desperate and despicable.

    Most recently, a pair of sensational documentaries appeared in the last couple of years. Oliver Stone and Jim DiEugenio’s JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, appeared in both two-hour and four-hour versions, as well as a beautiful book featuring transcripts of the interviews. There were two excellent decisions made in the presentation. One was to get as many mainstream academic historians as possible to remark on the truth about Kennedy’s motives and presidency, foreign policy and attitudes about self-determination, to maximize the credibility of the presentation. The other was to focus on revolutionizing the understanding of the whole history of the United States after World War II, which to my mind is absolutely key. The other documentary to come onto the scene was Max Good’s The Assassination & Mrs. Paine, which is not only brilliant in its own right but serves as a perfect partner for the Stone/DiEugenio work. Good obtained unprecedented access to Ruth Paine and her answers to his ever-polite questions is utterly fascinating. Good also got the late Vincent Salandria to agree to go on camera and participate in extensive interviews, so that the film also serves as a document for any researcher to get a glimpse into Salandria’s reasoning and the reason why he was so admired as a person by so many, including myself.

    FINAL THOUGHTS

    Aeschylus wrote that “God is not averse to deceit in pursuit of a just cause.” Plato, in the Republic, discussed the necessity of the “noble lie” to unite societies together. Both men were correct. However – and here we see the results of our discontinuity all around us – when you cannot get the people to agree on the preferred lies, or accept that the cause is just, the entire system is threatened. It becomes harder and harder for the citizenry to just accept a Manichean understanding of the world in which we are the Good Guys and anyone we don’t like are the Bad Guys, whether they be working-class Russians, Vietnamese peasant farmers, or whichever Latin Americans we have decided are our enemy this week. The lies, and the absence of a just cause, is unsustainable as rot sets in.

    It seems to me that we are in the middle of a sea change in the culture, in which a great many people are starting to wake up to these facts and to the central lie at the heart of all of these investigations: the government isn’t opposed to conspiracy. It just wants control of which conspiracies everyone takes seriously.

    Another decade brings another spike in interest and flurry of activity in the ongoing saga of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Sixty years have now gone by, but one thing remains the same: lies and obfuscation from the usual sources, attempting to bury the serious gains in research with endless red herrings. However, at the heart of this is what both Vincent Salandria and E. Martin Schotz called the “false mystery,” the drowning in irrelevant details of what is a frankly obvious state crime. I do not believe it to be an exaggeration to say that the failure to resolve that crime has resulted in the collapse of the republic, as the United States continues shakily moving forward like a train that is on fire. We may be able to ramble along for a little while longer, but it seems increasingly clear that if the flames are not put out, destruction is certain.

    NOTES

    1.
    https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/biden-washes-his-hands-of-jfk-assassination-records-16962174

    2.
    Bartholomew, Richard, “Many Theories & Single Bullets: False Beliefs of JFK’s Assassination,” https://bartholoviews.substack.com/p/many-theories-and-single-bullets

    3.
    Hyman, Mal, Burying the Lead: The Media and the JFK Assassination (TrineDay: Waterville OR, 2018/2019), 290.

    4.
    McBride, Joseph, Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy (Hightower Press: Berkeley CA 2022), 214.

  • A Review of Oliver Stone’s JFK: Destiny Betrayed

    A Review of Oliver Stone’s JFK: Destiny Betrayed

    For A Review of Oliver Stone’s JFK: Destiny Betrayed (Chapter 1) click here.

    For A Review of Oliver Stone’s JFK: Destiny Betrayed (Chapter 2) click here.

    For A Review of Oliver Stone’s JFK: Destiny Betrayed (Chapter 3) click here.

    For A Review of Oliver Stone’s JFK: Destiny Betrayed (Chapter 4) click here.

  • Antelope Valley College JFK Revisited: Destiny Betrayed Presentation

    Antelope Valley College JFK Revisited: Destiny Betrayed Presentation

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • CNN’s Apologia for LBJ, Part Two

    CNN’s Apologia for LBJ, Part Two

    see Part 1

    Early on in Joe Califano’s book, he writes the following about LBJ and Vietnam: “He certainly thought he was doing what John Kennedy would have done…” (p. 28). Califano’s book was published in 1991. The best one can say about that statement is that, even for that time, it was ill informed, because even back then, there was evidence that this was not even close to being the case. For example, Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers had written that Johnson had actually broken with what JFK was doing. As they stated, Kennedy was going to withdraw a thousand advisors before the end of 1963. (The authors here were referring to Kennedy’s NSAM 263 without naming it.) Kennedy then told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to announce this to the press in October of 1963. (Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, p. 17) Based on the paper trail in the Pentagon Papers, Peter Scott also wrote about this withdrawal plan. (Government by Gunplay, edited by Sidney Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian, pp. 152–187)

    CNN more or less adapts the Califano stance for this all-important issue. Why is it so important? If one is trying to salvage Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, it is imperative to somehow show that his radical escalation of the Vietnam War was really not his idea. There are two underlying reasons for doing this. First, Johnson’s escalation was not one of degree—it was an escalation in kind. LBJ would end up sending 500,000 combat troops into Vietnam. On the day Kennedy was killed, there were none there; only advisors. (The program tries to alchemize this by saying Kennedy had 16,00 troops in theater—utterly wrong.) Secondly, LBJ began Operation Rolling Thunder, the largest air bombing campaign since World War II, over both parts of the country. Even Califano admits that these American strikes extended to targets in and around Hanoi and Haiphong and close to the Chinese border. (Califano, p. 293) Kennedy never did anything like this—let alone to the extent of bomb tonnage that Johnson dropped.

    So what does the film do to relieve this heavy cross on Johnson’s back? To anyone who knows what really happened, it attempts something kind of shocking. Through Andrew Young, the film tries to say that, in December of 1964, it was McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk who were trying to convince Johnson to go to war in Vietnam. How on earth the film makers from Bat Bridge Entertainment got Young—usually a smart guy in public—to say this is a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. How they ignored all the evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board which contradicts it, is even more mystifying. Let me explain why.

    II

    Two of the most important pieces of evidence in Oliver Stone’s documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass concern the Vietnam War. Back in December of 1997, the Assassination Records Review Board declassified the records of the May 1963, SecDef meeting in Hawaii. These were regular meetings held by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the progress of the war. Representatives of branches of the American government stationed in Saigon, for example CIA, Pentagon, and State, were in attendance. Those May 1963 documents were so direct and powerful that they convinced the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer that, at the time of his death, Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3, p. 19) They showed that McNamara had given the order to begin a withdrawal program previously. And at this meeting various parties were submitting these schedules. To which McNamara replied: they were too slow. This supplied powerful corroboration for what O’Donnell, Powers, Scott and John Newman had written about—Newman in the 1992 edition of his breakthrough book JFK and Vietnam.

    The other important piece of evidence in this regard is a taped phone call that President Johnson had with McNamara on February 20, 1964:

    LBJ: 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 silently.

    RSN: The problem is—

    LBJ: Then come the questions: how in the hell does McNamara think, when he’s losing a war, he can pull men out of there?

    That tape is played loud and clear in the film, which has been out since November of last year, but Stone could have gone even further in this regard. Because in another phone call on March 2, 1964, Johnson tried to convince McNamara to revise his prior statements about withdrawing from Vietnam. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310) Further, in a January 1965 phone call, Johnson has learned that some of Kennedy’s hires now felt the new president was trying to shift the blame for the escalation of the war from himself to his dead predecessor, which was quite a logical deduction. (ibid, p. 306)

    After his attempt to turn around McNamara on the war, Johnson set up an interagency committee headed by State Department employee William Sullivan. That committee was to plan the possible expansion of the war. (Eugene Windchy, Tonkin Gulf, p. 309) In six weeks, Sullivan concluded that nothing but direct intervention by America would stop the eventual triumph of the Viet Cong. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, pp. 77­–88).

    In light of that conclusion, there is a telling point to be made about the choice of Sullivan to lead this committee. In October of 1963, Sullivan was one of the strongest opponents of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, Second Edition, p. 410) To put it mildly, Johnson likely knew the result he was going to get from Sullivan.

    Taken as a whole, what this accumulation of evidence shows is not just that Johnson reversed Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam, but he knew he was reversing it and then tried to camouflage that reversal. It also indicates that Johnson’s intent in this regard was established fairly early. The usual point of no return is considered to be the signing of NSAM 288 in March of 1964. That document mapped out a large-scale air war over North Vietnam, which Johnson invited the Joint Chiefs to design for him. (Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War, p. 129) As one commentator wrote about it: “Henceforth the United States would be committed not merely to advising the Saigon government, but to maintaining it.” (ibid) At that time, Max Frankel of the New York Times wrote that the administration had now rejected “all thought of a graceful withdrawal.” (March 21, 1964) As Gordon Goldstein has noted, Johnson was now working hand in glove with the Joint Chiefs on these future plans. (Lessons in Disaster, pp. 108–09)

    This last is another marked difference with Kennedy. As former undersecretary Roger Hilsman wrote to the New York Times, JFK did not want any member of the Joint Chiefs to even visit South Vietnam, so the idea of him inviting them into the Oval Office to plan a massive air war there was simply a non-starter. (Letter of January 20, 1992) In other words, what Kennedy did not do for three years, Johnson did in three months.

    Make no mistake, this was a key step in Johnson’s escalation. It was the document that would supply the working thesis for future air operations Pierce Arrow—retaliation for the alleged Tonkin Gulf incident—and Flaming Dart—retaliation for the Viet Cong attack at Pleiku—and those would evolve into Rolling Thunder. All of this counters Califano’s excuse for escalation in his book: that somehow the Joint Chiefs pressured LBJ into escalating. (Chapter 2, pp. 50ff) This is made possible by Califano not mentioning or describing NSAM 288, or how that process differed from JFK.

    Why do I indicate that LBJ had all but certainly decided on a war against North Vietnam by the spring of 1964? Because one of his objectives was to get the Washington Post in his corner on this decision; so he enlisted their support in advance. In April of 1964, Johnson invited the executives of that paper, plus Kay Graham, the owner, to the White House. In the family dining room, he asked for their support for this planned expansion of the war in Vietnam. (Carol Felsenthal, Power, Privilege, and the Post, p. 234)

    III

    If that is not enough to convince the reader that the program and Andrew Young are wrong about the December 1964 date, how about this: the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was drafted three months before it was submitted to congress. (Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, p. 27) In other words, in May, one month after Johnson told the Washington Post he wanted their support for a future war, he had an attorney sketch a rough draft of a declaration of war in Vietnam. Like the other steps on the way to intervention, I could not find this event mentioned in either CNN’s film or Califano’s book. It would seem to me to be a quite important revelation as to intent. But let us go a step beyond it: What made Johnson rather certain that the war resolution would be used? Because Johnson’s planning even spoke of a “dramatic event” that could occur to cause the White House to go for a congressional resolution. (Moise, p. 30)

    Johnson had approved a covert action plan after Kennedy’s death. General Maxwell Taylor had drawn up designs for fast hit-and-run sea operations against North Vietnam in September of 1963, but that plan was not submitted to McNamara until November 20, 1963. (Newman, p. 385) These attacks were eventually titled OPLAN 34A. Originally, the draft of NSAM 273 limited naval forces to those of the government of South Vietnam. On November 26, 1963, Johnson altered McGeorge Bundy’s draft. When OPLAN 34A was submitted to the White House, it now allowed direct American military attacks against North Vietnam. (Newman, p. 463) As Edwin Moise shows, these PT boat operations owed just about everything to the USA and were completely controlled by Americans. (Moise, pp. 12–17) They likely could not have been done by Saigon alone.

    It was the combination of OPLAN 34A with the already-in-practice DeSoto patrols that all but guaranteed an exchange between Hanoi and the Pentagon in the Gulf of Tonkin. The PT boats were designed and equipped with armaments that could be used to attack Hanoi’s military installations near the shore, which they did. The idea was for the OPLAN 34A missions to create a disturbance and then the destroyers in the gulf could theoretically gain some kind of intelligence from the reaction. The problem was that both the boats and the ships violated the territorial waters of North Vietnam. (Moise, pp. 50–51) The PT boats attacked the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu off the coast of North Vietnam on the night of July 30–31. The latter was 4 kilometers off the coast, the former about 12. Hanoi was claiming their waters ended at 12 miles, therefore both islands would be within their boundaries. When the PT boats retreated, they were within sight of one of the destroyers on a DeSoto mission, the Maddox, which had just entered the gulf. (Moise, p. 56)

    Therefore all the elements were in place for a confrontation. On the night of August 2nd, Hanoi sent out three torpedo boats to counter the raiders. They were all severely damaged by American fire and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed. The Maddox endured one bullet hole from a machine gun round. In spite of this engagement, President Johnson continued the patrols and the Navy added a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, to the mission. What made it even worse is that the PT boats attacked another North Vietnamese base on the evening of the 3rd of August. (Moise, p. 97) This is why many, including George Ball of State, considered the missions to be clear provocations. (Moise, p. 100)

    Needless to say, the alleged Hanoi attack on the two destroyers on the night of August 4th never really occurred. Yet Johnson used this false reporting to launch the first American air strikes against the north, based on the NSAM 288 target list, and also to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution which has been penned three months earlier. (Moise, p. 212) But all of the above is not the worst. The worst is this: Johnson realized the second attack did not occur about one week after he ordered the air strikes. (Moise, p. 210)

    In light of all the above, to say that Johnson was being talked into a war by Bundy, McNamara, and Rusk in December is simply hogwash. And to say, as the program does, that Johnson was not a war monger is equally wrong. The total debate time on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was about 8 hours. (Goulden, p. 75) And everyone sent up by the White House to testify for the resolution denied there was any connection between the DeSoto missions and the OPLAN 34A operations—which was false. (Goulden, p. 76)

    But there were two grand benefits garnered from the provocations:

    1. LBJ’s approval ratings on the war skyrocketed. As one commentator noted, he had turned his one weakness against GOP candidate Barry Goldwater into a strength.

    2. He got his declaration through. (Goulden, p. 77) The very fact he did the latter undermines what Tom Johnson says about the war: that the SEATO Treaty alone necessitated our involvement.

    IV

    Califano deals with the case of William Fulbright in one desultory page near the end of his book. (Califano, p. 360) CNN and Bat Bridge do not really deal with him at all. The Arkansas senator and Johnson had been friends prior to 1965. In fact, Johnson used Fulbright to get his Tonkin Gulf resolution through the Senate; the unsuspecting Fulbright trusted him. He ended up regretting it.

    The CNN series does not mention the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic either. Yet the two subjects are related, because Fulbright’s relationship with LBJ collapsed over the lies Johnson had told him about that 25,000 man Marine invasion in the Caribbean in 1965. Fulbright was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He had helped expedite both the Latin American invasion and the Tonkin Gulf resolution. Ironically, it was Fulbright’s reinvestigation of the former that led to his doubts about Tonkin Gulf and ultimately wrecked the relationship. One can even argue this was the main engine for Johnson’s capsized approval ratings, which resulted in his abdication.

    In June of 1965, Fulbright’s staff had begun to examine the reasons Johnson had given for the April 28, 1965, invasion of the island. At every opportunity, the reasons for the invasion were escalated and sensationalized. This culminated in June with the excuse that 1,500 people were killed, heads were cut off, the American ambassador called while hiding under a desk with bullets flying through windows, and Americans were huddled in a hotel screaming for protection. (Goulden, p. 166) The staff found out that this was mostly nonsense and Fulbright decided to give a scathing speech in which he said that there was simply no evidence to back up what Johnson had told him about decapitations and bullets flying through embassy windows. The democratically elected leader, Juan Bosch—who the Marine invasion fatally crushed—had been favored by President Kennedy. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78–79) Therefore, Johnson’s reversal of JFK’s policy “lent credence to the idea that the United States is the enemy of social revolution in Latin America…” (Goulden, p. 167)

    Fulbright now suspected that maybe the White House had also lied about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. In November and December of 1965, he and his staff now prepared for full-blown hearings on the Vietnam War. Fulbright called up administration official after official and quizzed them on both what the real purpose of the Tonkin Gulf resolution was, and if the administration had been candid about its provenance. The hearings themselves were damaging enough to Johnson, but when CBS and NBC decided to run them at full length for days on end, they began to really hurt him politically. For the first time, administration officials had to defend the remarkable escalation of the Indochina conflict and reply to questions about if the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was justified. There had been nothing like it since the Army/McCarthy hearings and there would be nothing like it again until the Watergate hearings.

    Average Americans now began to be informed about how America got into an open-ended conflict that had seemingly escalated beyond what anyone had ever thought it could be. But perhaps most importantly, the hearings dramatically illustrated the formula for the following:

    …what had happened to turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson…and the right-wing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into supporters of the present administration… (Goulden, p. 166)

    In other words, how Johnson had fragmented the Democratic Party beyond saving.

    Neither Califano’s book nor the CNN series figuratively lifts up the hood to show the audience just how Johnson was finally convinced to get out of Indochina. Since they will not, the present reviewer shall. After the Tet offensive, and during the siege of Khe Sanh, several foreign policy luminaries were asked to attend a Pentagon briefing at the White House—after which LBJ ranted and raved for about 45 minutes. This compelled former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to walk out. A White House staffer called him and asked him why he left. Being blunt, Acheson told him to “Shove Vietnam up your ass!” Johnson got on the phone and Acheson told him he would no longer listen to “canned briefings.” He only wanted to hear from people on the scene in Vietnam and would only accept raw data, not finished reports. About a month after this, Johnson sent his new Secretary of Defense over to the Pentagon. Clark Clifford went over the data and then quizzed the Joint Chiefs on the overall situation on the ground. He concluded that the only way to win the war was to expand it into Cambodia and Laos. Clifford reported back to Johnson that he should get out; Vietnam was a hopeless mess. (Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men, pp. 683–89; see also Clifford in the documentary film Hearts and Minds.)

    That is apparently too strong a truth for CNN and Bat Bridge Entertainment, which tells the reader a lot about the value and candor of this disappointing production. The program ends with the Richard Nixon/Anna Chennault subterfuge of Johnson’s attempt at a truce in Vietnam—which was about four years too late. (Click here for details)

    In sum, this is a disappointing and less-than-candid four-part series about Johnson and his presidency.  These kinds of programs make it difficult to understand the past, and therefore stifle our attempts to deal with the present.

  • Bob Buzzanco: Chomsky’s “Useful Idiot”

    Bob Buzzanco: Chomsky’s “Useful Idiot”

    Robert Buzzanco is a history professor at the University of Houston. He is also a co-host—along with Scott Parkin—of a podcast called Green and Red. On January 12, 2022, Buzzanco had the 94-year-old Noam Chomsky—looking every year of his age—on his show to reply to the treatment of Vietnam in Oliver Stone’s documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. Chomsky could not help but make some general comments about Kennedy. In this regard, the linguist was his usual pompous and somewhat ludicrous self. At one point, he compared President Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. If Chomsky can show us where either of the latter supported Medicare, universal healthcare, and equal rights for African Americans in the sixties, I would be curious to read about it, because Kennedy did all three. The program then slipped into Rocky Horror Picture Show low camp: Chomsky tried to parallel Kennedy’s success to the conditions existing in Germany in the twenties. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. The only way there is any resemblance is that the assassinations of that decade—JFK, Malcolm X, King and Robert Kennedy—led to the election of Richard Nixon, the premature end of an era of hope and aspiration, and a continuance of the war in Vietnam. I wish I could add that Buzzanco pointed out these absurd exaggerations. He didn’t. (For more on Chomsky, click here and here)

    As the program went on, it became clear that Chomsky and Buzzanco had done zero research on the new evidence about the subject of Vietnam adduced by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) and presented in JFK Revisited. The pair was largely relying on what Chomsky had written, if you can believe it, back in the nineties in response to Stone’s film JFK. The pair actually ended up being worse than the MSM on the subject.

    How? Because back in December of 1997, the Board declassified the records of the May 1963, SecDef meeting in Hawaii. This was a regular meeting that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had with representatives of each branch of the American government in Saigon: State, CIA, Pentagon, etc. Those declassified documents were so direct and compelling they convinced the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer that, at the time of his death, Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3, p. 19) It should be noted that the NY Times story was written by MSM stalwart Tim Wiener. But yet, Chomsky was still using his old excuse that Kennedy was only getting out if Saigon was winning. This was ridiculously illogical back in the nineties, because, as John Newman pointed out in his book JFK and Vietnam, Kennedy understood that the Pentagon was rigging their numbers in order to make it appear Saigon was winning. Newman demonstrates this awareness in the book. He even named the two men who cooked the books: General Paul Harkins and Air Force Colonel Joseph Winterbottom. (pp. 185–245, 2017 edition)

    The thesis of Newman’s book is that Kennedy was going to use this optimistic information to hoist the Pentagon on their own petard. Revealing on this point is that Kennedy told McGeorge Bundy’s assistant Michael Forrestal that America had about a hundred to one chance of winning in Vietnam. He then said that when he returned from Dallas:

    I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, what we thought we were doing, and what we now think we can do. I even want to think about whether or not we should be there. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 183)

    The other point that is important in this regard is that, after it became clear what JFK was doing—and also what the new president wanted—the intelligence reports began to change. They now became pessimistic and also backdated to early November, and even before. (Click here; see also The Third Decade Vol. 9 No. 6 pp. 8–10; Newman, 2017 edition, p. 438)

    Is not the point made with those two pieces of data? In fact, as historian Aaron Good has stated, when one combines the evidence, this “profound review” suggests the genesis of the Pentagon Papers. By 1967, it was fairly clear that President Johnson’s escalation and direct intervention was not going to work. Robert McNamara was still Secretary of Defense. Realizing that Johnson’s strategy of air and infantry escalation had failed, he had become quite emotionally disturbed. In 1966, fearing he was going to be attacked at Harvard, he escaped a hostile crowd through a tunnel. His son had draped a Viet Cong flag across his bedroom. He would rage against the war’s futility and then turn to the window and literally cry into the curtains. As his secretary said, that happened frequently. (Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous, p. 98, p. 121, p. 126) It’s a logical deduction that McNamara realized what had happened between Kennedy and Johnson and he was now expiating his guilt by exposing the secret history of the war through the Pentagon Papers, which is likely why he kept this 18-month effort a secret from Johnson. And he had no objection to Daniel Ellsberg giving the papers to, first, the New York Times and, then, the Washington Post.

    In fact, in JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, Stone plays a tape from February of 1964 in which Johnson admits that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was implementing Kennedy’s withdrawal policy. Johnson states that he knew this and he stewed in silence, because as Vice President he could not do anything about it, at least at that time. Somehow both Chomsky and Buzzanco missed this.

    But that is not what I really wish to address here. On that podcast, near the end, Buzzanco implies that somehow, there was no information in the documentary about Lee Harvey Oswald that was not in the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) volumes. I could barely believe what I was hearing, but I really think he meant it. If that is so, then Buzzanco:

    1. Could not have read the HSCA volumes
    2. Did not pay any attention at all to the documentary.

    This from a man who pontificates to the listener that he knows what he is talking about and can be trusted to set the record straight.

    One will search in vain through the 12 volumes of the HSCA for any annex on Oswald’s relationship with the CIA and/or FBI at any time in his career. In the film, we have John Newman and Jeff Morley talking about this issue. To mention just four things they brought up that are not in those volumes:

    1. That the liaison for the HSCA with the CIA also secretly handled the Cuban exile who tried to frame Oswald after the assassination for killing Kennedy for Cuba.
    2. That the FBI scraped off the address of 544 Camp Street from the Oswald flyers before they were sent to HQ. That address housed the offices of Guy Banister and also the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council.
    3. The FBI took Oswald’s flash warning off his file in the first week of October 1963. This meant the Secret Service was unlikely to remove him from the motorcade route. That warning had been on the file for 4 years prior.
    4.  A similar thing occurred at CIA, in order to lower Oswald’s profile in advance of the assassination.

    In fact, one will only see the last point in the so called Lopez Report. This was the HSCA’s classified report on Oswald and Mexico City, which was only released by the ARRB, a body which Buzzanco refers to only in passing, discounting it as he does. The middle two points were also only discovered as a result of that Board’s work. So just what is Buzzanco talking about in regards to the HSCA? He clearly has not done his homework on the subject.

    In fact, the only systematic, direct work done on Oswald and the CIA by the HSCA was not declassified until after the Board went out of existence. This was in 2005. I am referring to the scintillating work of HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf and it was discovered by British researcher Malcolm Blunt. (I would like Buzzanco to prove to me he knew of either person before he opened up his mouth on the subject.) Back in 1977–78, Wolf was the main HSCA researcher on the Oswald file at CIA. She discovered that there were two odd things about this file. First, there was no 201 file opened on Oswald for 13 months after his defection, even though the CIA knew about the defection within days, and had accumulated many papers on the man in just one month.

    The second thing she discovered was that the documents on Oswald did not go to the place where they should have gone, namely the Soviet Russia Division. Instead, they went to the Office of Security, which, as Malcolm found out, almost guaranteed there would be no 201 file opened on him.

    These anomalies disturbed Wolf. She decided to interview officers in the CIA who would know about such matters. She discovered that there was an unofficial Agency rule which said, once there were five documents on a subject, a 201 file should be opened. This was clearly and blatantly disregarded in the Oswald case. But it was not until late in 1978, when the HSCA was about to close down, that she found her Holy Grail about the Oswald file and its weird path. At that time, she interviewed Robert Gambino, who was the present Chief of Security at CIA. He told her that it did not matter how many documents came in on a subject or if they were stamped to a certain division. If someone had already arranged with the Office of Mail Logistics, those papers would go to the agreed upon destination. (Click here for that information) I would like for Buzzanco to show me where Gambino’s information is located in the HSCA volumes. I think I will have a very long wait, since, from what I can see, Wolf’s memos were not typed into memoranda form.

    When one combines the above information with what JFK: Destiny Betrayed reveals about another ARRB discovery, then we learn much, much more about who Oswald was. The four-hour version of the film, released this month, has an interview with ARRB Military Records Analyst Doug Horne. He revealed to Stone that in Oswald’s last quarter in the Marines, he was not being paid by that organization, but likely by someone else. The combination of these two new important pieces of information—the bizarre file routing, and the source of funds—would all but clinch the fact that Oswald was an intelligence project before he left for Russia. Buzzanco will not find that information in the HSCA volumes.

    I won’t go into all the incredibly important data that Oliver Stone unveiled to millions of people around the world in his film and which directly impacts on the facts of Kennedy’s death. How else does one explain that CE 399, the Magic Bullet, got to FBI HQ before it was delivered there. But on top of that, the FBI declared that the agent who dropped it off placed his initials on that bullet. The film proves they are not there.

    The film all but proves that CE 399 was never fired in Dealey Plaza that day and would never be admitted into a court of law since, as Stone said on the Joe Rogan Show—in front of 2.5 million people—it has no chain of custody. Buzzanco and Chomsky ignored this key evidentiary issue, because, as David Mantik states in the film, in all previous inquiries CE 399 was foundational to the case against Oswald.

    As Doug Horne says in the two-hour version of the film, the official autopsy photographer John Stringer denied under oath that he took the pictures of Kennedy’s brain at the Archives. He did this on at least five grounds. The first two being that he never used the type of film utilized in the photos. Second, he never used the optical processing method to produce the photos, which was a press pack. (For more details see Horne’s Inside the ARRB Vol. 3, p. 810) With Stringer’s denial, these official autopsy photographs would not be admitted into court. And they also indicate, as we show in the film, that the brain in evidence today cannot be Kennedy’s. The fact this subterfuge took place at a military controlled medical center, with many generals and admirals in control, betrays a high-level conspiracy—without even dealing with the mysterious flight plan of General Curtis Le May that day, which is also described in the recently released long version of the film.

    How can men who attest to be leading intellectuals of the left do such incredibly sloppy and irresponsible work? This critique could have easily been twice as long as it is. And it would have been just as pungent and pointed. Buzzanco and Chomsky remind me of what psychologists term a folie a’ deux. It spiraled into a collapsing domino effect, since neither man made any attempt to check the other. There was never one ounce of effort placed on fact checking on matters they knew nothing about, which was a lot.

    This has always been my problem with what I call the doctrinaire/structuralist left. In an odd way, their aims meet the MSM; and the underpinnings of both are exposed as being built on quicksand, because they both value expedience over facts, but for different aims.

    Addendum: In another program one week later, Buzzanco apparently could not get anyone to interview him, so he had Parkin act as his line reader for what amounted to an Orwellian “60 Minutes Hate” against President Kennedy. Like Buzzanco with Chomsky, Parkin did not cross check his colleague once. Buzzanco did issue a debate challenge, which I accept, but not on his program, since that would help aid his viewership. He can contact me and we can arrange an agreed upon venue with an agreed upon agenda that follows the subject lines of JFK Revisited.

    I await his response.

  • The Overthrow Attempt of 1934

    The Overthrow Attempt of 1934

    Was there really a businessman’s plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt’s government in 1934? Jonathan M. Katz in his new book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire isn’t sure.

    He begins his book with a meeting, allegedly between retired US Marine General Smedley Butler and a prominent Wall Street Stock power broker. It actually starts in 1933. Gerald C. MacGuire, a representative of a prominent Wall Street brokerage house, starts trying to recruit Smedley Butler. He wants Butler to speak against Franklin D. Roosevelt and his policy of taking the dollar off the gold standard at an American Legion conference in Chicago, but it broadens from there. And by 1934, MacGuire is sending Butler postcards from the French Riviera, where he’s just arrived from fascist Italy, and also Berlin. Then he comes to Butler’s hometown of Philadelphia and asks him to lead a column of half a million World War I veterans up Pennsylvania Avenue for the purpose of intimidating FDR into either resigning outright or handing off all his executive powers to an all-powerful, unelected cabinet secretary who the plotters backing MacGuire were going to name.

    Butler was a celebrated US Marine general having had experience on multiple battlefields from 1898 to the 1920s. In the summer of 1932, while the depression was deepening, he led a group of thousands of World War I veterans in a march on Washington to demand they be given access to their promised World War I pensions. It is for these reasons that the plotters chose Butler to lead the revolt.

    The coup plotters included the head of General Motors Alfred P. Sloan, as well as J.P. Morgan Jr. and the former president of DuPont, Irénée du Pont, and probably Gerald MacGuire’s boss, Wall Street luminary Grayson Murphy. The group asked the celebrated Marine Corps officer Smedley Butler to lead a military coup. But Butler refused and revealed what he knew to members of Congress.

    This is a portion of General Smedley Butler speaking before the committee in 1934:

    I appeared before the congressional committee, the highest representation of the American people, under subpoena to tell what I knew of activities which I believed might lead to an attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship.

    The plan, as outlined to me, was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff, or as a club at least, to intimidate the government and break down democratic institutions. The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men which would be able to take over the functions of government.

    I talked with an investigator for this committee who came to me with a subpoena on Sunday, November 18. He told me they had unearthed evidence linking my name with several such veteran organizations. As it then seemed to me to be getting serious, I felt it was my duty to tell all I knew of such activities to this committee.

    My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions. I want to retain the right to vote, the right to speak freely, and the right to write. If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe. No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech and press.

    From that point on, Katz takes us on an extended tour of all the places where Smedly Butler helped to build the American Empire. From his first action as a raw volunteer in the Spanish American War through his two tours of duty in China, to his aid in the Panamanian revolution that resulted in the establishment of an independent nation of Panama which was submissive to the US desire to build a canal, to his aid in crushing rebellions in the Philippines, Haiti, The Dominican Republic and Mexico, Katz extensively catalogues the rise and exploitation of the American Empire.

    Katz actually visited many of the places Butler served. And he combines interviews with historians of the various countries along with personal papers of Butler and many prominent businessmen to paint a rather ugly picture of the conquest, establishment, and development of the American Empire.

    For Kennedys and King website visitors, two groups that keep popping up during the extensive cataloguing of the events described in the book are Sullivan Cromwell and Brown Brothers Harriman. These two business entities were involved in many of the enterprises in Latin America described in the book. As Kennedys and King visitors recognize, these two entities are often linked as possible high-level orchestrators of the JFK assassination.

    Sullivan and Cromwell was associated with the Dulles Brothers: John Foster, Secretary of State Under President Dwight Eisenhower, and his brother Allen, the notorious CIADirector from 1953–1962, who was fired by JFK after the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion.

    Brown Brothers Harriman was associated with the Bush family—namely Prescott Bush. Prescott was heavily involved with investments in Nazi Germany prior to World War II. He was so involved with the Nazis that there was a separate investigation by the same committee that investigated the Butler accusations in the late 1930’s, which was a precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some documentaries confuse the two investigations. (Apparently the documents associated with these two separate investigations both reside in the same area of the National Archives.) But Katz insists that Butler never mentions Prescott Bush as a conspirator in the 1934 plot.

    As for the specifics of the plot, MacGuire told Butler at one of their early meetings in 1934 that very soon, a group identified as ‘The Liberty League’, involving some of the people earlier mentioned (Murphy, duPont, Sloan, etc.) were going to go public with an organization that would stand openly in opposition to FDR’s New Deal programs and agenda. A few weeks later, The New York Times published a front-page article declaring the emergence of The Liberty League which not only featured some of the businessmen, but also used two anti-New Deal Democrats and former Presidential candidates, John W. Davis and Al Smith, as front-men.

    The reason why we don’t know more about this plot is because the congressional committee that Butler testified in front of, which was headed by John W. McCormack—who went on to become the longtime speaker of the House—and Samuel Dickstein, who was a Democrat of New York, cut their investigation short. The only people who testified were Butler, a newspaper reporter who Butler had enlisted in sort of an independent investigation, Gerry MacGuire, and the lawyer for one of the minor players in the industrialists’ plot, the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. Absent that more detailed investigation, Katz isn’t willing to state definitely the extent to which the du Ponts, Sloan, Murphy, and the others were actually involved in the planning of the business plot. They may have been deeply involved and just stopped planning once Butler ratted them out. It’s possible that Grayson Murphy—MacGuire’s boss—hadn’t got them involved yet. Katz isn’t willing to say.

    Interestingly enough, the media reaction was quite similar to the more recent response to the 1960s assassination conspiracy research. The business community Butler accused tried to laugh Butler off and used The New York Times, Time Magazine, Henry Ford II’s Dearborn Examiner and other prominent media outlets of the time to debunk Butler’s testimony.

    Time Magazine owned by billionaire Henry Luce ran a satirical piece mocking Butler. The New York Times ran a mocking unsigned editorial strongly condemning Butler. While this limited investigation was able to verify all major statements made by Butler, and the few witnesses who testified, again, the mainstream media gave it little publicity—soft peddling it and spending little time on the summary and final analysis of the final congressional sub-committee report. (Sound familiar readers? How about that Assassination Records Review Board report? Who extensively reported on it in the 1990s?) But for all the discounting and snideness, the McCormack/Dickstein report included the following:

    In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life, it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country…There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.

    Katz sees definite parallels to the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington. He points out how MacGuire—the contact person for Butler—had been influenced by a fascist insurrection in Paris a few weeks before his association with Butler. A group called ‘The Fiery Cross’ lead an insurrection to prevent a center left, social democratic party from taking power in France. Using conspiracy theories about fixed elections and the suicide of a rightist leader who they claim was murdered combined with an unhealthy dose of antisemitism, this motley coalition of far right groups stormed the parliament and were almost successful before being suppressed by the authorities. It is that kind of Putsch that MacGuire and his associates hoped could be successful in the United States.

    I found this book a very interesting and enlightening read and believe it may have been an earlier precursor to the assassinations of the 1960s as well as a parallel to the January 6th insurgency of 2021.

  • Oliver Stone & Abby Martin: Down the JFK Rabbit Hole

    Oliver Stone & Abby Martin: Down the JFK Rabbit Hole

  • How the MSM Blew the JFK Case, Part One

    How the MSM Blew the JFK Case, Part One

    The way the mainstream media (MSM) reacted to the assassination of President Kennedy is one of the largest issues in the field of JFK assassination studies. One of the earliest books on the subject was Mark Lane’s A Citizen’s Dissent published in 1968. The late journalist Jerry Policoff was one of the leading writers on the topic. (Click here for an example of his early work) In 1992, scholar Barbie Zelizer wrote a valuable but rather unfocused book on the issue titled Covering the Body. That same year, Robert Hennelly and Policoff co-authored a long article for the The Village Voice addressing the troublesome topic. (Click here for details) In 2019, Mal Hyman wrote Burying the Lead, a creditable effort in the field, containing much new material. (Click here for our review)

    There are two other volumes of recent vintage about this immense subject that should be noted. One was published in 2018 by Dr. Jim DeBrosse, a lifelong journalist from Ohio. His book is called See No Evil. The more recent tome, published this year, is entitled Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy by Joseph McBride. McBride is the author of over twenty books, mainly on films, but he followed the JFK case for decades and, in 2013, wrote Into the Nightmare, which broke new ground in the murder of policeman J. D. Tippit. Since See No Evil came first, we will deal with the DeBrosse tome before McBride’s.

    When Jim DeBrosse was eleven years old, he watched Jack Ruby murder Lee Oswald live on network television. This shocking event prompted his father to say that Oswald’s murder was a sign of someone silencing him in order to cover up the Kennedy assassination. The author never forgot that warning about the case.

    Jim assumed a professional life as a newspaper reporter. He ended up spending over thirty years in the field. In 1991, he watched Oliver Stone’s film JFK. The film struck him as being both courageous and thought provoking. (DeBrosse, p. 1, all references to e book version of the book.) In retrospect, he noted something odd: in nearly 30 years, virtually no other working American reporter had yet done what Stone did. That is expose all the problems with the Warren Commission Report. The only exceptions would be Jim Marrs and Earl Golz. (Jerry Policoff did not make his living as a journalist, but as an advertising salesman.) But yet, Stone would cause at least two journalists, David Talbot and Jeff Morley, to make full scale inquiries into the JFK case. And even in the face of all the new evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board, which Stone’s film helped create, the MSM has still not adjusted its paradigm on the case. (DeBrosse, p. 49) For example, Doug Horne’s milestone essay on two Kennedy brain examinations got only a couple of stories in the media. (Ibid, p. 39)

    About two decades after Stone debuted his film, DeBrosse retired from the Dayton Daily News in order to attain a doctoral degree in journalism. Taking the advice of a friend, he eventually decided to write his thesis on this topic: how the media reacted, and continues to react, to the JFK case. The result ended up being the book under discussion, See No Evil.

    In this critic’s view, there are three main parts to the work. The first is termed by the author a content analysis of things like book reviews, news stories, and broadcasts dealing with the JFK assassination. The second deals with the rather extreme measures that establishment journalists—of both left, middle and right—have gone to shove the JFK case off the table. The third subject the author deals with is Kennedy’s Middle East policy and how it was irrevocably altered by Lyndon Johnson—and others who came after him.

    I have never seen the first subject, content analysis, done with the rigor and precision as DeBrosse does it. The author sectioned off the years 1988–2013 and then searched Lexis/Nexis in order to find rubrics like book reviews of the JFK case. One of the things he discovered was that pro-Warren Commission books are five times more likely to be reviewed than anti-Commission books. (DeBrosse, pp. 50–51) And of those reviews, about 65% of the former were positive, while over 90% of the latter were negative. That does not sound like a random pattern, does it? To give one example of why it doesn’t: Jeff Morley was an MSM journalist for over 20 years, writing for publications like The New Republic, The Nation, and The Washington Post. Yet the author could not find an MSM review of his Our Man in Mexico, the only biography about Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City in 1963. (Ibid, p. 52)

    Under every rubric the author searched for, published news stories, TV broadcasts, TV stories on JFK theories etc., this statistic held strongly. For example, the ratio in news stories was 3–1 in favor of pro Commission stories. (Ibid, p. 53) In TV news broadcasts, it was 2–1. DeBrosse also notes that the major networks were worse than the cable channels.

    Addressing the two-week period in 2017, when President Donald Trump tweeted about releasing the last of the classified JFK documents, the author notes who the main televised interview subjects were. Philip Shenon made 23 appearances, Larry Sabato did 17, and Gerald Posner did 16. There was simply no balance, as Jeff Morley did 4 and John Newman did 1. (Ibid, p. 66)

    With this kind of media bias, why does most of the public still think Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy? One of the most common techniques used to explain that divergence is the mantra that the reason the public does not buy the Warren Report is because Americans cannot accept the notion that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could end the life of someone as glamourous and powerful as President Kennedy. DeBrosse found this idea cited over 20 times in his studied time frame. (Ibid, p. 69)

    The other main concept used to dismiss the critics was proffered by the late Peter Jennings in his 2003 ABC special: “In all these years there hasn’t been a single piece of credible evidence to prove a conspiracy.” (Ibid) Bob Schieffer of CBS did the same, when he declared unilaterally that the evidence is overwhelming that Oswald acted alone. Schieffer was one of the first to introduce Philip Shenon to a large broadcast audience. (Ibid, pp. 64–65). How extreme is this bias? Larry Sabato’s book, The Kennedy Half Century—which upholds the orthodoxy on the case—was attacked by The Washington Post for simply acknowledging the fact that many people do believe there was a conspiracy and explaining some of the reasons for that belief. (Ibid, p. 59) That is how strict the gatekeeping is on the subject. Perhaps the best quote in the book on this innate bias is from the late Tom Wicker of The New York Times. He once said that he declined to accept evidence of a second gunman, but he admitted he had not studied the exhibits and testimony in the Commission volumes. Why had he not done so? “It would have taken too long and I had a deadline.” (Ibid, p. 75) Dan Rather actually changed his location in Dallas in order to double endorse the Warren Report. First, he said he heard no shots even though he was 30 yards from the grassy Knoll. On the 50th anniversary, he now said he actually ran up the Grassy Knoll and did not see anyone there. How he could forget doing something like the first time around is sort of inexplicable. (Ibid, p. 55)

    DeBrosse also notes that the books backing the Commission usually have much more established publishers than those attacking it. But even when a medium sized house like Bloomsbury Press published Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, they found the large market interviews they had lined up disappeared once hosts learned that the book was not just about the Bush family, but about George H. W. Bush’s possible role in the JFK assassination. (Ibid, pp. 58–59)

    The author uses an astute observation from the late Jerry Policoff in order to sum up why the cards in the JFK deck are rigged:

    When you talk about the Kennedy assassination, you’re talking about America’s basic institutions. And the fact is, the U.S. corporate media sees its role as protecting American institutions, and that’s what this case is all about. (Ibid, p. 76)

    The last part of the book deals with a subject that this reviewer has been exploring for several years, that is, Kennedy’s foreign policy in places outside of Vietnam and Cuba. In this instance, DeBrosse brings up the Middle East. It is notable in this regard that the author relates a communication made to him by Noam Chomsky.

    There is a significant question about the JFK assassination: was it a high level plot with policy implications? That’s quite important, and very much worth investigating. I’ve written about it extensively, reviewing all of the relevant documentation. The conclusion is clear, unusually clear for a historical event: No. (Ibid, p. 15)

    The year of this communication was 2014. Note the implication: Chomsky read all of the 2 million declassified pages of documents declassified by the ARRB. Besides that obvious shortcoming, he ignored the books by other scholars on this very subject. For example, the work by Robert Rakove in Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World (2013), by Philip Muehlenbeck in Betting on the Africans (2014), Bradley Simpson in Economists with Guns (2010), not to mention the previous work of Richard Mahoney in JFK: Ordeal in Africa (1989). They all strongly disagreed with him and they proved that such policy changes did occur.

    Concerning the Middle East, what happened there under Kennedy, versus what occurred both before and after, is easily discernible to real historians like Rakove and Muehlenbeck and they address it at length. I have used their work to write about this important topic. (Click here for details) Plain and simple: Kennedy was trying to forge a relationship with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Nasser was the single most important Arab leader, a man who believed in pan-Arabism and also that the oil in the Middle East belonged to all the Arabs. Nasser had been cut off by John Foster Dulles after the Suez Crisis. In fact, Foster Dulles tried to court Saudi Arabia in order to counter Nasser, who he feared as becoming too powerful, as did the Israelis.

    But Kennedy saw Nasser as a bridge to modernize and Westernize the Arab countries and pull them away from Islamic fundamentalism and the Muslim Brotherhood. (Click here to understand this point) The Israelis feared the possibility that Nasser could actually forge a Middle East confederation which would literally surround their country. Saudi Arabia feared that Nasser could overthrow their monarchy and nationalize their oil wells.

    There were two other complicating factors: the Israeli covert project to build an atomic reactor at Dimona and Kennedy’s insistence on bringing back the United Nations plan to give Palestinians the right of return and repatriation after the Nakba. The Israelis lied to Kennedy about Dimona, saying it was designed for peaceful purposes. It was not. And when Kennedy discovered this, he became the first and only president to threaten to pull funding for Israel unless he got biannual inspections of the reactor. (DeBrosse, p. 141) This standoff likely led to the resignation of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in late June of 1963.

    The two issues were unresolved at the time of JFK’s death, but as DeBrosse notes, Kennedy’s policy was clearly reversed by Lyndon Johnson, who obviously favored Israel and did not at all care for Nasser. Thus, the balance in the area that Kennedy had sought was lost. To give one example, from 1949–64, America gave Israel 27.4 million in military aid. From 1964–68 that number quintupled to 134.9 million and it changed to include offensive weaponry. (Ibid, p. 146) I don’t go as far as the author does in his appraisal of this issue. For example, I give little credence to the work of Michael Collins Piper, but DeBrosse at least brings up the important topic of Kennedy’s Middle East policy, which has been all but ignored in the critical community. It should be brought up since Kennedy’s policy there had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It had everything to do with nuclear non-proliferation, the search for rights for the Palestinians, and the attempt to mitigate the movement toward Islamic fundamentalism. In this author’s view—and the view of many others—what has happened in the Middle East since has been pretty much a debacle.

    In sum, this is an interesting and, in some ways, a unique book. It’s a coruscating look at an unsightly problem, namely the refusal of the MSM to address the assassination of President Kennedy in any honest way. And to acknowledge what occurred as a result of his murder.

  • James Kirchick and his JFK Assassination Gurus

    James Kirchick and his JFK Assassination Gurus

    In a previous essay, I tried to summarize the worldwide reaction to Oliver Stone’s documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. (Click here) By far, it is the widest and strongest reaction to any documentary ever made on the JFK case. The fact that it created such a hubbub clearly disturbed certain past critics of Stone, for example, Noam Chomsky and Gerald Posner. It also disturbed certain mainstays of the MSM, like Tim Weiner and Max Boot. I ended that discussion with what may be the worst outburst about the documentary yet, the one by James Kirchick at the digital zine Air Mail.

    As I noted in that overall review, it’s clear that none of these writers wish to deal with the specific points of new evidence made possible by the Assassination Records Review Board in the film. This evidence had never been presented to a worldwide audience in broadcast form. Weiner, Boot, Chomsky, Posner, and Kirchick never even mentioned that body. Yet this was the reason for the making of the documentary! Which is why it features interviews with three employees of the Board: Chairman John Tunheim, Deputy Chair Tom Samoluk, and Military Records analyst Doug Horne.

    Weiner and Kirchick dodged the problem of confronting the declassified evidence in the film by using two escape routes. First, they ignored the matters addressed, like official photographer John Stringer denying he took the photos of Kennedy’s brain at the National Archives. The second means of escape was to use discredited writers to smear the documentary and not reveal why they had earned derision in the critical community.

    As I noted at length, both Weiner and Kirchick utilized the discredited work of Max Holland to somehow impute that JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass was based on some sort of KGB disinformation campaign. This is so stupid it is actually ludicrous and I showed why. (For a lengthier reply, click here)

    The real reasons that New Orleans DA Jim Garrison formed his ideas about Oswald as an intelligence agent were his Russian language test in the service—suggesting he was being groomed as a false defector—and the address stamped on his New Orleans pro-Castro flyers, which was 544 Camp Street. (See Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins, pp. 22, 24) This had been the home of both the CIA’s Cuban Revolutionary Council and the FBI/CIA connected Guy Banister, who had been involved in both the Bay of Pigs project and Operation Mongoose. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 25–28) In his book, the DA clearly depicts both these events occurring way before the arrest of Clay Shaw who, as Bill Davy notes in his volume, Garrison had first called in for questioning in December of 1966. All of these events—the discovery of the Russian test, Garrison visiting 544 Camp Street, the suspicions about Shaw—occurred months before the Paese Sera article about Permindex, and Shaw’s service on the board, was published in Italy. Garrison was correct on his ideas about Bansiter, 544 Camp Street, and Oswald. In JFK Revisited, we have Jeff Morley and John Newman discuss the attempts by the CIA and FBI to disguise the provocative activities going on in New Orleans that summer. Holland’s redbaiting dodge of this evidence shows another reason why he is not credible inside the JFK critical community. But that does not disqualify him from being used in moments of desperation by the MSM.

    Another discredited source, used especially by James Kirchick, was Fred Litwin. Litwin has been taken over the coals so many times it’s kind of embarrassing, but somehow, with a straight face, Kirchick trotted him out. Kirchick then criticized JFK Revisited for something that is not in the film , namely the homosexuality of Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. What we did was show the connections of these men to the CIA and how Shaw lied about that connection. This Kirchick diversion is inherited from Litwin (and his partner Alecia Long). And, like Weiner with Holland, Kirchick ignored past demolitions of Litwin that clearly show he is not credible on the facts of the case. (Click here for one and here for another)

    This practice of using sources with serious journalistic and academic liabilities would not be allowed in any advanced historical studies or journalism class. But ever since the MSM decided to side with the Warren Commission back in 1964 and when CBS violated all of its Standards and Practices for its 1967 four part special, it’s par for the course in the JFK case. (Click here for that CBS story)

    For Kirchick to use Litwin as a source is simply inexcusable for any journalist or historian. In addition to the exposures noted above, this author has shown in detail why the Canadian alt/right media maestro should never enter into any debate on the subject. (Click here and here and here and here and here)

    Litwin’s self-admitted role model is the rather lamentable David Horowitz. Litwin tries to run away from this fact today, but it is there to see in his first book, Conservative Confidential. Does Kirchick know this? Would it matter?

    In the essays I noted above, we can see the factual havoc that Litwin’s admiration for Horowitz leads to. Some examples among a universe of them:

    1. Quoting Sylvia Meagher, Litwin writes that Kennedy’s motorcade route was not altered.

    This has been disproven by Vince Palamara in his book Survivor’s Guilt. (pp. 104–05)

    1. Litwin writes that the motorcade had to turn on Elm Street to take an exit on to the Stemmons Freeway which would take it to the Trade Mart.

    This was disproven by both Palamara and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. (HSCA, Volume 11, p. 522; Palamara, p. 109)

    1. In his first book on the JFK case, Litwin wrote that Jim DiEugenio had no testimony or paperwork to prove fraud with CE 399, and its chain of custody can be proven.

    This is not just false but it’s a case of Litwin practicing libel, since he had my book right in front of him which showed, with testimony and paperwork, the opposite. (The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today pp.89–92, 247–49)

    1. Litwin writes that Clay Shaw’s lawyers got no help from the CIA or FBI.

    This was completely disproven by the ARRB declassifications. Shaw’s lawyers lied about this until the end of their lives. (See James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 264–65, 269–83, 293, 294)

    1. In his book on Jim Garrison, Litwin features a picture of Harry Connick Sr., the DA who succeeded Jim Garrison and he says he used him as a source.

    What Litwin leaves out is shocking. According to investigator Gary Raymond, Connick failed to indict Father Dino Cinel for child abuse when Gary had the evidence to do so. Gary had to go to the media to force Connick to act. (Probe Magazine Vol. 2 No. 5)

    1. Litwin praised Hugh Aynseworth in the most fulsome terms for his work on the JFK case in his book on Jim Garrison.

    Aynseworth is a proven FBI informant. According to Joan Mellen Aynesworth tried to bribe Shaw trial witness John Manchester with a CIA job. Sheriff Manchester replied, “I advise you leave the area, otherwise, I’ll cut you a new asshole.” (Destiny Betrayed, pp. 249–55)

    1. In his chapter on the Clay Shaw trial in his Garrison book, Litwin never mentioned the testimony of Kennedy autopsy physician Pierre Finck.

    This is astonishing, because, for the first time, Finck’s testimony showed that Kennedy’s autopsy was not controlled by the pathologists, but by the military men there in the gallery, who guided them in doing what some have called the worst autopsy in history. (Ibid, pp. 300–04)

    1. Litwin implies that Garrison was allowed to pick his own grand juries.

    More nonsense. As anyone can find out by reading a law journal, in Louisiana grand juries are chosen from voter rolls. (Louisiana Law Review Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 682)

    1. In his book Conservative Confidential, Litwin attempts to hold up as praiseworthy the reactions of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and President George W. Bush, after the 9–11 attacks.

    That book was published in 2015. By this time, everyone knew that Giuliani had placed the city’s emergency response headquarters in WTC Building 7, and that W’s reason for the Iraq invasion, WMD, was false. Yet 650,000 innocent Iraqis had died because of that lie.

    1. Perhaps the worst thing that Litwin ever penned was in his first JFK book. There he wrote that the authors of the Warren Report were honorable men who conducted an honest investigation.

    In this day and age to write or imply that the likes of John McCloy, Allen Dulles, Jerry Ford, and J. Edgar Hoover were honorable men is just this side of science fiction. For one example, just read Kai Bird’s book on McCloy. Anyone who could help the Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie escape to South America and then deny it or never feel any remorse for his pushing through the Japanese internment in World War II, that person is anything but honorable. And therefore would have little difficulty in covering up the death of President Kennedy.

    This could go to an endless length. That is how bad a writer and scholar Litwin is, but evidently Kirchick did not give a damn about Litwin’s credibility. In fact, Kirchick even threw Joe Rogan under the bus for having Oliver Stone on his show. Stone did not say one thing about CV 19 while he was on the program.

    When one understands all that, plus the fact that JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass does not deal with anyone’s sexuality, one begins to understand what Kirchick is up to and why he borrows from Litwin. By creating a smoke and mirrors distraction, Kirchick can sidestep what does exist in the film. That is the revelations of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) which completely overturn the verdict of the Warren Commission. The film leaves no doubt that the Commission was wrong in its rogue prosecution of Oswald. A prosecution which did not even grant the defendant a lawyer. What the film deals with are the forensic facts of the JFK case, for example, Kennedy’s autopsy and the ballistics evidence, which is how one determines guilt in a homicide. As former prosecutor Bob Tanenbaum says in the film, because of all the problems with the evidence, one could not convict Oswald in any court in America.

    The murder of President Kennedy had a tremendous impact on the course of history, both in the USA and abroad. As we show in this film—and will show even more completely in the four-hour version, Destiny Betrayed—Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his murder. We present evidence that Lyndon Johnson knew this and he consciously reversed Kennedy’s policy. LBJ then lied about what he had done. In the four-hour version, we make it clear through Professor Bradley Simpson and author Lisa Pease that Johnson also reversed Kennedy’s policy of friendship and aid to President Sukarno of Indonesia.

    Those two Johnson reversals had horrendous effects. The latest tallies of total dead in Vietnam under American influence are at around 3.8 million. (See British Medical Journal 2008 study by Ziad Obermeyer) If one throws in the genocide that took place in Cambodia due to Richard Nixon’s invasion of the country, which one must, you can add in about 2 million. (Click here for details) The minimum who perished during the massacre of the PKI in Indonesia under Suharto is pegged at 500,000. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 217). JFK Revisited: Destiny Betrayed shows with authority that none of this would have happened under Kennedy.

    Most people would find this information rather interesting. James Kirchick did not. He chose to write about an issue not in the film. It is then fair to characterize his article as a distraction from these important, some would say, epochal matters.

    But this is what one expects from the MSM on the Kennedy case. About three months after the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission were published, in March of 1965, the first combat troops landed in Vietnam. By the end of the year, there were 170,000 of them in theater.

    Under President Kennedy, there were none.

    That is a pretty hefty issue to sidestep, but Kirchick does so with a completeness that is astonishing.

    Post Script: I now extend to Kirchick the same offer I did to another unfounded critic of the documentary, namely Gerald Posner. I will offer to debate Mr. Kirchick at any venue in Los Angeles or San Francisco on the merits of the JFK case, the Warren Report, or either version of Oliver Stone’s documentary. We can arrange for the sponsors, the format, and recording apparatus. He can even bring Tim Wiener. I await his reply.