Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: NIXON

  • Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 2

    Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 2

    IV

    But as bad as all the above is, its not the worst part of this awful book. No, the worst part is when Wallace tries to show that the Kennedy campaign stole the 1960 election.  To do this, he does something I thought no credible author would ever do again. He trots out Judy Exner and Sy Hersh. Again, can the man be for real?  He must be the only reporter in America who is not aware that the book he is using, Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, was discredited before it was even published.

    Hersh famously fell for a phony trust that was allegedly set up between the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe by her attorney Aaron Frosch. Hersh was told, not once, but twice that the signatures were faked.  (For an analysis of this, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/sy-hersh-falls-on-his-face-again-and-again-and-again) When experts in forgeries finally examined the papers, they proved to be forged in every way. The question later became why did Hersh, or his publisher, not do an examination first?

    But then Hersh used Exner and, as one will read above and below, that story also blew up in his face. Exner—who we will deal with soon– had now changed her story a second time.  She now said she was knowingly exchanging messages between John Kennedy and Sam Giancana. Unlike Wallace, Hersh realized Exner’s ever evolving story had credibility problems.  So Hersh now said that there was a witness to her messenger mission, namely Martin Underwood, a political operative for Mayor Richard Daley. (Hersh, pp. 304-305) 

    Like the Monroe trust BS, this also exploded in Hersh’s face.  Because when Underwood was examined under oath by the Assassination Records Review Board, he denied he did any such thing. (ARRB Final Report, p. 136) But incredibly, Wallace alludes to that part of the story again here.  For whatever reason, he does not name Underwood. (Wallace, p. 113)

    Now, still going with “pie on his face” Hersh, Wallace writes that Joseph Kennedy was involved in bootlegging operations with organized crime during Prohibition. This was disproved by author Daniel Okrent in his fine book on the era titled Last Call.  Okrent went through nearly 900 pages of FBI documents on Joe Kennedy.  These were done to clear him for the many positions he served on in government. Okrent found not one page or source who said a word about any such involvement. Joe Kennedy biographer David Nasaw discovered the same for his book, The Patriarch. But Nasaw, who had unprecedented access to Joe Kennedy’s files, also went over how Joe got so very rich. It was through stocks, real estate and, above all, the film business. As Okrent notes in his book, this mob mythology was begun in the sixties by gangsters who clearly had an agenda to smear JFK and RFK since they had made their lives so troublesome with their war against the Mob.

    Another point that Wallace sidesteps is this.  As FBI agent William Roemer explained in his book, Man Against the Mob, the Bureau had total surveillance on Giancana.  This included following him everywhere he went and having electronic wires on four dwellings that he did his business in. In Roemer’s 400 page book one will read no reference on tape to any arrangement with Joe Kennedy or the election.  Which is pretty convincing that it never happened.

    But for me, there is something even more convincing.  That is the work of professor John Binder. His landmark article “Organized Crime and the 1960 Presidential Election” first appeared in 2007 at Public Choice; it has been preserved at Research Gate. In a statistical study, Binder examined the returns for what were considered the 5 Chicago Outfit controlled wards. He discovered that there was no indication that the voting trends in those wards went up, and in some cases they declined. He also makes short work of the idea that the outfit could influence the Teamsters in that election. (Wallace, p. 214) Since Jimmy Hoffa depised the Kennedys and would not trust them with a tennis ball. After all they had already gotten rid of Hoffa’ predecessor Dave Beck.

    Thus Binder deduces that “union members in states where the Outfit operated voted less heavily Democratic than usual and therefore against JFK.” Binder concluded his essay by saying that “much of what has been written about the Outfit, the 1960 presidential  election and other events involving  the Kennedy family appears to  be historical myth”. (Here is a link to this fascinating article https://themobmuseum.org/blog/did-the-chicago-outfit-elect-john-f-kennedy-president/) 

    I should add one concluding note about Sy Hersh and his JFK book: Not even the MSM supported it. And  in most cases they savaged it. The most brutal and thorough review was composed by Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books on December 18, 1997. That memorable critique closed by saying it was an odd experience watching a once valued reporter destroy his reputation in a mad, and ultimately failed, mission to tear down President Kennedy–while simultaneously imploding himself. Somehow Chris Wallace missed that.

    V

    What Wallace does in trying to revive the dead corpse of Judy Exner is something I don’t even think magician David Copperfield would attempt.

    Exner first surfaced into the American consciousness for the Church Committee in 1975. At that time—and this is key– she stated that she wanted to head off wild-eyed speculation that she had ever discussed her relationships with either Sam Giancana or Johnny Roselli with John Kennedy.  She also said she knew nothing about the CIA attempts to neutralize Castro, and they were never brought up with the president.  Also, the president did not know she was seeing Giancana and Roselli. (NY Times 12/18/75, article by John Crewdson)

    She called a press conference in San Diego to say that she wanted to clear her name so as not to be implicated in “these bizarre assassination conspiracies.”  She also added that she “had no wish to sell the rest of her story to book publishers or to the news media.” (ibid) Although there were phone calls from Exner to the White House from California, no notations recorded her as a visitor to the Oval Office. (ibid). Evelyn Lincoln said the same. 

    It was revealed that when Hoover informed the White Hose of who she was, the communications stopped after March 22,1962. (Ibid)

    What is exceptional about this initial summary is that almost all of it will be radically altered over time.  And Wallace does not tell the reader about any of the revisions. She did take part in the writing of a book and Wallace quotes from it.  But that book was clearly a team operation out of agent Scott Meredith’s office with prolific Mafia writer Ovid DeMaris as co- writer.  It is important to note that DeMaris was also a big fan of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and a Warren Commission backer. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 330-31). There is a salacious and unbelievable  scene in My Story placed at the Democratic Convention of 1960, one which has all the earmarks of being a fabrication. And unsurprisingly, Wallace repeats it here. (Wallace pp. 169-70; DiEugenio and Pease, pp. 332-33)       

    Not only does Wallace not tell the reader that Exner altered her story, he does not even note when it happened. It was for the February 29, 1988 issue of Peoplemagazine. And they were radical alterations. She reversed herself on everything she said in 1975. She now stated that she was seeing Giancana at Kennedy’s bidding! But further that she helped arrange meetings between Kennedy and Giancana and Kennedy and Roselli,  some of which took place at the White House!  (ibid, p. 333) If one reads the two best biographers on those two gangsters, William Brashler and Lee Server respectively, nothing like this ever came close to happening. And the idea it would happen with Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General is pure science-fiction. Exner was selling whoppers, and she was being paid tens of thousands to do so. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 334)

    In her new and modified version, the reasons for these newly remembered meetings is in  order to cinch elections and to liquidate Castro. She specifically mentioned West Virginia at that time. Which Wallace agrees with.  Again, this shows  how poor his research is. Dan Fleming wrote a good book about that primary.  He notes that no subsequent inquiry—by the FBI, the state Attorney General, or by Senator Barry Goldwater—ever turned up any evidence of skullduggery that influenced the outcome of the election. (Fleming, Kennedy vs Humphrey: West Virginia 1960, pp. 107-12)  And unlike what Wallace tries to insinuate, Fleming interviewed literally scores of people throughout the state. He could not find any trace of any underworld figure on the ground during that primary.

    To show the reader just how bad Countdown 1960 is, Wallace mentions union leader Raymond Chafin, but he does so through author Laurence Leamer.  As far as I could detect, he does not refer to Chafin’s book Just Good Politics. Therefore Wallace twists the story of the Kennedy campaign contribution to Chafin for a get out the vote effort. Chafin originally backed Hubert Humphrey in that primary. Kennedy asked to meet with him and he told him that if he won, and then won the White House, he would give him even more than Humphrey had promised. Chafin changed his mind and asked for $3,500 to get out the vote.  Kennedy’s team misconstrued this and gave him $35.000, which he spent days delivering to other counties in the state.

    But that is not the end of the story.  Because Kennedy made good on his promise.  He summoned him to the White House after his inauguration. He was told he had 15 minutes with the president.  Kennedy countered and said Chafin would have all the time he needed.  At the end of the book, Chafin said that Kennedy ended up doing more for West Virginia than any previous president. That is quite a lot for Wallace to leave out of the story.

    In other words, Exner’s story about West Virginia is, to say the least, unfounded. But again, what Wallace leaves out is that Exner added to her story even further.  Almost ten years later, for Vanity Fair, she now said that JFK had impregnated her and she had an abortion.  Again, this is something she said the opposite of in her book. There she literally said “I didn’t have an abortion.” (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 336)

    But she then changed her story again for Hersh. For People, back in 1988, she said she was not really sure what was in the satchel that JFK gave her. Now it became 250,000 dollars in hundred dollar bills and the message was the elimination of Castro. (Hersh, pp. 303-07). To say that Exner changed her story is much too mild.  She has done a somersault from her original statements.  And the part about the elimination of Castro is an outright lie.  Because the declassified Inspector General Report on the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro specifically says that no president had any knowledge of them.  (Pp. 132-33)

    There is another outright lie that Exner told.  In Hersh’s book she told him that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy asked, “Are you still comfortable doing this. We want you to let us know if you don’t want to.” (Hersh, p. 308). Again, RFK is the man who had wall to wall surveillance on Giancana through both the FBI and the Justice Department. So Bobby was going to give Hoover bribery information on a mobster through the White House?  Who could believe this? 

    But Exner herself contradicted this.  In an interview she did with Larry King in 1992, she said that she never even talked to Bobby, perhaps in passing at a rally in Los Angeles.  In other words, Exner told so many lies she could not keep track of them. And this is the kind of witness that Wallace bases his book upon.  

    I could go on and on.  For example Wallace mentions the case of Florence Kater saying she had a picture of JFK leaving a girlfriend’s house at night.  The picture is not clear as to who the man is.  But Wallace attacks Kennedy for harshly scolding Kater about it in a threatening manner.  What Wallace does not reveal is this: Kater was blackmailing Kennedy.  She wanted a Modigliani painting.

    VI

    We now come to the reason for the book.  Which the author admits in his Acknowledgments. (p. 397). He says that during the January 6th Insurrection he was so disturbed  that he thought back to the elections he had covered.  He then writes that 2020 shattered the belief in acknowledging a winner and loser in a presidential campaign.  

    Wallace then makes a quantum leap in time.  He says that thinking about that day somehow reminded him of the election of 1960.  There is a slight problem here.  Wallace did not cover that election.  In fact, he was only 13 years old.  So, like much of the book, this simply does not wash. And if it did remind him of any election he covered, it should have been the 2000 election in Florida and the whole Bush v Gore phony decision commandeered by Justice Antonin Scalia and the Supreme Court. Where they halted the recount certified by the state and stopped the probability of Vice President Al Gore from winning the election.  Which it appeared he would have done since he was gaining on George W. Bush very quickly.  

    Besides the Supreme Court and its phony decision, we know that Roger Stone created a mini riot during a recount at the Steven B. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. This was later named the Brooks Brothers riot since it was made up of Republican staffers disguised as local residents. As Chris Lehmann noted in The Nation, it was this ersatz local riot that outlined the blue print for Trump’s insurrection. (August 4, 2022) Roger Stone had been a dirty tricks impresario under Richard Nixon. In fact Stone wore a Nixon tattoo on his back. He then moved into the orbit of Donald Trump.  Stone was then part of the Stop the Steal demonstrations in Washington on the eve of the Insurrection.

    As Lehmann notes, the difference between the two is that the Florida riot worked.  That particular recount was halted and then the Supreme Court sealed the deal for the disastrous reign of George W. Bush. Which, among other things, included the deaths of about 650,000 civilians in Iraq. Even William Kristol later said that the Brooks Brothers riot let loose a buried trait in the GOP that later became dominant. (ibid)

    Also, many observers think that the whole mythology about the corruption in West Virginia began with Nixon’s operatives late in the general election.  When it looked like Nixon had lost his lead, they planted a story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch to this effect.

    So 2000 is the proper precedent for the Insurrection. Not a pile of mythology created after the fact by gangsters, Judy Exner and Sy Hersh. Wallace does not want to go there for obvious employment reasons. But also because he admits he favored Nixon in 1960. (Wallace, p. 397). He clearly did not like Kennedy.  And that carried forward to this book.  Any reporter who would stoop to using Exner and Hersh to trash JFK is too biased to be trusted.

    The best way to close this review it to quote Wallace from the MSNBC show The Beat. On October 9th, he commented on the Fox defamation lawsuit over the 2020 election. He said, “There ought to be a price to pay when you don’t tell the truth.”

    As detailed above, you just paid it Chris.

  • Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 1

    Review of Countdown 1960 – Part 1

    Whenever one thinks that the MSM cannot get any worse, or purposefully bad on the subject of John Kennedy or his assassination, another reminder arrives showing they can.  The latest example of this is Chris Wallace’s Countdown 1960.  This book, by former Fox reporter turned CNN employee Chris Wallace, is ostensibly about the race for the presidency in 1960.  I say ostensibly because anyone who knows the subject will be able to figure out what this book is really about.  And, in fact, Wallace pretty much confesses to his real intent in the acknowledgements section of the book.  That section is usually included in the front of a volume, but here its at the end. I will get to why I think that is so later.  

    I

    Like almost every writer who wants to exalt his work on this subject, Wallace begins by saying that the primary system of electing party nominees for the presidency was somehow a novelty in 1960.  And Kennedy decided to use it to original effect.  This is simply not the case. The primary system was really invented during the Progressive Era, but the first one was held before that, in 1901 in Florida. And just a few years later, 12 states were conducting them. By 1910, the practice of holding state elected delegates to cast ballots for the party winner at the convention was established. And, in fact, there was a memorable donnybrook in 1912 during the primary season between challengers Robert La Follette, Teddy Roosevelt and incumbent president William Howard Taft. And there was another memorable race as recently as 1952 between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft.

    For me, the only notable differences in 1960 were 1.) The use of television, and 2.) The debates between Kennedy and Nixon. But the first would have happened anyway no matter who the candidates were.  It was a matter of the creeping reach and power of the broadcast media.  As for the second, this did not really establish a precedent. Because the next presidential debate did not occur until 1976. So right out of the gate, on page 3 to be exact, it can be said that Wallace is aggrandizing his subject. (As later revealed, this ties into his not so hidden agenda.)

    Another disturbing aspect of the book is the fact that Wallace and his researchers, Mitch Weiss and Lori Crim, did not seem to me to do a lot of genuine research.  In looking at the book’s reference notes, almost every one of them is to a prior book, newspaper article or periodical.  There is little that I would call new or original.  And, as I will explain later, some of the sources that Wallace uses are quite dubious; or as we shall see, in some instances, even worse than that.  These factors combine to make the book not just rather superfluous, but questionable at its foundations.

    One of the problematic areas of the book is that  very early Nixon is portrayed as an oracle on foreign policy. (p. 14) John Kennedy is portrayed as something of a cliché.  That is, the usual rich, handsome playboy portrait. (p. 17)  For example, Wallace begins by saying that Kennedy started running for the presidency in 1957, a thesis with which I would tend to disagree. (p. 2)  But if you are going to postulate such, how can any honest and objective author ignore Senator Kennedy’s great Algeria speech? Because it was made in that year. 

    Why is this both important and revelatory? There are two reasons why. First, that speech really put Kennedy on the national map. As Richard Mahoney noted, it provoked a firestorm of newspaper and periodical comments and editorials from all over the country. (JFK: Ordeal in Africa, pp. 14-16; see also, James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition,  pp. 25-28) That national furor ended up placing Kennedy on the cover of Time magazine, with the inside article titled “Man out Front”.  So how can that not be related to Wallace’s subject?

    The reason I think he does not include it is because that speech was a specific attack on President Eisenhower, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and, most relevant to Wallace’s book, on Vice President Richard Nixon. It assaulted the entire basis of their Cold War foreign policy in the Third World. Kennedy was essentially saying that America should not be backing European colonialism. We should be on the side of nationalism and independence in places like Algeria. And this was not just a matter of American idealism, but one of practicality.  He invoked what had happened three years earlier at Dien Bien Phu, where we had first backed the French empire–and it ended up in disaster. He proclaimed that what we should be doing now is assisting France to the negotiating table, in order to save that nation from civil war.  But we also should be working to free Africa. (See the anthology The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 65-81) 

    If one does not refer to this speech, or the trail that led Kennedy to make it, then yes, one can portray the senator as an empty Savile Row suit and Nixon as the experienced sagacious foreign policy maven. But that is simply not being accurate on the facts of the matter.  As John T. Shaw commented in JFK in the Senate, that speech made Kennedy the new voice of the Democratic party on foreign policy.  Since it challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of Eisenhower and Nixon. As Monice Wiesak wrote, this speech also made Kennedy the defacto ambassador to Africa. Because African dignitaries now began to follow him in the press and visit his office. (America’s Last President, p. 12)

    To ignore all of this is to shrink Kennedy and exalt Nixon.  If there is an historical figure who should not be exalted, it is Richard Nixon.  Because it was this Cold War monomania that first, got us into Vietnam, and then, from 1968 onward, kept us there. Until it became even more of a debacle than it had been under the French.

    II

    But there is another way that Wallace exalts Nixon. This is by minimizing the tactics he used to defeat, first Jerry Voorhees for a congressional seat, and then Helen Gahagan Douglas in a race for the senate. The latter is usually considered one of the dirtiest and most unscrupulous political races in American history. 

    Wallace spends all of one paragraph on it. (pp. 10-11)

    Which is really kind of startling.  Because illustrious author Greg Mitchell wrote a milestone book on that campaign in 1998.  It was titled Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady.  I could find no reference to that book in Wallace’s references.  In that campaign, Nixon’s team actually accused his opponent of being a conduit for Stalin. (Mitchell, p. 209) As Mitchell notes, up until that time, candidates who made anti-communism their focus usually lost.  That was not the case here. Nixon literally demagogued the issue to an almost pathological extent. As Mitchell notes:

    Republican and Democratic leaders alike interpreted the outcome as a victory for McCarthyism and a call for a dramatic surge in military spending…. Red baiting would haunt America for years, the so called national security state would evolve and endure and candidates would run and win on anti-Sovietism for decades. (ibid, xix)

    Nixon’s win seemed to demonstrate the political power of McCarthyism, which Senator Joe McCarthy had begun that same year with his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. But as Mitchell proves in his first chapter, McCarthy’s speech drew heavily on the actual words of Congressman Nixon. As with Nixon, it was McCarthy’s aim to make anti-communism a political issue, to portray Democrats as not just soft on communism—Nixon actually tried this with President Truman– but in some cases as commie sympathizers. (This is one reason why Kennedy’s Algeria speech hit home, because it broke through all that Cold War boilerplate with facts and realism.)

    As Mitchell reveals—and contrary to what Wallace implies–Nixon had a lot of money in order to smear Douglas. Not only did he get large corporate contributions, but both the LA Times and the Hearst newspapers backed him. Along with Hollywood bigwigs like Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hughes, Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, Louis Mayer, Anne Baxter, John Wayne and Rosalind Russell. (Daily Beast, article by Sally Denton, November 16, 2009) Nixon also used anti-Semitism, since Douglas’ husband was Jewish. Nixon’s campaign made anonymous phone calls saying, “Did you know that she’s married to a Jew?” (ibid) But in addition to anti-Semitism, the campaign utilized racism. In the last days, thousands of postcards were mailed to white voters in suburbs, and into northern California. That postcard was emblazoned with the phony title—note the gender– “Communist League of Negro Women.”  The message was “Vote for Helen for senator.  We are with her 100%.” (ibid). Can a campaign get any more scurrilous than that? This is why Nixon had such a deservedly wretched reputation as a political hatchet man. Which somehow, and for whatever reason, Wallace wants the reader to forget.

     Nixon lied about what his agenda was both before and after this ugly race. Before it started he said–rather satirically in retrospect–there would be “no name-calling, no smears, no misrepresentations in this campaign.” (Ingrid Scobie, “Douglas v. Nixon”, History Today, November, 1992) And later, he downplayed his tactics for the campaign.  One reason the race had a lasting impact is that Nixon’s manager, the odious Murray Chotiner, became a tutor to the likes of later GOP advisors Karl Rove and Lee Atwater. 

    To relegate all this–and much more–to a single paragraph is just inexcusable.  Because, with a trick worthy of a card sharp, it hides two of the most important and unseemly aspects of Nixon’s career, his Machiavellian morality, and obsession with dirty tactics. 

    As we have seen, Nixon’s Cold War ideology would lead to a hellish ending in Indochina. His political tactics would cause Watergate. Incredibly, Wallace wants to whitewash both.

    III

    But all the above is not enough for Wallace, who is herniating himself by cosmeticizing Nixon.  He now makes a rather curious  statement:

    In 1960, America moved slowly toward racial equality, partly because of detours placed along the road to civil rights by southern governors. (pp. 23-24)

    He then adds something even more curious: Nixon supported civil rights. He uses the crisis at Little Rock’s Central High and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as his evidence for this.  All of this relies on the ignorance of his audience to maintain even superficial credibility.

    Anyone who uses the web can find out that Eisenhower let the students at Central High be terrorized for 20 days while doing nothing. The courts had ordered nine African American students to enter Central High. Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent this. While this was boiling over, Eisenhower actually went on vacation to Newport, Rhode Island. He was then played for the fool by the redneck governor of the state. Faubus came to Newport and told Eisenhower he would now abide by the court ruling and withdraw the National Guard, who had worked against the students. He did not.  And the court ruled against him.  He then removed the Guard. Now the crowd had direct contact with the nine students the court had approved for attendance.

    Humiliated by Faubus and with the press now turning on him, Eisenhower had no choice but to call in federal troops.(LA Times, 3/24/1981, article by Robert Shogan.) Then he and Nixon tried to use a face saving device by submitting a weak civil rights bill to congress. They had no interest is expanding civil rights.  What they wanted to do was split the Democratic party in two: the northern liberals from the southern conservatives. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson did all he could to try and modify the bill so it would not be so polarizing to the southerners. (“The Kennedys and Civil Rights”, Part 1, by James DiEugenio) Because of this, the act ended up being little more than an advisory commission with virtually no real enforcement power.  So what Wallace is trying to sell here about Nixon on civil rights  is transparent bunk.

    But again, what he leaves out makes Wallace’s efforts worse than bunk.  The Eisenhower/Nixon team worked against civil rights. As Michael Beschloss has revealed, Eisenhower tried to convince Earl Warren not to vote for the Brown vs Board decision. And, in fact, both Eisenhower and Nixon failed to support that decision. In the 1956 Autherine Lucy case at the University of Alabama, Eisenhower let an African American student be literally run off campus, even though the court had supported her attendance. He did nothing to protect her. (Irving Bernstein Promises Kept, p. 97; Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 64)  This was two years after Brown vs. Board.

    In a full eight years, the Eisenhower/Nixon administration filed a total of ten civil rights lawsuits.  What makes that even more startling is that six of those years were under the Brown v Board decision. Two of those lawsuits were filed on the last day of Ike’s administration. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 104) And recall, during the Eisenhower/Nixon years, not only did you have the Brown decision, you had the Montgomery bus boycott. In other words one had some ballast to push ahead on the issue.

    Its not enough for Wallace to disguise the real facts about Eisenhower/Nixon on the issue. He now utterly distorts what Kennedy’s public stance was. He says that JFK had been silent about civil rights. (p. 24, p. 160). This is more rubbish from a book that will soon become a trash compactor. In  February of 1956 Kennedy said the following: 

    The Democratic party must not weasel on the issue….President Truman was returned to the White House in 1948 despite a firm stand on civil rights that led to a third party in the South…..We might alienate Southern support but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.

    It is hard to believe that Wallace’s research team missed this speech.  Why? Because Kennedy made it in New York City and the story appeared on the front page of the New York Times for February 8th.

    But in case that was not enough for Wallace, in 1957 Kennedy said the same thing.  This time he made that speech—the Brown decision must be upheld– in the heart of the confederacy:  Jackson, Mississippi. (Golden, p. 95)  As noted in the first speech, JFK made his opinion public knowing full well he would lose support in the south. Which, as Harry Golden noted, is what happened.

    One of the most bizarre things that Wallace writes is that Kennedy voted for the watered down version of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. What Wallace somehow missed completely is this: Kennedy did not want to vote for this bill at all.  As he wrote a constituent, it was because it was so weak. He had to be lobbied to vote for it by Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.  LBJ sent two emissaries to convince him to do so, but Kennedy resisted. Johnson now personally went to Kennedy to lobby him in person.  Kennedy still was reluctant, but he was instructed by some Ivy League lawyers who said it would be better than nothing. (See Lyndon Johnson: The Exercise of Power, by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, pp. 136-37)

    What was the result of all this back and forth?  Essentially nothing.  Because as Harris Wofford wrote in his book Of Kennedys and King, Eisenhower and Nixon resisted just about every recommendation the Civil Rights Commission—which originated with the act—made.  He should know since he was the lawyer for the agency. (p. 21)

    So the inactivity on civil rights in the fifties is clearly due to three men: Eisenhower, Nixon and Johnson. When JFK came into office, as Judge Frank Johnson said, it was like lightning.  Things changed that fast. Including going directly at those southern governors Wallace was talking about.

    Read part 2

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

    How JFK Tried to Prevent our “Lesser Evil” Elections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Notes

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

    Michael Kazin and the NY Review vs JFK

    Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown. The New York Review of Books is a leftwing, tabloid formatted political, cultural, and intellectual review. It specializes in contemporary political events, books, and the arts. In their May 27th issue, this respected publication allowed Mr. Kazin to do something that should have been prevented. Kazin was supposed to be reviewing part one of Fredrik Logevall’s, two volume biography of John F. Kennedy, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century.

    What’s disturbing about Kazin’s review is this: it is not a review. After reviewing books for approximately two decades—and studying literary criticism for longer than that—I understand what the process entails. The most important thing about critiquing a book is an analysis of the text of the book. What that means is the critic describes what the author has written and analyzes both what is there and also what the author left out that might have altered his argument. When that process is completed, the critic evaluates the book in relation to other works in the field as a measure of value. Of course, there are many, many biographies of John F. Kennedy that Kazin could have used as a measuring rod.

    What is striking about Kazin’s review is that it is really a polemic against John Kennedy. Kazin used Logevall’s book as a springboard to trash the man and his career. One can easily detect this by noting how much of Kazin’s “review” deals with matters outside the time frame of the book, which only goes up to 1956. In fact, one can see what the “reviewer” is up to in his first sentence:

    Why, nearly six decades after his murder, do Americans still care so much about and, for the most part, continue to think so highly of John Fitzgerald Kennedy?

    If one has to ask that question, then obviously one is about to assault those people who do so. Kazin follows that up by pulling a page out of the Larry Sabato/Robert Dallek playbook. He now writes that Kennedy achieved little of lasting significance in his presidency.

    Again, please note: this is a review of a book that only extends itself to 1956. But Kazin is now talking about something Logevall has not gotten to yet. Beyond that, he is making a judgment about the years that the book does not address! Clearly, Kazin has an uncontrollable agenda about the Kennedy years in the White House that his editors allowed him to spew. He more or less writes that Kennedy achieved nothing of value either domestically or in foreign policy. I would think that signing two executive orders for affirmative action in his first year would count as something of value. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 56) After all, no previous president had done that. In foreign policy, I would think that constructing the Alliance for Progress and refusing to recognize the military overthrow of the democratically elected Juan Bosch in Dominican Republic would be something to address.

    But if Kazin did note just those two things about Kennedy’s foreign policy, then he would create a polemical problem for himself, because then the reader would ask: What happened to those two programs? The answer would be that Lyndon Johnson pretty much neutralized both of them. (Click here for details)

    In the last instance, concerning Dominican Republic, LBJ did more than that. In 1965, he launched an invasion to preserve the military junta and prevent Bosch from regaining power,which was a clear reversal of what Kennedy’s policy was. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78–79) Pretty clever guy that Kazin.

    As one can see from the above linked article, Bobby Kennedy was very upset about what Johnson had done to the Alliance for Progress. As was RFK, Senator William Fulbright was beside himself about the Dominican Republic invasion. Fulbright’s staff had done some research by consulting sources on the ground. They concluded that Johnson had lied about the true state of affairs, especially concerning alleged atrocities by Bosch’s forces. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, p. 166)

    That Johnson deception in the Caribbean paralleled another, even larger one: the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. In fact, it was Fulbright’s outrage over LBJ’s subterfuge in the Dominican Republic that provoked him into reviewing what Johnson had done to get America into Vietnam. One of Fulbright’s staffers, Carl Marcy, had reviewed both instances and he now believed Johnson had lied about each. He wrote a memo to Fulbright about it. He concluded that what Johnson had done in the last 24 months helped explain what happened to:

    …turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration. (ibid)

    Feeling that he had been suckered, in 1966 Fulbright began his famous televised hearings on the Vietnam War. This is what began to split the Democratic Party asunder and aided the election of Richard Nixon. This is why it was smart for Kazin not to go there.

    The above points out just how wildly askew Kazin is in foreign policy. But as far as domestic policy goes, in addition to the two affirmative action laws, Kennedy granted federal employees the right to form unions and, by 1967, there were 1.2 million who had joined. That idea then spread to state and local government. In 1962, Kennedy signed the Manpower Development and Training Act aimed to alleviate African-American unemployment. In April of that year, Kennedy went on national television to begin what economist John Blair later termed “the most dramatic confrontation in history between a president and a corporate management.” (Gibson, p. 9) This was Kennedy’s battle against the steel companies who had reneged on an agreement he had worked out with them between management and labor. Kennedy prevailed after his brother, the attorney general, began legal proceedings against the steel cartel. If Kazin can indicate to me a recent president who has made such an address against another corporation or group of aligned businesses, I would like to hear it.

    In 1962, Kennedy tried to pass a Medicare bill. It was defeated by a coalition of conservative southern senators and the AMA. At the time of his death, Kennedy was planning to revive the bill through Congressman Wilbur Mills. (Bernstein, pp. 246–59) But also, on June 13, 1963, Kennedy made a speech to the National Council of Senior Citizens. This was part of those remarks:

    There isn’t a country in Western Europe that didn’t do what we are doing 50 years ago or 40 years ago, not a single country that is not way ahead of this rich productive, progressive country of ours. We are not suggesting something radical and new or violent. We are not suggesting that the government come between the doctors and his patient. We are suggesting what every other major, developed, intelligent country did for its people a generation ago. I think it’s time the United States caught up.

    In fact, one can argue that Kennedy proposed universal healthcare way before Barack Obama did. All one has to do is just look at this speech:

    How did Professor Kazin miss that one? It didn’t take deep research. After all, it’s on YouTube. Please note: in this speech Kennedy talks about how progressive goals for the public can be attained through government leadership and action.

    By 1960, because of his vote to table the measure, it was established that Richard Nixon was not going to advocate for federal aid to education. President Kennedy favored such aid and appointed a task force to study the issue. (Bernstein, p. 224) By October of 1963, Congress had passed the first federal aid to education bill since 1945. It would be signed into law by President Johnson.

    That last sentence is also apropos of the War on Poverty. It was not Lyndon Johnson who originated the War on Poverty, it was John Kennedy. Kennedy was influenced by the publication of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America. This provoked Kennedy to begin a series of talks with his economic advisor Walter Heller concerning the subject of how best to attack poverty. (Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, pp. 242–43) Kennedy decided he would make this an election issue and he would visit several blighted areas to bring it to national attention.

    Bobby Kennedy set his close friend David Hackett to actually study the problem of geographical areas of poverty and how it caused juvenile delinquency. (Edward Schmitt, President of the Other America, p. 68) In fact, JFK had allotted millions for demonstration projects to study possible cures for the problem. Hackett was also allowed a staff of 12 to do investigations and research for him. (Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America, pp. 111–12) At his final meeting with his cabinet, Kennedy mentioned the word “poverty” six times. Jackie Kennedy took the notes of that meeting to Bobby Kennedy after her husband’s death. The attorney general had them framed and placed on his wall. (Schmitt, pp. 92, 96)

    So, between Heller and Hackett, and his plans around the 1964 election, the president seemed off to a good start. It took very little time for Johnson to place his own stamp on the program. Over RFK’s protests, Johnson removed Hackett from his position. (Matusow, p. 123) Heller resigned in 1964 in a dispute over the Vietnam War. LBJ then did something really odd. He appointed Sargent Shriver to run the War on Poverty. As Harris Wofford notes, everyone was puzzled by the decision to retire Hackett and replace him with Shriver, for the simple reason that Shriver already had a job in the administration: running the Peace Corps. (Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 286) Consequently, the management of the program suffered. By 1968, Shriver had gone to Paris to serve as ambassador and LBJ had more or less abandoned the program. (Matusow, p. 270)

    This relates to the whole shopworn mythology that Kazin uses on the race issue. If anything shows his almost monomaniacal obsession, it’s this. Recall, Logevall’s book goes up to 1956. Kazin says that young JFK avoided the race issue for purposes of politics. Then how does one explain that in 1956 Kennedy made these remarks in New York:

    The Democratic party must not weasel on the issue…President Truman was returned to the White House in 1948 despite a firm stand on civil rights that led to a third party in the South. We might alienate Southern support, but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.

    Again, it takes no deep research to find this speech, because it was printed on page 1 of the New York Times of February 8, 1956. Kennedy did the same thing the next year in, of all places, Jackson, Mississippi. He said the Brown v. Board decision must be upheld. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) How could doing such a thing gain him political advantage in that state? As author Harry Golden notes, at this point Kennedy began to lose support in the south and to receive angry letters over his advocacy for the Brown decision.

    It was obvious what Senator Kennedy was pointing at: President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon were not supporting Brown vs. Board. In fact, as many historians have noted, Eisenhower had advised Earl Warren to vote against the case. (The Atlantic, “Commander vs Chief”, 3/19/18) The other civil rights issue that Kazin brings up is even fruitier. His complaint is that Kennedy did not try and pass his own civil rights bill in the Senate. Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson became the senate Democratic leader in 1953. LBJ became the Majority Leader in 1954. As most knowledgeable people know, Johnson voted against every civil rights bill ever proposed in Congress from the time he was first voted into the House in 1937. Was the junior senator from Massachusetts going to override the powerful Majority Leader from his own party? It was Johnson and Eisenhower who were responsible for fashioning a civil rights bill. And they didn’t.

    After Eisenhower had been humiliated by Republican governor Orval Faubus during the Little Rock Crisis at Central High in 1957, he tried to save face. He and Nixon sent up a draft for a Civil Rights Commission to investigate abuses. The concept behind it was to split the Democratic Party: Norther liberals vs Southern conservatives. Johnson cooperated by watering down the bill even more to prevent the schism. Why did LBJ cooperate? Because he was thinking of running for the presidency and he saw what being against the issue had done to his mentor Richard Russell’s national ambitions. Senator Kennedy did not like the bill; he thought it was too weak. Johnson had to personally lobby JFK to get him to sign on. (Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon Johnson: The Exercise of Power, pp. 122–25; 136–7) In a letter to a constituent, Kennedy wrote that he regretted doing so and hoped to be able to get a real bill one day with real teeth.

    From the day he entered the White House, Kennedy was looking to write such a bill. Advised by Wofford that such legislation would not pass in the first or second year, he did what he could through executive actions and help from the judiciary. He then submitted a bill in February of 1963. As Clay Risen shows in his book The Bill of the Century, it was not Johnson who managed to get it through. This was and is a myth. JFK began with a tremendous lobbying effort himself. After he was assassinated, it was Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Republican senator Thomas Kuchel who were the major forces to finally overcome the southern filibuster. Also, as most knowledgeable people know, it was not Johnson who managed to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That was owed to Martin Luther King’s galvanizing demonstration in Selma, Alabama. Johnson could not get an extension of Kennedy’s housing act through either. It was the occasion of King’s assassination that allowed it to pass.

    Plain and simple: Kennedy did more for civil rights than FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower combined. That is an historical fact. (Click here for the short version and here for the long version)

    Kazin writes something that I had to read twice to believe. He says that in his congressional races, from 1946–58, Kennedy never said or did “anything that might annoy his largely Catholic, increasingly conservative white base In Massachusetts.” I just noted his 1956 speech about civil rights in New York. But just as important, as readers of this web site know, from his visit to Saigon in 1951 and onward, Kennedy spoke out strongly against the establishment views of both Democrats and Republicans on the Cold War, especially as it was fought in the Third World. Kennedy assailed both the policies of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles as being out of touch and counter-productive in the struggles of former colonies to become free of imperialist influence. He noted this in 1956 during the presidential campaign:

    …the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies…In my opinion the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-Communism. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 18)

    Kennedy’s five year campaign to find an alternative Cold War foreign policy culminated with his famous Algeria speech the next year. There, he assailed both parties for not seeing that support of the French colonial regime would ultimately result in the same conclusion that occurred three years previous at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina. Kennedy’s speech was such a harsh attack on the administration that it was widely commented on in newspapers and journals. The vast majority of editorials, scores of them, decried the speech in no uncertain terms, as did Eisenhower, Foster Dulles, Nixon, and Acheson. But it made him a hero to the peoples of the Third World, especially in Africa. (Mahoney, pp. 20–24) This completely undermines another comment by Kazin: that Kennedy had “to surrender to the exigencies of cold war politics and the ideological make up of his party as he rose to the top of it.” As John Shaw wrote in his study of Kennedy’s senate years, JFK’s challenge to Foster Dulles allowed him to become a leader in foreign policy for his party and “to outline his own vision for America’s role in the world,” which Kennedy then enacted once he was in the White House. (JFK in the Senate, p.110) These were almost systematically reversed by Johnson. (Click here for details)

    Toward the end of his article, Kazin goes off the rails. He says there is no memorial statue of JFK in Washington. Well Mike, there is none of Truman or FDR either. He says there is no holiday for JFK. Again, there is none for Franklin Roosevelt either. And they have recently combined the Lincoln and Washington holidays into a single President’s Day. He also says that President Joseph Biden made no mention of the Kennedys in his campaign or during his brief presidency. Biden did make reference to RFK as his hero in law school, more than once. (See for example NBC news story of August 23, 2019, on a speech Biden gave in New Hampshire.) And Biden has RFK’s bust in the Oval Office and he transported a wall painting of President Kennedy from Boston to place in his study.

    If Kazin did not know any of the above, then it must be pretty easy to get tenure at Georgetown. If he did and ignored it all, then his editors should have never let this travesty pass. It does a disservice to the readers and it should be corrected. In a fundamental and pernicious way, it misinforms the public.

    Addendum:

    We urge our readers to write Mr. Kazin and complain to the NY Review of Books. There is no excuse for this kind of display of factual and academic ignorance and arrogance.

    JFK addressed the definition of a liberal and why he was one in a 1960 campaign speech. This speech is a good source to reference in any response to Mr. Kazin. (Click here for details)

  • Deep Fake Politics: The Prankster, the Prosecutor, and the Para-political

    Deep Fake Politics: The Prankster, the Prosecutor, and the Para-political

    In Part 1 of this review, I covered some of the ways in which the Adam Curtis documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head (hereafter CGYOMH) serves to misinform the audience about the nature of power in the US-dominated global capitalist system. In particular, I chose to focus on how CGYOMH deals with high finance and the international monetary system. These are realms that Curtis tendentiously obscures and distorts. In this installment, I am going to try and unpack his muddled and incoherent takes on Kerry Thornley, the JFK assassination in its historical context, and “conspiracy theory” in general.

    JFK, the Prosecutor, and the Provocateur

    For some reason, Curtis decided to weigh in on the JFK assassination. This is an event that should be very relevant to topics and themes under discussion, namely: power, secrecy, the state, and conspiracy. Though there have been a lot of good books written about the JFK assassination, from the looks of it, Curtis apparently did not read any of them. If he had done so, there would have been many angles that he could have taken to discuss the case, even if he could not cover the assassination in a comprehensive manner. For instance, he could have talked about the impossibility of the magic bullet theory. He could have discussed the overwhelming number of witnesses in Dallas and Bethesda who reported a massive exit wound to the back of Kennedy’s head, indicating a shot or shots from the front. He could have read David Talbot’s Brothers and then discussed how RFK came to believe that his brother had been killed as the result of a right-wing plot involving elements of the CIA, the Cuban exile community, and organized crime. The audience might have also appreciated learning about how RFK was assassinated before he could attain the presidency and reinvestigate Dallas—something he explicitly said he would do. Or Curtis could have focused on how, beginning in the immediate aftermath of Oswald’s assassination, Establishment figures like Dean Acheson, Eugene Rostow, and Joseph Alsop began lobbying LBJ to create a “blue ribbon” commission that would arrive at a predetermined no-conspiracy conclusion. Additionally, Curtis could have revealed that as part of this exercise, LBJ used the specter of nuclear Armageddon to pressure Chief Justice Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell into joining the commission.

    Curtis didn’t do any of the above. Not even close.

    For whatever reason, Curtis focuses on the figure of Kerry Thornley. In and of itself, this is not the worst choice. Thornley’s bizarre and implausible actions point very strongly to the conspiracy behind Dallas. But alas, it seems that since the grim implications of a coup d’état in Dallas would so dramatically falsify Curtis’ quizzically iconoclastic worldview, the director instead must offer a quirky and incoherent take on Kerry Thornley and his nemesis Jim Garrison. Regarding the Adam Curtis worldview that precludes him dealing with Dallas forthrightly, it is a difficult thing to pin down. Given that he has produced documentary films, totaling dozens and dozens of hours of runtime, it is noteworthy that one cannot get a clear grasp of what Curtis’ worldview actually is. I have to conclude that this is intentional on the part of the filmmaker, and that it is pretty dubious in and of itself. The easiest thing to say about his politics, which I mentioned in Part 1 of this review, is that he is anti-left. His anti-leftism takes an odd form, as he does not extol any obviously right-wing ideas. Instead, he often seems suspicious of power—especially technocratic power—but he seems even more suspicious of those who are suspicious of power. His detached, faux-anarchist analysis—for reasons I’ll not fully articulate—brings to my mind another British persona, the famed Bilbo Baggins. While I have a fondness for Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I would not look for someone like Bilbo Baggins to illuminate the dark pinnacle of capitalist imperium.

    So, what does Thornley do for Curtis? He largely serves to allow Curtis to be dismissive of “conspiracy theories,” even as he is superficially ambivalent about actual conspiracies elsewhere in the film. The conspiracies he does acknowledge are attributed to conspirators of low to middling status or non-Westerners. The ultimately sad or pathetic conspirators include Michael X, Jiang Qing, the cops who entrapped some Black Panthers, and European Red Guards. Even when Curtis acknowledges CIA plots to overthrow governments in places like Congo, Syria, and Iraq, they are not explained as being part and parcel of the geopolitical strategy of US imperialism. Rather, Curtis seems to imply that these disastrous interventions are the product of bureaucrats who are in some way misguided. Though there are innumerable instances where such covert operations (i.e. conspiracies) can be easily traced back to a materialist motive, Curtis doesn’t seem to want to state this clearly or to hash out the implications. Even when he does acknowledge the postcolonial exploitation of the Third World, it seems to be some sort of piecemeal phenomena arising through random policy choices.

    Thornley’s tale is curated so that he can play the role Curtis has in mind for him. It is deftly rendered and dispersed in random intervals throughout the eight-hour runtime of CGYOMH. The Kerry Thornley arc in CGYOMYH begins with Curtis telling us how Thornley and his friend Greg Hill went to a bowling alley where they disagreed about whether the universe was orderly or chaotic. They eventually came to the conclusion that the world was chaotic, but that individuals could use their minds to create some semblance of order. But then something strange happened. Thornley joined the Marines, where he met a young defiant man named Lee Oswald. He decided he would write a novel about Oswald. While Thornley was writing this novel, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. As a right-wing Ayn Rand devotee, Thornley detested Kennedy. He did not mourn when JFK died. But the fact that the figure he cast in his novel was the president’s alleged assassin was, according to Thornley, “very weird.”

    A little over two years before the assassination, Kerry Thornley moved to New Orleans with Greg Hill. They had begun to spin a spoof religion called Discordianism. Curtis states that around this time, Thornley got his Oswald novel published under the title, The Idle Warriors. This is an error; the novel did not get published until 1991—in the wake of Oliver Stone’s JFK. As Curtis would have it, Thornley ran into trouble because of the novel and the fact that—like Oswald before the assassination—Thornley was living in New Orleans in 1967. Thusly, Thornley “came to the notice of the man who was going to be the main creator of the JFK conspiracy theory…Jim Garrison.”

    Curtis does not present Garrison favorably. He states that:

    Jim Garrison believed that the modern democratic system in America was just a façade. That behind it was another secret system of power that really controlled the country, but you could never discover it through normal means because it was so deeply hidden.

    Curtis reveals that Garrison wrote a memo entitled “Time and Propinquity” for his staff, in which he tried to explain how they might grapple with this secret government. Meaning and logic are always hidden and so they should instead look for patterns—strange coincidences and links that are apparently meaningless but in actuality evidence of the hidden system of power. Curtis asserts that Garrison’s theory would be a big impact on how many people would come to understand the world:

    In a dark world of hidden power, you couldn’t expect everything to make sense. [I]t was pointless to try and understand the meaning of why something happened, because that would always be hidden from you. What you looked for were the patterns. And when Garrison read Kerry Thornley’s novel, he saw a pattern. Not only had Thornley been in the Marines with Oswald and written a novel about him, but he had come to live in the same city that Oswald had lived in before the assassination. And in 1967, Garrison accused Thornley of being part of the conspiracy. Thornley was furious; he knew that Garrison was wrong, but he also hated the very idea of conspiracy theories.

    Thornley, Curtis tells us, believed that people in power used conspiracy theories to control people by making them believe that the world was run by hidden forces. This served to make individuals feel “weak and powerless.” Curtis does not bother to point out that Thornley is essentially positing a conspiracy theory to explain conspiracy theories. Thornley claimed that he wanted to free people from the conspiratorial thinking that held them back. He wanted to break people out of their “authoritarian conditioning.”

    II

    As he began to take on the CIA in the mid-1960’s, Garrison was necessarily flying blind to a certain degree. The massive clandestine intelligence community was something novel in the American experience. A few exposés of limited scope had been published in the 1960’s, most notably The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross.[1] Ramparts magazine also published some important articles on the CIA in the 1960’s but, to put it mildly, Ramparts was an outlier in the US media landscape.

    It wasn’t until the 1970’s that a fuller picture of the clandestine state began to emerge, thanks to the work of people like Daniel Ellsberg, Fletcher Prouty, Phil Agee, Victor Marchetti, Alfred McCoy, and Peter Scott. In terms of Garrison and the “Time and Propinquity” ideas that Curtis ridicules, the work of Scott is quite relevant. Writing about obscured intrigues related to the Vietnam War, covert operations in the Third World, mafia-intelligence nexuses, and the assassinations of the 1960’s, Scott came to realize that the existing methods of journalists, historians, and social scientists were insufficient in terms of being able to elucidate realities shaped by powerful clandestine actors. He coined the term parapolitics to describe “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.”[2]

    In the course of Garrison’s investigation, he wrote many memos to his staff. Only a relatively tiny number of them were related to “Time and Propinquity.” The overwhelming vast majority of his inquiry was done through on-the-ground investigation (e.g. going to the Dallas area and trying to interview suspects like Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha Smith). Curtis ignores that fact. Using a technique that originated with the late rightwing pundit Tom Bethell—who betrayed the DA—Curtis ridicules Garrison for these ideas. (Click here for details)

    Garrison was merely trying to offer a strategy that might allow his office to do something heretofore not encountered—the successful prosecution of state actors whose crimes are supported by huge budgets, secrecy, and a license to covertly break laws in the name of national security. In fact, to bear this out, Garrison once wrote a memorandum to House Select Committee attorney Jon Blackmer about solving the JFK case. He said you could not solve this crime in the usual manner that felony investigations use (i.e. fingerprints, written records used as alibis, etc.). That would not work, because the JFK assassination was designed as a clandestine action.

    What should be done if—as Garrison ascertained—politico-economic elites, clandestine state actors and insiders can veto the will of the public by assassinating a democratically elected head of state? What if, additionally, it becomes clear that the national media and academia are under the hegemonic sway of the same elite of power, and thus cannot act institutionally as the democratic checks described in liberal political theory? Ultimately, Curtis can offer no alternative to parapolitical research or Garrison’s foray into the realm.

    In the face of this, Curtis instead blithely asserts:

    Thornley was right that most of what Garrison alleged was complete fantasy. Despite all the patterns, he could produce no evidence of a hidden conspiracy.

    If the reader can believe it, this is Curtis’ last word on Garrison. He does not mention that Garrison had convinced the jury at the Clay Shaw trial that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. That was accomplished through one exhibit and two key witnesses. The witnesses were Dr. John Nichols for the prosecution and the second was the devastating cross examination of defense witness and Kennedy pathologist Dr. Pierre Finck. The exhibit was the Zapruder film, which Nichols’ used to convincingly demonstrate a shot came from the front. This showed, at the least, that Lee Oswald was not the only assassin firing at Kennedy, which would mean JFK was killed by a conspiracy. So it’s convenient for Curtis to leave it out.

    Garrison also discovered that Oswald had been in New Orleans as an ostensibly pro-Castro activist, but had been working out of the office of Guy Banister—a hard-right, ex-FBI man who ran the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, was a member of the fascist “Minutemen” organization, and had been involved in anti-Castro CIA operations like the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose. Given that Oswald’s New Orleans activities only served to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the obvious inference would be that Oswald was a pawn in some kind of counterintelligence operation. The Zapruder film was so definitive that when it was finally shown on network television in the 1970’s, public support for the Warren Commission fell to all-time lows.[3]

    Years later it was revealed that Clay Shaw lied on the stand numerous times. (Click here for details) He was also getting considerable support from the CIA during the trial. And, just as Garrison alleged, Shaw had indeed perjured himself when he stated that he had had no relationship to the CIA. Additionally, there is no excuse for Curtis’ failure to mention that the last official word on the JFK case—the HSCA investigation—concluded that the assassination was the result of a “probable conspiracy.” He then also fails to disclose to the audience that the chief counsel of the HSCA eventually signed on to a petition which stated that the culprits were elements of the US national security state.[4]

    Curtis and Conspiracy

    Upon returning to Thornley and Discordianism, CGYOMH details how the group decided to use Playboy magazine to launch “Operation Mindfuck.” They kicked off the operation by submitting a fake letter positing that all the political assassinations in the US were the work of “the [Bavarian] Illuminati.” The Discordians began to spread this notion throughout the pop culture landscape. Thornley, Curtis states, was trying to break the spell of conspiracy theories by exposing the absurdity that a secret society in Bavaria could be covertly ruling the word. Here again, Curtis does not bother to point out that the Discordians were conspiring to discredit conspiracy theorizing. Any explanation of Operation Mindfuck is by definition a conspiracy theory. To acknowledge this truism would entail something that Curtis does not want to admit or explain: that any conspiracy theory—like any no-conspiracy theory—should be judged on its respective merits.

    One of many dispiriting aspects of CGYOMH is that Thornley and Operation Mindfuck are actually interesting subjects whose reexamination could offer fresh insights. The work of the illustrious and iconoclastic Florida State professor Lance DeHaven-Smith is instructive in this regard. By the end of the year 2000, DeHaven-Smith had already enjoyed an accomplished career as a scholar of public administration. However, as the top authority on Florida state politics, he was shocked when George W. Bush’s team was able to steal the 2000 election, committing multiple felonies in the process.[5] This experience radicalized the professor and led him to coin the term state crimes against democracy (SCADs). He defined SCADs as “concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty.”[6]

    Upon being forced to reassess historical events that he had lived through, DeHaven-Smith came to be alarmed by the strong social and academic norms which served to discourage and stigmatize reasonable suspicions of conspiratorial state criminality. In 2013, he published Conspiracy Theory in America. There he detailed the ways in which powerful actors and institutions have aided and abetted SCADs by stigmatizing those who posit conspiratorial explanations of politically significant events:

    Most Americans will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy-theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda program initiated in 1967. This program was directed at criticisms of the Warren Commission’s report. The propaganda campaign called on media corporations and journalists to criticize “conspiracy theorists” and raise questions about their motives and judgements. The CIA told its contacts that “parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.” In the shadows of McCarthyism and the Cold War, this warning about communist influence was delivered simultaneously to hundreds of well-positioned members of the press in a global CIA propaganda network, infusing the conspiracy theory label with powerfully negative associations.[7]

    DeHaven-Smith refers to this episode as “The CIA’s Conspiracy-Theory Conspiracy.”[8] Given that, as referenced above, the CIA was conspiring in 1967 to use its propaganda assets to manipulate public discourse around conspiracy concepts in the JFK assassination and given that 1968 would see another pair of cataclysmic assassinations of progressive leaders—MLK and RFK—does not the Discordians’ Operation Mindfuck plot dovetail perfectly with the Agency’s goal of stigmatizing conspiracy theorizing around suspicious political events? As we will see, this becomes all the more apparent when one looks at the overwhelming amount of evidence that Kerry Thornley was an intelligence asset involved in creating the legend that made Oswald a suitable designated culprit in the JFK assassination.

     

    III

    At the end of the first episode of CGYOMH, Curtis dismisses the idea of conspiracy in the JFK assassination. Thereby implicitly endorsing the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the president was assassinated for no discernable reason by a “lone nut”; who was subsequently assassinated by a concerned local pimp in a room full of policemen. Curtis invokes the tired JFK trope which explicitly or implicitly posits that since there are so many different wacky JFK conspiracy theories—featuring the KGB, the KKK, J. Edgar Hoover, the mafia, Castro, Nixon, the CIA—none of them can be valid. For those of us who feel that the truth of the JFK assassination is pretty obvious, Curtis is another example of a person who would accept, say, the magic bullet theory, rather than suffer the cognitive dissonance of acknowledging despotic political realities in the nominally “liberal democratic” West.

    Postwar Deep Politics

    Curtis cannot truly grapple with deep politics: “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”[9] This does not set him apart from mainstream historians and political commentators in the West. What is noteworthy about Curtis is that he produces so much work that delves into these areas, while always coming up with tendentious, limited-hangout summations, analysis, and conclusions. If it wasn’t obvious, this is why I chose to title this review “Deep Fake Politics.”

    His intervention into Dallas has already been discussed above. Additionally, he looks into other important episodes as though he is going to reveal something important, while invariably coming up with a narrative that is less than we already know. Or less than we should know were we not so propagandized and beguiled by our Western sense-making institutions. For example, Curtis states that some radicals in the West believed that the Nazi system was hiding behind the liberal façade. This is an important and fascinating issue. To what extent did key figures and institutions from the defeated Axis powers continue to exist postwar, in some form or another? We know that the US made use of notorious Nazis like Klaus Barbie, Reinhardt Gehlen, and Otto Skorzeny—as well as Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun.

    Furthermore, the German economic elites of the Nazi era were also allowed to retain power and wealth in the postwar system. The Nazis were brought to power by an elite group of German industrialists, whose cartel system gave them control over the commanding heights of the German economy. After the war, James Stewart Martin was the director of the Division for Investigation of Cartels and External Assets in American Military Government. In that position, he was charged with breaking up the Nazi cartel system and investigating its ties to Wall Street. His efforts were undermined by his superior officer, a man who had been an investment banker before the war. Stewart chronicled these events in a book published in 1950, concluding that “we had not been stopped in Germany by German business. We had been stopped in Germany by American business.”[10] Curtis chooses not to explore this issue deeply, leaving the impression that those who detect any semblance of Nazism under postwar US hegemony are fringe radicals or idealists, certainly not sober observers offering a historically grounded assessment. In postwar Japan, the situation was also similar. The US made use of sinister war criminals like Yoshio Kodama and largely preserved the Japanese elites who presided over the massive zaibatsu corporate conglomerates. I recall that in one interview, the illustrious Japan expert Chalmers Johnson made a quip about the Sony Walkman in the 1980’s, “From the people who brought you Pearl Harbor.”

    The Pivotal 1970’s

    In episode three, Curtis looks at Watergate and the tumultuous, poorly understood 1970’s. He describes Nixon as a paranoid man, obsessed with perceived enemies. He describes Nixon as having come to power thanks to the “silent majority” of Americans who felt isolated and alone. In other words, there is no mention of two crucial political crimes: the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy and the 1968 “October counter-surprise,” in which candidate Nixon sabotaged peace talks in Paris that could have ended the war before the 1968 election. (Click here for details)

    Robert Kennedy was planning to reinvestigate his brother’s assassination, believing—as did Jim Garrison—that JFK was murdered as the result of a conspiracy involving elements of the national security state, the Mafia, and Cuban exiles. This merits no mention from Curtis. Instead, Nixon and other Americans of the time were just feeling less connected and more paranoid, because of Vietnam. We are told about Nixon’s paranoia about the liberal establishment and his enemies list. His taping system recorded his paranoia. The president became obsessed with trying to destroy his “imaginary enemies.” To that end, Richard Nixon—one “of the most powerful people in the world”—kicked off a White House conspiracy that involved using ex-intelligence agents to crush his opponents. The Plumbers’ activities would expose Nixon’s criminality in the Watergate scandal. Says Curtis, “[I]n its wake, all kinds of other revelations came out—of dark secrets in the political world that had been kept hidden from the people…For twenty years, the CIA had been planning assassinations and overthrowing leaders of foreign governments all around the world using poisons and specially made secret weapons.”

    IV

    To say that this is an elision is not nearly strong enough. It makes one ask: Adam, what did you read in preparation?

     Nixon’s enemies were hardly imaginary. They were not confined to any “liberal establishment.” Nixon was being spied on by a cabal of right-wing Pentagon officials who were eventually caught red-handed. This is called the Moorer/Radford affair. (Click here for details) Further, as the late Robert Parry demonstrated, the origins of the Plumbers Unit was not over the release of the Pentagon Papers, as previously imagined. It was over the Lyndon Johnson/Walt Rostow memo exposing the 1968 October Surprise by Nixon and Claire Chennault. (Click here for details) It is really hard to fathom how Curtis missed these key historical points.

    Perhaps more significantly, Nixon could not get the CIA to cooperate with him in a number of key areas, including the president’s attempts to obtain all the CIA files which might explain the JFK assassination and the Bay of Pigs operation. (Click here for details)

    Nixon eventually fired Dick Helms, the director of the CIA, and ordered his successor, the outsider James Schlesinger, to compile all information about CIA crimes. He took these actions, in part, because he believed that the CIA was somehow involved in the Watergate scandal. There were good reasons for his suspicions. Two key Watergate figures—James McCord and E. Howard Hunt—were “former” CIA officers, were politically to Nixon’s right, and were so operationally incompetent that many suspect that they intentionally bungled their crimes as part of an operation to damage or gain control over the president.[11]

    The report of the CIA’s violations came to be known the “Family Jewels” and some of its contents were leaked to the press. These revelations, plus Watergate, eventually gave rise to two congressional investigations of the intelligence community. It is important to note that these leaks about Nixon, and about Nixon’s adversaries like the CIA, were part of what can be described as an Establishment civil war. To say that Nixon was merely paranoid about his liberal enemies is to greatly distort this history. Furthermore, such an explanation cannot explain how the ouster of Nixon led to the US lurching far to the right politically. Both major parties became more conservative. The liberalism of the Kennedys was excised from the political power structure. The Republicans became a Reaganite party and the Democrats adopted positions that had previously been associated with Rockefeller Republicanism, cultural politics notwithstanding.[12]

    Thornley: Conspiracist or Conspirator?

    Years after launching Operation Mindfuck, Thornley says he saw E. Howard Hunt’s photo after his Watergate arrest. He now recognized Hunt from his New Orleans days, when he also knew Oswald (although he was very reluctant to admit this, and one could argue he did not).

    And then, strangely, Thornley also recalled how he had known Guy Bannister and Clay Shaw, suspects in Jim Garrison’s investigation. Previously, Thornley had disregarded these matters. Suddenly, says Thornley, “I could not explain all these weird coincidences.” While the Operation Mindfuck hoax/operation promulgated an Illuminati meta-conspiracy theory, these bogus theories were getting mixed up with real world intrigues like CIA mind control and other scandals. Says Curtis, “The line between the reality of political corruption and a dream world of conspiracy theories started to get blurred in America.” Kerry Thornley, Curtis suggests, became swept up in this paranoid thinking. Thornley came to believe that the CIA had somehow manipulated him into setting up Operation Mindfuck, but he didn’t know how. Says Curtis, “Thornley had retreated into a dream world of conspiracy.”

    V

    For viewers not steeped in the JFK assassination, Curtis’ depiction of Thornley would not raise much suspicion. He would seem like a wacky and unlucky character, who wound up facing some troubles because of a bizarre set of coincidences. However, Curtis leaves out a tremendous amount of material that complicates matters considerably. Let us fill in what Adam Curtis could not find out about Kerry Thornley.

    For one thing, Thornley was an extreme right-winger and Kennedy hater. He was a devotee of Ayn Rand,[13] but his politics were even more reactionary than mere libertarianism. He had been a strong supporter of the Belgian scheme to recolonize Congo by creating a breakaway state in the resource rich province of Katanga. This was a vicious plan that was ultimately thwarted by President Kennedy after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the death—likely the assassination—of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. Thornley cited Katanga as one of the main reasons he hated Kennedy. When Kennedy was killed, Kerry couldn’t help himself: he began singing while at his restaurant job. He later urinated on Kennedy’s grave. In a 1992 interview for the television program A Current Affair, Thornley stated about Kennedy, “I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I would have had the chance.” Summing up Thornley’s politics, Jim DiEugenio writes, “What kind of person would celebrate the murder of Kennedy and the victory of colonial forces seeking to exploit both the native population and vast mineral wealth of Congo? […] I would call those kinds of people fascists.”[14]

    There are more key facts and events that Curtis omits from his tale. The Thornley and Hill move to New Orleans in February 1961 has never been adequately explained. It strains credulity to think that it was in response to a cop accusing the pair of loitering. New Orleans at that time was quite a place for a budding fascist to be. Right at the time of their arrival, preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were ramping up. Ultra-rightists and Garrison suspects like David Ferrie and Guy Bannister were involved in these operations, conducted at locales such as the Belle Chase naval air station and Banister’s 544 Camp Street office.[15] Upon arriving in New Orleans, Thornley began associating with these hard-right, CIA connected circles. When Garrison’s office questioned Kerry Thornley in 1968, he denied that he knew Guy Banister, David Ferrie, or Clay Shaw. However, in the mid-1970’s, when the HSCA investigation was about to begin, Thornley admitted that, in fact, he had known all of these characters. Furthermore, when his book on Oswald, The Idle Warriors, finally got published in 1991, Thornley admitted in the book’s introduction that he showed the manuscript to Guy Banister back in 1961.[16]

    Just prior to Thornley’s arrival in New Orleans, Banister was linked to a shocking incident. The Friends of Democratic Cuba (FDC) was a CIA/FBI shell company. Guy Bannister was one of its incorporators, and two other FDC members at times operated out of Guy Bannister’s 544 Camp Street office. In late January 1961, two men walked into a Ford Truck dealership claiming to be members of the FDC. They were looking to buy ten Ford Econoline vans. The man who did the negotiating was Joseph Moore, but he wanted his colleague to co-sign. The man co-signed simply as “Oswald” and told the dealer that his name was Lee.[17]

    It is hard to take seriously any non-conspiratorial explanation of these events. Thornley decided to write a novel based on a not-especially-interesting marine who defected to the Soviet Union. While this hapless Marxist was in Russia, some CIA assets were impersonating this wayward young marine while conducting FDC/agency business. Then Thornley whimsically decided to show up in New Orleans, where he happens to meet Guy Banister—one of the figures involved in creating the FDC. So, he shows Banister the novel he has written about Oswald, the same guy that Bannister’s FDC associates are impersonating. And apparently Adam Curtis doesn’t bat an eyelash.

    In testimony before the New Orleans grand jury, Thornley denied that he had associated with Oswald during Oswald’s time in New Orleans. This was implausible given that they had known each other in the Marines, that Thornley had written a novel about Oswald, and that the two men knew many of the same people and frequented the same places. In fact, Garrison had at least eight witnesses who had seen Thornley and Oswald together during that summer. Two of these witnesses stated that Thornley had told them that Oswald was, in fact, not a communist. Garrison had a witness who said that she, “her husband, and a number of people who live in that neighborhood saw Thornley at the Oswald residence a number of times—in fact they saw him there so much they did not know which was the husband, Oswald or Thornley.”[18]

    In that 1963 summer in New Orleans, Oswald was famously arrested while passing out Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) leaflets. The New Orleans Secret Service investigated this incident and eventually looked into the company that printed the FPCC leaflets.[19] In Never Again, researcher Harold Weisberg wrote that,

    [When] the Secret Service was on the verge of learning, as I later learned, that it was not Oswald who picked up those handbills, the New Orleans FBI at once contacted the FBI HQ and immediately the Secret Service was ordered to desist. For all practical purposes, that ended the Secret Service probe—the moment it was about to explode the myth of the “loner” who had an associate who picked up a print job for him.[20]

    As an investigator for Garrison, Weisberg interviewed two of those print shop employees. They identified Thornley, not Oswald, as the person who picked up the FPCC flyers. When Weisberg told Garrison investigator Lou Ivon about this, Bill Boxley—a CIA infiltrator in Garrison’s office—tried to distort and downplay the significance of the event. However, Weisberg had surreptitiously recorded one of those interviews and the recording served to quiet Boxley. Unfortunately, the tape—like many of Garrison’s files—soon disappeared.[21]

    Thornley also denied to the Garrison team that he knew Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler. Bringuier was part of the CIA-backed Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE) and Butler ran Alton Ochsner’s CIA-backed Information Council of the Americas (INCA). Thornley did eventually admit that he knew both of these men.[22] Butler and Bringuier were both involved with Oswald in an infamous radio debate. This followed Oswald’s arrest after a confrontation with Bringuier, during his strange FPCC leafleting spectacle. In the radio debate, it was revealed that Oswald was a Marxist who had previously defected to the Soviet Union. This served to discredit the FPCC by associating it with communism and the Soviet Union. As many people have noted, this seems to have been the objective that Oswald believed he was furthering—some sort of psychological operation for propaganda purposes. If there were any doubt about this, it should be dispelled by the fact that the flyers were stamped with Guy Banister’s 544 Camp Street address.

    VI

    In summary, Thornley, Bringuier, and Butler were all instrumental in creating the evolving Oswald legend. Thornley first did so by depicting Oswald in The Idle Warriors as a communist malcontent in the Marines. Then he furthered Oswald’s legendary persona through his and his associates’ activities in New Orleans. If Weisberg is correct, this may have included assisting Oswald in his FPCC leafleting spectacle. That playlet got Oswald arrested and led to the infamous radio interview with Butler and Bringuier. On the day of the assassination, the CIA—via Bringuier’s DRE—quickly formulated the first JFK conspiracy theory: that Oswald was in some way an agent of Castro’s Cuba.

    Less than 24 hours after the assassination, conservative Senator Thomas Dodd had Butler brought to Washington, so the propagandist could offer congressional testimony about Oswald. Thornley, who referred to the assassination as “good news,” was interviewed by the Secret Service 36 hours after the assassination and by the FBI a day later. Just days after the assassination, Thornley abruptly left New Orleans with ten days of rent left on his apartment. He went to Arlington, Virginia and was eventually called to testify to the Warren Commission. Conforming to the new cover story of Oswald as a discontented lone nut, Thornley’s testimony offered lots of psychology analysis that would never have been admissible in court. However, this sort of testimony suited the Warren Commission perfectly well.[23]

    Years after the Warren Report was issued, Thornley—as mentioned above—went on to perjure himself before a grand jury in New Orleans about not knowing or meeting Oswald during that brief but spectacular summer in New Orleans. At one point, Thornley agreed to meet with a Garrison investigator, but only if the meeting were held at NASA. Given Thornley’s low status in conventional terms, it is hard to understand how he could command entry to such a location. NASA also happened to be the place where several of Oswald’s former co-workers at the CIA-connected Reily Coffee Company would later find employment. The task of locating Thornley in the first place was also a challenge for Garrison’s staff. Eventually, it was discovered that he was in Florida. Thornley, who since leaving the military had only held jobs as a waiter and a doorman, had two homes—one in Tampa and one in Miami.[24]

    Following the Garrison investigation, Thornley faded from notoriety. He only reemerged in the mid-1970’s at around the time that the HSCA began reinvestigating the JFK assassination. At this point, Kerry reappeared as some kind of iconoclastic, hippie burnout—albeit one with ultra-rightist politics. Suddenly, Thornley did a complete reversal on the question of conspiracy. He admitted knowing many of the targets of Garrison’s investigation. He even sent Garrison a long manuscript which detailed his strange version of a plot behind Dallas.[25] This document is but one of the elaborate disinformation ruses that Garrison received at different times. Two other infamous and more elaborate examples were the manuscripts Nomenclature of Assassination Cabal and Farewell America.

    Though Thornley at this point admitted knowing Ferrie and Bannister, and even E. Howard Hunt, he claimed that these were not the real conspirators. Absurdly, Thornley was then asserting that the actual plotters were characters known as Slim, Clint, Brother-in-law, and Gary Kirstein.[26] Kerry said he later figured out that two of these men were Hunt and Minuteman Jerry Milton Brooks under pseudonyms. This is but one example of how the HSCA, like the Garrison investigation, was beset by disinformation agents. Besides Thornley, figures like Marita Lorenz and Claire Booth Luce led HSCA investigators on many pointless diversions.[27] John Newman has recently argued that Antonio Veciana was doing something similar to HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi by exaggerating the importance of David Atlee Phillips and by distracting from the relationship between army intelligence and Veciana’s Alpha 66 unit.[28]

    Conclusion

    Thornley’s activities, and his perjury about them, are completely bizarre and inexplicable, unless one posits that he is a low-level intelligence operative. When one looks at these episodes with that possibility in mind, all the otherwise ridiculous episodes are quite logical. The same holds true for Thornley’s famous friend, Lee Harvey Oswald. In Oswald’s case, his Marine discharge, defection, repatriation, Dallas associations, New Orleans escapades, Mexico adventures, and behavior during his last days are all impossibly weird—unless and until the intelligence angle is examined. Unfortunately, this is how we must approach facts and evidence in para-political contexts. The Warren Commission’s official story, and Thornley’s key role in creating that transparent myth—he is quoted three times in the Warren Report to characterize Oswald—simply collapses under this kind of analysis.

     The JFK assassination should be recognized as a state crime against democracy in the context of America’s deep political system. Such an understanding points to the existence of a despotic, exceptionalist state that can exercise veto power over democracy. Unsurprisingly, this is not a perspective that Curtis and the BBC would look to promote. Predictably, CGYOMH opts to ridicule and dismiss Garrison and critics of the Establishment’s JFK assassination theory[29]—the theory of the lone nut who gets killed by another lone nut, i.e. the dual nut theory.

    All of this is not to say that Garrison was beyond reproach. He should not have been so trusting with the volunteers he allowed to work on the case. He should have indicted Ferrie sooner, lest his main suspect succumb to a deadly brain aneurysm whilst sitting on the couch looking at two typed, unsigned suicide letters. Furthermore, given all the things that have come out about Kerry Thornley, Garrison arguably should have sought to prosecute him rather than Clay Shaw. One reason to argue that Garrison should have gone after Thornley for conspiracy to commit murder comes from Thornley himself. Said Kerry Thornley, “Garrison, you should have gone after me for conspiracy to commit murder.”[30] Admittedly, Thornley was positing a contrived hoax, but even this JFK disinformation is of a piece with his prior roles in Oswald’s framing and in the cover-up after the fact.

    For Curtis to omit so many crucial facts about the JFK assassination, about Kerry Thornley, and about Garrison’s case is useful to his cause. It allows him to ignore the history-making interventions of the deep state and the extent to which these interventions have helped bring about the political nadir that America is experiencing. Curtis’ obscurantism allows him to downplay American state criminality as merely “political corruption”: the regrettable result of various technocratic bureaucrats holding and acting on bad ideas while trying to impose order on a chaotic and unpredictable world. He omits, distorts, and cherry picks facts to present his interminable exploration of our current dystopia. In so doing, CGYOMH obscures what may be the most salient historical development of the postwar US-led world order—the criminalization of the state.

    In Part 3, I will examine (1) how Curtis fails to reckon with the nature of the state in the West, (2) how this precludes him from grappling with the realities of US foreign policy, and (3) how this dovetails with his tendentious and chauvinistic depictions of the chief US rivals, Russia and China.

    Postscript:

    Adam Curtis apparently never looked at this article which demolishes his entire view of both Thornely and Garrison. (Click here for details)

    see Deep Fake Politics (Part 1): Getting Adam Curtis Out of Your Head

    see Deep Fake Politics (Part 3): Empire and the Criminalization of the State

    [1] David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York, NY: Random House, 1964).

    [2] Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York, NY: Bobbs Merrill, 1972).

    [3] Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 99.

    [4] M.D. Gary Aguilar et al., “A Joint Statement on the Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X Assassinations and Ongoing Cover-Ups,” The Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 2019.

    [5] See: Lance DeHaven-Smith, ed., The Battle for Florida: An Annotated Compendium of Materials from the 2000 Presidential Election (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005).

    [6] Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American Behavioral Scientist 53, no. 6 (February 16, 2010): pp. 795–825.

    [7] Lance DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 20.

    [8] DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America, p. 20.

    [9] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 7.

    [10] James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men: The Story of the Men on Both Sides of the Atlantic Who Successfully Thwarted Plans to Dismantle the Nazi Cartel System, ed. Mark Crispin Miller, vol. 21, Forbidden Bookshelf (New York, NY: Open Road Media, 2016).

    [11] See: Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA (New York, NY: Random House, 1984).

    [12] For a longer discussion of this, see: Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2022).

    [13] James DiEugenio, “Kerry Thornley: A New Look (Part 1),” Kennedys and King, June 13, 2020.

    [14] James DiEugenio, “Kerry Thornley: A New Look (Part 2),” Kennedys and King, June 14, 2020.

    [15] DiEugenio, “Kerry Thornley: A New Look (Part 1).”

    [16] James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), p. 189.

    [17] DiEugenio, “Kerry Thornley: A New Look (Part 1).”

    [18] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 189.

    [19] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 190.

    [20] Quoted in: DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 190.

    [21] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 190.

    [22] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 191.

    [23] DiEugenio, “Kerry Thornley: A New Look (Part 1).”

    [24] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 191.

    [25] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, pp. 191-192.

    [26] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 192.

    [27] See: Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993).

    [28] See: John M. Newman, “Antonio Veciana, Mystery Man in JFK Assassination, Part 1,” Who. What. Why., February 5, 2019.

    [29] I write “Establishment’s” because the final official word on the assassination remains the HSCA conclusion of a “probable conspiracy.” Given this fact, it is telling that the dominant media still defends the Warren Commission—a body whose work was found inadequate—first by the Church Committee and then by the HSCA Congressional investigation.

    [30] DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, p. 192.

  • Biden, Trump, the CIA: Reflections in a Dark Mirror, Nixon vs. Helms, 1971

    Biden, Trump, the CIA: Reflections in a Dark Mirror, Nixon vs. Helms, 1971

    Come October, President Joe Biden will make a decision on whether to release the remaining 15,834 still-repressed files that were supposed to have been released under the JFK Records Act of 1992.

    The JFK Act required that all the JFK files be made public in their entirety within 25 years, which of course, was 2017.

    But back in October 2017, President Donald Trump caved to the warnings of then-CIA director Mike Pompeo, FBI director Christopher Wray, and the National Security State, and left the remaining 15,834 files either redacted or totally under wraps.

    However, the mercurial Trump then also ordered the withheld files to be reviewed again within four years, perhaps seeking leverage over his adversaries in the intelligence communities.

    Fast forward to present, Trump has been booted from office and the betting is that Biden will also cave before the National Security State, despite the JFK assassination having happened 58 years ago.

    History is full of confounding realities. For all of his weaknesses, Trump was probably the better hope for full disclosure of the JFK records than Biden.

    For Trump was often, perhaps usually, at odds with the National Security State, variously called the “invisible government” or the “shadow government,” and, of late, “The Deep State.”

    In one of his seemingly ubiquitous running battles, Trump in 2019 detailed then-US Attorney General Robert Barr to investigate the nation’s investigative agencies, to ascertain whether elements of the Deep State illegally colluded to first try to prevent his ascendance to the White House, and then to undermine his presidency.

    At present, the criminal investigation into what is called “Russiagate” is led John Durham, now special counsel to the Justice Department and the former US Attorney for the District of Connecticut (2018–2021).

    Durham, originally tasked by Barr in May 2019 to investigate whether the invisible government had it in for Trump, has left the US Attorney’s Office with the advent of the Biden Administration, but has stayed on and is leading the criminal Russiagate investigation, as special counsel.

    Like so many modern-day Washington look-sees, the Durham inquiry promises to be interminable yet inconclusive and spun thereafter by party-based PR machines and media mouthpieces.

    Even a synopsis of the National Security State vs. Trump could consume a book. The famed Mueller investigation ended in a muddle, followed by a December 2019 report by the Department of Justice Inspector General that concluded that the FBI copiously lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISA court, to gain permission to spy the former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page during the 2016 election.[1]

    To critics, Trump’s directives to Barr and Durham were the actions of a paranoid, or rank political theater. That could be. To put it mildly, Trump was and is a man of manifest flaws.

    But then, what other aspiring presidential candidate had contemporaneously written about him in the op-ed section of The New York Times, by a one-time director of the CIA: “Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”[2]

    That line was penned by Michel J. Morell, professional lifer in the CIA, a onetime deputy director, and occasional acting director until his retirement in late 2013. 

    The Morell missive was run in The New York Times even before Trump became President.

    Yet Trump was hardly alone among presidents in his friction with the CIA; Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon all had conflicts and reservations about the intelligence agency. Most famously, Kennedy has been quoted to the effect that he “wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” due to the agency entangling his White House into the debacle known as the Bay of Pigs.

    Did someone say “Bay of Pigs?” That expression “Bay of Pigs” brings up Richard Nixon.

    Nixon’s Unsuccessful Struggle With the CIA

    Set the stage in 1971, with President Nixon requesting files from then-CIA Director Richard Helms. Paper files—this was largely the pre-computer days, and totally pre-internet.

    So, 50 years ago, what CIA files did Nixon want?

    “The ‘Who Shot John?’ angle,” Nixon explained to Helms, who was seated for a tête-à-tête in the Oval Office.  Nixon had circuitously outlined to Helms why he wanted to see certain files held by the intelligence agency, evidently to further illuminate the background of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.[3]

    All but forgotten in the voluminous White House tapes recorded by President Nixon is one of the strangest conversations ever to take place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a verbal tussle between Nixon and Helms on the morning of October 8, 1971.

    In that meeting, Nixon told Helms that he, the President—the Commander in Chief, the Chief Executive—wanted to see the CIA files on the “Bay of Pigs.”

    The end result: President Nixon never got to see those files.

    Helms sandbagged Nixon, confirming a separation of powers not pondered by the Founding Fathers nor by any sensible understanding of democratic institutions. 

    History rhymes, as they say, and Trump had wanted his AG Barr to review and then possibly make public files held by national security agencies, including the CIA.

    One could ponder if Trump, like Nixon, was effectively thwarted, meaning that the intelligence agencies remain essentially immune from Oval Office directives and oversight. 

    The Nixon-Helms Backdrop

    On that October morning 50 years ago, the cagey CIA Director Helms was mute in response to Nixon’s “The ‘Who shot John?’ angle” gambit.

    Nixon then badgered Helms with a bewildering string of questions regarding responsibility or indirect culpability for Kennedy’s death.

    “Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Nixon to blame? Etc., etc.” asked Nixon. “It may become, not by me, a very vigorous issue but if it does, I need to know what is necessary to protect frankly the intelligence gathering and the dirty tricks department and I will protect it.”

    Nixon finished with the flourish, “I have done more than my share of lying to protect you and I believe it’s totally right to do it.”[4]

    Evidently, Helms was not moved by this Nixon soliloquy.

    The ever-scheming Nixon would later ask Helms for CIA help in derailing the Watergate investigation, by having the agency posit to the FBI that the famous Watergate break-in had actually been a CIA operation.

    Nixon advised his right-hand man and White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman this way on June 23, 1973, as recorded on tape:

    Nixon: When you get in these (CIA) people when you…get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this [Watergate investigation] will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing…”[5]

    In other words, Nixon was implying, if the Watergate story blew open, so would the JFK assassination story.

    One interpretation of the Helms-Nixon stalemate is that Nixon wanted to know if CIA files had details on the Mafia-Cuban-CIA hit squads that had targeted Cuba-leader Fidel Castro in the late 1950s and early 1960s—efforts which Nixon had helped set up as President Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President, along with CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, later known as the Nixon White House Watergate burglar-meister.

    Many JFK assassination researchers have concluded the anti-Castro death squads, possibly in cooperation with elements in US intelligence agencies, then turned on Kennedy after the failed CIA-sponsored 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles, in retribution for Kennedy’s decision to not provide air support for the beleaguered invaders. 

    Interestingly enough, arrested at the Watergate, on the fateful night of June 17, 1972, were five Cuban-exile operatives, including Eugenio R. Martinez, who it was revealed later was still on the receiving end of disbursements from CIA paymasters.

    H. R. Haldeman would later author a book and posit that the expression “Bay of Pigs” were Nixon code words for the JFK assassination. Certainly, if Nixon wanted to see the “Bay of Pigs” files to provide background information on “Who shot John,” then Haldeman’s intuition seems likely. To put it bluntly, Nixon was fishing for CIA files pertaining to the JFK assassination.[6]

    That October, 1971 morning, Nixon and Helms engaged in a polite, lengthy discussion about the President’s organizational and operational needs and prerogatives, to which Helms readily assented.

    But talk is cheap.

    Fast forward a year-and-a-half: Helms never coughed up vital Bay of Pigs files and White House tapes from May 18, 1973, reveal Haldeman informing Nixon that there was key memo missing “that the CIA or somebody has caused to disappear that impeded the effort to find out what really did happen on the Bay of Pigs.”

    So, in the case of Nixon vs. Helms, the CIA foiled a Presidential order to turn over files. The director of the CIA, Helms, was not answerable to the duly-elected US President.

    Of course, Nixon and Haldeman would have no way to know if many other “Bay of Pigs” files had also disappeared—national security agencies inherently have a monopoly not only on security information, but also on information about the information. 

    Ehrlichman

    The October 1971 Nixon-Helms conversation followed on the heels of an Oval Office chat between Nixon and John Ehrlichman, then Chief Domestic Adviser and previously White House Counsel.

    Ehrlichman, like Haldeman, explained to Nixon how he had been roadblocked by the CIA in his request for files and “the internal stuff.”

    Both wondered aloud how they could bring the CIA to heel and they discussed firing CIA Director Helms and replacing him with a loyalist. Then the pair discussed E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA officer they recently brought on-staff to the White House ostensibly to lead a “Plumbers’ Unit,” and who later organized burglaries, including the infamous Watergate break-in.

    “Helms is scared to death of this guy [E. Howard] Hunt we got working for us, because he knows where a lot of the bodies are buried,” opined Ehrlichman, in suggesting that the White House could intimidate Helms into cooperation by hinting Hunt had switched from the CIA to Team Nixon.[7]

    In the taped conversation, Ehrlichman and Nixon agreed that the CIA was pursuing “self-perpetuation” in keeping files secret—it would protect its image and could threaten that of others, with secret files.  “Helms is a bureaucrat first and he is protecting that bureau,” said Ehrlichman. Nixon retorted, “Well I am the President and the CIA is not, it [the CIA] is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.”

    President or not, Nixon never got the files he wanted.

    The final irony is that Hunt, of whom Nixon and Ehrlichman chortled was their ace-in-the-hole against the CIA, in truth probably never stopped being a friend of the agency.

    Rob Roy Ratliff, the CIA’s liaison on the National Security Council, in 1974 provided an affidavit to the House Judiciary Committee, when it was weighing articles of impeachment against President Nixon.[8]

    Ratliff swore that Hunt, while ensconced in the White House, had used secure agency couriers to send sealed pouches to CIA Director Helms on a regular basis.

    Rather than being Nixon’s lever against the CIA, more likely Hunt was a mole for the agency, working in the White House. Like the old joke, Nixon’s paranoia did not mean no one was out to get him.

    Trump

    Of course, Trump’s relationship with the intelligence agencies and CIA was much different from Nixon’s, with no shared history in Cuba, Latin America or Iran, no alignment of fervently held ideologies, and no mutually buried bodies.

    Unlike Nixon who reveled in foreign affairs, Trump was no scholar of international relations and instinctually regarded  offshore incursions as entanglements.

    Yet Trump, like Nixon, was deeply concerned with what might be in intelligence agency files and whether the agencies answer to him, or have their own agendas, or even worse, have plans for a presidential demise.

    By many accounts, the US intelligence community and the CIA and their allies in the media strongly resist anyone from outside their sphere rendering judgment on what is secret and what is not.

    And indeed, the mass media in general sang the CIA tune during the Trump Presidency, fretting, as did The New Yorker magazine, that AG Barr would “unilaterally” declassify documents.[9] In other words, the presumption was that a President should only declassify documents if given approval by the National Security State.

    Of course, the intelligence agencies cited the well-worn and sometimes true clichés that they need to protect “sources and methods.”

    Conclusion

    Still, as in the long-ago Nixon White House, the highly politicized circumstances of the Trump Presidency muddied some underlying principles.

    Trump, like Nixon, was embattled and deeply unpopular in some circles and even considered a menace to the nation by some. Both Nixon and Trump hardly had the charm of a President Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, or even the affability of a Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

    Yet Trump, like Nixon, was institutionally justified in his struggles with the intelligence agencies. As the elected President and Commander-in-Chief, Nixon had every right to view any file in the entire federal government. And Attorney General Barr, as deputized by Trump, had every right to look at and declassify any document at will, at Presidential direction.

    The real question remains: Will the intelligence agencies release all the relevant files to Special Counsel Durham or, like the CIA in the Nixon days, will they unilaterally withhold information?

    More speculative, but worth knowing—did  the CIA or other intelligence agencies have plants in the Trump campaign or in the Trump White House?

    And Biden?

    And looking forward: Will President Biden show the resolve necessary to release all the remaining 15,834 files that were supposed to have been released under the JFK Records Act of 1992?

    The record of Kennedy, and then Nixon, and then Trump, suggests that Biden will be unable to prevail against the National Security State, even if he tries.

    [1] Glenn Greenwald, The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media, The Intercept, 12/2/2019.

    [2] Michael J. Morell, I Ran the CIA, Now I Am Endorsing Hillary Clinton, The New York Times, 8/5/2016, see also https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html

    [3] Nixontapes.org. See http://nixontapeaudio.org/rmh/587-007a.mp3. See also Jefferson Morley, JFK Facts, 6/17/2014.

    [4] Ibid. 3

    [5] “Smoking Gun”: Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman discuss the Watergate break-in, June 23, 1972, Richard Nixon Presidential Library. See also Andrew Coan, Prosecuting the President: How Special Prosecutors Hold Presidents Accountable and Protect the Rule of Law, Oxford University Press, 165–166

    [6] Don Fulsom, Nixon’s Bay of Pigs Secrets, The History Reader, St. Martin’s Press.

    [7] Ibid 3

    [8] Chris Collins, Nixon’s Wars: Secrecy, Watergate, and the CIA, Eastern Kentucky University Encompass, 74.

    [9] David Rohde, “William Barr, Trump’s Sword and Shield,” The New Yorker, 1/13/2020.

  • Part 2: Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s The Irishman

    Part 2: Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s The Irishman

    After reading the first part of this review, which focused on the book about Frank Sheeran by Charles Brandt, it’s hard to understand why director Martin Scorsese and actor/producer Robert DeNiro were intent on making a film from his book, I Heard you Paint Houses. And, further, why they would spend 160 million to do so. That point is important to discuss, but I will delay speculation on that issue for later in this review. The fact is, they did make the film. So, let us review and analyze the product before us.

    The first thing that struck me about the picture is its length. It three and a half hours long with no intermission. To put it frankly: Lawrence of Arabia justifies its length; The Irishman does not. There are many scenes that are simply extended or not necessary at all. When Sheeran goes to Detroit to meet Hoffa for the last time, we see him getting on the plane. Then after he kills him, the film shows him returning through the airport. Why? When the hit team goes to pick up Hoffa for that meeting from the restaurant, the picture depicts the drive and the actors in the front seat get into a stupid discussion about the fish that the driver previously had in the car. That is not a mistype. They discuss a fish as they go to pick up Hoffa, in order to kill him. If this was supposed to be a kind of Pinteresque/David Mamet touch, it did not work for this viewer. These are not the only scenes that could have been either cut or shortened. Not by a long shot.

    Then, there is the protracted, over-extended ending section. The dramatic and intellectual ending of the film is the murder of Hoffa and the cremation of his body. But the picture goes on and on from there. We see Sheeran being tried in court for other crimes, we see him in prison with Bufalino, and then there is a long section after he gets out with scenes with his monsignor—two of these. We then see him trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter, falling down at home, and being placed in a retirement center. We then watch as he picks out a casket and chooses a cemetery lot etc. After the film was finished and I was driving home, I tried to figure out what that long extended ending was about. When I got home, I realized why. The film makers were trying to make Sheeran into some kind of sympathetic character; they were trying to wring pathos from the audience.

    Think about that. If we view Sheeran through the eyes of Charles Brandt, why on earth should he be any kind of sympathetic character? Here is a man who killed his friend and employer. And who put up no protest about it. And, according to Brandt, he then killed many other people in what were clear cut cases of murder. There was nothing fair or just about them, since they were allegedly mob hits. Why on earth should anyone feel any kind of sympathy for this guy?

    But in a deeper sense, as I have already made the argument for, if Sheeran is a liar, and if he conned Brandt, and if the book then conned the film makers, in my eyes, that makes it even worse. Why would we feel for a man who simply was a flimflam artist? But, further, his flimflammery was over a variety of serious subjects (e.g. the Bay of Pigs invasion, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the murder of Jimmy Hoffa).

    In comparison with Brandt, the film stays pretty much faithful to the story line of the book. Since the book is about 280 pages long, the distended length is chalked up to director Martin Scorsese’s dilated approach. Another example of that approach is—if you know Scorsese—pretty predictable. To give one example: In the book, Sheeran notes a brief anecdote about an organizing battle between the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO over a taxi company. He says that a method they would use was to steal an idle cab every once in a while and drive it into the river. Well, with Scorsese, this becomes a whole fleet of taxis parked conveniently near the river and all of them are thrown into the water at once. If that was not enough, other taxis are then blown up with explosives.

    The problem with this false, over-the-top treatment is that one wonders: How did Sheeran and Hoffa lose the organizing battle? Because they did. (Brandt, p. 137) I guess the rationale for these scenes are, if you have 160 million to spend, you spend it. Forget what actually happened. Because in the book, the author states that they paid the cops to look the other way for each taxi driven into the river. In reality, with the wholesale destruction depicted here, there would have been front page stories, a police investigation, and court hearings.

    The script also follows the aspect adapted by Sheeran and Brandt from the fairy tale Giancana concoction Double Cross. That is, Giancana made a deal with the Kennedys over the 1960 election, but Bobby would not let up on them once they got to the White House. The script has Sheeran saying years later something like, go figure that out. For anyone with any brains or knowledge, there isn’t anything to figure. Because it never happened.

    But there is a deeper fault here. The battle between Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy was the stuff of real epic drama. There was a lot at stake. And there were moral problems on both sides of the war. Unlike others, I do not think this was RFK’s finest hour. There were many things that chief investigator Walter Sheridan did that I believe were unethical. Rigging a lie detector test being only one of them. I do not know if RFK was aware of all these shenanigans. But, beyond that, what RFK thought about the problem turned out to be at least partly wrong. Because once Hoffa left the scene, the Teamsters union was not cleaned up. That effort went on for decades. So here is an actual political conflict—not the phony Giancana one—that one could really get involved in on a number of levels: the historic, the personal, the dramatic, and the epic. What do Scorsese, DeNiro, and writer Steve Zaillian do with this huge, violent confrontation?

    I hate to say it, but all the picture does is pay lip service to that titanic struggle. Bobby Kennedy is in the film for about five minutes. And those scenes are not at all gripping. You can see newsreels on You Tube that are much more interesting and intense than what is depicted in this film. I don’t see how one can make a less complementary comment on the picture than that. But it happens to be true. Apparently, no one involved in the film in any creative way thought this actual battle was worth spending much time or effort on. Making up scenes about dozens of taxis being thrown into the river somehow was.

    The film depicts the paper mâché scene about David Ferrie meeting Sheeran and giving him a weapons delivery to take to Florida. It cleverly introduces that episode by having actor Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino tell Sheeran, words to the effect: in Baltimore you will meet a fairy named Ferrie. For those who saw Pesci play Ferrie in the film JFK, the irony and humor are neatly understated. The film then depicts the almost impossible to digest hand off to Howard Hunt. The movie does not include the delivery by Sheeran of the rifles to Ferrie in the weeks leading up the Kennedy assassination. The JFK murder is depicted in the film as Sheeran, Hoffa and others in some kind of ice cream parlor as the bulletin comes on about President Kennedy’s murder. As this occurs, the characters move closer to the TV set to hear the news. Everyone except Hoffa, that is, who stays seated at his table eating his ice cream. But there is little doubt about who killed Kennedy according to this picture. Because later in the film in a discussion between Bufalino and Sherran, the latter says that Hoffa is a pretty high up guy. Bufalino replies that if they can kill the president, they can kill the president of a union. We are supposed to buy the idea that the Mafia killed the president. On the word of Joe Pesci playing Bufalino. Hmm

    What is also a little more than baffling is the fact that the script largely discounts the interactions between Hoffa, Fitzsimmons, and the Nixon White House and all their ramifications. Again, the reason for this escapes me. Because, unlike the baloney about the JFK assassination and the Giancana deal, these are all true and pretty much proven. Because of his bitter hatred of the Kennedys, Hoffa did try and develop a relationship with Richard Nixon. And after he was imprisoned, he did work through channels to get Nixon to grant him a pardon. There are even tapes on this now. (Chicago Tribune, 4/8/2001, article by James Warren) But the White House tricked Hoffa by putting restrictions on his pardon. Hoffa was challenging these in court at the time of his murder. Clearly, Frank Fitzsimmons, who Hoffa picked as his replacement, was working with the White House to trade a Teamsters Nixon endorsement in return for Nixon making sure Hoffa could not run against him in 1976. This is important, some would call it crucial information to understand, but the script really underplays it.

    Which brings us to two interrelated points about this 210-minute saga. If one is not really interested in history, why make a film out of a book that tries to seriously impact on historical matters of the utmost importance? For all its failings, the book by Brandt does a much better job of supplying details and context to the Fitzsimmons/Nixon interchange and how it impacted the plot to kill Hoffa. If there had been no restrictions on the Nixon pardon, Hoffa would have easily defeated his replacement without undertaking a bitter crusade, one which touched on Fitzsimmons’ record with the Mafia loans from the Teamster pension fund. But in watching this film, one cannot really understand that rather key issue. The script and Scorsese’s interests are elsewhere.

    Which leads me to an interview that the director gave before the picture’s release. Scorsese told Entertainment Weekly that he was not actually concerned about what really happened to Hoffa. He then added, “What would happen if we knew exactly how the JFK assassination worked out? What does it do? It gives us a couple of good articles, a couple of movies and people taking about it at dinner parties.” He then added that his film is really about Sheeran and what he had to do and how he made a mistake.

    In my opinion, this tells us a lot about Scorsese; both his mentality and his career. Concerning the first, can the man be serious? When Oliver Stone made a film about a measured hypothesis of what happened to Kennedy, it unleashed a tidal wave of controversy which enveloped the nation for over a year. This was unprecedented in cinema history. If that movement had not been diverted by the MSM, who knows where it would have gone? But it gave us not a few articles, but a whole flood of books, TV shows, newspaper articles, front page magazine covers plus an act of congress to declassify all the documents on the JFK case. And that act has still not been fulfilled 21 years after the legislation’s authorizing agency expired. So, what on earth is the guy talking about?

    But what makes it worse is that what he endorses, namely Sheeran’s story, simply does not survive real examination. In reality, it’s the stuff of John Ford’s films, which the fine film critic Vernon Young memorably described as mythomania masquerading as myth. Which is odd, because it was those kinds of films that, early in his career, Scorsese dismissed as the kinds of pictures he did not want to make. (And make no mistake about this, because the recent film about Nicola Tesla, The Current War, involved both Scorsese and Zaillian. And in its own way, it is as crushingly disappointing as this picture.)

    Does The Irishman redeem itself in its making? Not really. Al Pacino can be a good actor (e.g. Dick Tracy, Dog Day Afternoon). He can also be a guy walking his way to a huge paycheck. Scorsese let him walk. Pacino is not Hoffa. He is Pacino. If you want to see the difference between creative method acting and what was called at the Actor’s Studio indicative acting, compare what Pacino does here with Jack Nicholson’s portrayal in the 1992 film Hoffa. DeNiro as Sheeran tries to find the center of a character who, because he’s a confection, doesn’t really have one. Therefore, the fine actor delivers a studied, surface performance. When DeNiro strikes the center of a role—as he did in The Last Tycoon, or The Untouchables—he inhabits his character and the exterior simply becomes a surface to reflect that transformation. That doesn’t happen here. Joe Pesci does a decent enough job as Bufalino, but, again, the director didn’t push him hard enough to fill in points of character geography that are missing from the script. None of the other performances are worth noting. For example, Jessie Plemmons plays Chuck O’Brien. This is the fourth time I have seen him. Any difference between this performance and the prior three are due to hair style and costume.

    In his early films, Scorsese seemed to think that the aim of film art was to show us men with guns shooting each other and then supplying the audience with lots of gore and blood. For example, in the final shoot out in Taxi Driver, the director made sure that Travis Bickle blew off one of his assailant’s hands and the next one’s eye. Then the guy with the blown off hand arose and started hitting Bickle with this severed stump. This was Scorsese’s idea of realism. With a few exceptions, as in The Departed, he doesn’t do that anymore. But there is something else that has impacted Scorsese’s directorial approach and his oeuvre.

    That something else was Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. That TV crime series based itself around an original and fascinating idea. Let’s take a perfectly average middle-class male, a high school science teacher. Let us equip him with a middle-class family and house. Growing frustrated with his economic problems and introduced to a drug/crime element through his drug enforcing brother in law, Walter White evolved into an amoral, drug dealing killer, as did his high school partner Jesse Pinkman. That concept was original and daring. And it was treated with intelligence, a sense of irony, and a realism which did not include people getting their hands and eyes blown off. It was so interesting and well done that it created a mini-sensation with both the public and in the film industry. For me, Gilligan’s approach has made Scorsese’s both uninteresting and a bit obsolete. Gilligan showed there was a way to make crime sagas without having to deal with what are, in the end, pathological, dedicated and two-dimensional criminals. Therefore, you didn’t have to look for excuses to throw corpses out of tall buildings and have them land on car hoods.

    That approach was, I thought, limited enough. But with the Scorsese interview quoted above, we can see why it was such. And why The Irishman is a crushing disappointment.

  • Part 1: Charles Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses

    Part 1: Charles Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses

    Charles Brandt published I Hear You Paint Houses, about the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, back in 2004. This was about a year after the protagonist of the book, Frank Sheeran, passed away. Because of its sensational nature, it became a best-seller, because Sheeran did not just say he assassinated former Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. He was also involved with the murder of President John F. Kennedy. He also killed Joey Gallo in 1972. And he also killed another mobster, Salvatore Briguglio in 1978. And that was not all. The hit list went on for about 10-12 more people. Sheeran was a veritable Murder Incorporated unto himself.

    Brandt had been a criminal lawyer who eventually began to focus on medical malpractice. He and a partner were responsible for getting Sheeran out of prison due to a medical hardship. He had been put away for two felonies for approximately 30 years. Brandt struck up a friendship with his client and did a long series of interviews with him spreading out over several years. The longer they talked, the more Sheeran managed to dredge up. And the more he dredged up, the more Brandt wrote down and found credible and included in his book.

    The book proper begins with a dispute between some Mafia leaders who do not want Hoffa to run for president of the union in 1976. One of those mob leaders, Russell Bufalino, is trying to arrange a meeting between Hoffa and some of his cohorts in Detroit. This is a frame that Brandt will return to later in the volume as it’s the reason for the book.

    As many other types of these works do, the book then uses a long flashback to explain how the protagonist got to this point in his life. Sheeran’s life is kind of nomadic in its early years. He got expelled from school and joined the carnival. He then got into logging and later become a competition dancer, while working days for a glass company. In 1941, he joined the army infantry in Europe. According to Brandt, Sheeran saw a remarkable 411 days of combat. He participated in the Italian campaign, most notably in the battles of Monte Cassino and Anzio. He was also involved in the invasion of Southern France in August of 1944. He took part in the liberation of Dachau and also the assault on Munich. He was discharged in October of 1945.

    He returns to West Philadelphia and his glass works job. He then got a union job as a truck driver for a meat delivery company. He is caught stealing from that company and falls in with some Pennsylvania mobsters, namely Angelo Bruno and Bufalino. He cases out a linen company that a friend wants him to blow up, since its serious competition for his own business. But he is spied on as he cases it out and unbeknownst to him, Bruno has a piece of the business. He is now told to do away with the man who put him up to this. He does, and this is what makes him a soldier and hit man for Bufalino.

    Very early in the book, that is before page 100, I began to suspect that Brandt was aggrandizing his cast of characters, in order to swell his volume into something like an epic. The author compares Bufalino to Al Capone. (p. 75) Bufalino was the boss of my hometown, Erie Pennsylvania. At its peak, Erie had about 180,000 people. He had some other areas, but he was never the capo of a major or, even, mid-major city. He then adds that Hoffa was as famous as the Beatles or Elvis Presley. (p. 86) There is no doubt that Hoffa was a colorful and outspoken character, but to compare him to those two musical legends is really stretching it beyond any kind of normal judgment. And it was here than I began to question the author’s credibility and frankness.

    Brandt quickly lays in Hoffa’s rise in the union movement and he then gets to the reason that Hoffa was famous, which was his duel with a young Robert Kennedy before the McClellan Committee. After Teamsters president Dave Beck was suspected of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from his own union, Hoffa became its president. (p. 91) Shortly after this, Bufalino got Sheeran a job with Hoffa. According to the author, the first time Hoffa talked to Sheeran on the phone, he asked him, “I heard you paint houses.” This meant that Sheeran was a liquidator. (p. 101) Hoffa hires him and Bufalino buys him a plane ticket to Detroit.

    As almost any author in the field of Teamster studies knows, Hoffa was on friendly terms with organized crime. He even allowed some of the mob chieftains, like Tony Provenzano, to lead certain local unions. He also allowed the Mafia to borrow large sums of cash from the Teamster pension fund, in order to construct gambling casinos in Las Vegas. Hoffa set up Allen Dorfman to manage this aspect of union business and the president got a cut of the loan as a finder’s fee. These kinds of activities set up the confrontation between Hoffa and RFK on Capitol Hill.

    Bobby Kennedy was the chief counsel to the McClellan Committee, sometimes called the Rackets Committee. His brother, Senator John Kennedy, also served on that committee. It was at this time that Bobby Kennedy began to raise his political profile as a dreaded enemy of organized crime and, because of his association with gangsters, Jimmy Hoffa. Bobby Kennedy did everything he could, and then some, to try and remove Hoffa from power and place him in prison. But since Hoffa was allowed to use the Teamsters treasury to finance his legal defense, he remained an elusive target. In fact, as Brandt notes, Hoffa eluded three court cases against RFK. But once Bobby became Attorney General under President Kennedy, he assembled a Get Hoffa Squad at the Justice Department. The tactics used by its leader, Walter Sheridan, were extremely controversial. Author Fred Cook of The Nation was a vociferous critic of Sheridan’s tactics. Victor Navasky, in his book Kennedy Justice, also criticized RFK for the enormous amount of Justice Department resources that the Attorney General spent on the Hoffa case.

    Brandt does not criticize Sheridan at all and he presents Edward Partin as pretty much a straight shooter. Partin was a mole set up by Sheridan in Hoffa’s camp and was the principal witness at his jury tampering trial. Partin had a record a mile long prior to his employment by Sheridan. So, Sheridan tried to clean him up by giving him a polygraph test, which, quite predictably, he passed. Sheridan then trumpeted this to the press and Partin was now considered credible by the media. Years later, a society of professional polygraphers got hold of the Sheridan arranged test and unveiled their analysis at a trade convention. I was furnished this discussion by researcher Peter Vea and I reviewed it during a speech I made at the 1995 COPA Conference in Washington.

    It turned out that the polygraph experts concluded that Partin had been deceptive throughout the test. But they concluded the most egregious lie was told when Partin said Hoffa had threatened RFK’s life. The analysis concluded that the administrator had to have turned down or misrepresented some of the indexes to the test to pass Partin. And, in fact, one of the original technicians was later indicted for fraud in his practice. In other words, Sheridan had rigged the test. The fact that Brandt does not know this is indicative of the lack of scope and depth to the book. For although it is largely told through Sheeran’s eyes, the author interjects frequently to give background to the protagonist’s story.

    It is through this part of the story that Sheeran begins to insert the JFK case into the narrative. Sheeran begins to work for Hoffa in Detroit and, since Chicago is in proximity to Detroit, Sheeran now says that he saw Sam Giancana with Jack Ruby a few times. (p. 119) And once Giancana is in the story, Sheeran now begins to recite the whole phony tale about how Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger with the Mafia and he made a deal with them to get his son elected to the presidency in 1960. And, somehow, the Mafia felt double crossed when Bobby Kennedy continued to prosecute them after the election. (p. 1200)

    I noted in my review of Mark Shaw’s book Denial of Justice that this concept is simply spurious. It was clearly manufactured as a way to smear JFK during the latter stages of his race against Richard Nixon in 1960. (See Daniel Okrent, Last Call, pp 367-69) Prior to that, in all the reviews that Joseph Kennedy had to undergo through his six appointed positions in the federal government, there was never a word mentioned by anyone about it. Author Daniel Okrent reviewed the voluminous files in the reviews. Once this phony accusation made it into the press, gangsters like Frank Costello and Joe Bonanno then sued it in their cheapjack books as a way of getting back at Bobby Kennedy for bringing the Mafia out of the shadows and making life much more difficult for that enterprise.

    In 1992, Sam and Chuck Giancana decided to capitalize on the success of Oliver Stone’s film JFK.

    They wrote a book based on this false thesis called Double Cross. This book was almost entirely a ludicrous confection. (For the salacious details as to why, see my review of Mark Shaw’s book noted above.) Yet, it became a best seller and the nutty thesis has been popularized. Even John Newman repeated it in his series on John F. Kennedy. How he could do so when the House Select Committee collected just about every file available on organized crime and the JFK case, and this was not in them, escapes me. But again, Brandt accepts this with no investigation, probably so that Sheeran can say that his boss Jimmy Hoffa warned Giancana against this because Bobby Kennedy could not be trusted in any negotiation. (p. 125)

    Brandt then has Sheeran go even beyond this. He has Giancana tell Hoffa that John F. Kennedy was going to help get Castro out of Cuba. And this would aid the Mob in getting their casinos back. (p. 121) This is obviously a reference to the Bay of Pigs operation. So we are also supposed to think that somehow President Kennedy told Giancana about this operation prior to the election. Somehow, the Erie Pennsylvania Don, Bufalino also knew about this. Somehow, Joe Kennedy told Russ this.

    But Brandt and Sheeran are not done with this concept. Sheeran now says that at a meeting at the Gold Coast Lounge in Hollywood, Florida he was sitting in the midst of Santo Trafficante, Bufalino, and Carlos Marcello. This was in the 1960-61 time period. He tells Brandt that David Ferrie was also there. Why Ferrie would be there is not explained in any way.

    Brandt then writes something that is even more far-fetched. On the orders of Hoffa, Sheeran is to go to a cement plant in Baltimore with a borrowed truck. He is to go to a tiny landing strip and there he meets Ferrie in a small plane. Ferrie tells him to reposition his truck nearby some other trucks. Soldiers carrying arms emerge from these trucks and place their weapons in the back of Sheeran’s vehicle. Ferrie tells him that the weapons are from the Maryland National Guard and that he is to drive these to Jacksonville. (p. 129) There he will be met by a man named Hunt. We later find out that this is Howard Hunt of Watergate fame.

    Again, apparently Brandt asked no questions about any of this. I will. Having read all of the reports on the Bay of Pigs, I have yet to see anything anywhere that says the CIA needed help from Hoffa to drive arms from Maryland to Florida. The ships carrying arms to Cuba in that aborted invasion had thousands of rifles, but they were furnished by the Pentagon. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 42.) Ferrie did do training for the Bay of Pigs, but it was all done in and around New Orleans. I have never seen any evidence he was part of the logistics side of the operation. Howard Hunt worked on that operation, but not on the military side, on the political and propaganda side. That is, organizing an exile government group. (ibid, p. 40) Finally, why would Hunt use his real name with a total stranger? And why would Ferrie blow his cover?

    In 1963 Bobby Kennedy again indicted Jimmy Hoffa on two charges, one for fraud and one for jury tampering. (The liar Partin was important in the latter.) Bobby was now really on the warpath against the Cosa Nostra. He had a defecting Mafia soldier giving him the secrets of the organization. His name of course was Joe Valachi. RFK did all he could to promote him and place him in the public eye. In November of that year, Hoffa calls Sheeran and asks him to go to Brooklyn to a Genovese hangout called Monte’s. (Brandt, p. 163) While there, Tony Provenzano hands him a duffel bag and tells him to drive down to the same cement company as he had before. There he meets David Ferrie again and hands him the bag with three rifles in it. (ibid) This is later explained with the following:  Hoffa actually supplied the rifles for the murder of John Kennedy. The original hit team somehow lost their weapons in a car crash. They needed Ferrie to supply them with replacements. (pp. 241-242) Brandt apparently did not bother to ask: Why did they have to get them from New York? And with four intermediaries? (The author tells us that Ferrie had an accomplice with him.). This is all hammered home when Hoffa begins to get out of line and Bufalino tells him that there are people higher in the Mob than him who are complaining Hoffa has not shown any appreciation for Dallas. (p. 240)

    As everyone knows, the Justice Department eventually convicted Hoffa on two felonies and sent him to jail for 13 years. Hoffa’s handpicked replacement was Frank Fitzsimmons. Hoffa did all he could to get out of prison early. According to Sheeran, money was being sent to Nixon’s White House for Hoffa. (p. 197). Fitzsimmons did get Nixon to pardon Hoffa at Christmas of 1971. But it’s pretty clear that Nixon and Fitzsimmons duped him. They first made Hoffa resign as president, a title he still had in prison. He was then turned down on a parole bid, one he thought was going to be granted. Then Nixon pardoned him on condition that he not run for president of the union again until 1980. In return, Fitzsimmons had the Teamsters endorse Nixon in 1972.

    But, as the reader may suspect by now, Sheeran had driven down to Washington from Philly with a suitcase full of money. He met Attorney General John Mitchell at the Hilton and turned over a half million in cash to him. (p. 204)

    When Hoffa got out, he assembled a legal team to go ahead and challenge the restrictions on his pardon. When his parole period ended, Hoffa began to now began to intimate he would challenge Fitzsimmons for the presidency in 1976. Hoffa made it known that he felt Fitzsimmons was not getting good deals from the Mob for the pension loans. He also implied he could prove it. (p. 240) Bufalino now tells Sheeran to talk to Hoffa and convince him to wait until 1980 to run. Bufalino tells Sheeran that if the Mob could take out the president they could remove the president of a union.

    Hoffa did not heed the advice. Bufalino and Sheeran drive to an airport at Port Clinton near Toledo, Ohio. Sheeran then flew on to Pontiac, Michigan. From there, Sheeran drove to a house near the Machus Red Fox Restaurant outside Detroit.  At the house were Sal Briguglio and the Andretta brothers, Steve, and Tom. (Sheeran does not actually name Tom, but he implies it.) There they waited for Chuck O’Brien, a virtual step son to Hoffa to pick up Sheeran and Briguglio. When he arrived, the three went to the restaurant, picked up Hoffa, and convinced him that a meeting to straighten out his political problems with local Don Tony Giacalone and Provenzano was to occur at a nearby house. Hoffa fell for this, and once in the house, Sheeran killed him with two shots to the head. (p. 257). He left his gun there and departed, while the Andretta brothers did the clean-up job and disposed of the body.

    The rest of the book deals with the aftermath of the murder. Although the FBI never did indict anyone, they focused on several people who they thought were involved. And they ended up making their lives quite difficult. Sheeran continued a life of crime and he was busted on two felonies. He ended up in Springfield with Bufalino and Tony Salerno, who some think approved the Hoffa murder. (pp. 276-77) Sheeran’s health failed him and one of the attorneys who got him out on a medical hardship was Brandt. And that was the genesis for the book.

    I have pointed out what I think are some serious problems with the book. And I will be quite frank about these:  I don’t believe any of them happened. As far as these stories about rifles sent by Hoffa through New York to Dallas, and Ferrie instructing arms to be sent to Florida, and Joe Kennedy’s deal with Giancana etc. I give these tales about as much credence as I do to the stories of people like Chauncey Holt, Judy Baker, and James Files. But I have to add, other critics of Brandt also do not find the specifics about Sheeran’s many stories about Mob hits to be credible. For instance, Brandt has Sheeran killing Joey Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House in 1972. The suspected killer was Carmine DiBiase and Gallo was set up by one Joseph Luparelli. The original descriptions describe DiBiase not Sheeran. And Luparelli later turned state witness and implicated DiBiase. Gallo’s widow, who was there that night, also said the men she saw did not match Sheeran’s physical profile. Shereen was 6’ 4”, pale complexion, and sandy haired. Gallo’s bodyguard, who was also shot that night said DiBiase was the shooter. Nicholas Gage, who covered the Mob for two newspapers and wrote a book about the organization, said that Brandt’s book “is the most fabricated mafia tale since the fake autobiography of Lucky Luciano forty years ago.” (“The Lies of the Irishman”, Slate, by Bill Tonelli, 8/7/19)

    In fact, in Tonelli’s article, he talked to several people who knew Sheeran back there in Philadelphia. One source, the reputed head of the Irish Mob, told Tonelli that Sheeran was full of it. That the man never killed a fly, but he did crush many bottles of red wine. Tonelli wrote that no policeman, no prosecutor, no known criminal ever harbored any suspicion that Sheeran was a hit man. A former FBI agent named John Tamm told Tonelli that Sheeran’s story was baloney and he never heard that Sheeran killed anyone. Further, no one except Ed Partin has ever said that Hoffa ordered anyone dead.

    And then there are the problems in the text. On page 340, Brandt writes that Tom Andretta was dead in 2004. This was not accurate as one can see by clicking the linked Wikipedia entry. Vince Wade was a reporter for a local TV station in Detroit when Hoffa disappeared. Wade discovered the air strip in Pontiac that Sheeran thought was gone is still there. It is now called Pontiac International Airport. When Sheeran got to the location, he drove right past the restaurant, because he said the location was back quite a ways from the parking lot. This is also not accurate. It is only separated by a sidewalk and a row of parking spaces. (The Daily Beast, 11/1/19)

    Then there are the problems with Sheeran’s evolution of his story. In 1995, these began with a story about contract killers being hired by the Nixon White House to kill Hoffa. He then modified that story to Vietnamese contract killers who killed Hoffa for John Mitchell and that he had diagrams showing where the body could be found. He was apparently looking for a book deal with these disclosures. In 2001, as he was about to enter a nursing home, Sheeran now said he was involved in the killing. NBC was going to run with the story, but decided not to because of Sheeran’s past history of storytelling.

    When Sheeran passed away in 2003, differing “confessions” were found. John Zeitts, who was working on a book about the man, produced a confession saying Sheeran only disposed of the body, but did not kill Hoffa. But Sheeran’s daughter said this was a forgery, since the signature did not belong to her father. Then Zeitts produced tapes of conversations in which Sheeran now said he was innocent and not involved with the Hoffa case. Then, weeks before he died, Brandt got Sheeran to go on camera to say that what was in the book was accurate. Right after this, Brandt said his camera battery died.

    Brandt did not publish the entire video. But he did give a copy to Andrew Sluss in 2008. Sluss was lead investigator on the Hoffa for the FBI for 15 years. Sluss said the Sheeran video was ludicrous. (Jack Goldsmith, New York Review of Books, 9/26/2019)

    The oddest thing about this book is that Brandt plays himself up as a very able and efficient prosecuting attorney. But in his zeal to acclaim Sheeran as a hitman and killer of Hoffa, he shows about as much discrimination as Arlen Specter did for the Warren Commission. And I have some bad news for those interested. Brandt has now decided to focus on the murder of John Kennedy. Oh no, I can just see him tracing those rifles from Brooklyn to Baltimore and Ferrie picking them up. Robert Blakey’s fantasy is now going to be furthered. Pity us all.

    see Part 2: Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s The Irishman

  • Tom Hanks and 1968

    Tom Hanks and 1968

    As many of this site’s readers know, for the recently released book The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, this author did a lot of work on the career of actor Tom Hanks. In 1993, on the set of the film Philadelphia, Hanks met music producer Gary Goetzman. A few years after that meeting, Goetzman and Hanks decided to expand their careers into producing movies: both feature films and documentaries. They set up a company called Playtone and began to churn out products that—if one understands who Hanks is—were reflective of both the actor’s personal psyche and his view of the American zeitgeist. That view was accentuated when, in 1998, Hanks first worked with Steven Spielberg on the film Saving Private Ryan. It was while working on this film that the two met and befriended the late historian Stephen Ambrose, who was a consultant on that picture.

    As I wrote in my book, Ambrose turned out to have a real weakness for a historian: He manufactured interviews. Ambrose made his name, and became an establishment darling, due to his several books about Dwight Eisenhower. This included a two volume formal biography published in 1983-84. All of these books, except the first, were published after Eisenhower’s death in 1969. It was proven, by both an Eisenhower archivist and his appointments secretary, that Ambrose made up numerous interviews with the late president, interviews which he could not have conducted. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 46) Late in his career, Ambrose was also proven to be a serial plagiarist by two different studies. (See David Kirkpatrick’s article in the NY Times, January 11, 2002; also “How the Ambrose Story Developed”, History News Network, June 2002)

    But the worst and most revealing issue about Ambrose’s career was his switching sides in the attacks on James Bacque’s important book, Other Losses. Bacque had done some real digging into the military archives of World War II. He had discovered that the Americans had been involved in serious war crimes against German prisoners of war, and had later tried to cover it up. Bacque sent his manuscript to Ambrose in advance of publication. Ambrose had nothing but praise for it. (DiEugenio, p. 47) In 1989, before the book was to be published abroad, Bacque visited Ambrose at his home and the two went over the book in detail. When Other Losses was published in America, Ambrose at first stood by the book, which, quite naturally, was generating controversy. But after doing a teaching engagement at the US Army War College, Ambrose reversed field. First, he organized a seminar attacking the book. Then, as he would later do with Oliver Stone’s JFK, he wrote an attack article for the New York Times. (DiEugenio, p. 47)

    As Bacque noted, the book Ambrose attacked was the same one the historian had praised in private letters to the author. It was the same book Ambrose read and offered suggestions to in the confines of his home. The difference was that the information was now public, and creating controversy. Bacque’s book was accusing the American military of grievous war crimes, including thousands of deaths, and since Eisenhower was involved in these acts, the pressure was on. Ambrose was the alleged authority on both Eisenhower and his governance of the American war effort in Europe. Could America have really done what the Canadian author was saying it did? To put it simply, Ambrose buckled. Under pressure from the military and the MSM, he did triple duty. Not only did he organize the panel and write the attack editorial, he then pushed through a book based on the panel. (See Bacque’s reply to this book)

    Reflecting on this professional and personal betrayal, Bacque later wrote that he could not really blame Ambrose for it all, because the American establishment does not really value accuracy in the historical record. What it really wants is a “pleasing chronicle which justifies and supports our society.” He then added that, in light of that fact, “We should not wonder when a very popular writer like Ambrose is revealed to be a liar and plagiarizer, because he has in fact given us what we demand from him above all, a pleasing myth.” (DiEugenio, p. 48)

    II

    I have prefaced this review of Playtone’s latest documentary 1968: The Year that Changed America, because it is important to keep all of this information in mind during any discussion of Hanks and his producing career. Even though he did not graduate from college, he fancies himself a historian. Thus many of his films deal with historical subjects: both his feature films and his documentaries. Yet Hanks—and also Spielberg—have set Ambrose as their role model in the field. In my view, it is this kind of intellectual sloth and lack of genuine curiosity that has helped give us films like Charlie Wilson’s War, Parkland, and The Post. These films all tried to make heroes out of people who were no such thing: U.S. representative Charlie Wilson, the Dallas Police, and in the last instance, Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham. And by doing so, these pictures have mislead the American public about important events; respectively, the origins and results of the war in Afghanistan, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the position of the Washington Post on the Vietnam War. (For details on all of these misrepresentations, elisions, and distortions see Part 3 of The JFK Assassination.)

    Since he wrote so often about Eisenhower, one of Ambrose’s preoccupations was World War II. He wrote at least a dozen books on that subject. As previously mentioned, Hanks and Spielberg took a brief vignette Ambrose had uncovered for his book Band of Brothers and greatly expanded and heavily revised it into the film Saving Private Ryan. (DiEugenio, pp. 45-46) From there, Hanks and Spielberg produced the hugely budgeted mini-series Band of Brothers. This was a chronicle of a company of American soldiers fighting in the European theater until the surrender of Japan. In addition to these two dramatic presentations, Hanks has produced three documentaries on the subject of American soldiers fighting in Europe. As anyone who has seen Saving Private Ryan knows, that film is largely based on the allied landing at Normandy in 1944. Ambrose wrote extensively on that event. In fact, one of his books was titled D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. And in the films of Hanks and Spielberg, the import of that title is also conveyed: that America defeated the Third Reich.

    The problem with this is quite simple: it’s not true. Any real expert on World War II will inform you that it was not America that was responsible for the defeat of Hitler. It was the Soviets. And D-Day was not the climactic battle of that war. That took place in 1942 at Stalingrad, and to a lesser extent in 1943 with the tank battle at Kursk. Both of those titanic battles took place prior to the Normandy invasion, and Hitler gambled everything on them. His invasion of Russia in 1941 consumed 80% of the Wehrmacht, over three million men. To this day, it is the largest land invasion in history. (DiEugenio, p. 454) When this giant infantry offensive was defeated at Stalingrad, Hitler tried to counter that defeat with the largest tank battle in history at Kursk. This battle ended up being more or less a draw; but it was really a loss for Hitler since he had to win. The Germans lost so many men, aircraft and tanks on the Russian front that the rest of the war was a slow retreat back to Berlin.

    Due to the Cold War, the historical establishment in America largely ignored these facts. Like Ambrose, they chose to glorify and aggrandize what commanders like Eisenhower had done in Europe and, to a lesser extent, what Douglas MacArthur achieved in the Pacific. In both films and TV, Hollywood followed this paradigm. Pictures like The Longest Day, Anzio, and Battle of the Bulge were echoed by small screen productions like Combat, The Gallant Men, and Twelve O’clock High. Parents bought their children toy weapons and they played games modeled on these presentations of America crushing the Nazis.

    The social and historical problem with all this one-sidedness in books, films and network television was simple. It contributed to a cultural mythology of American supremacy, both in its military might and moral cause. That pretense—of both might and right—was slowly and excruciatingly ground to pieces in the jungles of Indochina. This is an important cultural issue that Ambrose, Hanks and Spielberg were not able to deal with in any real sense. I really don’t think that they ever actually confronted it. If one can make a film so weirdly lopsided as The Post, then I think one can say that, for whatever reason, it’s just not in them. After all, Hanks is 61, and Spielberg is 71. If you don’t get it after a combined 132 years, then it is probably too late. (This reviewer did some research into both men’s lives to try and ponder the mystery of this obtuseness. For my conclusions, see DiEugenio, pp. 42-44, 405-12)

    III

    This brings us to the latest Hanks/Goetzman historical documentary for CNN. It is called 1968: The Year that Changed America. HBO is the main outlet for the Playtone historical mini-series productions, e.g., John Adams, Band of Brothers, The Pacific. Cable News Network is the main market for their historical documentaries. This includes Playtone’s profiles of four decades—The Sixties, The Seventies, The Eighties, and The Nineties, and their awful documentary The Assassination of President Kennedy. This last was broadcast during the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in 2013. The two main talking heads on this program were Dan Rather and Vincent Bugliosi. One would have thought that Rather had so discredited himself on the subject that he would not appear on any such programs ever again. Playtone did not think so. Either that or Hanks was unaware of the discoveries of the late Roger Feinman. Feinman worked for CBS and exposed their unethical broadcast practices in both their 1967 and 1975 specials, in addition to their subsequent lies about them. (See Why CBS Covered Up the JFK Assassination) I would like to think Hanks unaware of all this. But after sustained exposure to his output, I am not sure it would have made any difference.

    This lack of scholarly rigor is reflected in some of the talking heads employed in 1968: The Year that Changed America. There is a crossover with that recent documentary bomb, American Dynasties: The Kennedys. (See my review) So again we get writers like Pat Buchanan, Tim Naftali and Evan Thomas. But in addition, we get Rather, plus the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, former Nixon appointee Dwight Chapin and Hanks himself. There have been many books written about that key year of 1968, but this documentary does not utilize most of the recent releases by authors like Richard Vinen, or even Laurence O’Donnell. Instead, it relies on authors who wrote their books long ago; for example, Mark Kurlanksy, whose book was published in 2003, and Charles Kaiser, who first published his volume in 1988. Readers can draw their own conclusions about these choices.

    The four-hour series is divided up by seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. It begins with Rather discussing the fading presidency of Lyndon Johnson. He delivers the usual platitudes about LBJ’s passage of some good domestic legislation like Medicare, but how this was outweighed by the war in Vietnam. In addition to this standby cliché, the program misses a grand opportunity to elucidate a key point about that war. In 1966, author Michael Arlen termed it “the living room war”. This is because reporters on the scene were allowed almost unfettered access to military operations. This approach brought the war’s brutality into the home front. The Pentagon understood this was a liability, so in later wars, this was greatly curtailed. What took its place was the so-called press junket or pool: certain journalists were given restricted access accompanied by escorts. They reported back to their colleagues and that is how the news was distributed. To put it plainly, because of Vietnam, war reporting has now become controlled. This technique was used extensively during Operation Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq (e.g., the siege of Fallujah).

    The film’s second lost opportunity concerns the fact that, by 1968, Johnson had escalated the Vietnam War to almost unfathomable heights since he had taken office in 1963. What made that worse is that he had run on a peace platform in 1964. In that campaign he had characterized his opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, as the hawk on Vietnam. As Frederick Logevall noted in his book, Choosing War, if anyone had promised anything during that campaign, Johnson had promised the American people there would be no wider war. But not only did LBJ hide his true intentions in 1964, he also hid the fact that, unlike President Kennedy, he was determined not to lose in Indochina. (Logevall, p. 94) The fact that he had deceived the American public in 1964, then escalated the war to the point of inserting 500,000 combat troops in theater, while instituting Rolling Thunder, the largest aerial bombardment campaign in military history—all of this was too much of a reversal. Especially when it was accompanied by a draft, and resistance to that draft. In this reviewer’s opinion, this film downplays or ignores all of these key points. Yet they are all crucial in explaining why Johnson had become so unpopular in 1967 and 1968. To have Dan Rather, not Logevall, address this issue reveals early how honest this program is going to be.

    We then cut to the siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet offensive. Philip Caputo talks about the former, Hanks discusses the latter. Surprisingly, the program makes no attempt to link the two attacks. Many analysts of the war, like John Prados, have posed the questions: Was Khe Sanh a diversion for Tet? Or was Tet a diversion for Khe Sanh? Today, the consensus seems to be the former. Khe Sanh was in an extreme, almost isolated northern part of South Vietnam and was under siege by the regulars in the North Vietnamese army. Most of the Tet uprisings were in the south and were conducted by a combination of the Viet Cong supported by about 60 to 70,000 North Vietnamese regulars. The commander of the northern army, Genral Giap, later said that Khe Sanh itself was not important, but only served as a diversion to draw American forces away from population centers in the south, including Saigon. (See the essay “The Battle of Khe Sanh”, by Peter Brush.) Not only is this important issue not addressed, but the program again utilizes another cliché: namely, that Tet was a military defeat but such a shock that it succeeded psychologically.

    The reviewer begs to disagree. Militarily, what Tet revealed was two crucial points. The first was that the three-year escalation by Johnson, as supervised by General William Westmoreland, had been a failure. No major city in South Vietnam was secure from attack, not even the American embassy in Saigon. The enemy was everywhere and was armed and ready to kill. The Westmoreland/Johnson strategy of wearing down the opponent through a war of attrition had been misguided and pretty much useless. Secondly, it showed that the fabricated country of South Vietnam was a hollow shell. Without American troops, Tet would have probably collapsed the Saigon government. Johnson and Westmoreland had built no effective independent fighting force there. It was the exposure of these two failures that cashiered both Johnson and Westmoreland. On top of that, it stopped any further troop escalation of the war.

    A third result of Tet—also ignored by the program—was that it showed the almost astonishing lack of intelligence America had on the enemy. As CIA professionals like Ralph McGehee have written, the surprise of the Tet offensive was probably one of the greatest intelligence failures in American military history. Yet it did not seem to hurt the career of the CIA station chief in Saigon, Ted Shackley.

    The complement to this North Vietnamese success was that the American military was disintegrating. In fact, the My Lai Massacre took place in March, 1968. If the reader can believe it, I could detect no mention of this atrocity in this four-part documentary. I also could find no mention of what My Lai was probably a part of, namely Operation Phoenix. This was the CIA’s systematic and brutal program to torture and kill civilians who were suspected of being Viet Cong. Reporters like Seymour Hersh had denied My Lai was part of the Phoenix Program. But later authors like Doug Valentine have discovered new evidence which indicates it was. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 367)

    In addition to these shortcomings, there is almost no analysis of why President Johnson decided not to run in 1968. The program offers up the fact that Senator Eugene McCarthy had done well against LBJ in the New Hampshire primary—something that we all know and is about as sophisticated and penetrating as a high school history textbook. The program does not mention the now famous meeting of the so-called Wise Men that Johnson called after the Tet offensive. This meeting was attended by some outside luminaries like former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General Omar Bradley. Johnson brought in a military briefer. The briefer tried to explain how Tet was a military loss for the communists. At this point, former Secretary of State Acheson got up and walked out. After, a Johnson aide called and asked why he left. Acheson replied that he would not sit through more canned Pentagon briefings. He wanted to see the raw reports and talk to people on the ground. After this call, LBJ sent Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford over to the Pentagon to look at those reports and interview the commanders. After about two weeks of review, Clifford—who had been a hawk—now decided the war was hopeless. He advised Johnson to seek a negotiated settlement. What makes this key episode surprising by its absence is that Evan Thomas is the co-author of the book the information first appeared in. Today, Thomas has become a hack. But in 1986, he and Walter Isaacson wrote an interesting book. (The Wise Men, pp. 683-89; see also Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. 303-04)

    The other reason that Johnson decided to step down was first conveyed through journalist Jules Witcover’s book 85 Days, a chronicle of Robert Kennedy’s last campaign. After Senator Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary and Robert Kennedy’s announcement to enter the race, Johnson’s men on the ground in Wisconsin predicted he had no chance of winning the state primary. (Gitlin, p. 304; Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets, p. 419) That is how unpopular LBJ had become. Indeed, realizing he had no chance of winning, authors like Robert Dallek and Joseph Palermo have shown that Johnson now schemed of ways to deprive Bobby Kennedy of both the nomination and a victory in November. Again, Dallek is one of the interviewees, but apparently this was too hardboiled for the Playtone scenario.

    IV

    After Vietnam, the second major subject the film portrays is the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis that Martin Luther King was part of in March and April of 1968. It was this participation that led to King’s assassination on April 4th. Since this is Hanks and Goetzman, there is no discussion of any of the suspicious circumstances that took place that made his murder possible. Rather, the program uses the late Rev. Billy Kyles as a witness, a man who some believe may have been part of the set up to kill King. (See The 13th Juror, pp. 521-28) There is only a brief mention that, in 1967-68, King was trying to expand his movement beyond civil rights, of how this strained his relations with his more conservative political allies and how it was not enough for the more radical elements.

    The program then breaks from straight political history into a segment on African-American singers James Brown and Diana Ross. It thereafter cuts to the 1968 Academy Awards, where the Best Picture Oscar was won by the film In the Heat of the Night, a tricky race-relations police mystery. If the reader can fathom it, the program then follows with a few moments on the science-fiction film Planet of the Apes. Author Rick Perlstein says something like, well the riots in the cities were reflected in the destruction of the Statue of Liberty at the end of that film. I will not comment on the silliness of that cultural comparison. Except to say that this is Playtone.

    Instead of the sci-fi interlude, I wish the program would have given more time to the establishment and aftermath of the Kerner Commission. As a result of the terrible race riots in Watts, Chicago, Newark and Detroit, President Johnson appointed Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois to chair an 11-member panel to study the causes and possible cures for these riots, which had taken the lives of scores of citizens. That 1968 report ended up being a national bestseller and was one of the most acute and candid analyses of the race problem written in that era. It revealed that police brutality instigated many of the riots and that the underlying issues were failed housing and education programs. It also assailed the media for having almost no insight into the causes of the conflagrations. The report’s most memorable quote was, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate but unequal.” The most notable aspect of this remarkable document is that, after appointing the commission, Johnson ignored the report. This was the beginning of the policy that White House advisor Patrick Moynihan and President Richard Nixon would later formalize as “benign neglect” toward the race problem. (Viorst, p. 508) Needless to say, one month after the report was published, over a hundred riots broke out in the wake of King’s assassination.

    The third large event that the film describes is the entry into the Democratic race for the presidency by Robert Kennedy. Tim Naftali says that Kennedy did not enter until Johnson had been already wounded by McCarthy in New Hampshire. As several authors have noted, Bobby Kennedy had been having discussions on whether to announce his candidacy for over a month prior to the New Hampshire primary. As journalist Jules Witcover wrote, he had decided to enter the primary race prior to New Hampshire. (Chapter 2 in the e-book version of Witcover’s 85 Days, specifically p. 70) But he did not announce until after because he did not want that announcement to have any effect on that state primary. The film then depicts Kennedy in Indianapolis announcing the news of King’s murder to an awaiting crowd, and his prominent role in helping Coretta King arrange the funeral in Atlanta.

    The student riots at Columbia are mentioned and depicted visually, but their anti-war origins are bypassed. One of the students involved, Bob Feldman, had discovered the university was supporting the war effort through its association with the Institute for Defense Analysis. The film also does not deal with the unusual bifurcation of that demonstration. The SDS students were dealt with separately from the university’s African-American demonstrators. The former were motivated by Columbia’s association with the war; the latter by the encroachment by the university into the nearby lower class area of Morningside Heights and the construction of a gym they felt would be segregated. The Columbia demonstration ended with the NYPD assaulting the students: over 100 were injured and nearly 600 were arrested. As author Todd Gitlin noted, the MSM—particularly the New York Times and Newsweek—turned against the students and did not denounce the brutality the police used in expelling them from the campus. (Gitlin, pp. 307-08)

    The film now begins to posit the two figures of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in opposition to these student and race disturbances. The series never makes explicit what was clearly the political objective of both presidential candidates: To capitalize on these inner city bonfires—over one hundred cities erupted in riots after King’s murder—in order to exploit the issue of “law and order” for political purposes. The idea was to ignore their underlying causes and exalt the effort of the police to stamp them out, which was made easier by LBJ ignoring the Kerner Commission. For example, Nixon began to cultivate a Southern Strategy around the race riots issue. Kevin Phillips, a Nixon strategist at the time, was open about this later. He had noted that in 1964, although Senator Barry Goldwater had lost in a landslide, the conservative Republican presidential candidate took five states in the south. The strategist chalked this up to the fact that Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Phillips concluded that his party should enforce the Voting Rights Act because, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” He then added that without that aspect, “the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.” (NY Times, May 17, 1970, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy”) For whatever reason, Phillips is not on the program to explain this strategy.

    A good way to have crystallized this moral and political quandary would have been to contrast the Nixon/Phillips strategy with what Bobby Kennedy was faced with in late 1963. The first scene of John Bohrer’s book about RFK depicts the Attorney General contemplating a letter of resignation to his brother in November of 1963. Kennedy felt that he had been too strong on the issue of civil rights and would now lose the entire south for JFK in the upcoming election. (The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, p. 1) In other words, since the 18 previous presidents had ignored the issue and allowed segregation and discrimination to fester in the south, when Bobby Kennedy faced the issue directly, white backlash had been unleashed. This painful moral and political issue is not addressed in this Hanks/Goetzman production.

    V

    The race for the Republican nomination is also outlined. Richard Nixon had a well-planned, well-organized campaign and he got in early. His two rivals were Michigan governor George Romney and the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. In 1967, Romney made a bad mistake for a Republican: He told the truth about Vietnam. In explaining his early support for the war, he said he had been brainwashed by the army about it. (Gitlin, p. 297) This eventually forced him to leave the field in February. Rockefeller vacillated and did not enter the race until the end of April. Considering that tardiness he did fairly well, coming in second in the delegate count at the Miami convention. California Governor Ronald Reagan challenged Nixon in some of the primaries but only won in his home state. Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland was nominated for Vice President, reportedly on the strength of a scolding delivered to civil rights demonstrators. (Gitlin, p. 132)

    As many commentators have stated, this race constituted a milestone for the Republican Party. Nixon’s victory and the failure of Romney and Rockefeller to effectively challenge him from the center marked the beginning of the end of both the moderate and liberal wings of the GOP represented, respectively, by politicians like Senator John Sherman Cooper and Senator Jacob Javits. The next Republican to win the White House would be the man who challenged Nixon from the far right, Ronald Reagan. This historical landmark is only passingly noted in the film.

    In dealing with Bobby Kennedy’s June victory in California, the program has Tim Naftali say words to the effect that when Kennedy exited the Embassy Room and walked through the pantry, Sirhan Sirhan was waiting for him. It’s comments like this that keep Naftali on these programs. As anyone who has studied the RFK case knows, Sirhan was escorted into the pantry by the infamous Girl in the Polka Dot Dress after he shared coffee with her. Or as Sirhan himself said, “Then she moved and I followed her. She led me into a dark place.” (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby, p. 115) The program then shows some film of the aftermath of the shooting. In relation to Sirhan, who was being pummeled, one person cries out, “We don’t want another Oswald!” That exclamation bridges a five-year national psychic chasm extending from Dallas to Los Angeles.

    Kennedy’s death is followed by the subsequent mass at St Patrick’s in New York, featuring Ted Kennedy’s memorable eulogy. We then see the famous railroad car journey from New York to Washington where reportedly two million spectators lined the tracks to say good-bye and pay their respects to the senator. This touching moment is then dissipated by Hanks coming on and saying words to the effect: And that was the end of 1968. No Tom, that was the end of the second phase of the sixties, and for all intents and purposes it closed the promise of the decade down. The first phase of the sixties are sometimes termed the Camelot years, from 1960-63. It was brought to an end in Dallas in 1963. The second phase of the decade was the angry sixties, finished off by Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination in Los Angeles. The murders of both King and RFK were the last spasms of the once promising and hopeful decade. After this, American youth escaped into drugs and psychedelic rock epitomized by Woodstock in 1969. That sensational decade was therefore literally shot to death.

    During Kennedy’s funeral at Arlington, many inhabitants of Resurrection City, the site of the Poor People’s March, journeyed over to pay their last respects. This was fitting in more than one respect, because it was Kennedy, through Marian Wright, who had given King the idea for that Poor People’s March. (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 911-12) The film does not note that irony. Nor does it note that Tom Hayden, who was about to lead the demonstrations in Chicago, was weeping in a pew during the requiem mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Schlesinger, p. 956)

    And that would have been a good lead-in to the film’s presentation of the disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had entered the race, but had bypassed competing in any primaries. In 1968, it was still possible to amass a large amount of delegates without going the primary route. Because he was closely associated with President Johnson, Humphrey—unlike Kennedy and McCarthy—had not denounced the war in public. On the contrary, as John Bohrer wrote, he had attacked Kennedy for offering diplomatic solutions to end the conflict. (The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, pp. 271-74) As the film notes, after the death of RFK, McCarthy essentially slid off the grid. There really was no genuine anti-war alternative to Humphrey in Chicago. And this was the cause of the demonstrations and rioting that took place there. Unlike what the film conveys, while the riots were ongoing, the networks did not really cover them very much. For instance, out of 19 hours of coverage, NBC only showed 14 minutes of the demonstrations and police beatings. (“Lessons from the Election of 1968”, The New Yorker, January 8, 2018)

    Resurrection City and the Poor People’s March had failed without King. And, as many have observed, without RFK there, the Democratic Party split apart in Chicago. Mayor Richard Daley was determined to show that, amid the chaos, he was in charge. The police even raided McCarthy’s headquarters at the Hilton Hotel. (Gitlin, p. 334) Humphrey won the nomination, but he was a severely wounded candidate. He did not announce his support for a bombing halt and negotiations until the last month of the campaign. McCarthy would not endorse him until the last week. He was gaining rapidly at the end, but he fell just short. The film tries to say that Illinois, which went for Nixon, made the difference. But doing the arithmetic in the Electoral College, that is not correct. Nixon still would have won. The difference was probably the Wallace campaign.

    To the film’s credit, it does mention the October Surprise of 1968: that is, Nixon’s actions through Republican lobbyist Anna Chennault to sabotage Johnson’s attempt to get negotiations going in Paris between Saigon and Hanoi. The subterfuge turned out to be effective and it might have cost Humphrey the election. But the film does not ask the next logical question. Since Johnson found out about Nixon’s subversion while it was in progress, why did he not make it public? Johnson also had evidence that the Greek junta had funneled Nixon $500,000 during his campaign. (NY Times, April 12, 1998, “Lone Star Setting”) This was clearly a bribe. Did Johnson not want Humphrey to win? In fact, as Sean Wilentz reported in the aforementioned article, Johnson actually preferred Nelson Rockefeller as his successor.

    The film ends with what one would expect of Hanks. Not with Nixon and the premature end of the sizzling Sixties, but with 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 missions, the latter of which orbited the moon. Hanks has always idealized those space missions. And he has always ignored their prohibitive costs and the fact that they ended up in the Challenger catastrophe. Which pretty much ended the wild ideas about manned space flights. This contravenes the film’s idea that somehow Apollo 8 redeemed the horrible disappointments and reversals of 1968, which helped bring about the coming of Richard Nixon. And neither does a film culture that went from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Wonder Woman and Black Panther. Those last two films treat the issues of women’s rights and black identity only a couple of notches below the depth with which In the Heat of the Night did. On the issue of race, I much preferred the quiet simplicity of Nothing But a Man.

    In sum, this is a thoroughly mediocre rendering of a tumultuous year. Mediocre in every way, including aesthetically. It is almost as if Adam Curtis and the daring things he did with documentary form in The Power of Nightmares never happened. What Playtone does here is simply slap together archival footage with people talking. Which would not be bad if the talking heads delivered original or insightful commentary. But they don’t. Not even close. And that is a real shame since what happened in 1968 casts a very long shadow. A shadow that cuts well into the new millennium.