Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: POLITICAL

  • Vince Foster, JFK and the Rise of Chris Ruddy

    Vince Foster, JFK and the Rise of Chris Ruddy

    One of the most nauseating characteristics of the New Right is its hypocrisy. For instance, the GOP has historically been the party of sound money and banking. Yet, in their devotion to supply-side/trickle-down economics, it was their party which ran up the national debt to heights no Democrat ever dreamed of doing. And it was a Republican administration which oversaw the worst banking/real estate crisis and economic downturn since 1929. Another example: for all of their pontificating about religion and family values, most of the GOP evangelist preachers endorse a president who had to pay off two former girlfriends to keep quiet during his election campaign.

    Which brings us to the subject of this article. On December 17th, a week before Christmas, a man named Paul F. deLespinasse wrote an article for the conservative website Newsmax. It was titled: “Conspiracy Theories Merit Only Undivided Suspicion”. Mr. deLespinasse began by saying that such theories are meant to confuse the public, “often for political purposes.” As most conservative shills do, he tried to belittle this kind of thinking with a ludicrous example. He said that Nicholas II of Russia faked his overthrow and ruled from the back room. Obviously, he concedes, he made that up out of whole cloth. But the author said since it made sense to his students, he went on and “concocted new conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.” He goes on to mention two truly ridiculous ones about the JFK case. The first was that Joe Kennedy wanted to have Jackie killed so she would not divorce his son while in office. So the father hired Lee Oswald, but Oswald missed. He then writes, well maybe JFK learned that his medical problems would kill him within months. Therefore he staged his own assassination to become a martyr in order to increase the chance his brothers would follow him into office. (In both of these examples, it is still Oswald as the killer.)

    As was his intention, the author then goes on to ridicule any and all other kinds of alternate ways of thinking about certain momentous events: the 9-11 attacks, Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the idea that America never went to the moon. Note the way he has deliberately mixed in events of genuine interest and scholarship with those that amount to piffling: JFK and the moon landings, for instance. Consequently, he concludes that the best way to remain of sound mind is just to ignore “conspiracy theories and regard their propagators as probable cranks.” Which, of course, is what the Power Elite would like the general public to think, so they can continue on their rampage, killing whatever hopes we have of recovering our democratic processes.

    The reason I mention this piece of claptrap is because it was run in Newsmax. For anyone who knows something about that business entity, the irony of the posting of this article is too rich to be ignored. It underscores the hypocrisy I just pointed out. How so? Because the CEO and founder of Newsmax is Chris Ruddy. And Newsmax would not exist if not for Ruddy’s propagation of one of the wildest and most rudderless conspiracy theories of recent decades––namely, that Vince Foster was murdered by sinister forces employed by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Why would the Clintons murder their close friend and legal colleague? Well, for any number of reasons. These would include that he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton or he was about to give away the secrets of the Whitewater scandal to Congress. But since there were no secrets to that manufactured scandal, then it must have been the first reason. Even though there was no credible evidence of that either. Note that deLespinasse did not mention the Foster case in his long listing, probably because he was aware that it was Ruddy’s hand that was feeding him.

    II

    Vince Foster was a legal and political colleague of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas. He worked with her there at the Rose Law Firm. By all accounts, he was an effective and successful lawyer. After the 1992 presidential election, the Clintons invited Foster to move to Washington and work for the Clinton administration. He did so, and this turned out to be a serious mistake on his part. Foster was a sensitive soul who was not cut out for what author James Stewart later termed the “blood sport” of Washington DC during the Clinton years.

    It is important to recall an ignored historical milestone at this point. Late in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans had managed to achieve one of their longtime goals. They negated the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time provisions of FCC law. This was quickly followed by ABC moving Rush Limbaugh from Sacramento to New York and channeling him nationwide. Rupert Murdoch had now become an American citizen. His purchase of Metromedia TV and a share of 20th Century Fox around this time would be the kernel that would launch Fox TV. In other words, what David Brock termed “The Republican Noise Machine”—a huge propaganda network––was now in place, well-positioned to amplify and aggrandize the so-called Clinton Scandals.

    The first two out of the box were the Travel Office affair and the Whitewater real estate imbroglio. Foster worked as Deputy White House counsel. He was involved in the first, and tangentially in the second––which was even more of a pseudo-scandal than the first. Foster was also involved in vetting candidates for positions in the administration; for example, the Nannygate episode over the nomination of Zoe Baird for attorney general. Because of the controversy over these instances, in June and July of 1993 Foster came under political attack in the Wall Street Journal. By several different accounts, Foster was now suffering from depression and anxiety over these attacks. (Dan Moldea, A Washington Tragedy, pp. 203-12). His sister recommended he see a psychiatrist, and he called one to set up an appointment. In the meantime, his personal doctor gave him prescriptions for anti-depressants. Foster was so distraught that he thought of leaving Washington and going back to Little Rock. But he felt that this would be admitting defeat. (Moldea, p. 215). On July 20, 1993 Foster shot himself at Fort Marcy Park in Virginia with a handgun given to him by his father many years previous.

    The first investigation of his death was submitted by the U.S. Park Police on August 10, 1993. The police had been supplemented by the FBI and Justice Department. Relying on that investigation and the medical examiner’s findings, they concluded that Foster had taken his own life. But now something absolutely remarkable began to occur. And for this author, it was the first manifestation of the awesome power of the advancing rightwing media.

    To fully understand the spectacle, worthy of the Roman Colosseum, that was about to be unleashed on the national stage, one needs to outline the metamorphosis that the Republican Party had undergone. To do that, one must delve into a brief––but appropriate––historical synopsis.

    III

    Prior to the election of 1960, the two leaders of the Republican Party had been Senator Robert Taft and President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1952, those two had fought a close and bitter battle all the way to the convention for the Republican nomination for president. It was only through a questionable ploy at the convention that Eisenhower managed to win the nomination.

    There are two points that should be drawn about these men in order to understand the subject at hand. First, Taft was a non-interventionist in foreign policy, to the extent that he was opposed to American involvement in World War II, the Nuremburg Trials and the formation of NATO. Second, Eisenhower more than once said that he was not about to repeal FDR’s New Deal. When Eisenhower left office after eight years, the income tax rate was 91 per cent for the highest income earners.

    One last point needs to be made in order to delineate the dichotomy that was to come. Around this time—early to middle sixties––there was actually a moderate wing to the Republican Party. People like Senator Mark Hatfield, Governor George Romney, Senator Charles Percy, Senator Jacob Javits, Governor Raymond Shafer, Senator Charles Mathias, Governor William Scranton, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Congressman Pete McCloskey, these and others constituted a minority, but an influential one, within the GOP. As many have noted, what began to alter the Republican Party, and eventually made its moderate wing extinct, was the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. That nomination brought to the forefront the extreme rightwing elements of the party—the John Birch Society types—who declared war on the moderate elements in the party. Although the Goldwater forces lost, they succeeded in establishing a beachhead in the GOP. Senator Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was against the high taxation rate, and felt President Johnson was soft on communism. He became the first Republican nominee to consciously run on a Southern Strategy, one which was designed to break up the Democratic majority in the south by employing racist symbology. That strategy, plus the fact that Goldwater was from Arizona, began to rebuild the Republican party on a Southern/Western axis.

    This included California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan made a last-minute televised appeal for Goldwater in 1964. And that appeal first put him on the national political map. At that time, the highest political office Reagan had attained was president of the Screen Actors Guild.

    It was not just Reagan who supported Goldwater; it was also William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s Young Americans For Freedom supplied the shock troops for the Goldwater campaign. Goldwater was trounced, but Buckley and Reagan now started to pull the Republican party to the far right. In a blatant effort to exterminate them, Buckley began to defame and run against those from the moderate wing of the party: for instance, Charles Goodell and John Lindsay. The very threat of a Reagan run in 1976 provoked President Gerald Ford to perform the Halloween Massacre. That panic-stricken move, for all intents and purposes empowered the neoconservative movement and triggered the rise of Dick Cheney.

    Once Reagan won the White House in 1980, he began to meet with representatives of the Religious Right in order to incorporate them into the GOP. But as writers like Sidney Blumenthal have noted, this was really a kind of flirtation that never made it to the altar. Reagan never gave people like Jerry Falwell what they really wanted, things like prayer in school or a bill banning abortion. But allowing them tea time was enough incentive to make them attack dogs against the Democratic Party. They therefore were useful politically. (Salon, 10/24/15, article by Neil J. Young.)

    Because of all this, by the nineties, the Republican Party had undergone a stunning metamorphosis. Its philosophy had become the antithesis of Taft’s non-interventionism. The GOP now went looking for wars, such as against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Reagan assailed the War on Poverty by saying that the result of it was that poverty had won. This kind of talk eventually allowed his acolytes like Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan to begin the effort to privatize Social Security. Reagan had called Medicare “socialism”. His success allowed the new GOP to do what Eisenhower said he would not: assault the New Deal. (LA Times, 12/8/2017, article by Michael Hiltzik) With the cooperation of Bill Clinton, they almost succeeded at this. (See US News and World Report, 5/29/2008, “The Pact Between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich”)

    The new Republican Party had cultivated a more reactionary base. Through Limbaugh-led talk radio, and people like Falwell, it traded on social conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, so-called family values, xenophobia, veiled racism and hostility toward immigrants (the anchor baby syndrome). The new GOP had no problem in depriving minority groups of their right to vote by scrubbing election rolls, which gave George W. Bush his win over Al Gore in the 2000 election heist in Florida. All of this was amplified and channeled into the Limbaugh/Fox sound machine. It was designed to appeal to what many have called “the angry white man vote.” This propaganda formula was so powerful that it managed to convince millions of working-class Americans that their interests coincided with those of billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife and later the Koch brothers.

    IV

    The staggering force of this new apparatus broke dramatically into the open during the rightwing war against Bill Clinton.

    After the first verdict in the Foster case was rendered by the Park Police, unfounded rumors now began to circulate, like the claim Foster’s body had been moved while wrapped in a carpet and there was no exit wound, even though Foster had shot himself through the mouth. As we shall see, these were both false. In fact, the autopsy report described the exit wound at the rear of the skull. But at that time, Richard Mellon Scaife was also in the process of forming the so-called Arkansas Project—hiring people to dig up dirt on the Clintons from their Arkansas days—through the conservative magazine American Spectator, and Limbaugh was now pushing that journal on his radio show. The Foster case and Whitewater were an early instance of the powerful rightwing propaganda outlets bleeding over into the mainstream media. The first book on the Foster case was published in February of 1994, entitled, The Murder of Vince Foster. It concluded that the Clintons had Foster killed. (Moldea, p. 286)

    More importantly, Chris Ruddy was about to leave Murdoch’s New York Post, where he had already written some stories on the Foster case, for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. That newspaper was owned by Scaife. With the creator of the Arkansas Project now his boss, Ruddy had free reign to go after the Clintons and the Foster case. After 12 years of Republicans in the White House, the conservative media barons were intent on bringing down the new Democratic president––and it did not matter how they did it. The incessant work of people like Ruddy resulted in enough buzz for the appointment of a special prosecutor. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a respected Republican lawyer named Robert Fiske to helm that inquiry. Opening an office in Little Rock, Fiske employed 15 lawyers and 25 FBI agents. (New York Times, “Muddy Water”, March 24, 1996) After a careful inquiry, during which he interviewed 125 people, Fiske concluded that the Clintons had not wielded undue influence in the Whitewater matter and that the original police inquiry was correct about Vince Foster’s death.

    On the day that Fiske issued his report, President Clinton signed the reauthorization of the Independent Counsel law, with the difference that instead of being chosen by the Attorney General, a special prosecutor would now be picked by a panel of federal judges. The panel was led by Judge David Sentelle. Sentelle was elevated to the federal court upon the request of Senator Jesse Helms. Under the influence of Helms, Ronald Reagan duly appointed Sentelle in 1985. Reno requested Fiske be reappointed. Under the influence of Helms and fellow reactionary senator Lauch Faircloth, Sentelle and his two cohorts declined to do so. (Washington Post, 8/12/94, article by Howard Schneider). In August of 1994, they replaced Fiske with the even more conservative Ken Starr.

    The Foster case was one of the most bizarre and, at the same time, most assiduous instances of a national political paroxysm this writer can remember. The entire effort to manufacture the case was backed by the late Jerry Falwell, the late billionaire Scaife, with people like reporter Ruddy and west coast political hatchet-man Pat Matrisciana. Matrisciana produced the dubious videotape The Clinton Chronicles. That infamous video began the whole fairy tale about the “Clinton body count”. This quartet perfected a combination business/political model that rose to a grand scale, prefiguring the rise of Alex Jones. Falwell raised money for Matrisciana and Ruddy by selling their productions, which then helped produce more films. Scaife paid for the ad campaigns for Ruddy’s pamphlets on the Foster case. By 1997, Matrisciana and Ruddy had a shared bank account worth over 3 million dollars.

    Some of this massive haul was spent on paying off “witnesses” to talk about the alleged crimes of the Clintons. In other words, it was checkbook journalism. This included signing up Arkansas State Troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson. Their contract was designed to pay them to make statements saying that Vince Foster had not died in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. Foster had actually died in the White House parking lot. This concoction quickly collapsed when the person who was supposed to have made a phone call revealing this––White House aide Helen Dickey––testified and proved that she did not learn of Foster’s death until late in the evening, not in the afternoon, which was when Foster’s body was discovered. As reported by Robert Parry, Starr concluded that Dickey was telling the truth and the troopers were not. (The Consortium, March 30, 1998; see also New York Review of Books, August 8, 1996, reply by Gene Lyons to Ambrose Evans Pritchard)

    Just how far would these deceptive practices go? During an infomercial, Falwell interviewed a witness in silhouetted background he labeled an investigative reporter. The mystery witness said that he knew his life was in danger because not one, but two insider witnesses had been killed before he got their stories. They both died in plane crashes. (Note, the idea of neutralized witnesses was apparently borrowed from the JFK case.) The silhouetted “investigative reporter” then asked: “Jerry, are these coincidences? I don’t think so.” It was later revealed by journalist Murray Waas that the mysterious investigative reporter was Matrisciana himself. When the scheme was later exposed, Matrisciana tried to blame the idea on Falwell. (See again Parry, cited above) With this in mind, again note the hypocrisy: the name of Matrisciana’s business outfit was Citizens for Honest Government.

    What troubled me about this outbreak of rightwing profiteering designed to increase political dementia was this: When I once mentioned it in Probe Magazine, I got a letter saying that somehow I was wrong to belittle the efforts of Ruddy and Matrisciana. The author then equated the death of Vince Foster to what had happened to President Kennedy. And that somehow, the “cover-up” around Foster’s death equated to what the Warren Commission did to JFK’s murder. I was disheartened by the letter. If one of our readers could not tell the difference between the political flackery around Foster’s death and the real criminality and cover-up around President Kennedy’s demise, then I was not doing a very good job as a writer or researcher. Either that, or the forces arrayed against me were simply too awesome to contemplate.

    V

    At around this time (1994-95), another Scaife-funded journalistic entity, Western Journalism Center (WJC), began to issue pamphlets based on Ruddy’s writings on the Foster case. These were supported by full-page ads in numerous newspapers throughout the nation, including the Washington Times, Chicago Tribune and New York Times. This writer was given one of Ruddy’s WJC reports by a friend. I immediately began to note even further that the techniques Ruddy was using were reminiscent of what the early critics of the Warren Commission had done. Ruddy was questioning the forensic basis of the prior pronouncements on the case by trying to find errors, misstatements or inconsistencies in those judgments. For example, Ruddy said that, although Foster’s body was found with the gun in his right hand, Foster was actually left-handed. Like so many other Scaife-sponsored “facts”, this turned out to be false. (Sixty Minutes, October 8, 1995). But this did remind me of the strange circumstances in the death of Gary Underhill, one of the earliest witnesses to proclaim a conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 100) So Ruddy seemed to be imitating the early Warren Commission critics. The problem as I saw it was that there was simply no comparison between the circumstances of the two cases—in any manner. And by 1995, two more judgments had been rendered on the Foster case. One by the Senate Banking Committee and one by Congressman Bill Clinger of the Government Operations Committee. Both concluded that the original police investigation was correct. What I found striking about this was Clinger was a Republican and the Senate investigation was completed under the co-leadership of the highly partisan Republican Al D’Amato. (Starr Report on Foster, Section 2, part C)

    This point was rammed home when, once Starr replaced Fiske, Brett Kavanaugh found a way to reopen the Foster case. (See article by Charles Pierce, Esquire, August 3, 2018). As any objective observer can conclude, Ken Starr had a rather unethical reign as independent counsel. More plainly: Starr had an agenda. He also utilized questionable methods in order to fulfill that agenda. (For a rather harrowing look at those methods, see Susan McDougal’s book The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk.) Yet, in spite of this, Starr came to the same conclusion everyone else did. (Although he delayed announcing it for well over a year to keep the controversy brewing.) But he did employ the man who many consider to be the finest criminalist in America, Henry Lee. Lee is noted for his independence. He has bucked the establishment in the OJ Simpson case and the JFK case. Lee teamed up with two other experts, Dr. Brain Blackbourne and Dr. Alan Berman, to certify that Starr agreed with Fiske.

    The beginning of Starr’s Report relies upon the work of two doctors: James Beyer and Donald Haut. Dr. Haut was at the crime scene and Dr. Beyer did the autopsy. Unlike with the JFK case, the doctors identified the wound path with no ambiguities. (Moldea, p. 30) And there was an alignment between the entrance and exit wounds. In other words, there was no impossible Single Bullet Theory to contend with. Nor, as with Kennedy’s head wound, did the bullet come in from one angle and then veer 90 degrees to the right for its exit. (Read it here)

    The Office of Independent Counsel traced the purchase of the .38 handgun as far back as 1913. Henry Lee actually determined how Foster carried the weapon that day. Lee also detected blood stains on nearby vegetation. These investigators, along with the FBI lab, also determined where the carpet fibers on Foster’s clothes came from, which was Foster’s home in Washington and the White House. These two evidentiary conclusions effectively countered Ruddy’s suppositions that, first, the weapon was not traceable, and therefore was not Foster’s; second, that Foster was killed elsewhere––or took his own life elsewhere––and then his body was transported to the park; and third, contrary to what Fiske’s critics reported, that there was a considerable amount of blood at the Fort Marcy Park scene (Moldea, p. 203), thus neutralizing reports saying there was not very much there and consequently Foster must have been killed elsewhere. (See section 6 of the report, part B; see also Moldea, pp. 312-17)

    The work of Henry Lee and forensic pathologist Brian Blackbourne was devastating to the likes of Ruddy and conservative media attack dog Reed Irvine. In addition to the above, Foster’s DNA was found on the barrel of the handgun. There was a bone chip on a nearby piece of brown paper, and through DNA testing it was proven that the chip was part of Foster’s skull. Contrary to another myth, Lee found that Foster’s shoes did contain soil materials and vegetative matter. (See again Moldea, cited above)

    The findings by Lee and Blackbourne were so compelling that when Ruddy issued his book on the Foster case—The Strange Death of Vincent Foster—even critics of conservative orientation, like Byron York and Jacob Cohen, panned the book. The American Spectator, home of the Arkansas Project, also filed a negative review of Ruddy’s volume. (Moldea, p. 320). When Scaife heard about the latter, he pulled his funding for the magazine, which indicated what the whole sorry episode was really about. Because of that, the journal went into a financial tailspin and was later sold to George Gilder. (Washington Post, May 2, 1999, “Arkansas Project Led to Turmoil and Rifts”)

    As the reader can see, the Foster case and Kennedy case are not at all forensically equivalent. Virtually every forensic aspect of the JFK case is genuinely susceptible to challenge. These are challenges that, when followed through on, prove the opposite of what the Warren Commission concluded; this is especially the case with the medical and ballistics evidence, including Oswald’s alleged possession of the rifle and handgun.

    Neither was there any credible evidence that the Foster autopsy was obstructed by officials on the scene. Or that notes were burned and the autopsy was rewritten once or twice. In the JFK case, both David Mantik and Doug Horne have argued that the autopsy we have in the JFK case is likely the third version. (See Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, Volume 3, pp. 851-878) And this change occurred the morning of Sunday the 24th, when Jack Ruby killed Oswald, a murder which guaranteed there would be no trial for the defendant. I won’t even detail the wholesale revisions made in the Kennedy autopsy by the Ramsey Clark Panel in 1968. But the record shows there has never been a true official forensic inquiry into the JFK case. What Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission did was pretty much a pathetic disgrace. The forensic examination by the House Select Committee on Assassinations was flawed beyond recognition by its use of the junk science of Thomas Canning and the late Vincent Guinn. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 76-82) On top of that, the HSCA concealed much of their evidence, and then misrepresented the evidence that was concealed. (Essay by Gary Aguilar in Trauma Room One, pp. 208-11) This is why, in the upcoming Oliver Stone documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, the public will––for the first time, fifty-seven years after the fact––see a real forensic review of the evidence in the JFK case.

    VI

    I would like to close the crime detection part of this essay with a direct comparison of the findings of a so-called expert in forensics who participated in both the Foster and JFK cases. That man is the late Vincent Scalice. Like many who worked for the House Select Committee, Scalice came out of the New York City Police Department. He was hailed as a fingerprint expert.

    As both Sylvia Meagher and Henry Hurt have noted, there was a timing problem with the discovery of Lee Harvey Oswald’s palmprint on the barrel of the Mannlicher Carcano rifle found at the Texas School Book Depository. On the night of the assassination, there was no print announced by the Dallas Police. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 124) Their identification expert, Carl Day, was supposed to have been working on the rifle at the time it was taken from the police and sent to the FBI. Vincent Drain was the FBI agent who picked up the rifle from Day that evening and shipped it to Washington. Drain told author Henry Hurt that no such print was pointed out to him by Day when he picked up the rifle on the evening of the assassination. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 109)

    What makes Drain’s statement compelling is that when the rifle was examined by FBI expert Sebastian Latona, he said that there were no prints of value he could discern on the weapon. (Hurt, p. 107) Latona was probably the foremost authority on the subject at that time. In conversations with Chief of Homicide in New York, Robert Tanenbaum, he told this writer that every DA in America wanted Latona for his case, for the simple reason that his pamphlet on fingerprint analysis was used by most local police departments as an instruction guide.

    What happened after Latona came up with a negative verdict on the prints shows why the Dallas Police Department was later exposed as the single most corrupt police force in the country. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 196-98) After the rifle was returned to Dallas, DA Henry Wade announced that, presto, they now had a print on the rifle. What made the late arriving print even more suspect was this: After Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby on the 24th, his body was taken to Miller’s Funeral Home in Fort Worth. In 1978, agent Richard Harrison told Gary Mack that he had driven another agent to the funeral parlor with the alleged “Oswald rifle”. His understanding was that this other agent was to get a palm print off the corpse for “comparison purposes”. This makes no sense since Oswald had been fingerprinted three times while in detention. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 1989 edition, p. 444) The owner of the parlor, Paul Groody, later said it took a long time to remove all of the “black gook” from the hand of the corpse. And that convinced him the agents were there to retrieve a palm print. (Hurt, p. 107) When the Warren Commission wanted Day to sign an affidavit to the effect he had identified the print before the rifle was turned over to the FBI, Day refused to execute the document. (Marrs, p. 445) Because of these rather suspicious circumstances, no serious author on the JFK case believed the palmprint was legitimate.

    Then, in 1991, a man named Rusty Livingston entered the scene. Livingston had worked for the Dallas Police, and his nephew Gary Savage later produced a book, called First Day Evidence, based on his uncle’s remembrances and souvenirs. Livingston claimed that, in addition to the palm print, there was a fingerprint Day developed on the trigger guard. He had pictures to prove such was the case. When the late Mike Sullivan of PBS heard about this, he and his crew—which included Gus Russo and Scott Malone––hurried to talk to Rusty and Gary. And this new evidence turned out to be the final sequence for their (quite flatulent) 1993 Frontline special entitled Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?

    Savage had tried to get a confirmation that the trigger guard prints were Oswald’s from an examiner named Jerry Powdrill. Powdrill’s examination was quite weak; he only said he could match three points. This number is four times less than the usual standard in US courts, and five times less than in British courts. (Savage, p. 109)

    Sullivan was undeterred. PBS then brought in a former FBI examiner, George Bonebrake. He said the prints were not clear enough for identification purposes. But that still did not discourage Sullivan and PBS. They now brought in Vincent Scalice. As Pat Speer notes in his fine article, “Un-smoking the Gun”, back in 1978, when working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Scalice said these trigger guard pictures were not defined enough for identification purposes (Volume 8, p. 248). But now, Mr. Scalice determined the prints were Oswald’s. He explained this switch by saying that he now had more and better pictures to work from.

    As Speer notes, Scalice and Savage were wrong about the new and better photos which allowed the new determination. After separating out blow-ups from originals, Speer determined that Scalice worked from all of two photos––not as PBS said, “a set”. Scalice was also wrong when he said he had only seen one photo of the trigger guard prints while with the HSCA. He had seen more than one while working for that committee. (HSCA Admin Folder M-3, pp. 5-6, at Mary Ferrell Foundation Archives.) PBS was also wrong when they said that the trigger guard prints had been ignored prior to 1993. They had been examined by the HSCA and the FBI. (See preceding link)

    But as Speer points out, although the misrepresentations above were pretty bad, they were not the worst part of the dog and pony show that Sullivan and PBS had produced. Sullivan realized PBS had a problem with the FBI work on the rifle which occurred the very evening of the assassination. So when PBS presented the program for the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in 2003, they wrote the following piece of narration: “The FBI says it never looked at the Dallas police photographs of the fingerprints ….” This statement strongly implies that when Latona examined the rifle for the Warren Commission, he did not have the DPD photos.

    Again, this is false. In his Warren Commission testimony, Latona is quite clear on this point. He states that he did examine photos of the trigger guard area that were sent by the Dallas Police. (WC Vol. IV, p. 21). And he went beyond that. He says that he examined the area with a magnifying glass. (WC Vol IV, p. 20). He then adds that he called in a photographer and took his own photos. He states that they tried everything, “highlighting, side-lighting, every type of lighting that we could conceivably think of ….” Latona also said that he then processed the entire rifle, to the point of dismantling the weapon and breaking down all its parts. He concluded that there were no prints of value on the rifle. (WC Vol IV, p. 23)

    It’s one thing to make a mistake. We all do that. But when you state as fact the opposite of what happened, then the audience has a right to suspect that the producer of the program––in this case Mr. Sullivan––has an agenda. I simply do not believe that every person involved with this program had failed to read Latona’s sworn testimony. Not when this issue was the concluding segment of the show. They had to have read it. But they were so eager to pronounce Oswald guilty that they ignored it. They did not want to explain why the best fingerprint expert the FBI had––using every technique he could muster––could not find a print on the weapon while Oswald was alive; but the most corrupt police department in America did find it after he was dead. If the case had been presented that way, then the audience would have been thinking: “Where did Day’s prints come from?” And they would have been justified in asking that question. As they would have been in asking these questions: What the heck is PBS up to? Didn’t this used to be a reputable network? And also this one: Why is Scalice going along with this cheap charade? (I strongly advise the reader to peruse the rest of Speer’s article, because, if you can believe it, the smelly evidentiary trail of this print gets even worse.)

    After retiring from the NYPD Scalice had become a forensic examiner in the private field. In other words, he was for hire. And, yes sir, after his work for PBS and Sullivan, he later took part in the Foster case. And he joined it with a vengeance. In April of 1995, he issued a report through the WJC agreeing with the idea that Foster’s body had been transported to Fort Marcy Park from an outside location. (Moldea, pp. 249-50). Part of this “analysis” was based on the phony tenet that there was not any soil found on Foster’s shoes. (Associated Press Report of 4/28/95) The problem with this, as we have seen, is that Henry Lee proved it was wrong.

    But Scalice now plunged further into the Foster mire. A few months later, he switched hats and became a document examiner, one specializing in handwriting analysis. Investment advisor James Davidson was friendly with both Ruddy and Republican stalwart Grover Norquist. He also later became a board member of Newsmax. In 1995, Davidson called a press conference. Vince Foster had written a note prior to his death. He had ripped it up and thrown it into his briefcase. It expressed his discouragement with the Washington scene and his disdain for the unfair attacks on him. It was found four days after his body was discovered. Both the Fiske and the Starr inquiries had employed authorities who determined the note was written in Foster’s hand. (See Final Report of Independent Counsel, Volume 3, Part 3, p. 278, published in 2001 and finalized by attorney Robert Ray)

    Well, to counter this, Davidson put Scalice on a panel with two other men, including one Reginald Alton from England. (Alton seems to have been a bit biased against the Clintons; see Moldea, p. 373.) Their analysis differed from the prior ones and said the note was a forgery. That analysis was vitiated by Marcel Matley in the Volume 21 No.1, Spring 1998 issue of the Journal of the National Association of Document Examiners.

    After reading the above analysis, this author is compelled to note that when Scalice offered up his confirmation statement of the Oswald fingerprint for PBS, he did not furnish any comparison charts. This would have been standard procedure for any legal proceeding. As Pat Speer wrote, this should have been easy for him to do, as exemplars of Oswald’s prints were in the record going all the way back to his Marine Corps days. Because of that, and the other points mentioned above, it is safe to suggest that, by the nineties, Scalice was pretty much planning for his retirement. Masquerading as a versatile forensic expert, he was the equivalent of a think-tank academic for hire. With the confirmation bias agreed upon during the signing.

    VII

    As the reader can see, unlike the first generation of critics in the JFK case, people like Chris Ruddy and Reed Irvine had a sugar daddy who was supplying them with bucketloads of cash. This patronage both furthered their endeavors and allowed them to be publicized via full page ads in large newspapers, thus ensuring their information would be available to millions of readers. This is almost the opposite of what happened with writers like Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, Vincent Salandria and Sylvia Meagher. Weisberg was reduced to self-publishing his books after his first. The FBI stopped Lane from publishing Rush to Judgment in the USA, leading to its first being published in England. (Mark Lane, Citizen Lane, pp. 160-61) Whatever that first generation of critics achieved was largely due to the quality of their work, not to any promotion by wealthy rightwing backers.

    But it was that rightwing backing that kept on advancing further inquiries into the Foster case. And these further official inquiries were all done by those who would be politically in line with the likes of Ruddy and misaligned with the Clintons. Again, this is contrary to the Kennedy case. The Warren Commission was clearly politically biased from the start to attain a no-conspiracy verdict. (See James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, Chapter 11) Once Dick Sprague and Bob Tanenbaum left the the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Robert Blakey attempted to convict Oswald, using a lot of the same dubious evidence the Warren Commission did. (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 63-89). Because of this innate bias, there has never been anywhere close to a real examination of the true circumstances of Kennedy’s death. This bias is furthermore why both of those inquiries proffered the ridiculous Single Bullet Fantasy as the sine qua non of their verdicts against Oswald.

    But forensics was not what the Foster case was about. It was a political crusade. So––as we have seen––facts were not important. When needed, they could simply be made up. (For some further examples of this, see the Salon 12/23/97 article by Gene Lyons.) The idea, as future Solicitor General Ted Olsen told his then ally David Brock, was to publish speculation that even they understood was false, so that it would preoccupy the White House until a new scandal came along. (Washington Monthly, article by Martin Longman, 5/24/16). Can anyone in their right senses say that this stands in any comparison to what authors and activists in the Kennedy case were doing? But the underlying results in the Clinton case seem fairly obvious: it was effective. And it clearly drove Bill Clinton to the right. Which is why he hired the likes of Dick Morris to run his political office and his 1996 campaign.

    The Clinton Wars brought some of the worst political hacks into the MSM. In addition to those I have mentioned, there were Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Floyd Brown, and David Bossie. And it was these characters who further decimated the Republican Party of any political beliefs it previously held under Taft and Eisenhower. They are and were simply shock troops. As congressman Trey Gowdy recently said upon leaving congress, the GOP is about one thing: winning. And since that party has been reduced to the level of Coulter and Bossie, it is about winning through a scorched earth policy, as in the case of Donald Trump Jr. trying to revive the Foster case in 2017. (CNN Report of May 11, 2017 by Andrew Kaczynski) Along with this, there was the constant refrain from the Right that the MSM was too liberal. This, of course, was preposterous. The Power Elite, which has owned the media in America for eons, was never liberal––which is why they cooperated so completely with the cover-ups of the assassinations of the sixties. As Eric Alterman has noted, this refrain about being too liberal was the equivalent of “working the refs” in sports. You softened up the gatekeepers in order to get your message on the field. And it worked. It also caused writers who had formerly been on the left to move right in order to to gain access, one example being the late Christopher Hitchens.

    The Republican Party has become so bereft, so craven by this continuing devolution that it all but ignores the real scandals that have taken place in order to distract the public with these ersatz ones. The heist of the 2000 election, the probable stealing of the 2004 election, the Iran/Contra scandal, the importation of drugs into the USA by the CIA, these all are minimized or ignored by the GOP. In fact, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsay Graham said the fact that the Senate allowed a sexual assault accuser to testify against Kavanaugh was one of the worst things he saw in his political career. Evidently, the Supreme Court and Roger Stone stealing the 2000 election––thus allowing the deaths of 600,000 Iraqis in a phony war––this did not count for anything to Graham. That is how bonkers that party has become. Their aim is to be constantly riling up the base, which does not really understand they are being used as lemmings to ensure policies that will make their lives worse.

    To be clear: I never voted for either of the Clintons. Since I live in the safe state of California, I could vote Green in the general election. I never voted for either one in the primaries. As Robert Reich later noted, the Clintons were really Eisenhower Republicans. I mean, can anyone imagine Bobby Kennedy attending H. L. Hunt’s funeral, like Bill Clinton did Scaife’s? (CBS News, August 3, 2014, report by Jake Miller) My point here is that the political antics that surrounded them was nothing but a cheap and tawdry circus, one which, without Scaife’s money, likely would have never existed. And when all the investigations were done, what real charges were there? Monica Lewinsky. Talk about hypocrisy, as Larry Flynt later showed: the GOP was full of similar instances. (See SF Weekly, 9/15/99, article entitled “Inside Flynt”) To take the hypocrisy of the Lewinsky matter even further: Scaife himself carried on a long affair with a call girl, one which his wife found out about and exposed. (Vanity Fair, 1/2/08, article by Michael Joseph Gross) There were two good books written on the stupidity of all this. First, there is Blood Sport by James Stewart from 1997; and then The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, which came out in 2001. The latter was made into a documentary film in 2004.

    Chris Ruddy rode the tidal wave of ridiculousness. He was well rewarded by his backers for his incessant efforts to aggrandize nonsense and create an aura of mystery where none actually existed: to suggest there was some kind of kill squad employed by the Clintons; that Vince Foster had to have been murdered and then, James Angleton style, the murder was made to look like a suicide; and that this was all over the Whitewater real estate deal in which the Clintons lost money. Today he runs Newsmax, which employs people like Mr. deLespinasse, who ridicules all ideas about conspiracies, but conveniently passes over the Foster mythology in silence. But when Ruddy does run a story and documentary on a possible JFK conspiracy, who is it about? The poseur James Files. (Report on Newsmax by Jim Myers, August 29, 2016). Ruddy has us nailed both ways.

    Donald Trump has complained that he is the most attacked president in decades. Mr. Trump has a short memory. Bill Clinton was. Just ask Chris Ruddy how he did it. And how he benefited so much from it.

  • Kamala Harris: Part 2

    Kamala Harris: Part 2

    Our mainstream media never fails to amaze this author. The day after Kamala Harris attacked Joe Biden at the Miami debate over the issue of busing, she was asked if she supported busing and said that she did. (Talking Points Memo, June 30th, story by Josh Marshall)

    In that story, nobody asked her what kind of program she would support or propose in her busing plan.

    No one asked her if she ever came up with such a plan as Attorney General of California. After all, she had six years to do so. Where was it?

    No one asked her if she proposed such a plan while she was District Attorney in San Francisco. She had over six years to do so in that position. Could she show when and where she did put forth such a plan?

    I believe the reason there is no evidence of her proposing these plans is fairly simple to figure out. If she had gone to any court, as either DA or AG, and done so, it would have been highly improbable the plan would have passed. But if it had, and if it had been comprehensive, Harris would have not been long for the political world. Court-ordered busing is not the equivalent of Harris’ policy of arresting the parents of students with chronic truancy problems. Those parents did not have strong constituencies behind them. So making those arrests was the moral and political equivalent of President Bill Clinton taking the advice of advisor Dick Morris and passing on welfare to the states in the form of block grants. Without Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King around, no one of any real stature was going to scream bloody murder. In fact, as I noted in the first part of this essay, since both men were dead and buried, Clinton could even invoke RFK’s name while he signed the bill.

    The fact that no one asked these questions—and the likes of Josh Marshall actually praised her for her honesty on the issue—illustrates what is wrong not just with the MSM, but also with the so-called liberal blogosphere. Because what the questioners were seemingly unaware of was the fact that court-ordered busing is pretty much dead. Two decisions by the Supreme Court, both under George W. Bush, killed it. These were the Belk decision in 2002, and the Seattle School District case of 2007. Anyone can look those up and see for themselves. I would have liked to have asked Harris if she ever made any comments on those two cases as they were handed down. If so, could she produce them? If busing meant so much to her, then why didn’t she?

    For anyone to report on this issue today, or comment on it, without recalling the history of court-ordered busing, is simply not leveling with the reader. This issue pretty much tore apart at least two cities: Boston and Los Angeles. In Los Angeles it led to the rise of politicians who attacked the issue like Roberta Weintraub and Bobbi Fielder. As Kevin Drum indicated in Mother Jones, court-ordered busing provoked one of the largest political backlashes in modern American history. When it was over, Ronald Reagan was president, and Reagonomics dominated the nation for the next forty years. Who did this benefit? The rich and powerful. Who did it hurt? Ethnic minorities. (Blog post of July 1st) Drum points out that the program Harris participated in had her transported all of three miles. Plus it was voluntary, not court-ordered. (LA Times, June 30, 2019) But even at that, the city of Berkeley deep-sixed it more than 20 years ago. And just about every major city dumped it in the eighties because of the enormous resistance to it.

    One reason that there has been no real progress in integrating public schools is simple. It is a matter of geography, which itself was a reaction to busing. When court-ordered busing began to be enacted in a comprehensive way in the seventies, many white members of the community resisted it by moving to the suburbs and/or unincorporated areas. To cite one example: in Boston when the program began, over half the students in public schools were white. Today, it is less than 15 percent. In Pasadena, the results were similar. As a result of seventies court-ordered busing, over 82 percent of the students today are non-white So what is the point in bringing up the issue today? You simply cannot enact it because of the geographic facts, the brutal memories it evokes, and the potential of more backlash. And that is what makes it a perfect issue for a showboat like Harris.

    There is no doubt that we need comprehensive reform to improve public schools. Students who are unfortunate enough to be born in a rundown neighborhood should not have to go to inferior schools because of that fact. But court-ordered busing is not the answer. And everyone, including Harris, knows it. One solution is something called open enrollment. This means that in a large school district, like say Los Angeles, one could divide up the district into three large sections. Students in each section could be allowed to go to any school in that area, and the district has to provide the transportation. If too many students desert a neighborhood school, then the district should have to go in and reform it until its reputation improved enough for students to want to go there. This is a serious, and feasible solution; yet Harris, to my knowledge, has never suggested it. Her plan, as I noted previously, is to arrest the parents of truant kids. Even if the kid had sickle cell anemia.

    The fact that there is no evidence of her ever proposing anything comprehensive, that she never objected to the Supreme Court decisions, that there is no evidence that she proposed any kind of busing plan when she was in a position to do so—these all indicate that she brought the issue up for one reason: political expediency. As I showed in part one, this is a hallmark of her career. And it was the same reason the Clintons proposed their welfare program in the election year of 1996. As I said, if you want more of Clintonism and Barack Obama, Harris is your candidate. I don’t agree with that. In fact, a political opportunist is just what we don’t need right now.

    Read the first part of this essay here.

  • Kamala Harris: A Study in Showboating

    Kamala Harris: A Study in Showboating

    I was going to delay writing this article for a couple of months since I wanted to see how the Democratic primaries played out. But after watching the performance by Kamala Harris during the first Democratic debates, I decided to move up the schedule. I am no big fan of Joe Biden, but the race-baiting stunt that Harris performed struck me as symbolizing everything that is wrong about not just her, but also certain aspects of the Democratic party and the “progressive” blogosphere. But before we get to that, let us sketch in some of the background on Harris.

    Harris was born in 1964. After her parents divorced, her mother moved the children to Canada. She graduated from high school there and went to Howard University for her BA degree. She moved to California to attend law school at the University of California, Hastings. She graduated in 1989. She served as an assistant DA in Alameda County, before joining the City Attorney’s office in San Francisco. In 2003 she won the election to be the DA of the City and County of San Francisco. In 2010 she defeated Steve Cooley for the office of California Attorney General. She was reelected in 2014. In 2016, she ran for the Senate when Democrat Barbra Boxer declined to run again. After only two years in Washington, she has now decided to run for president.

    Since she has held elected office for over 15 years, many of them in law enforcement, Harris has a record that people can review and discuss. And it is worth reviewing. There are many indications that, after the disappointment of Barack Obama, the uninspiring campaign of Hillary Clinton, and the extraordinarily regressive presidency of Donald Trump, the American electorate is more “liberal” now than at any time since the inauguration of John Kennedy. Perhaps even more so than in 1961. In my view, this has helped elect people like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. It almost allowed Beto O’Rourke to defeat Ted Cruz in Texas.

    Most remarkable is that it has produced a wave of upsets in District Attorney’s offices throughout the land. These new DA’s have almost all pledged to reassess traditional patterns of resource management in criminal trials. This is a long overdue approach which many legal scholars have recommended. The idea is rather simple: candidates have pledged to go softer on victimless crimes so they can spend more resources on violent crime. Some of the attorneys who won using this platform are Rachael Rollins in Boston, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti in Arlington, Virginia, and perhaps most stunningly—if her lead holds up—Tiffany Caban in Queens. Many of these candidates have been supported by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). That new and powerful lobbying group counts as its members people like Alexandria Oscasio Cortez, George Soros and film director Adam McKay.

    The DSA was founded in its present form by Michael Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich. Today it has over 50,000 members. Most observers consider that growing membership to be a reaction to the Trump presidency. Cortez and Tlaib were members of the DSA. The DSA began to rise due to its backing of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and its refusal to back Hillary Clinton after she became the Democratic nominee. In 2017, the DSA won 15 offices nationwide. In 2018, for the first time, they began to run several candidates for national and gubernatorial office. The DSA is probably the most progressive lobbying/political group to emerge since the decimation of the Henry Wallace Left in the fifties due to the second Red Scare. To me this is an important, perhaps a key political development of recent times.

    In that regard it should be noted that, in February of this year, in New Hampshire, Harris specifically stated, “I am not a Democratic Socialist.” (See The Hill, February 19, 2019, story by Rachel Frazin). If one goes over to the site called Open Secrets, which lists political contributions to major political candidates, one can see why she would go out of her way to say something like that, thereby differentiating herself from people like Cortez. Since she lives in California, some of her big contributors are 21st Century Fox, WarnerMedia Group and Creative Artists Agency. She is also backed by the giants of high tech: Google (through their subsidiary of Alphabet), Cisco, and Apple. The gravy train would not keep humming if she declared sisterhood with Cortez and company. And from that declaration one can also see that Harris is not really an advocate for any real structural change. With her, these mega monopolies do not have any real dread of being broken up, no matter how massive their domination of markets are or will be. Which is, in my view, a revealing trait for a former Attorney General who bills herself as a champion of the people. In fact, when she declared her candidacy for president in Oakland, she said she went into the DA’s office because she knew that there were predators out there who often targeted the voiceless and vulnerable. (Yahoo News, 3/18/19, story by Alexander Nazaryan)

    In that regard, it is interesting to note how Harris approached a major nutritional company called Herbalife while she was AG in California. In 2015, she was sent a long memorandum from prosecutors in San Diego who requested that she begin an inquiry into this company based upon evidence developed elsewhere. After that letter had been sent to her office, Harris began getting donations to run for the Senate from the Podesta family. As many know, that family has been a mainstay of the Democratic party and Hillary Clinton for years. Both Tony Podesta and his former wife Heather worked for that company as lobbyists. (See Nazaryan story)

    Herbalife was actually being investigated by the FTC for several months before Harris got the memo from San Diego. There was also an activist group opposed to Herbalife in Chicago that sharply attacked the company for preying on the Latino community. Their nickname for Harris is a play on her first name, Que Maia, which translates into “How bad.” (Nazaryan). Many critics have gone after Herbalife since they see it as a disguised pyramid scheme in the form of multi-level marketing. The marketers quickly find out that the pills sold by the company are worthless, so to salvage their investment they have to recruit others into the scheme. In addition to the Podestas, another reason Harris may have passed on a lawsuit against the company is their employment of Michael Johnson as CEO. Johnson worked for Disney, another big contributor to Harris’ campaigns.

    Herbalife was so bad in its business practices that it was being investigated in Illinois and in the state of New York. The FBI began an investigation in 2014. There may have been another facet to the problem. The law firm representing Herbalife employed Harris’ husband. (Nazaryan)

    In another example of seeming favoritism, Harris likes to talk about the cases she filed and reached settlements with on mortgage fraud. But in the case of OneWest bank, her investigators found over a thousand cases which they thought were worthy of prosecution. And they thought they could come up with many more. But Harris declined the case. Harris received a donation from the wife of the CEO. In 2016, she was in receipt of the only donation the CEO made to a Democrat. That CEO was Steve Mnuchin who went on to become Trump’s Secretary of Treasury. (See Huffington Post, August 3, 2017, article by Jesse Mechanic)

    As everyone knows the whole concept of immigration and sanctuary cities has been made a huge issue by the draconian policies of the present administration. Representatives from DSA like Cortez have gone as far as to propose abolishing ICE. Under President Obama the level of deportations had risen to levels not seen in a half century. (Huffington Post, 6/18/2019, story by Roque Planas). Since California has so many people crossing the border illegally, there were many Hispanic activist groups who disagreed with Obama’s policy. They decided to pass a bill called the Trust Act over Obama’s objections. This bill was a way to limit cooperation with ICE at the state level. In fact, before she became California AG, as DA, she supported a city policy in San Francisco that required police to turn over undocumented juvenile immigrants to federal authorities if they were arrested, “regardless of whether or not they were actually convicted of a crime.” (CNN story of February 11, 2019 by Nathan McDermott and Andrew Kaczynski) This reversed the city’s status as a sanctuary city.

    According to its backers, although they tried to get Harris to back their bill, in the three-year travail they undertook, Harris sat it out. In fact, her office deemed the act too expensive to enforce. (See Planas). Backers of the bill, which eventually passed, designed it as limiting local authorities’ cooperation with ICE. They viewed Harris’ neutrality as her way to avoid conflict with Obama. David Campos, one of the strongest promoters of the bill, said, “Kamala was always seen as a very law and order type who was not very supportive of pro-immigrant legislation. At the best, she was not involved and at the worst, she opposed.” As Professor Kevin Johnson has said about her, “I think she was seeing where the state was going to go, instead of being a trailblazer on the issue.” Another backer of the bill, Tom Ammiano, has been even stronger on Harris and this issue. He has said that, with Trump as president, it is now easier for the Democrats to support sanctuary cities, “because he’s so extreme that you can confront him. But in those days, it was lack of political will. She was cautious.  And sometimes in politics, you have to be inspirational.” (See Planas)

    In fact, as another law professor, Lara Bazelon, has written, although “progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent.” (New York Times, January 17, 2019). According to Bazelon, Harris even fought to uphold wrongful convictions. Even when these had been attained through false testimony and/or tampering with evidence. This included having a technician in her police laboratory who sabotaged cases. Harris stood by the employee and criticized the judge who condemned Harris’ refusal to reopen those cases. Harris lost the appeal. As Attorney General, she appealed a judge’s ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional. She actually made a statement saying that this decision “undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.” (NYT, 01/17/19). In 2014, Harris refused to take a position on Proposition 47, an initiative approved by the electorate that reduced low level felonies to misdemeanors—which is partly what DSA candidates are running on. She was against the recreational use of marijuana. But when public opinion shifted so hard against her in 2018, she changed course on the issue. (NYT, 01/17/19)

    Harris opposed a bill in 2015 requiring her office to investigate police officer shootings. She did not support statewide standards regulating use of body-worn cameras by officers. But as Bazelon writes, the worst thing about Harris is her refusal to reopen cases where it has been demonstrated that the defendant suffered a miscarriage of justice. In the Kevin Cooper case, the defendant sought advanced DNA testing to demonstrate his innocence. Harris opposed the motion. It was only when the case became a cause célèbre that she relented. (NYT 01/17/19). She even defended a Kern county prosecutor who falsified a confession of a defendant that was later used to threaten a life sentence. (The Guardian, January 27, 2019, story by Shanita Hubbard)

    To this author, and to many others, the record of Kamala Harris seems to exemplify not a DSA candidate like Rollins or Caban, but a tough-on-crime Democrat who will do just about anything to protect her right flank. In other words, in the age of AOC and Bernie Sanders, she reminds many of the unlamented politics of Bill and Hillary Clinton. This brings us to three key subjects: her “war on truancy”, her attacks on Joe Biden at the first Democratic debate, and her refusal to reopen the Robert Kennedy murder case.

    As AG, Harris decided to champion a bill that could lead to the arrest of the parents of students who missed more than 10% of a school year without a valid excuse. Not only did she champion and enforce this law, she did what she could to get wide coverage of her employees making arrests of the parents of the truant kids. As one parent said upon her arrest, there were so many cameras and reporters there that she felt like she had committed homicide. (Huffington Post, story of 3/27/19, by Molly Redden). The problem was that her office did not do the proper legwork to determine the causes of the truancy before they made the arrests. For instance, in one instance, the child had a severe case of sickle cell anemia which necessitated unpredictable absences from school and also special education aids. At the time of the mother’s arrest, she was arguing with the school over the provision of those aids while her child was being hospitalized. (Redden, Huffington Post). Again, when these kinds of harsh and insensitive measures were exposed, Harris now began to back away from them so she could call herself a “progressive prosecutor.” Which, from the evidence adduced above, does not seem to be the case.

    With what I know about Harris, if I had been advising Joe Biden at the June 27th debate, I would have rehearsed him in advance and done it more than once. Studying her showboating career, it would have been obvious to me that she would attack the frontrunner over his comments in a 2007 book he wrote about being able to work with conservative segregationists from the south in his early says in the Senate, e.g., James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia. In a speech he gave recently, he talked about how he needed Eastland’s blessing to get on the Judiciary Committee, a spot he very much coveted. He also added that Talmadge was a mean man, but he managed to be civil with him. (Washington Examiner, June 28, 2019, article by Alana Goodman)

    Recall, this was over forty years ago when Biden was one of the youngest senators ever elected. In fact, Biden was very collegial with almost everyone in the Senate. He understood that one had to be that way in order to get things done. When Biden was first elected to that body, she was about 9 and would soon move to Canada. I would have told Biden to remind her of that fact and also this one: Kamala, would you also condemn Robert Kennedy for working with Eastland when he was Attorney General? Because RFK called Eastland during the Freedom Riders crisis in 1961. He needed his help with local law enforcement to protect the lives of the demonstrators. RFK made a deal with the senator which both sides kept. (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 312). As this author has shown, Bobby Kennedy was the most vigilant Attorney General to enforce civil rights in the history of this country. And that is not just my judgment, but it’s the judgment of people like Martin Luther King, and Harry Belafonte. That is not an opinion, but a proven fact. Both RFK and Biden were victims of history and the refusal of either political party to stand up to the forces of white supremacy in the south that allowed senators like Eastland and Talmadge to stay in power as long as they did. To try and score cheap political points by feigning ignorance of that reality seems to me to be typical of Harris’ career.

    As to her second complaint about Biden’s objections to forced busing to integrate public schools, again I am surprised he was not better prepared. The obvious way to have replied was through her relationship with Willie Brown. Everyone knows how close that was. Willie Brown was one of the smartest politicians in the history of California. He went on Sixty Minutes one evening in the eighties and said he told everyone running in the state not to come near the busing issue. He said that stance came from a simple fact: the issue was too polarizing. Brown said that no matter how good a candidate the Democrats would put up, they would be in serious trouble—and would often lose—to a GOP candidate who would use demagoguery on the busing issue (for instance, the defeat of Jim Corman by Bobbi Fiedler in 1980). Corman was an excellent liberal congressman who had a part in the groundbreaking Kerner Commission report. That report was so honest and far reaching on the racial issue that President Johnson ignored it. Biden should have told her to call Willie Brown after the debate and ask him about that interview and about the fate of Jim Corman. In fact, I would have advised him to have Brown’s number on speed dial and just press it after Harris attacked him. That is how predictable this was.

    He should also have asked her if she ever advocated for busing in California. There are many problems with public schools, but if arresting the parents of truant children is the only policy you have, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. I would suggest something like open enrollment throughout the large districts with the requirement that the district has to get the student to his school of choice.   Hold your breath for Harris to propose that one.

    Now, if Harris would have gone after Biden for what he did during the Anita Hill hearings, that would be different. I would not be writing this column at this time if she had done that. And I really wish someone would have asked her why she did not do that. But this is someone who is responsible for arresting African American mothers with kids who have sickle cell anemia. And then keeps them tied up in court for two years.

    It’s no surprise to me that people like Van Jones praised what Harris did. This is the guy who once said that the Kennedys had to be educated about civil rights. That is utterly false. But this shows that when it comes to history, Jones is as bad as Harris.

    There is one last thing that Biden could have replied with, but it would have been too much of an outlier for someone like him. He should have also lectured Harris about Bobby Kennedy and his actions at places like the University of Alabama, protecting incoming students like Vivian Malone from George Wallace with a force of 3500 soldiers and marshals under the supervision of General Creighton Abrams. Some southern politicians you could work with and some you could not. Biden then should have said something like: “Remember Bobby Kennedy Kamala? Maybe you don’t. He is the guy who’s murder you refused to reopen when you had the opportunity to do so as Attorney General. In fact, you actually worked with people who had done their best to cover up the facts of that case. It’s part of your legacy of refusing to free people who had been framed by the state.”

    This is all utterly true. And it is written about by Lisa Pease in her fine new book on the RFK case, A Lie Too Big to Fail (see pp. 501-02). This is how much a part of the Establishment Harris really is. This is how protective she is of her image with the MSM. At the time of the William Pepper/Laurie Dusek appeal, she actually said that the evidence against Sirhan Sirhan was overwhelming. To anyone who reads the book by Pease, that statement is ludicrous.

    Because of her Clintonesque politics and record, it is easy to explain why she is the darling of the MSM. They want more of Barack Obama. And that is who Harris really is: she is a combination of Obama and Hillary Clinton. She is about as far away from Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as one can imagine and still be a Democrat. Which may explain why she had no interest or sympathy in freeing an innocent man for his murder. A crime he did not—actually could not have—committed.

    Read Part 2 of the essay here.

  • Truthdig, Major Danny Sjursen and JFK

    Truthdig, Major Danny Sjursen and JFK

    truthdigOn April 6, 2019 Truthdig joined the likes of Paul Street and Counterpunch in its disdain for scholarship on the subject of the career and presidency of John F. Kennedy. To say the least, that is not good company to keep in this regard. (see, for instance, Alec Cockburn Lives: Matt Stevenson, JFK and CounterPunch, and Paul Street Meets Jane Hamsher at Arlington) What makes it even worse is that the writer of this particular article, Major Danny Sjursen, was a teacher at West Point in American History. In that regard, his article is about as searching and definitive as something from an MSM darling like Robert Dallek. The problem is, Truthdig is not supposed to be part of the MSM.

    Sjursen’s article is part of a multi-part series about American History. The title of this installment is “JFK’s Cold War Chains”. So right off the bat, Sjursen is somehow going to convey to the reader that President Kennedy was no different than say Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, or Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson in his foreign policy vision.

    Almost immediately Sjursen hits the note that the MSM usually does: Kennedy was really all flash and charisma and achieved very little of substance in his relatively brief presidency. And the author says this is true about both his foreign and domestic policy. Like many others, he states that Kennedy hedged on civil rights. I don’t see how beginning a program the night of one’s inauguration counts as hedging.

    On the evening of his inauguration, Kennedy called Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon. He was upset because during that day’s parade of the Coast Guard, he did not see any black faces. He wanted to know why. Were there no African American cadets at the Coast Guard academy? If not, why not? (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 52) Two days later, the Coast Guard began an all-out effort to seek out and sign up African American students. A year later they admitted a black student. By 1963 they made it a point to interview 561 African American candidates. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 114)

    This was just the start. At his first cabinet meeting Kennedy brought this incident up and said he wanted figures from each department on the racial minorities they had in their employ and where they ranked on the pay scale. When he got the results, he was not pleased. He wanted everyone to make a conscious effort to remedy the situation and he also requested regular reports on the matter. Kennedy also assigned a civil rights officer to manage the hiring program and to hear complaints for each department. He then requested that the Civil Service Commission begin a recruiting program that would target historically black colleges and universities for candidates. (Carl Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, pp. 72, 84) Thus began the program we now call affirmative action. Kennedy issued two executive orders on that subject. The first one was Executive Order 10925 in March of 1961, three months after his inauguration.

    Kennedy’s civil rights program extended into the field of federal contracting in a way that was much more systematic and complete than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. (Golden, p. 61) In fact, it went so far as to have an impact on admissions of African American students to private colleges in the South. As Melissa Kean noted in her book on the subject, Kennedy tied federal research grants and contracts to admissions policies of private southern universities. This forced open the doors of large universities like Duke and Tulane to African American students. (Kean, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South, p. 237)

    I should not have to inform anyone, certainly not Major Sjursen, about how this all ended up at the University of Mississippi and then the University of Alabama. The president had to call in federal marshals and the military in order to escort African American students past the governors of each state. In both cases, the administration had helped to attain court orders that, respectively Governors Ross Barnett and George Wallace, had resisted. That resistance necessitated the massing of federal power in order to gain the entry of African American students to those public universities.

    After the last confrontation, where Kennedy faced off against Governor Wallace, he went on national television to make the most eloquent and powerful public address on civil rights since Abraham Lincoln. Anyone can watch that speech, since it is on YouTube. By this time, the summer of 1963, Kennedy had already submitted a civil rights bill to Congress. He had not done so previously since he knew it would be filibustered, as all other prior bills on the subject had been. Kennedy’s bill took one year to pass. And he had to mount an unprecedented month-long personal lobbying campaign to launch it. (Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century, p. 63) When one looks at Kennedy’s level of achievement in just this one domestic field and locates and lists his accomplishments, it is clear that he did more for civil rights in three years than FDR, Truman and Eisenhower did in nearly three decades (see chart at end).

    The reason for this is that the Kennedy administration was the first to state that it would enforce the Brown vs. Board decision of 1954. The Eisenhower administration resisted enacting every recommendation sent to it by the senate’s 1957 Civil Rights Commission. (Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 21) As Michael Beschloss has written, Eisenhower actually tried to persuade Earl Warren not to vote in favor of the plaintiffs in that case.

    Kennedy endorsed that decision when he was a senator. In fact, he did so twice in public. The first time was in New York City in 1956. (New York Times, 2/8/56, p. 1) The second time he did so was in 1957, in of all places, Jackson, Mississippi. (Golden, p. 95) Attorney General Robert Kennedy then went to the University of Georgia Law Day in 1961. He spent almost half of his speech addressing the issue: namely that he would enforce Brown vs Board. Again, this speech is easily available online and Sjursen could have linked to it in his article. So it would logically follow that in 1961, the Kennedy administration indicted the Secretary of Education in Louisiana for disobeying court orders to integrate public schools. (Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 135)

    Once one properly lists and credits this information, its easy to see that the Kennedy administration was intent on ripping down Jim Crow in the South even if it meant losing what had been a previous Democratic Party political bastion. (Golden, p. 98) Kennedy’s approval rating in the South had plummeted from 60 to 33% by the summer of 1963. He was losing votes for his other programs because of his stand on civil rights. But as he told Luther Hodges, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand….” (Brauer, pp. 247, 263-64)

    In addition to that, Kennedy signed legislation that allowed federal employees to form unions. (Executive Order 10988 , January 17, 1962) This was quite important, since it began the entire public employee union sector movement, today one of the strongest areas of much diminished labor power. In March of that same year, Kennedy signed the Manpower Development and Training Act aimed at alleviating African American unemployment. (Bernstein, pp. 186-87)

    On April 11, 1962 Kennedy called a press conference and made perhaps the most violent rhetorical attack against a big business monopoly since Roosevelt. Thus began his famous 72-hour war against the steel companies. Kennedy had brokered a deal between the unions and the large companies to head off a strike and an inflationary spiral in the economy. The steel companies broke the deal. Robert Kennedy followed the speech by opening a grand jury probe into monopoly practices of collusion and price fixing. He then sent the FBI to make evening visits to serve subpoenas on steel executives. No less than John M. Blair called this episode “the most dramatic confrontation in history between a President and corporate management.” (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p. 9) When it was over, the steel companies rescinded their price increases.

    Three months later, Kennedy tried to pass a Medicare bill. It was defeated in Congress. But on the day of his assassination, he was working with Congressman Wilbur Mills to bring the bill back for another vote. (Bernstein, pp. 256-58) In October of 1963, Kennedy’s federal aid to education bill was passed. This was the first such bill of its kind. (Bernstein, pp. 225-230)

    At the time of his assassination, due to the influence of Michael Harrington’s The Other America, Kennedy was working on an overall plan to attack urban poverty. As careful scholars have pointed out, the War on Poverty was not originated by Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy had been working on such a program with the chairman of his Council on Economic Advisors, Walter Heller, for months before his murder. (Edward Schmitt, The President of the Other America, pp. 92, 96) As more than one commentator has written, what Johnson did with the Kennedy brothers’ draft of that plan was quite questionable. (Wofford, p. 286 ff.) To cite just one example, LBJ retired the man—David Hackett—who the Kennedys had placed in charge of the program.

    I could go on with the domestic side, pointing to Kennedy’s almost immediate raising of the minimum wage, his concern for lengthening unemployment benefits, his establishment of a Women’s Bureau, the comments by labor leaders that they just about “lived in the White House”, etc., etc. In the face of all this, for Sjursen to write that Kennedy’s administration contained “so few tangible accomplishments” or did nothing for unemployed African Americans, this simply will not stand up to a full review of the record.

    Sjursen’s discussion of Kennedy’s foreign policy is equally obtuse and problematic. He begins by saying that Kennedy fulfilled “his dream of being an ardent Cold Warrior.” He then writes that “Kennedy was little different than—and was perhaps more hawkish than—his predecessors and successors.”

    In the light of modern scholarship, again, this will simply not stand scrutiny. Authors like Robert Rakove, Philip Muehlenbeck, Greg Poulgrain, and Richard Mahoney—all of whom Sjursen ignores—have dug into the archival record on this specific subject. They have shown, with specific examples and reams of data, that Kennedy forged his foreign policy in conscious opposition to Secretaries of State Dean Acheson, a Democrat and Republican John Foster Dulles.

    This confrontation was not muted. It was direct. And it began in 1951, even before Kennedy got to the Senate, let alone the White House. His visit to Saigon in that year and his meeting with a previous acquaintance, State Department official Edmund Gullion, about the French effort to recolonize Vietnam, was the genesis for a six-year search to find a new formula for American foreign policy in the Third World. Congressman Kennedy was quite troubled with Gullion’s prediction that France had no real chance of winning its war against Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap. Upon his return to Massachusetts, he began to make speeches and write letters to his constituents about the problems with America’s State Department in the Third World. In 1954, Senator Kennedy warned that

    … no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an enemy of the people which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.

    In 1956, he made a speech for Adlai Stevenson in which he criticized both the Democratic and Republican parties for their failures to break out of Cold War orthodoxies in their thinking about nationalism in the Third World. He stated that this revolt in the Third World and America’s failure to understand it, “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, pp. 15-18) Stevenson’s office wired him a message asking him not to make any more foreign policy statements associated with his campaign.

    My question then to Mr. Sjursen is: If you are too extreme for the liberal standard bearer of your party, how can you be “little different than” or even “more hawkish” than he is?

    This was all in preparation for his career-defining speech of 1957. On July 2 of that year, Kennedy spoke from the floor of the Senate and made perhaps the most blistering attack on the Foster Dulles/Dwight Eisenhower Cold War shibboleths toward the Third World that any American politician had made in that decade. This was Kennedy’s all-out attack on the administration’s policy toward the horrible colonial war going on in Algeria at the time. He compared this mistake of quiet support for the spectacle of terror that this conflict had produced with the American support for the doomed French campaign to save its colonial empire in Indochina three years previously. He assaulted the White House for not being a true friend of its old ally. A true friend would have done everything to escort France to the negotiating table rather than continue a war it was not going to win and which was at the same time tearing apart the French home front. In light of those realities, he concluded by saying America’s goals should be to liberate Africa and to save France. (John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, pp. 66-80)

    Again, this speech was assailed not just by the White House, but also by people in his own party like Stevenson and Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson. (Mahoney, p. 20) Of the over 130 newspaper editorials it provoked, about 2/3 were negative. (p. 21) A man who was “little different” than his peers would not have caused such a torrent of reaction to a foreign policy speech. To most objective observers, this evidence would indicate that Kennedy was clearly bucking the conventional wisdom as to what America should be doing in the Third World with regards to the issues of nationalism, colonialism and anti-communism. As biographer John T. Shaw later wrote about these speeches, what Kennedy did was to formulate an alternative foreign policy view toward the Cold War for the Democratic party. And this was his most significant achievement in the Senate. (John T. Shaw, JFK in the Senate, p. 110) But for Mr. Sjursen and Truthdig, this is all the dark side of the moon.

    By not noting any of this, Sjursen does not then have to follow through on how Kennedy carried these policies into his presidency. A prime example would be in the Congo, where Kennedy pretty much reversed policy from what Eisenhower was doing there in just a matter of weeks. The man who Kennedy was going to back in that struggle, Patrice Lumumba, was hunted down and killed by firing squad three days before the new president was inaugurated. Eisenhower and Allen Dulles had issued an assassination order for Lumumba in the late summer of 1960. (John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, p. 236) After he was killed, the CIA kept the news of his death from President Kennedy until nearly one month after Lumumba was killed. But on February 2, not knowing he was dead, Kennedy had already revised the Eisenhower policy in Congo to favor Lumumba. (Mahoney, p. 65) In fact, this was the first foreign policy revision the new president had made. Some have even argued that the plotting against Lumumba was sped up to make sure he was killed before Kennedy was in the White House. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23)

    How does all of the above fit into the paradigm that Sjursen draws in which the Cold War heightened under Kennedy and his vision had no room for nuances of freedom and liberty? Does anyone think that Eisenhower would have reacted to Lumumba’s death with the pained expression of grief that JFK did when he was alerted to that fact? Eisenhower was the president who ordered his assassination. (For an overview of this epochal conflict and how it undermines Sjursen and Truthdig, see Dodd and Dulles vs Kennedy in Africa)

    One of the most bizarre statements in the long essay is that Kennedy was loved by and enamored of the military. The evidence against this is so abundant that it is hard to see how the author can really believe it. But by the end of the 1962 Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were openly derisive of JFK. They told him to his face that his decision to blockade Cuba instead of attacking the island over the missile installation was the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler at Munich. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 57) They were also upset when he rejected the false flag scenarios outlined in their Operation Northwoods proposals, e.g., blowing up an American ship in Cuban waters. These were designed to create a pretext for an invasion of the island. He also writes that Kennedy deliberately chose the space race since it was a popular way to one-up the Russians. This ignores the fact that Kennedy thought it was too expensive and wanted a joint expedition to the moon with the Soviets. According to the book One Hell of a Gamble by Tim Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko, Kennedy actually attempted to do this earlier, in 1961, but was turned down by Nikita Khrushchev.

    Sjursen blames the failure of the Bay of Pigs on Kennedy. First of all, the Bay of Pigs invasion was not Kennedy’s idea. And anyone who studies that operation should know this. It was created by Eisenhower and Allen Dulles. Dulles and CIA Director of Plans Dick Bissell then pushed it on Kennedy. They did everything they could to get Kennedy to approve it, including lying to him about its chances of success. The important thing to remember about this disaster is that Kennedy did not approve direct American military intervention once he saw it failing. This had been the secret agenda of both Dulles and Bissell, who knew it would fail. (DiEugenio, p. 47)

    Kennedy later suspected such was the case and he fired Dulles, Bissell and Charles Cabell, the CIA Deputy Director. There is no doubt that if Nixon had won the election of 1960, he would have sent in the Navy and Marines to bail out the operation. Because this is what he told JFK he would have done. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 288) And today, Cuba would be a territory of the USA, like Puerto Rico. Again, so much for there being no difference between what came before Kennedy and what came after.

    Sjursen then tries to connect the Bay of Pigs directly to the Missile Crisis. As if one was the consequence of the other. Graham Allison, the foremost scholar on the Missile Crisis, disagreed. And so did John Kennedy. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had a meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. He found the Russian leader obsessed with the status of Berlin. So much so that during the Berlin Crisis in the fall of 1961, the Soviets decided to build a wall to separate East from West Berlin. In the fine volume The Kennedy Tapes, still the best book on the Missile Crisis, it is revealed that Berlin is what Kennedy believed the Russian deployment was really about. (See Probe Magazine, Vol. 5, No 4, pp. 17-18) That whole crisis was not caused by Kennedy. It was provoked by Nikita Khrushchev. And again, Kennedy did not take the option extended by many of his advisors, that is, using an air attack or an invasion to take out the missiles. He insisted on the least violent option he could take. One person died during those thirteen days. He was an American pilot. Kennedy did not take retaliatory action.

    I should not even have to add that Sjursen leaves out the crucial aftermath of the Missile Crisis: that Kennedy developed a rapprochement strategy with both Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. Both of these are well described by Jim Douglass in his important book JFK and the Unspeakable. (see pp. 74-90 for the Castro back-channel; pp. 340-51 for the Kennedy/Khrushchev détente facilitated by Norman Cousins) The rapprochement attempt with Russia culminated with Kennedy’s famous Peace Speech at American University in the summer of 1963. Which, like Kennedy’s Algeria speech, Sjursen does not mention.

    Predictably, Sjursen ends his essay with Kennedy and Vietnam. He actually writes that Kennedy’s policies there led the US “inexorably deeper into its greatest military fiasco and defeat.” What can one say in the face of such a lack of respect for the declassified record?—except that all of that record now proves that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his murder. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 18-21) That Johnson knew this at the time, and he consciously altered that withdrawal policy, and then tried to cover up the fact that he had. And we have that in LBJ’s own words today. (Virtual JFK, by James Blight, pp. 306-10) There was not one combat troop in Vietnam when Kennedy was inaugurated. There was not one there on the day he was killed. By 1967, there were over 500,000 combat troops in theater.

    Many informed observers complain about the censorship and distortion so prevalent on Fox News. But I would argue that when it comes to this subject, the journals on the Left do pretty much the same thing, ending up with the same result: the misleading of its readership. I would also argue the very process—from the editor on down to the choice of author and sources used—skews the facts and sources as rigorously and as stringently as Fox. On two occasions, I have asked Counterpunch to print my reply to anti-Kennedy articles they have written. I sent an e-mail to Truthdig to do the same with this essay. As with Counterpunch, I got no reply. This would suggest that there is a Wizard of Oz apparatus at work, one which does not wish to see the curtain drawn. Such a contingency reduces this kind of writing to little more than playing to the crowd. With Fox, that crowd is on the right. With Counterpunch and Truthdig, it is on the left. In both cases, the motive is political. That is no way to dig for truth.

  • This is who Bret Kavanaugh is and this is what the Federalist Society has done to the court system

     

  • Wisconsin Supreme Court decides to overturn three prior decisions and send John McAdams back to Marquette

     

  • 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.

  • 44 out of 102 districts in upcoming primaries have Democratic candidates with military-intelligence backgrounds

     

  • Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews

    Robert Parry has left us at the young age of 68.  Read this tribute by his son Nat Parry.

  • John R. Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy

    John R. Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy

    rfkrevolutionNext year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. Consequently there have been three biographies published about RFK in the last 16 months. Last year we had the Henry Kissinger endorsed book by Larry Tye entitled Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. That work was so agenda driven, with so little new information, that it was quite difficult to read. (Click here for my review) A couple of weeks ago we had the publication of Chris Matthews’ book on RFK. Judging from Matthews’ book on John Kennedy, the volume does not hold much promise; but we will be fair in our upcoming review.

    This past June, John R. Bohrer published an unusual book about RFK. Entitled The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, it focuses on the period of time from after President Kennedy’s assassination to the end of 1966. In other words, it covers only three years, but they were crucial years. To anyone really interested in RFK, it seems to me a volume of the greatest interest. Not only is it unique in its focus, but, unlike Tye, Bohrer has done some valuable research on his subject, and unearthed some new and important information about the senator. His book shows that you can reveal a lot about a person if you study your subject from a small window but tell more about that frame than others do.

    In his introduction, Bohrer mentions something I was not aware of. Bobby Kennedy had offered to resign his position as Attorney General in advance of his brother’s 1964 reelection campaign. It had become clear to RFK that the opposition to his actions in the civil rights arena had done much to alienate both Democratic voters and politicians in the south. He saw this as being a serous liability to President Kennedy’s 1964 reelection. JFK refused to entertain the offer, but on November 20, 1963 Bobby Kennedy was despondent about the issue and still thought it was the right thing to do. After all, as the author notes, Bobby had run JFK’s 1952 senatorial campaign. In 1956, as a kind of dress rehearsal for 1960, he joined up with Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign. So he knew how brutal these things could become, and the impact his name and acts could have on the calculus for 1964.

    Bohrer portrays the assassination of President Kennedy as something that seriously affected Robert Kennedy and made him rethink his ideas about politics, in the sense that ideas and ideals mattered. It should not be all about practicality and vote counting. In fact, one of the recurring words in his speeches after his brother’s death was “revolution”. In visiting Peru, he told students who had assembled to meet him that the revolution was their responsibility. They must be wise and humane so that it will be peaceful and successful: “But a revolution will come whether we will it or not. We can affect its character, we cannot alter its inevitability.” (Bohrer, p. 8) That speech was made while RFK was a senator from New York. Ask yourself the last time you heard a US senator encourage revolution anywhere in the world.

    II

    When Attorney General Robert Kennedy got the word of his brother’s death, he talked with his press secretary Ed Guthman. The latter commented that this might bring people together. RFK replied prophetically that no, this was going to make things worse. (Bohrer, p. 12) He actually pondered whether he should resign. But President Johnson sent Clark Clifford to persuade him to stay in his position. Within days, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had pulled RFK’s private line out of his inner office. And with that, the Attorney General realized that his power in the Justice Department had been severely curtailed. As long as his brother was president, he had some leverage over Hoover. Without the White House behind him, Hoover was free to chart his own course. (p. 15) Again, he thought of resigning. But he decided to stay on until the Civil Rights bill that he and his brother had worked so hard for was passed. A main thesis of Bohrer’s book is that although his brother was gone, and JFK had been the main fulcrum of his life, Bobby now began to search for a new rudder. And that would turn out to be keeping the legacy of President Kennedy alive. Because, as the book outlines, in addition to Hoover, RFK saw certain moves that President Johnson made as being counter to what his brother had been about.

    One of these was the ascension of Thomas Mann on the Latin American desk of the State Department. Under President Kennedy, Mann had been Ambassador to Mexico. Within three weeks of his murder, Mann was promoted by Johnson to Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and also to govern the US Agency for International Development. As Arthur Schlesinger has noted, and as RFK agreed, this double appointment seemed aimed at neutralizing JFK’s rather moderate Alliance for Progress program in Latin America. (Bohrer, p. 19)

    In fact, a couple of months later, Mann held a conference for the State Department’s Latin American diplomatic corps. During his address, he did not mention the Alliance for Progress. He said the USA should not intervene against dictators if they were friendly to American business interests. But they should oppose communists whatever their policies would be. The speech was leaked to the press and characterized as advocating American commercial profits over Latin American political reform. The policy became known as the Mann Doctrine. (Walter LaFeber Inevitable Revolutions, p. 157)

    Mann’s speech was instrumental in the American backed coup that occurred several weeks later in Brazil. The following year, Mann and Johnson worked together in order to halt the movement to reinstall Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic. President Kennedy had ordered severe economic sanctions against the military plotters who had ousted the democratically elected President Bosch in September of 1963. In their opposition to Bosch, Mann and LBJ’s actions eventually led to a large military intervention by the Marines to halt his restoration. (See LaFeber, pp. 157-58; Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78-80)

    What RFK and Schlesinger understood was that Johnson’s favoring of Mann’s hardline approach was a direct challenge to what Kennedy wished to achieve with his Alliance for Progress. (For a long, detailed analysis of this program under JFK, see Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 494-574) One of the aims of the 1961 Alliance program was to stimulate economic growth by making loans to Latin American countries directly from the American treasury; this afforded lower interest rates and less stringent policy strictures than going through the World Bank.

    To understand who Mann was and what he did in Latin America, one only has to comprehend that in reviewing the Alliance for Progress, historians like Schlesinger and LaFeber divide it in half: the Kennedy version versus the Johnson version. As Alliance administrator William D. Rogers stated about the Mann/LBJ takeover: “… a more dramatic shift in tone and style of US Alliance Leadership would have been difficult to imagine.” (Schlesinger, p. 721) As for President Kennedy’s oratorical hopes for the Alliance causing peaceful revolution, LBJ assistant Harry McPherson termed that: “A lot of crap.” As LaFeber notes, the Mann/LBJ revision of the Alliance consisted largely of dismantling it. But also in tilting it away from economic investment and toward military build ups. (LaFeber, p. 156) As Juan Bosch later noted of JFK’s intent to use the Alliance for Progress for democratization and structural change, those aims died with Kennedy in Dallas. (Schlesinger, p. 722) Bobby Kennedy predicted what the outcome of that abandonment would be: “The people of Latin America will not accept this kind of existence for the next generation. We would not, they will not. There will be changes.” Considering the violence that swept through Central America in the eighties, and the more peaceful revolutions that occurred in the new millennium, Kennedy was correct. (For the latter, see Oliver Stone’s documentary film, South of the Border.)

    A significant achievement of the book is its detailed explication of Robert Kennedy’s opposition to what LBJ did in another theater of Third World conflict, South Vietnam. The accepted version of RFK’s thoughts and actions on this subject has been that his tacit acceptance of what Johnson did in Indochina from 1964-66 suggested that he was in agreement with it. With what Bohrer has unearthed for his book, that view is simply untenable today.

    When young Adam Walinsky first joined Senator Kennedy’s staff, Kennedy told him that Johnson was more conservative than most people thought he was. (Bohrer, p. 141) Walinsky recommended that they not confront Johnson directly, but on the edges of policy, thus not inciting an open feud. So Kennedy took his time in making his disagreement over Indochina public. But as early as 1964, he told Johnson that he did not think the war should be escalated into a full-blown military conflict. (p. 70) Kennedy felt that raising the military component to a higher level would not work. There had to be some attempt at a political settlement. But also, our side had to offer more significant aid to the people of South Vietnam. Johnson feigned at agreeing with this approach. But, as we all know, that is not the path he took. (p. 152) In June of 1964, shortly after telling Johnson about his ideas, Attorney General Kennedy confided to Schlesinger that he believed “the situation in Vietnam may get worse and become a serious political liability to the administration.” (p. 72)

    It did get worse after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed two months later, and Johnson began air attacks against the north. When the Viet Cong retaliated by detonating bombs on new American air bases, the retaliatory air attacks increased. Kennedy was also disappointed that, while escalating, Johnson seemed to rely for advice and courage on former President Eisenhower. (p. 152)

    Journalist David Halberstam—who was a full-fledged Hawk at the time—got wind of this and criticized Bobby on the grounds of arrogance: How dare he think he was smarter than the likes of LBJ and Eisenhower? Unlike them, Bobby thought he could win the war without dropping tons of bombs and using overwhelming force. Needless to say, Halberstam’s half-baked ideas would lead to an epochal disaster. And only when it peaked out in 1968, with over 500,000 combat troops in Vietnam, and the war devolved into ”dropping tons of bombs and using overwhelming force,” did Halberstam begin to see that he and his colleague Neil Sheehan were utterly and completely wrong about a path to victory. But, to my knowledge, neither author ever admitted that the Kennedys were right.

    III

    Although some members of JFK’s staff wanted to resign after his assassination, the Attorney General advised them to stay on at least until the presidential election of 1964, if only in order to push Johnson into following through on President Kennedy’s goals on civil rights, unemployment insurance, and aid to education. In January of 1964, there was a boomlet to draft Bobby Kennedy as Johnson’s vice-president. Democratic leaders like Peter Crotty of New York, and Paul Corbin, who was working a write-in vote for Bobby in New Hampshire, were a major part of this effort. (Bohrer, pp. 31-39) Without visiting the state, Kennedy got over 25,000 write-in votes in New Hampshire. (p. 47) By April, a poll showed that 47% of the public wanted the Attorney General to serve as vice-president. An aide, Fred Dutton, advised him to make more speaking engagements to boost that figure. Up until that time, Kennedy had only made two speeches after his brother’s death. The first was little more than a courtesy appearance for the UAW, the second was a speech on civil rights. Kennedy now began to negotiate personally with GOP Senator Everett Dirksen over the civil rights bill in progress through Congress. (p. 55) To show how intent he was on seeing the bill pass, he visited Prince Edward County Virginia, a school district that had closed down its school system rather then integrate. The Kennedys had been instrumental in raising private funds to keep the system open. RFK visited the area again to present a large check to the Teachers’ Union to sustain issuing paychecks. Shortly after, in a visit to West Georgia College, he was asked about George Wallace’s popularity. He replied that people who vote for Wallace “…want the Negroes to be quiet, but the Negroes are not going to be quiet.” He then managed to continue his reply with what was now becoming his favorite word: “This is a revolution going on in connection with civil rights and the Negroes.” (pp. 58-59)

    In an oral history given as he began to find his own voice, Kennedy stated the differences between him and the new president. He said LBJ had made it clear that it was not really the Democratic Party anymore. It was now an All-American party and the businessmen like it. All the people who opposed JFK now like it. He concluded with, “I don’t like it much.” (p. 60)

    Those sentiments are remarkably consistent with what Senator William Fulbright would conclude in 1966 as he began to investigate the reasons for the escalation in Vietnam. Namely, conservatives opposed to President Kennedy were now supporting LBJ, while liberals who supported President Kennedy were now opposed to the new president. In the late spring of 1964, Bobby Kennedy began to formulate a countering political strategy: running for the Senate from New York. As he said, there he would be the “head of the Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party.” (p. 60)

    Bobby Kennedy was leaving the Senate seat in Massachusetts to his brother Teddy. His brother-in-law, Steve Smith, had been at work organizing President Kennedy’s presidential campaign. New York was to be a big part of that campaign. So Smith now switched to recommending RFK run for the Senate in New York against Republican Kenneth Keating. After all, the Attorney General had lived in New York for about ten years. (pp. 62-63) Bobby now put out the word that he would resign from Johnson’s cabinet after the civil rights bill was passed and signed. As the author notes, one of the things that bothered the AG was that he believed that Johnson saw Vietnam as a military problem. Kennedy did not see it that way. He thought a purely military effort would not be successful. He also did not like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was also a Hawk on Vietnam. (pp. 70-71) Because of this, Kennedy was not happy when Johnson chose General Maxwell Taylor as the new ambassador to Vietnam. RFK liked Taylor because of his advocacy of low intensity warfare through Special Forces, like the Green Berets. But Kennedy thought that LBJ chose the general to give him cover for a military escalation. Which turned out to be the case. (p. 74)

    The civil rights bill passed in the latter part of June, 1964. A few days later, Ben Bradlee of Newsweek asked Kennedy what he would like to do in life now. Kennedy replied that he would like to maintain all the energy and excitement his brother had generated and harness it. (p. 88) Bradlee printed this and Johnson was quite naturally perturbed. During the signing of the bill, LBJ let Bobby know how perturbed he was. Within earshot, he handed a signing pen to J. Edgar Hoover and told the FBI Director, “You deserve several of these.” If anything told the Attorney General he was persona non grata with the new power axis, that did. (p. 90) Further, Johnson now arranged the upcoming Democratic convention so that the salute to President Kennedy came on the last night, instead of the first. Johnson was worried because Bobby Kennedy was now outpolling Hubert Humphrey for vice president by a margin of 2-1. In July, Johnson called in the Attorney General and read off a list of potential vice presidential nominees he would not consider, with Bobby being on the list. (p. 100) The next month in Atlantic City at the Democratic convention, it was obvious that Johnson had made the right decision for himself politically. When Robert Kennedy appeared at the podium an oceanic ovation took place that lasted over ten minutes. In the public eye, Robert Kennedy was the heir apparent to his brother. It was time to begin his ascension to the throne.

    IV

    Robert Kennedy declared himself a candidate for the Senate on August 25, 1964 at his home in Glen Cove, Long Island. As he began to campaign, something unusual began to happen which no one recalled seeing before. In his public appearances, a reaction set in similar to Beatlemania: people began to tear his clothes off, rip his cuff links, and shake hands with him so hard that after doing this repeatedly, it caused the candidate’s hands to bleed. (p. 117) His managers, fearing for his health, demanded he not campaign each day and take off one day per week to recover.

    His advisors also found out that Kennedy did not speak well in rehearsed commercials for the camera. But he did do well in unrehearsed Q-and-A periods after delivering a speech, especially with young people. So this is what they broadcast. (p. 124) Kennedy ended up defeating Keating by ten points.

    Once in the Senate, RFK visited his brother’s grave at night. In fact, after a friend watched this happen once, he realized that the groundskeeper had an arrangement with Bobby to let him in when no one was there. (p. 147) In the Senate, Robert Kennedy decided to do what he could to maintain what he perceived to be his brother’s legacy. He fought against closing Veterans Hospitals for budgetary reasons. He got the administration’s requested allotment cut in half. He moved for adding testing provisions to a large education bill—and he got that through. He fought Governor Nelson Rockefeller on getting grants for New York state’s impacted poverty areas. He won that battle also. (pp. 148-50) By his eleventh week in office, the new senator was getting a thousand letters per day.

    One of his pet issues was something his brother was an early advocate for: gaining home rule for Washington D. C. He said about this objective that, because the District of Columbia was predominantly African-American, home rule was being held back for the reason that “there are many people who don’t want progress made here.” (p. 161) He further added that, in his view, the problem fundamentally was not about race, but about poverty. There was a reason he accentuated this point. RFK had kept his notebook from President Kennedy’s last cabinet meeting. In his notes he had written down the word “poverty” seven times. So this was another way of continuing the policies his older brother had left behind. (p. 159) To him, if America did not attack the problems of broken homes in the ghetto, and the effect that had on education, then there would be no real improvement.

    RFK and his brother Senator Ted Kennedy were very much involved in extending the Civil Rights Act with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They also wanted to add a clause that would eliminate the poll tax. That failed, and an amendment had to be passed to eradicate the tax. (pp. 165-66) The bill passed in large part because of the 1964 electoral landslide, which gave the Democrats 68 seats in the Senate. As Walinsky later said, it was, “A crazy time. I mean we were going to reshape American society, all of us. There was a new bill every day.” (p. 166)

    But there was a shadow hanging over it all. In early April of 1965, Johnson gave a hawkish speech about Vietnam. This was just after the first combat troops had landed at DaNang Air Base, and Rolling Thunder, Johnson’s air campaign against the north, was in its initial stages. Again, RFK advised Johnson against taking the militaristic path in Vietnam. Sounding like his fallen brother, he added that America should make it clear to the Saigon government that we will not be staying there to fight the war for them. He even asked Johnson to fire Dean Rusk and replace him with the more moderate Bill Moyers. (p. 168) But since he was a Democrat, and American troops had been committed into theater, he also felt obligated to vote for Johnson’s appropriations for escalation, even though he did not approve of the actions. He explained, “If I voted for it without saying anything, it would have appeared that I approved of it—which I didn’t.” (p. 175)

    In his public speeches he again returned to his favorite word, revolution. He praised students who marched on Washington as demonstrating the “essence of the American Revolution.” (p. 180) At a commencement address he stated, “We are the heirs of a revolution that lit the imagination of all those who seek a better life for themselves and their children.” He added that there was also a revolution aimed against America. After hundreds of years of domination by the West he said, America buys 8 million cars per year, while those in formerly colonized countries go without shoes. He told the graduates, that they “have an unparalleled opportunity—not to find a world, but to make one.” (p. 179)

    Kennedy had no qualms about taking on big lobbies or big business. He railed in public about the growing power of the NRA, a lobby which he characterized as spending huge amounts of cash distorting the facts, and which placed a minimal inconvenience above saving the lives of thousands of Americans each year. (p. 182) He called in the CEO’s of the Big Three auto companies and questioned them about how much money their companies were making while spending so little on research into safety matters. (pp. 200-01) He also moved against the tobacco companies. He was the first to propose a warning label on cigarette packages. (p. 203) Senator Kennedy even tried to get right-to-work statutes repealed. These were laws, mostly in the south, that weakened unions since they allowed employees in a shop to opt out of union membership while enjoying union benefits. (p. 203)

    Reading Bohrer’s book, it is very hard to defend the MSM meme that RFK was a reluctant warrior on civil rights and the plight of African Americans. For the simple reason that he never let go of the issue. At times he went beyond what most civil rights advocates were talking about. Frequently, his ideas echoed Martin Luther King’s. At a VISTA indoctrination in Harlem, Kennedy said, “It is one thing to assure a man the legal right to eat in a restaurant: it is another thing to assure that he can earn the money to eat there…” (p. 205) He was sometimes at pains to delineate the differences for black Americans in the south versus the north. For example, he stated, “Civil rights leaders cannot, with sit-ins, change the fact that adults are illiterate. Marches do not create jobs for their children.” (p. 205)

    In one of his most controversial statements about the issue, the former Attorney General talked about the differing ways in which the law is looked upon by middle class and wealthy Caucasians as opposed to downtrodden minorities. To the more privileged group, the law is looked upon as a friend who preserves and protects property and personal safety. But to the latter group, the law seems different: “The law does not fully protect their lives, their dignity, or encourage their hope and trust for the future.” (p. 206) Kennedy was attacked for this statement by several media outlets including the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times and Time. They characterized his comments as a sitting senator encouraging youths to break the law. Kennedy stood by his statement. He said that the Watts riots of 1965 would be repeated “across the nation if we don’t act quickly.” (p. 206)

    As noted above, another point that Bohrer’s book effectively contravenes is the idea that Kennedy was late to oppose Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. As shown, Kennedy had done this in private with LBJ in 1964. That same year, in an address at Caltech, he did so publicly in an indirect way. He stated that guerilla warfare and terrorism arose from the conditions desperate people live under, and they cannot be put down by force alone. He then said, “Over the years, an understanding of what America really stands for is going to count far more than missiles, aircraft carriers and supersonic bombers.” (p. 190)

    What surprised many commentators inside the beltway was that the first term senator’s attempt to forge his Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party was working. For example, one evening there were two competing Washington social events arranged. One was by the Kennedys; one by the wealthy Washington hostess and former ambassador to Luxembourg, Perle Mesta. Mesta had backed Johnson against JFK in 1960. The Kennedy gathering outdrew Mesta’s by a 10-1 ratio. (p. 183)

    In the midst of this entire rising furor came the invitation to speak in South Africa.

    V

    Ian Robertson was a member, and eventual president, of the longstanding National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). From its founding in 1924, this group had opposed the apartheid system in their country. In July of 1965, Robertson extended an invitation to Kennedy to speak at Cape Town University in the spring of 1966. After doing so, he challenged the authorities to deny Kennedy entry. Robertson was now placed under house arrest. Not only did Kennedy accept, he made the invitation public, thereby making it harder for the South African government to deny him entry. Reporter Murray Kempton wrote, “It is unlikely he will ever go. What is extraordinary is the fact of the invitation …. Senator Kennedy has a name at which lonely men grasp in their loneliness.” (p. 227)

    Kempton was wrong. Kennedy had every intention of speaking in South Africa. But at the time that journey was being arranged, RFK also decided to also take an expedition to Latin America. What Kennedy did south of the border, and the very fact that he was determined to go to South Africa—these factors defined who he was at this time, and also where he was in the makeup of our political system. As we shall see, he had by now clearly inherited his brother’s mantle, and in some ways, gone beyond it.

    Before going to Latin America, Kennedy was to be briefed on the political conditions in the countries he was visiting, and also what the State Department wanted him to say and not say while he was there. So he and two assistants showed up at the State Department and were briefed by Jack Vaughn. As Vaughn went through the countries Kennedy was to visit, and advised him on what to say if anyone asked him about the American invasion of the Dominican Republic, the senator began to fully understand how much Johnson had overturned President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress program. By the time it was ending, RFK registered his disgust at what had happened:

    Well, Mr. Vaughn, as I see it, then, what the Alliance for Progress has come down to is that you can abolish political parties and close down the Congress and take away the basic freedoms of the people and deny your political opponents any rights at all and banish them from the country, and you’ll get a lot of our money. But if you mess around with an American oil company, we’ll cut you off without a penny. Is that it?

    Vaughn then replied, “That’s about the size of it.” Walking out of the meeting, Kennedy said to one of his assistants, “It sounds like we’re working for United Fruit again.” (p. 231)

    What Kennedy said and did while on this voyage south seemed designed to show that he, for one, was not working for United Fruit. In addressing crowds in Lima, Peru, he told them to emulate the men who liberated Latin America from the Spanish Empire: San Martín and O’Higgins. He urged them on by saying, “You can do as they can. You cannot do less.” He then went beyond that. He urged them to emulate the justice of their Indian ancestors, the Incas, who punished nobles more harshly than they did the peasants for breaking identical laws. (p. 233) In Lima, Santiago and Buenos Aires, he repeated what had become his motto: “The responsibility of our times is nothing less than revolution.” (p. 233)

    In speaking of the history of the United States, he told crowds that the revolution in the American political system that they should look at was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Because that example demonstrated “the power of affirmative free government.” To RFK it was a hallmark of the state combining the twin ideals of social justice and liberty. (p. 234)

    In Peru, Kennedy made part of his itinerary a visit to the high altitude city of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca civilization. There, young children followed him shouting “Viva Kennedy”, ripping his pants and tearing his cheek, drawing blood. On their way back down, he stopped to talk to some peasant farmers tilling the land. When they told him they paid high prices for powdered milk donated through the US Food for Peace program, he turned to the Peace Corps aide with them and told him to look into the matter. He then asked aloud, “What happened to all our AID money? Where is it going?” He then added that the ambassador to Peru, Wesley Jones, “might as well have been the ambassador from Standard Oil.” (p. 235)

    The high point of the Peru part of the visit was a meeting with intellectuals and artists in Lima, at a gathering that resembled a salon on the west side of Manhattan. Bobby was being assailed about all the problems that the Rockefeller owned oil companies had caused and mistakes America had made. RFK asked why they always looked to the USA first. The answer was that the USA would not let them do anything about Rockefeller’s International Petroleum Company. Kennedy replied that they could not have it both ways, cursing the USA and then blaming the State Department. The solution was simple: nationalize the oil company. Someone responded that David Rockefeller had been there and warned them if they did anything to his oil company all aid would be cut off.

    The senator’s response to this should serve as a model to any doctrinaire leftist who still thinks that the Kennedys were part of the Eastern Establishment. He tartly replied, “Oh, come on! David Rockefeller isn’t the government. We Kennedys eat Rockefellers for breakfast.” (p. 235)

    In Chile, he offered to debate with communist students on an equal time basis. But after he gave his speech and offered the time to the other side, no one took him up on it. (p. 240) Then, in the mining town of Concepcion, he went down into a coal mine. When he came back up he said, “If I worked in this mine, I’d be a communist too.”

    In Brazil, three youths were arrested on charges of plotting to kill the senator. Bobby asked that they be released. They were not, but the charges were then lessened. RFK then sent a messenger to the jail to ask them to write down any questions they had about him. (p. 244) He then visited a sugar cane field and talked to the workers. They told him that their landlord was paying them three days wages for six days work. The senator walked directly to the property owner’s house and started yelling at him for not paying his workers a decent wage. (p. 245) He then went to the presidential palace. After visiting with the newly installed government ushered in by the previous year’s CIA sponsored coup, he was being driven back to his hotel when he saw some of the crowd being struck by soldiers trying to keep them away from his car. He jumped out of the car and shouted, “Down with the government! On to the palace!”

    His visit to Latin America was so incendiary that much of it was not reported in American newspapers. (p. 245)

    VI

    At the time of his death in August of 1965, United Nations representative Adlai Stevenson was working on at least one—perhaps two—ways of negotiating out of Vietnam. One was through the UN Secretary General U Thant. A second rumored one was initiated by Ho Chi Minh, using Italy and India as go-betweens. (p. 250) Bobby Kennedy heard about these through his contacts in the White House. He was very disappointed they came to naught, and shared his chagrin with columnist Joe Kraft. Kraft then wrote a column in which he said that the senator opposed what Johnson was doing in Indochina, but could not confront the White House about it out of loyalty to the president and also to his party.

    In December of 1965, echoing Martin Luther King, Kennedy said that we should not forsake the domestic battle against poverty for a war abroad because it would divide the nation. (p. 252) Heeding Kennedy’s words to accept an offer for a bombing halt at Christmas 1965, Johnson did so, although he told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara it went against his “natural inclinations.” Both Senators Fulbright and Kennedy urged Johnson to use the interim halt as a negotiating tool for some kind of settlement. When LBJ resumed bombing at the end of January 1966, Kennedy said if bombing Indochina is our answer to the problem there, we were headed for a disaster. He added that, “The danger is that the decision to resume may become the first in a series of steps on a road from which there is no turning back—a road which leads to catastrophe for all mankind.” (p. 264)

    The next month RFK called a press conference. The reaction to this conference shows just how much Johnson and the unquestioning press—specifically David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan—had tilted the scales toward intervention. This press conference was called a few months after Halberstam had published his book, The Making of Quagmire. That book was an all out attack on American policy toward Saigon from the right. Kennedy suggested a power sharing coalition government in South Vietnam, which included the communists. (p. 269) In retrospect, this was a very sensible solution for everyone: Hanoi, Saigon, and the USA. Kennedy was viciously attacked by both the MSM and Washington politicians, even those from his own party. Vice-President Humphrey said this would be like placing an arsonist in the fire department. The Chicago Tribune called him Ho Chi Kennedy. Forgetting Vietnam was one country, The Washington Post said it would be rewarding aggression. (pp. 271-74).

    Incredibly, Kennedy visited both Ole Miss and the University of Alabama in 1966. At Ole Miss, he revealed to the crowd just how politically motivated Governor Ross Barnett was before the James Meredith riot broke out there in 1962. In negotiations with Barnett, the governor had asked Kennedy if he could have a federal marshal pull a gun on him so it would look like he was physically intimidated into going along with integrating the college. Kennedy was not responsive. So Barnett called him back and said, no, he wanted all the marshals to pull guns on him. The students roared with laughter at that one. (p. 285)

    At Christmas, 1965, Kennedy threw a series of celebrations of the holidays in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. It was his way to begin to follow through on President Kennedy’s nascent attempt at a war on poverty. It was his way to generate interest in a developing program to attack the poverty cycle in the inner cities. He gave a series of three speeches on the subject. The aim was to break up the ghettoes and offer subsidies to those who wished to leave. For those who stayed, Kennedy wanted to give more aid to schools to improve education, offer tax breaks to companies to relocate there, and free legal advice for tenants to fight predatory landlords. The idea was to go beyond the New Deal. He envisioned this program to be a combination public-private community development corporation, the aim being to offer a diversified program to end inner city poverty and eradicate ghettoes. (pp. 255-61)

    There can be no better way to end this review than to describe Kennedy’s eventual journey to South Africa at the request of the courageous Ian Robertson. I should preface this by saying Kennedy really had nothing to gain from this visit. The South Africa cause was so vague and nebulous in 1966 it did not even register as a blip on the political screen. And, due to what he and his brother had done from 1961-63, there was no domestic political benefit for him because he already had the African–American vote tied up.

    The South African government denied any American reporters entry into the country. Four who tried to sneak in were rounded up and placed on a plane to Rhodesia. (p. 294) The visual record we have of this momentous event consists largely of grainy black and white home movies. No member of the government would meet with him. And the only press representatives on hand were those who supported apartheid. Unlike in the USA and Latin America, spectators did not rush to grab him, since it was considered an offense for a black man to shake hands with a white man. At his first speaking engagement Kennedy stood an empty chair next to him to signify the absence of Robertson. Robertson had been charged with the Suppression of Communism Act. Which evidently meant that, in South Africa, RFK was considered a communist.

    When he visited Robertson at his apartment, the government would allow no one else to be present, not even friendly journalists. The first thing he asked Robertson was if the place was bugged. He then told him to stomp his feet to throw the surveillance off temporarily. Kennedy then asked him questions about his country and how he felt about Vietnam. He told him how badly he felt about his house arrest. He closed the meeting by giving him a copy of President Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage. It was signed by Jackie Kennedy. (p. 295)

    He then went to make his memorable speech at the University of Cape Town—to, of course, an all white audience. That speech has one of the most brilliant openings in the history of modern American oratory. He began by saying he was glad to be in a country settled by the Dutch, taken over by the British, and now a republic. A nation in which the natives had been subdued and with whom relations remained problematic; a land which defined itself by a hostile frontier; a land which once imported slaves and now had to solve the residue of that problem. He then stopped, smiled, and said, “I refer, of course, to the United States of America.” (p. 295)

    He then talked about the responsibilities of a republic, which South Africa had become in 1961. And how that model of government was intended to guarantee individual rights for its citizens. He added that he meant all of the citizenry. He then talked about governments that denied freedom and would label as “‘communist’ every threat to their people.” He continued with how his family had felt the sting of prejudice because they were looked down upon as being Irish in New England. He mentioned the fact that Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Prize because of his struggle in the USA. He ended his speech in South Africa with the following:

    Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

    He then closed with, “Each of us have our own work to do.”

    This is a fine book. The best volume on Robert Kennedy I have read since Arthur Schlesinger’s two volume set in 1978. If you want to know about Bobby Kennedy’s life, the Schlesinger book is your choice. But if you want to know who RFK was in his last years, this is the book to read. No politician I know of ever did or said these kinds of things at home and abroad. I strongly recommend the book as a Christmas gift for your children and younger loved ones. Through it, they will be reminded that, not that long ago, the political spectrum was not defined by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And you did not have to hold your nose before entering the voting both. We all owe thanks to John Bohrer. He is to be congratulated for capturing the essence of a good man who became a great man. The vivid memory this book draws reminds all of us just what America could have been.