Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: VIETNAM

  • The Crimes of Quillette

    The Crimes of Quillette

    I’ll say this for Fred Litwin: He knows where to go to advance his cause.

    On Steve Paikan’s Ontario TV show The Agenda, Litwin stated that nothing in the declassified files of the ARRB indicated anything about a conspiracy in the JFK case. This is simply and utterly false. As I wrote about Litwin’s essay on Jim Garrison, this statement proves one of two things: 1.) He did not read any of the declassified files, or 2.) He did read them and is deliberately misrepresenting them. In my review I proved that such was the case with several specific examples. This exposure reduces Litwin to the level of Leslie Nielson as Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun: proclaiming to a gatheringcrowd there was nothing to see as, behind him, bombs explode a fireworks factory. But this is the kind of poseur that Litwin is, except he is not nearly as funny as Nielson.

    In addition to his interview, Litwin has also done an article for an online journal. That online journal is something called Quillette, which I never knew existed until someone pointed out the Litwin article. I would have never found this journal on my own, and I would not have been missing anything.

    Quillette is a libertarian inspired anti-PC, anti-liberal journal founded by one Claire Lehmann. Journalist Bari Weiss grouped Lehmann as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, along with the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. (See this article for info on Peterson) Shapiro is the snarky right-winger who went on MSNBC to defend gun rights by handing the host, Piers Morgan, a copy of the constitution. Unfortunately Morgan, a Brit, did not reply with, “Ben, do you also believe that African Americans should count as 3/5 of a person for census purposes? Because that is what this document says. Should they, and also women, be allowed to vote? Because under this document they were not.” As Alice Dreger wrote, opinions are not scholarship, and that is what the members of this group generally offer. (“Why I escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’’’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/11/2018) She could have added that snark does not denote intelligence. As with the Shapiro exchange, it’s often just an excuse for being a smartass. Quillette published the so-called “Google memo” by James Damore, in which he accused that company of practicing reverse discrimination which somehow hurt Asians and whites and males. The right loves this kind of thing since it is a way to repudiate the affirmative action policies originated by President Kennedy. Except, by reading some of their articles concerning JFK, I would be willing to wager than no one at Quillette even knows that JFK started that policy. The Intellectual Dark Web is really the cover layer for the rise of the Trumpian alt-right. If the reader understands all that, then everything that follows is as natural as water running over a rock.

    I

    On September 27, 2018, Quillette published an article by Litwin based on his book I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak. That article tried to make the case that somehow the KGB was involved in fostering JFK conspiracy thinking in the USA by planting disinformation stories. Litwin, not the most original researcher, largely based his piece on the work of Max Holland. He labels Holland an historian—which he is not. Two of the three pieces that Holland says are KGB produced disinformation are not disinfo at all. I dealt with them in my critique of Holland’s original article that The Daily Beast was dumb enough to print. As I noted there, the late Mark Lane did not get secret donations from the KGB. And he proved this in his book, The Last Word. (pp. 92-96) As I showed in my critique of Litwin’s essay on Jim Garrison, the last thing in the world that Permindex was was a creation of the KGB. And Shaw’s association with it was something he himself acknowledged. I demonstrated this, not just in my previous essay on Litwin, but also in my lengthy exposure of Holland.

    The third piece of alleged KGB mischief that Litwin brings up is the famous “Dear Mr. Hunt letter”. In book form this was first produced in Henry Hurt’s volume Reasonable Doubt. It is a note dated November 8, 1963, and addressed to a Mr. Hunt. It is written in cursive and reads, “I would like information regarding my position. I am only asking for information. I am asking that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else. Thank you.” Oswald’s signature follows. (See HSCA Vol. 4, p. 337) Again, Litwin says this was part of a Russian intelligence operation codenamed Arlington.

    One of the problems with that pronouncement is that the Dallas Morning News ran a story saying they had three handwriting analysts look at the note: Mary Harrison, Allan R. Keon and Mary Duncan. They compared it to samples of Oswald’s writing. All three concluded it was genuine. (NY Times, April 4, 1977) The trio belonged to a professional organization called the Independent Association of Questioned Document Examiners. Harrison said she would be comfortable going into court and presenting her analysis. Litwin gets around this problem by saying that the NY Times wrote of the note’s possible authenticity. As the reader can see, that is not what the Times reported. The HSCA did not make a conclusive judgment about the note because it was a photocopy. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 236) On this point, Ms. Harrison stated that reproductions are often presented in court.

    Most of the Litwin/Holland material was produced by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin. Making the Mitrokhin case look even worse on this matter is the work of researcher Greg Doudna. Doudna did his best to track down the evidence Mitrokhin had purloined from the KGB showing the note was a forgery. In Mitrokhin’s book, The Sword and the Shield, there is a footnote referencing some original papers at a British university. (Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, pp. 228-29) Greg got in contact with the curator at Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, and part of the University of Cambridge. To cut to the chase, there is no evidence for this forgery in the Mitrokin collection. All there exists to back up that footnote is a typed draft of the book. This is the kind of scholarship Litwin offered and Quillette accepted. (E-mail communication with Doudna, 11/28/2018)

    Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who became a defector. Apparently, neither Litwin, nor anyone at Quillette, ever read Amy Knight’s coruscating review of his role in the wave of alleged Soviet defectors finding their home with Anglo-American publishers and newspapers owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. As she points out, when first drafts by these defecting authors were not sensational enough, they were spiced up. And presto! They now included information like, well, how about Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer were giving atomic secrets to the USSR? And Oppenheimer recruited Klaus Fuchs—who actually was a spy—to Los Alamos, the location of the Manhattan Project. Knight, a real scholar in the field of Soviet studies, had some fun with that one. (“The Selling of the KGB”, Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2000) She had more fun with the source for both Holland and Litwin. The idea that an archivist did not have access to a copier for 12 years and therefore had to scribble down notes from documents, instead of copying the documents themselves, this simply strains credulity. But if one sees this new field of exchange as a marketable continuation of the Cold War—with impoverished KGB agents finding a way to make mucho bucks from an American/British Establishment that has a lot invested in the justification of that Cold War—then it makes sense. Somehow, the anti-PC Quillette fails to acknowledge that angle. Which indicates what their political correctness is all about.

    In fact, on the matter of the JFK case, Quillette is Establishment to the hilt—and beyond. On the 55th anniversary of the murder of President Kennedy, they gave Litwin an encore. They ran an echo to his book. One of the editors, Jamie Palmer, penned a piece called “My Misspent years of Conspiracism”. All I can say to Mr. Palmer is that if this was an audition for the big-time MSM, he should be getting a few calls from the Fox network in the near future.

    II

    In Litwin’s book, he says that what originally convinced him there was a conspiracy in the JFK case was ABC TV’s public showing of the Zapruder film in 1975. In Palmer’s Bildungsroman, it was his viewing of the film JFK. But even in describing that experience the reader can see why, as with Litwin, Palmer ended up being a Warren Commission shill. He writes that somehow the Mr. X character in that film turned out not to be credible. That character is based on Fletcher Prouty, and virtually everything he related from his own experience at the meeting in Washington with the Jim Garrison character has turned out to be accurate. That Mr. X/Garrison conversation on a park bench concerning Vietnam has revolutionized our thinking about that entire conflict. It inspired several books that have advanced the film’s thesis even further. Namely, that President Kennedy was not going to escalate the Vietnam quagmire any further, that no combat troops would be sent into theater, and the advisors America had there were going to be recalled. From what I have seen of Quillette, they would not print scholars like David Kaiser or Gordon Goldstein or James Blight. That’s not what they are about. Litwin is.

    Palmer is unintentionally funny when he gets to the turning point of his personal saga. He says that his original beliefs about the case were reversed when he watched the 2003 program on the assassination that was produced by Peter Jennings at ABC and broadcast in England by the BBC. This site carries an entire section consisting of 16 critical articles demonstrating why Jennings’ show was a three-ring circus. From Jennings’ hiring of Gus Russo as his main consultant, to the “computer simulation” of the Magic Bullet, the program was a set up to revivify the corpse of the Warren Report. Our articles expose that agenda in gruesome detail. Somehow, Palmer swallowed it whole. In fact, he calls this program “a masterpiece of methodical argument”.

    Palmer goes on to describe certain parts of that “methodical argument” for an entire section of his long essay. What is incredible about his recitation is that, with one exception, it is all recycled Warren Commission drivel used to convict Oswald in 1964. Are we to believe that in over ten years of his belief that Oswald was innocent Palmer never read any of this material? Not even in books critical of the Commission? For he now says that he sees that Stone was remiss by not including the shooting attempt at General Edwin Walker in his film. Palmer writes, “Oswald had tried to assassinate someone else in April 1963.” The case against Oswald in the Walker shooting has been well examined by, among others, Gerald McKnight in his fine book Breach of Trust. That book is 13 years old, so if Palmer wanted to check up on that incident, he could have.

    First off, the Walker shooting was investigated by the Dallas Police for over seven months and Oswald was never a suspect. Why? For one, the best witness was Kirk Coleman. He ran out of his neighboring house right after hearing the shot. He saw two men escaping, in two separate cars. Further, when he was shown pictures of Oswald by the FBI, he failed to identify him as either man. (McKnight, p. 57) But beyond that, a cursory look at the Warren Report reveals that Oswald did not drive, or own a car. Another witness, Robert Surrey, told the police that two nights before the shooting he had seen two men casing Walker’s house. They left in a Ford. Again, he said that neither man looked like Oswald. (McKnight, p. 58) Tough to go into court when the two eyewitnesses deny the defendant was there.

    But it’s worse than that. The bullet recovered from the scene of the crime, which missed Walker from about 25 feet away, was not the correct ammunition for the alleged Oswald rifle. In newspaper and police accounts it was reported as a 30.06 projectile, not 6.5 mm. Plus, it was steel jacketed, not copper jacketed as was the ammunition used for the Oswald rifle, and therefore was a different hue. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 100) The reason the FBI and the Warren Commission had to pin the Walker shooting on Oswald was because there was next to nothing in his past to connect him to such an outburst of murderous violence as occurred in Dealey Plaza, and later, with the killing of Patrolman Tippit. In the Marines, Oswald accidentally injured himself when a derringer went off as he opened a locker. He then had a dispute with an officer and threw a drink in his face. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 130) What makes that sum total even weaker is that Oswald liked and admired President Kennedy. (Dick Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, p. 206)

    The one exception to his warmed over Warren Commission refuse is contained in Palmer’s final and thunderous J’accuse against Stone. The author concludes his conversion story by praising the ABC-produced Dale Myers computer simulation of the Magic Bullet done for the Jennings program. That simulation was supposed to show the Warren Commission was correct in saying that one bullet went through both John Kennedy and Governor John Connally, making seven wounds, smashing two bones, and emerging from its journey in pretty much unscathed condition, missing only 3 grains of its original mass. There have been several devastating critiques of this simulation. All Palmer had to do was search the web and he would have found them. In our section on this site, we feature three full-scale dismantlings of Myers and his cartoon. The Single Bullet Theory, the sine qua non of the Warren Report, simply did not happen. And when one has to cut as many corners as Myers does in order to create a Rube Goldberg contraption to say it did, then such is the proof of the plot. That Mr. Palmer did not consult any of these critiques says a lot about his personal bias and also his honesty with his readers. He actually writes that he found Myers’ simulation “too convincing to dismiss”.

    Robert Harris showed how easy it was to dismiss. He demonstrated that Myers deliberately misplaced the positions of Kennedy and Connally in the car for ABC. Harris proved this was the case by using actual images from the Zapruder film to demonstrate that Myers had jammed the two victims much closer together than they were, thereby foreshortening the firing trajectory. Myers also changed the position of the two men and altered the image of the car within the same traveling shot. He did this in order to conceal the fact that when placed in their proper perspective, the Magic Bullet comes in way too low to strike Connally in the right rear shoulder. In spite of all this, Palmer concludes this section of his essay by saying that if this same technique would have been used to demonstrate a frontal shot, he would have considered it “decisive and final”. I would like to inform Quillette that by using these techniques, one could simulate a sniper hitting Kennedy and Connally from the top of the Hertz sign in Dealey Plaza. But for Palmer and Quillette, in keeping with Mr. Litwin’s approach, it’s not the accuracy of the presentation that matters, it’s the result. Or to use an old realpolitik adage: the ends justify the means.

    III

    But Palmer has to maintain his whole “personal saga” pretense. So he now shifts gears into the New Orleans aspect of Stone’s film and also to Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. But, like Litwin, Palmer refuses to acknowledge an important aspect of the overall calculus: the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Litwin simply misrepresents the discoveries of that body. Palmer simply ignores them. As I noted in my review of Litwin, this tactic is convenient for Warren Report shills since so much of what Garrison was talking about back in 1967 has turned out to be accurate. In fact, because Garrison was correct on much of what he said, the FBI and CIA had to cover up the facts, and the CIA had to launch subversive operations against him.

    Part of the subversion was to launch infiltrators into Garrison’s camp. As Garrison describes in his book, one of them was a man he called Bill Boxley, his real name being William Wood. In Stone’s film, he and co-screenwriter Zach Sklar named him Bill Broussard. Palmer actually calls the character, “a composite of various Garrison staffers” and “is allotted the role of the villain in Stone’s film”. Wrong again. From talking with co-screenwriter Zach Sklar, Broussard was based upon Boxley. And if anything, Stone and Sklar underplayed the damage Boxley did to Garrison. This author spent several pages dealing with the havoc the man unleashed, and also the investigative files he stole—some of which were never recovered. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 278-85) If you can believe it, Palmer actually tries to make the guy some kind of hero. What is even more bizarre is that Palmer also relies upon Tom Bethell, the man who was supposed to be in charge of Garrison’s archive. On the eve of the Shaw trial, Bethell turned over the DA’s trial brief to Shaw’s defense. Through research into the Garrison files declassified by the ARRB, Peter Vea discovered that, unlike what Bethell tried to imply years later, he did not admit this to Garrison. Lou Ivon, Garrison’s assistant, conducted an investigation and found out Bethell was the culprit. According to Peter’s work, Bethell broke down and wept upon discovery. Before Garrison could decide what to do with his case, he fled to Dallas. As stated to this author in a conversation he had with the late Mary Ferrell’s estranged son, for whatever reason, Bethell ended up at her doorstep. With touchstones like this, you can do a lot to downgrade Jim Garrison.

    And Palmer cannot let go of Litwin’s false idea that somehow Garrison’s witness Perry Russo was drugged and fed leading questions to get him to identify Shaw as Bertrand. In my review of Litwin I showed this was not the case. It was a trick set up by Shaw’s lawyers with the aid of compromised journalist James Phelan. They rearranged the two sodium pentothal (truth serum) sessions to make it appear that this is what occurred. When read in their true order no such thing happens. Russo introduced the character of Bertrand on his own without being coached. The two best exposures of this charade are by Lisa Pease (Probe Magazine, Vol. 6 No. 5, p. 26), and Joe Biles in his book on Garrison entitled In History’s Shadow (pp. 43-47). Both have been available for over 15 years.

    But Palmer goes beyond Litwin. He says that Perry Russo flunked his polygraph test according to the administrator. The administrator he is referring to is one Ed O’Donnell. O’Donnell was a policeman who Garrison had tried to draw up on charges for police brutality against African American suspects. Both he and Ray Jacob, another technician used by the DA, were intent on unsettling Russo in order to get the wrong indications on the test. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 147) When Russo complained to Garrison about these tactics, Garrison called O’Donnell into his office. He asked him if he had a tape of Russo denying that Shaw/Bertrand was at a gathering at Ferrie’s apartment. The policeman said no he did not. Yet he had told Russo he did. Garrison terminated his services upon hearing this. (Clay Shaw trial testimony of 2/26/69) The proof of who O’Donnell really was is that he ended up being an advisor to Shaw’s defense team at the trial. (Mellen, p. 309)

    If you continually and falsely smear the DA’s investigation, and then assume that Oswald shot Kennedy—which we know today did not and could not have happened—then you can characterize Garrison’s inquiry as “inconsequential”. But you would have to add that the Richard Schweiker/Gary Hart investigation for the Church Committee was also meaningless, and the Richard Sprague/Robert Tanenbaum phase of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was also adrift. The problem with saying that is you are now dismissing two fine senators and two excellent prosecutors. Between them, Sprague and Tanenbaum prosecuted about two hundred homicide cases. The combined record was one loss in well over twenty years. Sprague was the lawyer who prosecuted the famous Jock Yablonski murder conspiracy case and convicted corrupt labor leader Tony Boyle. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 326) According to Tanenbaum, when he was privately briefed on the Church Committee inquiry by Schweiker, the senator told him that, in his view, the CIA had killed Kennedy. He then handed him a research file compiled by his chief investigator Gaeton Fonzi. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 5, p. 24) Need I add that this was the same conclusion that Garrison had come to a decade earlier? But Dale Myers and ABC have magically made this information “inconsequential”. And with a stroke of his pen, or keyboard, Palmer has made Schweiker, Hart, Sprague, Tanenbaum and Fonzi all disappear. In fact, from his perspective, they never existed.

    Without that backdrop, and without the relevant discoveries of the ARRB about New Orleans, then you may as well be writing about Jim Garrison from the viewpoint of some MSM hack journalist in 1968. For instance, like Litwin, Palmer wants to discount the fact that we can now prove that the mysterious Clay Bertrand, who called Dean Andrews, was really Clay Shaw. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 385-86) He fails to mention that we know today that it was Shaw and his friend David Ferrie who were escorting Oswald around the villages of Clinton and Jackson 100 miles north of New Orleans in the late summer of 1963. They were trying to register Oswald to vote in a parish far away from where he lived so he could get a job at a mental hospital. (Bill Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 101-17) Shaw lied about all these matters: that he knew Ferrie, or Oswald, that he used the Bertrand alias, and that he was in Clinton-Jackson with those two men that summer. Shaw also knew Guy Banister. (Davy, pp. 93-94) Oswald spent many days of that fateful summer of 1963 in Banister’s office preparing his Fair Play for Cuba Committee flyers and pamphlets, with Banister’s address on the early copies. (Davy, pp. 37-42)

    Somehow, Palmer does not understand that it was these activities in New Orleans that summer that were injected into the media within hours of President Kennedy’s murder and did much to convict Oswald in the public mind as the sociopathic communist who killed the president for ideological reasons. It thus makes sense that Shaw would call his acquaintance Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald—not knowing Oswald was going to be killed within 48 hours of his apprehension. Shaw would know that Andrews could be compromised, or be used as an incompetent lawyer.

    This is where, as they say, the plot thickens, and again, Palmer leaves it out. Through the ARRB, we know today that Oswald was not a sociopathic communist. He was very likely working through Banister as a CIA agent provocateur. The CIA had set up an anti-FPCC campaign under the tutelage of David Phillips, who was one of the men running that operation. (Davy, p. 286) Further, a man fitting the description of Phillips was in Banister’s office in 1961 trying to arrange a citywide telethon for the Cuban exile cause. (Davy, pp. 21-24) Phillips’ was also seen in film made of one of the nearby New Orleans CIA training camps, a film which the HSCA temporarily had in their possession. Along with Oswald and Banister, witnesses also identified him as being in the film. (Davy, pp. 30-31)

    With this background now filled in a bit, Palmer may want to ask himself if it explains the curious provenance of Oswald’s pamphlet, “The Crime Against Cuba” by Corliss Lamont. Oswald stamped it with 544 Camp Street, Banister’s address. Oswald’s version of the pamphlet was printed in 1961. It had gone through at least four more printings by the time Oswald was leafleting with it in 1963. Yet his was from the first edition. The CIA purchased 45 copies of the original edition in 1961. Is this how Oswald got the outdated version, perhaps through Phillips who was running the subversive program against the FPCC? To make it all a bit more curious, Oswald wrote about his altercation with the Cuban exiles, which got him arrested and the pamphlet confiscated, before it happened. (Davy, p. 38)

    As the reader can see, these are the provocative questions that Oswald’s activities in New Orleans pose when they are presented with the full information we have today. Much of it was available at the time of the Jennings special. Mr. Jennings was not going to touch it. We explain why in our special section reviewing that very poor and unethical documentary. In a nutshell, in 1984, ABC Nightly News did a report on the exposure of a CIA front company in Hawaii and the Agency’s involvement in a possible murder plot. It was a fascinating two-part installment. CIA Director William Casey was very upset by that reporting. So he arranged to have some of his friends and colleagues at Capital Cities buy the network. Jennings, the host of the program, got the message. After Casey and Cap Cities bought the network, Jennings, who had originally stood by the story, now said he had no problem with the CIA’s denial of it.

    Palmer closes his essay with a reference to Litwin’s book, saying that somehow the technical panels set up by the HSCA on things like forensic pathology, photographic evidence and the rifle tests sealed the deal against Oswald. By now, one really wonders just what Palmer was doing in those ten years he doubted the Warren Commission. He certainly was not reading the journals on the subject. Because if he had been, he would have known that people like Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. David Mantik and this author completely took apart these very flawed tests made by the HSCA. And, in fact, the chair of the HSCA, Robert Blakey, also took one of them back, the one he relied upon as the lynchpin of his case against Oswald, namely the Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis (CBLT). He has now termed it junk science. (For a full scale, in-depth analysis, see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 69-85; pp. 250-91) Those 58 pages simply devastate the so-called findings that Litwin, in four pages, trumpets. And one will find evidence in those pages indicating that the HSCA simply and knowingly misrepresented some of their forensic findings.

    IV

    At the end of Palmer’s article, he sourced a previous piece in Quillette from 2017. This was from one Craig Colgan. Colgan fits right in with Quillette’s agenda. He once wrote an article about the National Museum of African American History and Culture and complained that although there was an exhibit for Anita Hill there was none for Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill was the first woman who actually brought the issue of sexual harassment into national consciousness. The fact that she was an African American testifying against the Establishment-backed Thomas made what she did even more courageous. (See this article)

    The title of Colgan’s November 25, 2017 piece was “Are the JFK Conspiracies Slowly Dying?” He begins his article with a reference to Dylan Avery and his film on 9-11 called Loose Change. He then says that since Avery has backed away from some of his more extreme statements, perhaps those who attack the Warren Report should also. Toward the end of the piece, he says he would allow a kind of Robert-Blakey-inspired Oswald-did-it-with-some help concept. And that is what the JFK critical community should be aiming for.

    I don’t know very much about the 9-11 controversy. But I do know that the official investigating committee issued a report without an accompanying set of volumes of evidence. The Warren Commission issued an over-800-page report with 26 volumes of testimony and evidence. The incredible thing about the early critics is this: some of them actually read those volumes. They came to a clear conclusion: the evidence in the volumes did not support the tenets of the report. The late Maggie Field wrote an unpublished book in which she reproduced pages from the report”s conclusions, then juxtaposed to them extracts from the supporting volumes of evidence that directly contradicted them. One could similarly refer to Sylvia Meagher’s classic study Accessories After the Fact. Unlike with 9-11, then, in the case of President Kennedy’s murder, there is nothing to retreat from. In fact, as tens of thousands of declassified pages have later been released, Field’s book has not just been ratified; it has been shown to be too mild, for we know today certain agencies were concealing evidence that would have indicated how parts of the plot and, even moreso, the cover-up, worked. (For example, see section III of this essay and the discoveries about David Phillips and New Orleans.)

    At this point, one must accentuate the fact that even though Quillette is known as a scientific and technically oriented journal, that is what is completely missing from any of its articles on the JFK case. For instance, Colgan mentions a conversation he had with Gary Aguilar about his critique—co-written with Cyril Wecht—of the PBS special Cold Case JFK which aired at the 50th anniversary of the JFK murder. But he does not devote a single sentence to the total demolition of that series that Aguilar and Wecht performed—in a peer review journal on ballistics! And he does not link to the two-part review. Nor does he note that, although Gary offered to pay for both their flight and hotel accommodations, the father and son team who were featured on that program refused to debate him in public.

    Colgan also notes the decline in the public’s belief that there was a plot behind Kennedy’s murder. This is accurate. At the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Hart Associates did a poll for Larry Sabato’s book, the Kennedy Half Century. It statedthat 75% of the public did not believe the Commission’s lone gunman verdict. This was down from the over 90% during the time that Stone’s film JFK premiered. (Sabato, p. 416) The reason for this is simple to discern. Due to Stone’s film, for about one year—from 1991-92—there was actually an open discussion in the media about Kennedy’s murder. And there were actually programs and front-page stories in magazines that addressed it in an even-handed way. The Power Elite was quite upset by that hubbub. They did three things to counter it. Random House, through editor Bob Loomis and publisher Harold Evans, decided to recruit Gerald Posner and give his book one of the most massive publicity barrages in recent publishing history. We know this from the lawsuit the late Roger Feinman launched against Random House concerning that book.

    Secondly, they decided that there would be no more open debate on the issue in the media—and there has not been. We know this from written communications between researcher Walt Brown and Loomis as well as from Alec Baldwin’s speech in Houston last year at a dinner during the JFK mock trial. Baldwin said he had approached NBC with a proposal for a documentary program on Kennedy for the 2013 anniversary. It was rejected without a hearing, with words to this effect: We have reconciled ourselves to the official version. Another example would be what happened in Dallas at the fiftieth anniversary. With the world’s media on hand, Mayor Mike Rawlings completely controlled and cordoned off Dealey Plaza so that no critic could be heard by them. (See our report on the subject as well as this one at jfkfacts.org)

    Third, virtually every single program since—and there have been more than a few—has endorsed the Warren Report, specifically the Single Bullet Fantasy and the no-frontal-shot concept. The problem with these productions is that each one has falsified the facts of the case. (See this video or read this essay)

    Judging from their articles, Quillette is really more of a politically oriented journal than a scientific or technical one. At that, they should have understood the politics of the Warren Commission. The policies of the most active member of that body, Allen Dulles, were opposed to those of President Kennedy. But from this review, the reader can see that both Litwin and Quillette were more in sympathy with Dulles than JFK.

  • Jim Garrison vs. Fred Litwin: The Beat Goes On (part 2)

    Jim Garrison vs. Fred Litwin: The Beat Goes On (part 2)

    In the field of JFK assassination studies, those who advocate for the Warren Commission have always had a special and personal problem with Jim Garrison. After all, the New Orleans DA was an elected official who did not just challenge the Warren Commission; he actually put together an alternative theory of Kennedy’s assassination. That theory created intense interest and attracted a public following.

    This created a serious problem for the MSM. The press had embraced the Warren Report, all 800 pages of it. Now came an accomplished District Attorney who was saying that their much-ballyhooed report on the death of President Kennedy was rubbish. By doing that, Garrison was not just upsetting the MSM’s apple cart, but also the FBI, the Secret Service and the White House. After all, they had all cooperated and worked for several months on this much anticipated report. Could they all have been so easily taken in by the Dallas Police? Or was there something else at work? Perhaps a deliberate cover-up? If so, why? What could be behind such an evil act and its elaborate concealment?

    By raising these questions, Garrison was upsetting the establishment. Therefore, he was harshly attacked by all elements of the power structure. Almost no one in the media—except the LA Free Press, Ramparts and Playboy magazines—gave him a fair hearing. Every major newspaper, magazine, and TV network discounted or attacked him—none treated him fairly or even handedly. Elements of the government illegally spied on him, sent infiltrators into his camp, wired his office, tapped his phone, and launched subversive operations against his investigative efforts. (See William Davy, Let Justice be Done, Chapter 12) When Garrison complained about these actions, the MSM ignored him. Today, after the disclosures of the Assassination Records Review Board, they cannot be ignored. For the simple matter that the acts of subversion can now be proven with declassified documents.

    There is another important element to the cacophony enveloping New Orleans that has also been revealed. That is the incessant efforts of Clay Shaw’s attorneys to enlist as much help as possible from Washington DC. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 261-78) What makes this secret solicitation so curious is that, for two solid years, the media portrait of Shaw was that he was as clean as the driven snow. If such were the case, then why were Shaw’s lawyers so desperate for help from the CIA and the FBI? And why did the Agency and Bureau give it to them? Was there something that those two executive intelligence agencies knew that they weren’t telling the public? If so, what was it?

    Through the ARRB, we have now discovered that there was a lot to hide about Clay Shaw. And neither the FBI nor the CIA had planned on letting the public know about it. If not for the ruckus created by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, no one may have ever discovered any of it.

    Now comes one Fred Litwin. Litwin has written two books. They have both publication and thematic similarities. The first was called Conservative Confidential. That book is about his coming out as a gay man and also traveling politically from left to right, eventually emerging as an activist conservative in the gay community in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. What I found interesting about the first book is that, although I had never heard of Litwin, evidently some powerful people had. The book was blurbed by the likes of Conrad Black, and Daniel Pipes. Black is a former international newspaper magnate who was convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in America and banned from running a company or serving on any boards in Ontario. Pipes is a rightwing veteran of several think tanks who wrote a book labeling almost anyone who believes in political conspiracies as being inherently paranoid. In Chapter 1, Pipes specifically pointed to the African American community. Nice fan base. After making a lot of money in the computer field, Litwin is involved in lecture presentations, music, film festivals and publishing today. (For an example of the people he sponsors, go here)

    Litwin’s second book is called I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak. Like his first, it was published through his own company, Northern Blues. From the title, one does not need much explication as to the similarity in theme. With the JFK case, as with his politics, Litwin has now seen the light. Like St. Paul on the way to Damascus, he had a vision. Except, unlike with Paul, his was not of a vision of a resurrected Christ appearing before him. It was Lee Harvey Oswald firing three shots in six seconds from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository; scoring two of three direct hits to the head and shoulder area of JFK. A feat that, without cheating, no expert has ever been able to duplicate. One of those bullets went through Kennedy’s back, rising upward slightly, even though it was originally traveling downward. Without striking bone, it then went left to right, even though it was fired from right to left. It made a perforating exit from Kennedy’s neck, one that was smaller than its entrance—even though exits are supposed to be larger. It then went through Connally’s body and as it exited his chest it veered right towards his wrist, and then deflected left into his thigh. It emerged from his thigh and was found in the rim of a stretcher, except no one knows whose stretcher it was. (The Impossible One-Day Journey of CE 399; see also Was the CE 399 Magic Bullet Planted?)

    When it was found there was almost no deformation of the bullet, and no blood or tissue on it. After smashing two bones in Connally, it was missing only three grains of its mass. (WC Vol. III pp. 428-30) As Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson have shown, CE 399 was so specious as evidence that the FBI had to lie about its identification. (The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?) As others have said, to believe all this, one must have had some kind of religious experience. Especially if one did not buy into it at first.

    But there is another oddity about Litwin. The present author has been in this field for going on three decades. I have read a rather large amount of material on the subject. This includes research journals from both America and abroad. I do not recall coming across Mr. Litwin’s name in any of them. Apparently, the man kept his beliefs about a JFK plot rather close to his vest.

    I am not going to deal with the entirety of Litwin’s book. Anyone who can propagate that the evidence for more than one gunman in the JFK case has weakened over time does not deserve extended scrutiny. Neither does anyone who is on friendly terms with the likes of Daniel Pipes. But there is a chapter of Litwin’s book available online. It happens to be his chapter on Jim Garrison. Since that is 16 downloadable pages, it should serve as an example of the quality of his work.

    As I have previously said in dealing with the anti-Garrison crowd, if there was one area that the Assassination Records Review Board did a decent job on, it was in declassifying a lot of interesting documents on the New Orleans aspect of the Kennedy case. In two previous review essays on the subject, I have been critical of the fact that none of these documents were anywhere to be seen in the work under discussion. Specifically, this would include the essay by Don Carpenter at Max Holland’s site (Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs Jim Garrison and the ARRB), and Alecia Long’s essay at 64 Parishes (Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On).

    Litwin continues to manifest that revealing trait. In the 16 pages, I could find no evidence that he used even one single piece of declassified documentation. When an author does this, it immediately tells the reader much more about him than the writer’s ostensible subject. That is, Mr. Litwin does not give one iota about the declassified record. He is not interested in what the new information is. He does not want to know what the CIA and FBI knew about Clay Shaw back in the sixties, or why it was deemed so taboo that the public had to be kept in the dark about it.

    Which leaves us with two alternative theorems. Either Litwin does not know about this new information; or he does know about it but does not want the reader to be aware of it. Both explanations are pretty unappetizing. But they tell us much about Litwin and his book.

    By the third paragraph, the author exposes the serious fault lines in his work. He writes that Jim Garrison cracked down on vice in the French Quarter by raiding gay bars. How anyone can write something like that is incomprehensible. Once Garrison became famous through the exposure of his JFK inquiry, many people wrote about this 1962 crusade. Almost ten years ago, there was a book written on the subject by author James Savage. What Garrison was cracking down on was a racket called ‘B girl drinking’. The B-girl would sit with a male customer and, as long as he paid for the liquor, she would entice him with hints of sex to be had. (Washington Post, 2/10/63) The girl’s drinks would be very watered down, and as the mark got inebriated, the host would then shortchange him. Afterwards, the poor guy was taken to a cab to get to his hotel; the house got 2/3 of the take, the girl got 1/3.

    I would like to ask Mr. Litwin the obvious question he is seemingly unaware of: If the racket involved a female employee with a male customer, how could these be gay bars?

    What Litwin does next is as bad as the above. He does all he can to denigrate the value of the information that Jack Martin relayed to Garrison’s office within 48 hours after the assassination. For instance, he does not fully explicate why Guy Banister exploded and pistol-whipped his former investigator/employee Mr. Martin. Martin had made some rather incriminating comments, like implicating Banister in the Kennedy assassination. Martin specifically said: “What are you going to do—kill me like you all did Kennedy?” Martin later said that if Banister’s secretary had not intervened, he thought Banister might have killed him. (HSCA Volume 10, p. 130) After the assault, Banister threw some money at his victim. On his way to the hospital, Martin told an acquaintance: “The dirty Nazi bastards did it to him in Texas, and to me here.” (Affidavit of Martin and David Lewis to Jim Garrison 2/30/68)

    Since Martin was describing events on the day of the assassination, who does Litwin think Martin was referring to when he said, “Did it to him in Texas?” In light of the Martin’s previous comment, it was probably President Kennedy.

    What was the specific reason for Banister’s assault? Again, Litwin does not fully reveal that aspect. As Garrison’s staff later discovered, the FBI in New Orleans—namely agent Regis Kennedy—later thought that Martin might have pilfered Banister’s files on Oswald. (Garrison memorandum from Andrew Sciambra, 10/28/68) In fact, a part-time employee at Banister’s office, Mary Brengel, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that she felt that both Banister and his secretary Delphine Roberts knew what was going to happen in Texas that day. (HSCA interview of 4/6/78)

    It was Roberts who rescued Martin. Banister then swore her to secrecy and kept her out of the office after the bloody incident with Martin. (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 294) So when Garrison interviewed her, she was tight-lipped. Later she did reveal things to the HSCA, specifically to investigator Bob Buras. On his second attempt to get her to talk to him, Roberts told Buras that Oswald was at Banister’s office and had a few private meetings with him. He was allowed to use a second floor room to print up his anti-Castro materials. (HSCA interview of 7/6/78) Reporter Scott Malone later found a corroborating witness for this information. Brengel told him that Roberts said Oswald had been at 544 Camp Street, Banister’s office, that summer. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 111) When this author interviewed another Banister employee, Dan Campbell, he also revealed that Oswald had been in Banister’s office that summer. In a separate interview with this writer, so did his brother Allen. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 112)

    In other words, it makes perfect sense for Banister to have had a file on Oswald and for Martin to be interested in it on the day of the assassination. It also follows that, as Roberts told Buras, Banister was upset when he heard that Oswald had handed out flyers in New Orleans with Banister’s office address of 544 Camp Street on them. (HSCA Buras interview.)

    Litwin’s depiction of David Ferrie is about as limited and dubious as his work on Banister. Litwin writes that when the FBI and Secret Service questioned Ferrie, he denied knowing Oswald, or having anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination. Litwin leaves it at that. Which is rather uncurious of him. For as anyone who reads Ferrie’s FBI statement has to acknowledge, Ferrie lied his head off to the Bureau. And it is hard to buy the argument that they did not know he was lying. For instance, Ferrie said he never owned a rifle with a telescopic sight and would not know how to use one. This, from a man who was a trainer for both the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose. (HSCA interview of John Irion, 10/18/78; Davy pp. 28-31; CIA memo of October 1967, “Garrison Investigation: Belle Chasse Training Camp”)

    Ferrie also said that he did not know Oswald and Oswald was not a member of his Civil Air Patrol (CAP) unit in New Orleans. This was another lie that Litwin seems comfortable with. In this case, all the Bureau had to do was question some of the other members of that CAP unit to find out Ferrie was lying. Jerry Paradis, who later became a corporate attorney, told the HSCA that he knew Ferrie and Oswald were members of the same CAP unit because he was also a member and he saw them together at a meeting. (HSCA interview of 12/15/78) Anthony Atzenoffer said the same about Ferrie and Oswald at the CAP meetings. (HSCA interview of 1/2/79) As we all know, in 1993, PBS discovered a photo of Oswald and Ferrie at a CAP cookout and showed it on TV.

    But there is something even more incriminating about Ferrie which indicates that not only was he knowingly lying to the FBI but was also trying to scoop up evidence that would prove his perjury. For in the days immediately following the assassination, Ferrie was looking for that CAP picture of him with Oswald. He called a former CAP member, Roy McCoy, to find out if he had a copy. The FBI had to know Ferrie was doing this. Why? Because McCoy and his wife later called the Bureau and told them about Ferrie’s search for the photo of him with the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. In other words, the FBI was complicit in Ferrie’s cover-up. (New Orleans FBI report of 11/27/63)

    Somehow, Litwin did not think that any of this information about Banister, Ferrie and their ties to Oswald—or the attempts to conceal it—is worth conveying to the reader. Nor does he feel it necessary to note the FBI’s odd reaction to Ferrie’s perjury and attempts at obstruction of justice. This writer would beg to disagree with Mr. Litwin. And again, the fact that he does not reveal it says a lot about his intent as an author.

    Litwin trudges onward with Dean Andrews. Andrews was the New Orleans lawyer who said that a man named Clay Bertrand called him on Saturday, November 23, 1963, and asked him to go to Dallas to defend the alleged assassin of JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald. Again, it takes Litwin about two sentences to descend into travesty. First, he says that Andrews was in hospital and heavily sedated at the time he got this call—which is supposed to cast doubt on the credibility of the claim. Twenty-three years ago, the estimable William Davy checked on this point through the hospital records. Those records indicate that Andrews got the call at least four hours before he was sedated. (Davy, p. 52) Litwin then writes that the call was actually from a man named Eugene Davis. This is also wrong. The name of Eugene Davis did not enter the record until NBC produced its hatchet job on Jim Garrison in the summer of 1967. Davis subsequently denied this under oath. And Andrews was then convicted of perjury. (Davy, p. 302; Jim Garrison’s interview in Playboy,10/67)

    Today there is no doubt who Clay Bertrand was. And through the efforts of British researcher Martin Hay, we now know that Andrews admitted that Bertrand was Clay Shaw. The late Harold Weisberg did some work for Jim Garrison in New Orleans. He developed a friendly relationship with Andrews and talked to him on several occasions. In an unpublished manuscript, Weisberg wrote that Andrews admitted to him that Shaw was Bertrand. But the lawyer told him he was not to say anything about this without his permission. (See the unpublished book Mailer’s Tale, chapter 5, p. 11, at the Weisberg online archives at Hood College)

    Although Andrews’ word would have probative value in this instance, with the work of the Assassination Records Review Board there is simply no question today that Shaw was Bertrand. And, again, the FBI knew this. There are two declassified FBI reports from 1967 in which the Bureau is given information that such was the case. (FBI teletypes of February 24, and March 23, 1967) In a third FBI report of March 2nd 1967, Bureau officer Cartha DeLoach states that they had information about Shaw in relation to the Kennedy case in December of 1963! Somehow, Mr. Litwin did not find that interesting. Many people would disagree. They would also be upset to know that the public had to wait over 30 years to find out that the FBI agreed with Jim Garrison. In light of these revelations Litwin is unintentionally humorous when he writes that the FBI could not find out who Bertrand was. They did know who he was. They did not want to tell anyone because it would support Garrison.

    But Litwin is intent on trying to show that Garrison was somehow deluded by Andrews. So he trots out another discredited tale that is about fifty years old. He says that Andrews made up the name of Manuel Garcia Gonzalez and that Garrison ended up believing him. Again, this tells us more about Litwin than it does Andrews or Garrison. Andrews actually gave Garrison two names: Gonzalez and Ricardo Davis. Both of these were names of real people. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would have Talked, pp. 349-50) And if the reader wants to see just how interesting Gonzalez was, please read this. Dean Andrews was anything but ignorant or dishonest. This is why—as he told Garrison, Mark Lane and Anthony Summers—he was in fear for his life.

    Predictably, Litwin uses an old trick that reporter James Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers originated in the sixties to discredit Perry Russo. Russo told Garrison that he heard Ferrie and Shaw, at a gathering with a Leon Oswald, speak about killing Kennedy. Garrison had Russo undergo both truth serum and hypnosis. By mixing up Russo’s two interviews under sodium pentothal, Phelan made it appear that Dr. Esmond Fatter was leading the witness. But Garrison submitted the two transcripts to the HSCA, and he had them clearly marked and dated in his own files, which this author had access to. When read in their correct order, not backwards, there is no leading of the witness. Russo comes up with the name Bertrand and describes him as the big white-haired guy—which he was—on his own. (See Probe Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, p. 26) Again, this canard was exposed nearly twenty years ago.

    Like Donald Carpenter, Litwin is intent on not revealing the declassified record about Clay Shaw, even though the ARRB did interesting work in that area. It is clear now that, as declassified CIA documents reveal, Shaw was a valuable and well-compensated contract agent from the fifties. Joan Mellen prints the declassified document that proves this in her book about George DeMohrenschildt, Our Man in Haiti, on pp. 54-55. That book was published six years ago. Is there any reason for Litwin not to refer to it? That document also explains why Shaw committed perjury on the stand when asked about this issue. (Davy, p. 185) When you add in Shaw’s covert security clearance for the project QK ENCHANT and his probable clearance for ZR CLIFF, then it is obvious why the CIA considered him a valuable agent. It also helps explain why, as the ARRB discovered, the CIA destroyed Shaw’s 201 file. (ARRB Memo from Manuel E. Legaspi to Jerry Gunn, dated 11/14/1996) The internal lie about Shaw by the CIA—that he was only part of Domestic Contacts like 100,000 other businessmen—shows the lengths they felt they had to go to in order to construct a cover-up about their prized employee. Like the FBI, the last thing the Agency wanted to admit was that Jim Garrison was right about Clay Shaw—which he was.

    Litwin never acknowledges, let alone confronts, any of these documents. He tries to escape from Shaw’s CIA employment by using the excuse that Shaw’s service with the mysterious European entity called Permindex was a tall tale manufactured under Soviet influence and passed on to a leftist newspaper in Italy, the same excuse the likes of Max Holland uses.

    This is more malarkey. The State Department wrote up memos about Permindex at the time the organization was creating a large controversy in Switzerland. Due to the character and suspected criminal backgrounds of members of its board, the controversy got so disturbing it caused the entity to move to Rome. This information was declassified back in 1982 due to a Freedom of Information lawsuit by Bud Fensterwald. They extend from February 1957 to November of 1958 and Shaw is featured in these cables. Bill Davy and others have used these in their books about Garrison’s investigation of Shaw. Again, the FBI was aware of the CIA role in Permindex and how Shaw figured in it. (Davy, p. 100)

    Canadian researcher Maurice Phillips recently discovered even more interesting memos about Permindex in the Louis Bloomfield archive in Montreal. Shaw had been on the board of Permindex, and Bloomfield was a corporate counsel. It turns out that Permindex was likely operating not just as a CIA shell, but at a level above that. Phillips has discovered memoranda which show that Bloomfield was soliciting funds for the endeavor from some of the wealthiest people in the world, for instance, David Rockefeller and Edmond deRothschild. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. Imfeld of 2/10/60) Phillips also discovered a memo revealing that one of the founders of Permindex, Ferenc Nagy, was a CIA asset. Because of that status, he invited the Agency to use this new “business” entity in any capacity they wished. (CIA memo of March 24, 1967, released in 1998)

    Question for Mr. Litwin: did the Soviets manufacture those State Department cables back in the fifties? And somehow insert the Bloomfield correspondence into his personal papers? Once we dispose of this silliness, the obvious question all this leaves, and which Litwin wants to avoid is: What was Shaw doing in the middle of all this?

    The discoveries of Maurice Phillips were quite detrimental to the cover story about Shaw, Bloomfield and Permindex. So much so that, in violation of Bloomfield’s will, his heirs have now tried to stop any more information from being released from his papers. The totality of the declassified record reveals that the cover-up about Shaw was wide, deep, systematic and is ongoing a half century later. This is how fearful the Establishment was about Jim Garrison’s discoveries and where they would lead.

    And that is the fact that Litwin’s article is meant to divert us from. As noted, I could not find one single reference to a primary source record in the entire 16 pages of his essay. Instead of relying on these newly released documents, who does Litwin choose to trust? Well, how about Hugh Aynesworth? If that isn’t bad enough, then how about James Phelan? It’s one thing to use a discredited reporter; it’s another not to tell the reader that he is provably related to the FBI, the CIA, or both. Also that both men denied those relationships prior to the documents being released showing such was the case. Can one say anything worse about a journalist? But that does not seem to bother Litwin at all. (For Phelan, see Probe Magazine, Vol. 6 No.4, pp. 5 and 32, and FBI memo from Wick to DeLoach of April 3, 1967; for Aynesworth see a Western Union teletype of May 13, 1967 which he sent to both the White House and the FBI.)

    By using his discredited sources instead of the declassified record, Litwin is able to conceal the fact that Shaw committed perjury at least four times at his trial:

    1. He lied about his association with the CIA, as amply demonstrated above.
    2. He lied about his use of the alias Clay Bertrand, as is also amply demonstrated above.
    3. He lied about his relationship with David Ferrie. (Affidavits to the DA of 6/27/67, 10/9/68, FBI teletype of 3/5/67, Probe Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 4, p. 8. The last two sources refer to secretaries who saw the two together.)
    4. He lied about not knowing Oswald. (Interview of attorney Samuel Exnicios by Joan Mellen 1/8/02; Davy, pp. 101-17)

    Do innocent people tell this many lies under oath, thereby risking decades in prison? Shaw had to lie, because if he didn’t it would have exposed him to too many questions that he would not have been able to explain away. Like, “Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” And, “Why were you and Ferrie escorting Oswald around the Clinton/Jackson area attempting to register him to vote in a place he didn’t live?”

    In the face of all this—quite relevant—perjury, what does Litwin do? Besides avoiding it all, he runs to another risible source: Paul Hoch. Hoch had been misleading the critical community on New Orleans for so long that, when the ARRB opened its doors, he did not want to be exposed as a charlatan. He therefore stood in front of a crowd of about 300 people in Chicago in 1993 and told them to ignore any new releases that came from the Board about Clay Shaw. I wish I was kidding about that, but unfortunately I was there. For that reason, and many others, Hoch simply has no credibility on the issue today. By following Hoch’s advice, Litwin now has custard pie all over his face. Or as they say in the field of information technology, which both men worked in: garbage in, garbage out.

    Not that it matters. If this excerpt is any measure of his book—and from a preview I saw, it is—then Litwin did not write it to educate any members of the public. Neither did he wish to elucidate any of the issues that have now been accented by the releases of the ARRB. And he certainly doesn’t give a damn about the assassination of President Kennedy.

    What he has done is enhance his status with the kinds of people who backed his first book, that is, Conrad Black and Daniel Pipes. He has become a member in good standing of the Culture Warrior crowd. If one looks at his book from that Machiavellian perspective, then like George W. Bush and his disaster in Iraq: Mission Accomplished.

  • Kennedy and Indochina

    Kennedy and Indochina

    (Click here to open in a new page.)

  • John Kenneth Galbraith: A Hero in our Time

    John Kenneth Galbraith: A Hero in our Time

    As many who are interested in the JFK case know, John Kenneth Galbraith was truly A Man for All Seasons. There are few men in public life who pulled off the triple crown like he did: serving with distinction as a public figure, an academician, and as a man of letters. Specifically, Galbraith was an advisor to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson; he served as an instructor at Harvard for over 25 years; was a writer and editor at Fortune and, all told, wrote over forty books. Two of them are considered classics: The Great Crash and The Affluent Society. To have performed just one of those endeavors would make an individual a significant figure in American life. To have done all of them is a remarkable achievement. To have done them with the wit and style that Galbraith possessed makes what he did just about unique in modern American history.

    Galbraith was born in Ontario, Canada in 1908. He was granted an undergraduate degree at a branch of the University of Toronto in 1931. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley to attain his Masters and Ph. D. in agricultural economics. After graduation he taught at both Harvard and Princeton from 1934-40. He worked in the Office of Price Administration for Roosevelt, and then as one of the directors of the Strategic Bombing Survey under Truman. In the last position, he disagreed with his boss, the eternal hawk Paul Nitze, on the effectiveness of the bombing over Germany in reducing war production. After this he went to work at Henry Luce’s Fortune and then in 1949 he was appointed a full professor in economics at Harvard.

    Galbraith had a role in writing the summary reports for both the bombing survey of Germany and Japan. He concluded that war production had expanded during the bombing of Germany. Some strategic targets were impacted; others were not. But bombing had not decided the war in Europe. The air war cost America more than it did the Germans; it was just that the USA could afford it at the time. The real value of the bombing was in support of ground troops. They had won the war. (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 183)

    Galbraith’s input into the summary survey of the bombing of Japan was probably even more important at dispelling myths. He described the terrible fire bombings of Japanese cities that sometimes consumed as many as 16 square miles, causing massive numbers of civilian deaths, but barely touching industrial production. He then wrote that in all probability, Japan likely would have surrendered in December of 1945, or maybe even in November, without the two atomic bombs being dropped. (Summary Report, Pacific War, July of 1946, p. 26)

    These insights by a skilled economist like Galbraith seem to be quite valuable, especially in light of the later emphasis placed on bombing in both the Korean War and especially the war in Indochina. The tons of bombs dropped over Indochina exceeded the tonnage dropped over both Germany and Japan during World War II. In fact, it was not even close. Yet none of the countries in Indochina—Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam—had a real industrial base as did Japan and Germany. Most of the population made its living from agriculture. So Galbraith had a real perspective on this issue during his advisory years with President Kennedy.

    It was during his first stretch of employment at Harvard that he met young John Kennedy. From 1936-39, Galbraith tutored JFK at Winthrop House. (Parker, p. 324)

    It is difficult to overestimate how much Galbraith liked writing and being on the faculty at Harvard. For instance, in 1946, he turned down an offer from Nelson and David Rockefeller to become chief economist for the Rockefeller family. (Parker, p. 222) I should not have to inform our readers the kind of money and status that position would have offered him.

    In 1956, Senator Kennedy sought his advice on an agricultural issue. After that, Kennedy developed a rather close relationship with Galbraith as an unpaid advisor. The relationship deepened after the launch of Sputnik in 1957. The two would often meet in Cambridge when Kennedy was in Boston. Kennedy came to rely on Galbraith briefing him before his major appearances. (Parker, p. 325)

    In 1960, Galbraith was one of candidate Kennedy’s floor managers at the Los Angeles Democratic convention. He then wrote several speeches for the nominee during the campaign and prepped him for the third debate with Richard Nixon. He was at Kennedy’s campaign headquarters the night of the election. (Parker, p. 336)

    As most people who have studied Kennedy’s political career know, he had a genuine interest in the huge country of India. He felt that being the largest democracy in the world, and sitting in south Asia, it was of large strategic importance. In the late fifties, he wrote an article for The Progressive on the subject. With Senator John Sherman Cooper, he drew up an aid bill for the country. (Cooper had been President Dwight Eisenhower’s ambassador to India.)

    But another reason Kennedy viewed India to be of central importance is because of its proximity to Red China, and also to the former countries of French Indochina. If there were tensions in that area—as there were bound to be—then India could be both a counterweight, and also a nearby emissary. If such were the case, Kennedy would need a man whom he trusted implicitly to be the ambassador there. Which is why he chose Galbraith for the position.

    But with the kind of relationship the two men had, Galbraith was still advising Kennedy on a wide variety of subjects. On economics, Galbraith was a disciple of the great Englishman John Maynard Keynes. So he urged Kennedy to adapt an expansive economic policy in order to encourage growth. As almost any observer of the Kennedy presidency knows, the years 1961-66 were probably unmatched in post-war American economic history. Gross National Product averaged 5% growth each year, employment grew 2.5% each year, unemployment receded to 3.9%, poverty declined by a third and inflation was at a quite manageable 2 per cent. All of this was done with no significant budget deficits and a positive balance of payments.

    To show how in sync Galbraith was with Kennedy, during his confirmation hearings, the economist suggested that the USA recognize Red China. This created quite a stir on the committee. (Parker, p. 351) But as our readers know through the recently posted interviews with State Department official Roger Hilsman, this is what Kennedy had discussed with Hilsman as early as 1961.

    Galbraith tried to warn Kennedy about committing to the Bay of Pigs operation. He also warned about using American ground troops in Laos. (Parker, pp. 354-56) Kennedy agreed with this and told Richard Nixon, “I just don’t think we ought to get involved in Laos, particularly where we might find ourselves fighting millions of Chinese troops in the jungle.” (Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, pp. 45-48)

    And, of course, there was Vietnam. Kennedy had been advised by the likes of Edmund Gullion, Nehru of India, and General Douglas MacArthur on the subject. They all advised him not to send in combat troops. Galbraith agreed with them. Inside the Kennedy White House, he sided with Chester Bowles and George Ball for non-intervention. In prior treatments of precisely what Galbraith’s role was in these debates, the picture painted of it was, to say the least, a bit murky.

    For instance, in David Halberstam’s long book The Best and the Brightest, Galbraith is portrayed as being some kind of outsider, on the periphery of Kennedy’s circle. (Halberstam, p. 152) To state it kindly, Halberstam’s book has not aged well. To be unkind, today it seems quite misleading; so much so that this author would call it pernicious. In addition to getting the role of Robert McNamara wrong, the highly praised Halberstam also mischaracterized Galbraith’s part.

    John Newman came closer to what the true facts and characterizations were in his milestone book JFK and Vietnam, first published in 1992. There, Newman wrote that Galbraith had written Kennedy in March of 1962 after visiting Vietnam. He was quite derisive about America being involved there at all. He suggested a neutralist political solution, similar to what the administration was negotiating for in Laos. (Newman, p. 236) This is more accurate but is still unsatisfactory since it is incomplete.

    Galbraith’s role in all this began even before the famous two week long November, 1961 debate over committing combat troops to Saigon. In July of 1961, Galbraith wrote the president, warning him about the information he was getting about Indochina. He said that President Ngo Dinh Diem was not the right man to lead South Vietnam. He had alienated the public to a much further degree than the newspaper reporters have let on. (Galbraith, Letters to Kennedy, pp. 76-77) But it turns out that Galbraith was directly involved in the November debates.

    The ambassador was in Washington to accompany Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on a state visit. Galbraith had already heard about the mission President Kennedy had sent General Max Taylor and Deputy National Security Advisor Walt Rostow on in October. The ambassador feared America’s entry into a war in Vietnam would be a disaster. It could endanger Kennedy’s domestic programs, tear the Democratic Party apart, and perhaps provide the opening for a new conservative era in American politics. (The Nation, February 24, 2005, “Galbraith and Vietnam”)

    Galbraith had arranged the luncheon to be at the Newport Rhode Island home of Jackie Kennedy’s mother, so no other State Department representative would be there. Kennedy and Galbraith asked the Indian leader to participate in a neutralist solution for Vietnam. They even asked him to talk to Ho Chi Minh about forming a UN observer team as a first step in that direction. Nehru was non-committal except for saying that America should not get into a shooting war in Indochina. (Galbraith, A Life in our Times, pp. 470-77)

    The next day in Washington, Galbraith made a beeline for Rostow’s office. He questioned Rostow about the actual contents of the report. Rostow said it was highly classified. Then the phone rang. With Rostow distracted, Galbraith stole a copy of the report from his desk and left. (The Nation, 2/24/2005)

    Reading it back at his hotel, the ambassador was stunned. He realized that this report and its recommendations would create the first commitment of combat troops to Saigon and that would then be the pretext for an open-ended conflict. The first group of 8,000 men were to go in under the guise of “flood relief workers”. The report recommended deepened cooperation between the CIA and Saigon’s intelligence, more covert operations and massive training of Vietnamese soldiers. Plus the use of a sprayed herbicide which Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Kennedy was really a weed killer. (At first this was called Agent Purple, it later turned into Agent Orange.)

    Kennedy had seen Galbraith the day before the Newport meeting. Realizing there was going to be a long debate over the Taylor-Rostow report, he had asked him to prepare a paper to contest direct American involvement. This now became the basis for his memo to the president. JFK read both documents and then postponed the meeting on Vietnam. Meanwhile, Galbraith did something that the president had already done. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 107) The ambassador started leaking stories to the press that Kennedy was opposed to the escalation his advisors were pressing on him. Before Galbraith left to return to India, he told Kennedy it would be a good idea if he stopped off in Saigon. JFK agreed and then instructed the ambassador to report back to him alone. (The Nation, 2/24/2005; Parker, p. 370-72)

    At the crucial meeting, which occurred on November 11, Galbraith’s biographer Richard Parker notes something that Newman did not mention, namely that Bobby Kennedy was in the room. Later, authors like David Kaiser and Gordon Goldstein did write about this information, based upon recovered notes. In what appears to be a mapped out plan, the Attorney General would repeatedly deny any suggestion of ground troops by saying flatly, “We are not sending combat troops. Not committing ourselves to combat troops.” (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 113) Then the president would add that if there was ever going to be a troop detachment sent in it would be a multilateral mission, under the aegis of the UN or SEATO. (Parker, p. 371)

    As most of us know, this two week long debate ended with Kennedy issuing NSAM 111. That order significantly increased the number of American advisors to over 15,000 and it sent in more equipment, like helicopters. But this is as far as Kennedy was going to go. He was going to aid Saigon, but he was not going to fight their war for them. He never allowed combat troops into theater. In fact, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was killed than on the day he was inaugurated. The president even wanted to replace Frederick Nolting as ambassador to Saigon with George McGhee, who he knew was opposed to intervention. But Dean Rusk, who had been one of the leaders for troop insertion during the debate, nixed this idea by saying Nolting should stay since he had Diem’s confidence. (Parker, p. 376)

    It seems to this author that with the information about Bobby Kennedy’s role in the November, 1961 debates, the attempt by Kennedy to replace Nolting, and the now fully revealed role of Galbraith, this episode is even more clearly a demarcation line than before. Kennedy simply was opposed to transforming Vietnam into America’s war, and he knew that was what it would become if ground troops were placed in theater. As the president had told Arthur Schlesinger:

    They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale … The troops will march in; the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off and you have to have another … The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 63)

    Upon Galbraith’s return to Asia, he did file a report from Saigon. In fact, he eventually filed three of them. These all ended up being back channel cables, meaning they bypassed the usual State Department protocols. They were laced with Galbraith’s blend of impatience and sarcasm: “Who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to … ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age.” (The Nation, 2/24/2005) And again, Halberstam was wrong about what happened as a result of these, just as he was wrong about how Kennedy regarded his advice in November of 1961. For Galbraith was not on the periphery, he was at the center of the story—in two ways.

    First, Kennedy attempted to follow up on the ambassador’s proposal to open negotiations for a neutralist Vietnam settlement through India. Unfortunately, he tasked the wrong person with the mission. Averill Harriman was Kennedy’s point man on the attempts to defuse the Laotian situation with a coalition government. Apparently he did not feel the same way about Vietnam. In December of 1961, Harriman had been appointed to Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Kennedy asked Harriman to send instructions to Galbraith about pursuing a peace plan by having Indian and Russian diplomats approach Hanoi. Harriman suggested a delay, which the president agreed to. But Kennedy concluded “that instructions should nevertheless be sent to Galbraith, and that he would like to see such instructions.” Harriman said he would send them. (Douglass, p. 119) Harriman did send instructions, but “he struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line.” The diplomat dictated a memo to his colleague Edward Rice which changed the de-escalation approach to a threat of escalation of the war unless Hanoi accepted American terms. When Rice tried to rewrite the memo with the original instructions, Harriman again struck Kennedy’s language. He then simply killed the telegram altogether. (Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance, pp. 158-59)

    Galbraith’s other attempt at de-escalation was more successful. In early April of 1962, the ambassador was visiting the Kennedy family for a weekend at Glen Ora, their rented estate in the Virginia countryside. Jackie Kennedy had just made an official visit to India and they were watching a TV special about it. He then told the First Lady about his talk with the president about the situation in Saigon, his later visit to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the memo he left behind. (Parker, p. 389)

    It turned out that Kennedy had been giving the Galbraith memos about Vietnam a lot of attention. He wanted the ambassador to put his thoughts in writing and give a copy to McNamara. In that memo, Galbraith stated American policy should keep the door open for a political solution. We should also measurably reduce our commitment to the present leadership of South Vietnam. He then added that the advisors who were already there should not be involved in combat and kept out of any combat commitment. Their roles should become as invisible as the situation allowed. (Newman, p. 236)

    As described in JFK and Vietnam, this memo was mightily resisted by the Pentagon, because, just five months after sending in advisors and equipment, Kennedy now had an alternative. Newman also notes that Kennedy had said at that time “he wished us to be prepared to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment, recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.” (Newman, p. 236) In other words, Galbraith had just given Kennedy support for what he really wanted to do in Indochina. As both Douglass and Newman have written, Galbraith’s visit to Washington and the handing off of his memo to McNamara were the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (Newman, p. 237; Douglass, p. 119)

    The very next month, in May of 1962, Robert McNamara now delivered a surprising message to his subordinates in Vietnam. Arriving in Saigon for one of his so-called SecDef meetings, McNamara asked some of the higher-ups to stick around after the formal meeting ended. The defense secretary now echoed what the president had told Arthur Schlesinger: “It was not the job of the U.S. to assume responsibility for the war but to develop the South Vietnamese capability to do so.” (Douglass, p. 120) He then asked when they thought Saigon would be able to assume sole responsibility for all actions. The secretary got no satisfactory reply, since everyone was shocked by the question. So he proceeded to tell the commander in charge of the American advisory command, General Paul Harkins, “to devise a plan for turning full responsibility over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference.” As Jim Douglass notes, Kennedy and McNamara only wanted a plan for withdrawal at this time. For as he had told Galbraith in November of 1961, “You have to realize that I can only afford so many defeats in one year.” (Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, p. 469) The president was referring to the Bay of Pigs and Laos, the latter of which he knew the Pentagon would consider a defeat.

    It took quite a long time for the commanders of all departments in Vietnam to prepare their withdrawal schedules for McNamara. More than a year to be exact. But finally, in May of 1963, at a SecDef meeting in Hawaii, they were presented to McNamara. McNamara said they were not fast enough and requested they be accelerated “to speed up replacements of U.S. units by GVN units as fast as possible.” (Douglass, p. 126) This plan was then coordinated with Kennedy’s NSAM 263 order and its accompanying report, which dictated that a thousand men would be withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and all American advisors would be removed by 1965. So much for Galbraith being at Halberstam’s “periphery”. In a very real sense, the ambassador had provided the rationale for Kennedy’s withdrawal plan.

    Galbraith always said that he would only serve under Kennedy for a bit more than two years since he had to get back to Harvard in order not to lose tenure. How badly did Kennedy want him to stay? He offered him the ambassadorship to the USSR. (Parker, p. 406) If Kennedy had lived, and Galbraith had taken that position, one can only imagine how relations between the two superpowers would have turned out. But the fact that JFK offered him the position shows what the president had in mind for the future. He saw how visionary Galbraith was on Vietnam, and he wanted to try more of that with Russia.

    Galbraith continued to be an advisor to the White House after Kennedy’s assassination. But he and President Johnson simply did not agree on Indochina policy, and Galbraith really did not like how the escalation of the Vietnam War began to downsize the War on Poverty. In January of 1966, he wrote a memo to Johnson saying that America had no national interest at stake in Vietnam. A few months later he tried again. He offered to write a speech that would set the stage for American withdrawal. Johnson did not appreciate the advice. And that was about it for their relationship. (Parker, p. 431)

    But about four months before that happened, and probably provoking the exchange, Galbraith had shared a dinner with Richard Goodwin, Carl Kaysen, Arthur Schlesinger, and Defense Secretary McNamara. By this time, January of 1966, each of these men, except for McNamara, had left the White House. Galbraith described the meeting as jarring. McNamara was extremely emotional as he described what was happening in Indochina and at the White House. The Defense Secretary said the war was spinning out of control. Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign Johnson had banked on, was not effective. Johnson was getting depressed over the results. But he still seemed insistent on victory, even if it meant more escalation. If America did not find a way out soon, we would lose the war. (Kai Bird, The Color of Truth, p. 345; Galbraith, A Life in our Times, pp. 482-83) This is why he wrote to LBJ. Instead, Johnson escalated the war further. He then pushed McNamara out of office. But it was very likely that dinner which caused McNamara to begin the task of writing the Pentagon Papers.

    Galbraith now wrote a book entitled How to Get out of Vietnam. It sold 250,000 copies. Along with Schlesinger and Goodwin, he organized a protest group called Negotiations Now. He had concluded that if LBJ would not end the war, someone who would must run against him in 1968. Things go so bitter between the two men that Johnson told White House advisor John Roche to start attacking Galbraith in the press. (Parker, p. 432)

    Galbraith finally did find someone to run against Johnson. It was Senator Eugene McCarthy. When Bobby Kennedy later announced he was also in the race, Galbraith was in a sticky position. But he felt he should be loyal to his first choice, so he stuck with McCarthy, even though after Johnson made his shocking announcement not to run, it was apparent RFK was the stronger candidate with a better chance to defeat Richard Nixon in the fall.

    After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, McCarthy, for all intents and purposes, dropped out of the race. After Kennedy’s funeral, Galbraith visited him in Washington. He later wrote the following about that meeting:

    Gene was deeply depressed; the death of Robert Kennedy showed the hopelessness of the game. What had been real would now be pretense; what had been pleasure was now pain … I pleaded that he carry on. The banality of my argument still rings flatly in my ears. Gene remained sad and unmoved, but proposed another talk in Cambridge a few days later. This we had with Coretta King and a number of McCarthy’s local supporters present. His mood was better … but I don’t believe that Eugene McCarthy’s heart was ever again wholly in the battle. (Galbraith, A Life in our Times, p. 499)

    The Kennedy administration was responsible for being the first to bring some remarkable men into the White House, or promoting them to their highest positions. These individuals were not just outstanding civil servants; they were extraordinary men in their own right. People like Robert Kennedy, George Ball, Richard Goodwin, Harris Wofford, Ted Sorenson, Sargent Shriver, Arthur Schlesinger, Edmund Gullion, Adam Yarmolinsky and G. Mennen Williams were all distinguished individuals and personalities who have yet to be surpassed in talent and achievement by those who followed. As a group no other administration comes close.

    John Kenneth Galbraith is one of the most distinguished of them all.

  • MacArthur’s Last Stand Against a Winless War

    He leaned on JFK to stay out of Vietnam. Had Kennedy survived, might history have been different?

    By Mark Perry, At: The American Conservative

  • Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On

    Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On

    Would Jim Garrison have been forgotten if Oliver Stone had never met the late Ellen Ray? If the reader is unaware of who Ellen Ray was let me inform you of her importance in history. (her obituary)

    Ellen Ray was the wife of Bill Schaap. They ran a publishing company called Sheridan Square Press. Sheridan Square did not just release books. They also published magazines like the illustrious Covert Action Information Bulletin and Lies of our Times. If our readers do not know about those two periodicals, it is their loss. The first dealt with the Central Intelligence Agency and its allies; the second was concerned with media analysis. They were well done and important journals.

    Ellen Ray had known Jim Garrison a long time—going all the way back to his original investigation of the John Kennedy murder in the late sixties. She always thought highly of him and his work. So when Garrison thought of writing a book on his inquiry in the eighties, Sheridan Square was one of the houses he thought of releasing it through. But before that, Garrison had had an offer from a much bigger publishing house. That deal did not go through since the proofreader the house assigned to the book was Sylvia Meagher. Now as everyone knows, this site is a sincere admirer of Meagher and her fine book, Accessories After the Fact. But as most insiders also realize, Meagher was one of the early critics who developed a phobia—some would call it a mania—about Jim Garrison and his inquiry. (The others would include Josiah Thompson and Paul Hoch.) Even someone like Jerry Policoff, who was a close friend of Meagher, once said that Sylvia should not have been assigned to review Garrison’s book: “My God, she contributed money to Clay Shaw’s defense!”

    Well, predictably, Meagher’s analysis contributed to Garrison returning his advance. But that may have been fortunate, because now he turned to Ellen Ray and Sheridan Square Press. They assigned him Zachary Sklar as his editor. Zach was a distinguished journalism professor and contributor to Sheridan’s two publications. It was a fortunate pairing. Originally, Garrison had written his book from a third person point of view. But when he met Zach, the editor convinced him that since the DA was an actual participant in the story he was telling, it would be more effective if he wrote the book as a first person narrative. I think most people today would say that was a good choice.

    On the Trail of the Assassins sold about forty thousand copies when it was originally released in hard cover. The thoroughly annotated book revealed many new things about Garrison’s investigation that most outsiders did not know about. It also exhibited Garrison’s firm grasp on the entire evidentiary record of the JFK case and also Kennedy’s place in history. Overall, it was a real contribution to the library of books on the assassination of President Kennedy.

    But what happened later was probably even more significant. At a film festival in Havana, Ellen Ray met up with Oliver Stone. She told him words to the effect: “Have I got a book for you!” Stone read Garrison’s book and decided to bring it to the big screen. He did so in December of 1991.

    But this was the JFK assassination. And it was Jim Garrison. As the DA noted in his book, there were many media critics of his inquiry. And they struck at him in what can only be called a vicious and personal manner. Some of them hid their relationships with the intelligence community, e.g., James Phelan, Walter Sheridan, and Hugh Aynesworth. Even more buried was the cooperation between these men and Clay Shaw’s lawyers. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, chapter 11 for an analysis of this nexus.) That sixties wave of media critics was not going to let Oliver Stone bring back Jim Garrison and the JFK case in any kind of fair or salutary manner. So they decided to do a preemptive strike on Stone’s film.

    In what was probably an unprecedented campaign in the history of American cinema, the MSM attacked the film JFK seven months in advance of its release. In fact, Ben Bradlee and the The Washington Post sent George Lardner to Dallas to write a story as the film was being shot in Dealey Plaza.

    Lardner’s article began with one of the truly snarky remarks in recent journalistic history. In watching a rehearsal of the Dealey Plaza sequence, Lardner noted that Stone had ordered up five shots in the assassination sequence. The reporter then wrote: “Five shots? Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?” Through their acoustical testing, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had concluded that there were four shots fired. But as researcher Donald Thomas revealed at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference in 2003, those same sound technicians told Chief Counsel Robert Blakey that they detected five shots. Blakey told Thomas that he did not think it was possible to sell that many shots to the committee, so their report only analyzed and accepted four. In other words, this was a political decision, not a scientific one. There is real evidence that there were five shots, but somehow that did not matter to Lardner. After all, it’s the JFK case.

    Lardner’s article was the first volley in a seven-month MSM campaign that was intended to make sure that the reception of JFK was jaundiced in advance. Many of the same people who attacked Garrison back in the sixties were brought back to do so again, like Aynesworth and Edward Epstein. The fact that neither of these men was at all credible or objective on the subjects of the Kennedy assassination or Jim Garrison was irrelevant. The goal was to savage the film before it had a fair hearing. That is how radioactive this subject was, even thirty years later.

    In spite of this assault, JFK did well at the box office, both at home and abroad. It was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. But to show the reader just how nutty the anti-JFK crusade was, consider the following. On the eve of the Oscars, an anonymous author bought an ad in the trade journal Variety. The ad asked that no voters cast their ballot for the film as Best Picture. Researcher Rich Goad did some detective work and found out that the ad was paid for by the late Warren Commission counsel David Belin.

    Besides bringing the Kennedy assassination back into the limelight, JFK was the main cause for the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). For at the end of the film, Stone added a subtitle revealing that the files of the House Select Committee were being kept secret until the year 2027. This created a sensation in Washington. Tens of thousands of citizens now called their representatives, sent them letters or faxed them in order to do something about this travesty. It worked. The Board was created. It was a unique agency that was made up of private citizens appointed by the president. That agency had a staff that read and researched documents that were now to be declassified. If an intelligence agency objected, that agency had to show why the document should be kept secret. This reversed the previous Freedom of Information Law, which put the burden of proof on the requester, who had to show why it should be declassified. But even today, twenty years after the ARRB closed its doors, the government is still maintaining secrecy over thousands of documents.

    That Board has a decidedly mixed record of achievement. But it did do some good work on the Garrison angle of the JFK case.   In fact, the Board even went to court with then New Orleans DA Harry Connick to salvage a file cabinet full of documents remaining from the Garrison investigation. After being shown up in the press, Connick resisted turning over the materials. But the Justice Department eventually secured the documents. The Garrison family also turned over thousands of pages that the late DA had in his personal effects.

    Garrison had always insisted that, for various reasons, he was never able to reveal most of the evidence he had secured from 1967-69. After authors like William Davy, Joan Mellen and myself went through what the ARRB attained, we had to agree. The Garrison files in the Archives today hold an abundance of utterly fascinating material on a wide array of subjects dealing with many aspects of the JFK case. Does the MSM reveal any of this to the public? Nope. One of the most embarrassing aspects of the three-week binge that the media went on last year in anticipation that the JFK files were finally going to be completely declassified was this: No one chronicled what the ARRB had already released. Which was significant. It was about 2 million pages of material that opened up new vistas on subjects like Rose Cheramie, Kennedy and Vietnam, and the medical evidence in the JFK case. Guests like Larry Sabato, Phil Shenon and Gerald Posner did not want to discuss those topics. Nether did their hosts like NBC stooge on JFK, Rachel Maddow.

    It is easy to understand why this would occur. As Upton Sinclair once said: It is hard to make journalists understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. Contrary to popular belief there is no such thing as a liberal media. In the twentieth century, and up until today, the American media has been controlled by an oligarchical class. Some authors call this class the Eastern Establishment. Some call it the Power Elite.   As sociologist Donald Gibson explained in his fine book Battling Wall Street, President Kennedy was not a part of that group. He never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; he did not join any secret societies at Harvard; he didn’t like working intelligence during World War II. He got transferred out to the South Pacific and served with a bunch of Joe Six Pack guys on what were close to suicide missions. As this author demonstrated in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, both in the Senate and in the White House, Kennedy was opposed to much of what this Power Elite was doing abroad, especially in the Third World. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 21-33) After his death, the progress that he did make in the White House was largely halted, and then reversed. (pp. 367-77) Due in part to the ARRB, we know much more about these changes, especially regarding Indochina.

    Jim Garrison was probably the first critic of the Warren Commission who understood this matter. And it is probably one of the reasons the MSM decided to smear him beyond recognition. This goes on to the present day. In a recent article in a regional journal called 64 Parishes, a writer named Alecia Long decided to pick up the infernal and eternal anti-Garrison cudgel. The New Orleans Times Picayune has always liked to go after Garrison and so they are now carrying it on their web site.

    To anyone who is familiar with the territory, the first reaction is, “Oh my aching back!” The ten-page article is simply a compendium of every MSM caricature of Garrison and his Kennedy case that one can imagine—except Long does not even mention the ARRB. She only alludes to what they did in about a half a sentence. As we shall see, this was a wise choice on her part.

    The preposterous thesis of her essay is that somehow, by his clever use of the media, Garrison was able to advance his case, his cause and his reputation. She uses Garrison’s 30-minute talk on NBC as proof of this. She even opens her article by asking why NBC agreed to give the DA this platform. She does not answer her rhetorical question until several pages later. There, she finally says that in June of 1967, “NBC ran an hour-long special sharply critical of Garrison’s claims and the methods used by his investigators.” This is an understatement. Most objective observers considered the Walter Sheridan production a straight-out hatchet job. But she tries to bolster the program’s credibility by adding, “The special featured several witnesses who claimed to have been offered bribes in exchange for providing testimony damaging to Shaw.”

    What she does not note is that these so-called “witnesses” were later exposed, either in court, or by their own confessions, as being bogus. (DiEugenio, pp. 239-43) And more than one witness—for instance, Fred Leemans and Marlene Mancuso—testified as to the unethical and threatening tactics used by Sheridan for the program. It was Sheridan who fabricated these phony on-air statements by threatening and intimidating Garrison’s witnesses. Mancuso did not succumb to his bullying, so she was not on the show. Leemans did and went on the program. But both of them signed affidavits revealing the extent to which Sheridan and his cohorts would go to in order to flip Garrison’s witnesses. For example, Leemans was told, “… if I did not change my statement and state that I had been bribed by Jim Garrison’s office, I and my family would be in physical danger.” (DiEugenio, p. 240) Somehow, Long missed those statements, which gravely undermine her thesis because logically, they explain why the Federal Communications Commission decided to grant Garrison the time to counter Sheridan’s handiwork. But even at that, the FCC only gave Garrison a half hour, compared to Sheridan’s full hour, which contradicts the idea of equal time embedded in the now defunct Fairness Doctrine.

    She also questions why, when granted the time, Garrison did not answer Sheridan’s charges in more specific terms. As the DA stated throughout his Playboy interview, if he had done that, it would have given Shaw’s lawyers a pretext to move to get his case thrown out of court, since it would prejudice prospective jurors.

    With the release of Garrison’s files by the ARRB, the idea that Garrison did not have a factual basis for his case against Shaw is revealed to be utterly false. There is no doubt today that Shaw used the pseudonym of Clay Bertrand. The declassified files contain over ten witnesses who stated this was the case. It is further revealed that the FBI knew this as well. And finally, attorney Dean Andrews knew it—and lied about it.   As a consequence, Garrison never got to ask Shaw the key question: “Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88)

    It is also now shown that Shaw lied about his association with the CIA. That association has turned out to be a long service and a lucrative one. Not only did Shaw lie about it at his own trial, the CIA continually lied about it, and Robert Blakey fell for it. In the HSCA volumes, Shaw is referred to as part of a large businessman’s contact program in the Agency. Not true. Shaw was a well-compensated contract agent from at least the fifties. (Joan Mellen, Our Man In Haiti, pp. 54-55) In the sixties, he had a covert security clearance code name that was the same as Howard Hunt’s. (DiEugenio, pp. 383-87) The CIA tried desperately to cover up these facts, even going as far as altering Shaw’s files. (William Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 200) The ARRB later discovered the CIA had gone even further and destroyed Shaw’s 201 file.

    (or open in a new window.)

    As the late Yale educated attorney Allard Lowenstein once said regarding the Robert Kennedy assassination: in his experience as a lawyer, people who have nothing to hide don’t hide things. Somehow, Long does not think any of this new material is relevant to any discussion of Jim Garrison today.

    In addition to this secrecy about Shaw, which hurt Garrison’s case, Long does not detail any of the other methods of obstruction that the CIA and the FBI used against Garrison. Nor does she elucidate any of the meetings that Shaw’s lawyers had in Washington soliciting this kind of aid, which ended up being bountiful. The declassified files of the ARRB contain literally scores of pages on this subject. This features interference with the serving of Garrison’s subpoenas. And further, the setting up of a special committee within the CIA to survey actions to take against Garrison before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw. At the first meeting of this super-secret group, James Angleton’s assistant, Ray Rocca, said that he felt that Garrison would convict Shaw in the Kennedy case. (DiEugenio, pp. 269-74) Perhaps in their quest to stop that from happening, on the eve of the trial, at least three prospective witness for the prosecution were physically attacked before they testified: Richard Case Nagell, Clyde Johnson and Aloysius Habighorst. None of these men ended up testifying. (p. 294)

    As mentioned previously, one of the most bizarre statements that the author makes is that Garrison was proficient at using the media and manipulating them for his own benefit. How anyone can make such a statement today is simply inexplicable. As authors like William Davy and myself have shown, the media utterly destroyed Jim Garrison. Before Garrison took on the Kennedy assassination, he had a promising career ahead of him as a Louisiana politician. Many thought he could have been governor or senator from the state. (DiEugenio, pp. 172-74) That career was utterly wrecked by the two-year roasting he took in the press from almost every outlet imaginable: CBS, NBC, NY Times, Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, to name just a few. Garrison was eventually defeated in his District Attorney re-election bid due to two sets of phony pinball kickback charges, which he defeated at trial. But the publicity weakened his position and strengthened his opponent Harry Connick, who defeated him in a close election in 1973. (See chapter 19 of Garrison’s book.) To most legal observers, Connick turned out to be a very poor DA compared to Jim Garrison.

    After Garrison was retired from the DA’s office, it took him years to recover from the ordeal he went through. At that time, people who visited him in New Orleans said he had a small office that he rented from a larger firm. This is the man who likely would have been residing in the governor’s mansion if not for the JFK case. That media manipulation Long describes did the DA a lot of good, didn’t it?

    Long is so utterly biased that she actually credits Judge Herbert Christenberry. This is the judge who threw out Garrison’s attempt to try Shaw on perjury charges after his acquittal. Today, there is little or no doubt that Shaw lied numerous times at his conspiracy trial. For instance, about his employment by the CIA, about his friendship with David Ferrie, about his use of an alias. And according to Garrison assistant Steve Jaffe, this time Garrison was not going to make the same mistake he did at the conspiracy trial. He was going to use every witness he had against Shaw.

    Judge Herbert Christenberry should never have presided over this hearing. Moreover, there should have never been a hearing in the first place. As Garrison notes in his book, the idea of a federal judge inserting himself into a state case was quite unusual, since there was a law against it. But that is what happened. Shaw’s lawyers moved to have a state case considered in federal court. (Garrison, p. 253)

    Why did they do this?

    Because Christenberry’s wife had written a letter to Shaw after his acquittal. This was also after Garrison filed the perjury charges. The letter uses the plural pronoun “we”, so it clearly describes both husband and wife’s sentiments. The Christenberrys congratulated Shaw on the outcome of the trial. They sympathized with him over what the DA had done to the poor man. They continued by saying how much better the proceedings would have been if the case had been allotted to federal court and Judge Christenberry. But unfortunately, Caroline Christenberry could not voice these sentiments during the trial for risk of being labeled prejudiced in advance. (Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p.315)

    If there was ever an attempt to solicit a case, this was it. That letter is in the National Archives today. It appears Long has never heard of it.

    This article proves the very worst about the JFK case. Everyone hoped that the declassification of the files would aid in the public’s understanding of what that case was really all about, what impact it had on the personages involved and also on American history. That will not happen with people like Long. At the end of her original essay as published in the periodical 64 Parishes, it is revealed that her piece is part of something called the “Democracy and the Informed Citizen Initiative”, which is sponsored by the Federation of State Humanities councils. The Andrew Mellon Foundation was part of the support for that initiative. In other words, the Power Elite Kennedy opposed is still thriving.

    But further, as Anthony Thorne discovered, Long made up her mind about this matter without looking at any documents. She said, “I don’t want to dig through CIA and FBI documents for the rest of my life.” She then gave the back of her hand to the myriad books on the JFK case: “I find the basic premise of many these books to be problematic and would then note [sic] take those as seriously as historical studies.”

    The books don’t matter. The documents don’t matter. Typical MSM historian on the JFK case.   Which is why her article is worthless. It is the vacuity and speciousness of work like this that helps drive readers to the likes of Alex Jones. Perhaps unbeknownst to her, Long is adding to his minions.

  • Clete Roberts interviews Roger Hilsman on Vietnam (1983)

    Clete Roberts interviews Roger Hilsman on Vietnam (1983)

    The following is a transcript of an interview at the 1983 USC conference entitled “Vietnam Reconsidered”. Clete Roberts was a local newscaster in Los Angeles. This interview occurred a year before his death. The cameraman for the interview was the Oscar-winning activist cinematographer Haskell Wexler. This interview is important because it took place almost ten years before the publication of John Newman’s book, JFK and Vietnam. But it shows Kennedy’s attitude toward that conflict was just as Newman depicted it.

    Clete Roberts, correspondent
    Ian Masters, Producer, Director
    Michael Rose, Producer
    Haskell Wexler, Camera (along with others)
    Susan Cope, Sound
    Eric Vollmer, Coordinator
    Anne Vermillion, Coordinator

    Vietnam Reconsidered Conference, USC, 1983

     

    Clete Roberts:

    Let’s see. When you were Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs what was going on in Vietnam at that particular time?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, I started off with the Kennedy administration as being Assistant Secretary for Research and Intelligence, and then when Averell Harriman was promoted to be Under Secretary, I became Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs. So the last 14, 15 months of the Kennedy administration, I was head of the Far East. What was going on was that Kennedy had followed the Eisenhower policy of giving aid and advisors to the South Vietnamese, but Kennedy was absolutely opposed to bombing North Vietnam or sending American troops. Kennedy was killed, I stayed on and I pursued Kennedy’s policy and Mr. Johnson, President Johnson disagreed. He and I quarreled about this, he wanted to bomb the North and send American troops in, I was opposed to it. As it happened, I resigned, but I beat him to the punch by about two hours. I think he would have fired me if I hadn’t resigned. So that gives you the basic picture.

    Roberts:

    Well, I suppose this question ought to be asked. Who got us into the Vietnam War?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, you can … If you start at the very beginning, in the middle of World War Two, OSS, which I was a member of, had liaison officers with Ho Chi Minh and we were helping Ho Chi Minh. Then as the Cold War heated up, or the Cold War got involved, increasingly Vietnam got involved with the Cold War. And during the Truman administration, we began to help the French and so on. In the Kennedy administration, Kennedy started off something of a hawk, but as things progressed, he became convinced of two things. One is that it was not a world communist thrust, that it was a nationalist Vietnamese anti-colonialst thing, and that therefore we should help the South Vietnamese with aid and maybe advisors, but that we should never get American troops involved.

    When Kennedy was killed the balance of power shifted to a group of people, Lyndon Johnson, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, Bob McNamara, who saw it not as an anti-colonialist nationalist movement, but as a world communist movement, you see. And they, for ideological reasons or, I would argue, for a misunderstanding of the nature of the struggle, made it an American war. So is that a capsule version?

    Roberts:

    You spoke a moment ago of being at odds, at loggerheads, with President Johnson, but what does a State department official, an official in the position you were in, what do you do when you get to loggerheads with the administration or with a policy you can’t live with? Do you just quit or do you take it to the press, to the public? Now you could have done it, but you’re arguing with the President of the United States, I understand that.

    Roger Hilsman:

    That’s right. Well, I want to be responsive to your question and how to do so. Averell Harriman was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs and I was Assistant Secretary for Research and Intelligence, and Kennedy promoted him to be Under Secretary of State and promoted me to Averell’s job. And I remember a press man said to me that I think this is a wonderful appointment. And I said, “Well, why? Do you admire us that much?” And he said, “No. Both you and Averell are free men. Averell is a free man because he’s got $500 million. You’re a free man because you’ve got a PhD in International Politics and you can always go back to teaching at a university.” So he said, “I am confident that you guys will quit if push comes to shove, and you’ll do so publicly.” And I think this is true.

    For example, one of the best Foreign Service officers, I’ve never said this publicly, but I’m willing to do so now, one of the best Foreign Service officers in my day was Marshall Green in the Far East. He was Consul General at Hong Kong and I think that I can prove that I thought he was good because I brought him back to be my deputy. But some years later, in the Nixon administration he was made Assistant Secretary. I thought that was a terrible mistake.

    Roberts:

    Because he was a career man?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Because he was a career man, you see. Now when Nixon worked the rapprochement with China, the Assistant Secretary of State, Marshall Green, read about it in the newspapers. He had no alternative career. You see, if I had been Assistant Secretary at the time, or Averell Harriman, Nixon wouldn’t have dared to have done this without consulting the State department because he would know that either Averell or I would have marched out of our office, we’d have gone down to the first floor, we’d have called a press conference in front of TV, and we’d have resigned publicly with a blast. It would have cost him. Marshall Green can’t do that, a career Foreign Service can’t do that.

    So I think what I’m saying is that an Assistant Secretary who is a political appointee, who is the President’s man, yes, but because he’s the President’s man, he can say to the President, “You can’t do this without consulting the experts. You can’t go off on your own, you’ve got to consult the experts. If you don’t consult the experts, I’ll blast you and I’ll blast you publicly.” And I think it’s important that people at that second level, or third level, you see the Assistant Secretary of State level, be free men, be people who are able to blast and the President has to know. You see, he stands between the experts and the President so that the President has to consult the experts or otherwise he’ll pay the price.

    Roberts:

    And that is done only by going to the press?

    Roger Hilsman:

    I think it’s true.

    Roberts:

    No other way?

    Roger Hilsman:

    There’s no other way. This is … The press are perhaps being used in this sense, but not unfairly.

    Roberts:

    Talking earlier with George Reedy who was Press Secretary, as you know, for President Johnson, he told us that after Johnson came into office, into Washington D.C., that he felt that he was at a loss of what to do about Vietnam. And there was a meeting …

    Roger Hilsman:

    That Vietnam was … That Johnson was at a loss?

    Roberts:

    At a loss initially in what to do about it.

    Roger Hilsman:

    I don’t think that’s true.

    Roberts:

    That he felt it … At a meeting that he attended, that he was looking, he, Johnson, was looking for signals from the Kennedy people about which way to go. And he felt that perhaps Johnson had misinterpreted what the Kennedy people were saying to him.

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, George Reedy is a very old friend, I’ve known him for 25 years, I respect him a great deal, but I would have to say that George was, he was the public relations guy, so he was not involved in the substantive discussions and therefore I beg to disagree. When Johnson was Vice President, he attended a number of meetings, National Security Council meetings at which I was the Assistant Secretary. You see, I was responsible for all of Asian policy. The President made the decisions, the Secretary of State made the decisions, but I was the person who made the recommendations and who carried out their decisions. So I was in a key position.

    And I would say that those meetings, George was not at those meetings, and long before the President was killed, when LBJ was Vice President, it became very clear to us that LBJ had a viewpoint, a position, that he was a hawk if you will. That he thought that, whereas Kennedy felt we should support the South Vietnamese with aid and with advisors, but that it was basically not a world communist struggle, it was not the communist bloc against America. It was a nationalist anti-colonialist movement, we should help them certainly, but we should not get any Americans killed, we should not make a war out of it. Johnson had a world ideological view of it that this was a struggle between the communist world and the West, and I think he’s been proved wrong because they won, and the world hasn’t changed that much, we’re still here, thank God. But I think that Johnson, long before Kennedy was killed, a year before, in those meetings, made it very clear that he saw it as a cataclysmic struggle between good and evil, that he saw it in ideological terms.

    Johnson saw Vietnam as a struggle between the communist world and the non-communist world; whereas Kennedy saw it, I think correctly, as history will show us, as a nationalist anti-colonialist movement, which really had no effect on the survival of the United States. Johnson saw it as Armageddon, you see, and I think Johnson clearly was shown to be wrong.

    Roberts:

    After you left your position in the administration and you watched Vietnam, what did you think of the quality of the reporting that was coming out of there?

    Roger Hilsman:

    I’m moved to not answer your question just yet, but another question first. One of the things that has troubled me all my life is that, you see, Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, George Ball, me, Mike Forrestal, saw this as a nationalist anti-colonialist movement, whereas a lot of others saw it as this world shaking event where the communist world was going to dominate and dominoes and all the rest. And one of the things that has bothered me ever since, and that was the question I thought you were asking, was have you examined your soul? Was there anything that you could have done? ‘Cause you see, with hindsight it turns out we were right. Is there anything I could have done to have stopped this that I didn’t do? If I had been successful, there would be 55,000 Americans alive that are not alive, and about a million Vietnamese. And that one I have struggled over. I can’t think of what I could have done. It was … I tried, I tried endlessly to try to convince Johnson that this was not Armageddon, this was not something that we should spend all these American lives on, and I failed. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.

    Roger Hilsman:

    But now to go to your question, could the press have done anything differently?

    Roberts:

    My question, yes. And what they did do, what do you think of it?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, to tell you the honest to God truth, I don’t think any of us did a good job. I mean, I think there were a few of us in government who saw it as history shows it was. It was not ordered by Moscow or Peking. It was not Armageddon. There were some of us who saw it that way. We failed in convincing Lyndon. Now Jack Kennedy saw it that way, we didn’t need to convince him, he convinced us. He deserves the most credit. So I think that some of us saw it that way, there were a few in the press, but basically I think that it can be said equally of the press, the policy makers, the foreign service, the CIA, anybody you name, that they failed to understand what was going on.

    The press, in my judgment, never addressed themselves to the question of what is the nature of this struggle? You see, they assumed that it was a world communist movement. It wasn’t, it was a nationalist anti-colonialist movement. The press got themselves involved in the day by day business. What happened yesterday? How many Americans were killed? It was the Ernie Pyle sort of thing, you see. They accepted the overall rationale of the war, the press did, without question, and they concentrated on the Ernie Pyle level of the grunt, of the soldier. And I think they failed the American people, I think they failed the American policy makers, they didn’t ask the right questions. They didn’t ask the fundamental questions. I think that’s true of the press, I think that’s true of the policy makers. I’m not focusing on the press, I don’t think the press caused the war or the press is responsible. I just think the press, like the CIA and the foreign service and the policy makers, failed to ask the right questions. I can understand why the press did because they’ve got to make the next deadline, they’ve got to make the next thing. But there’s a tendency in the press to hype things, to push it up.

    And by the way, the most severe critics of the press are the press. For example, go to the Iran hostage situation. We now know that the militants who seized the embassy didn’t intend to hold it for more than 24 hours. They held it for 444 days. The reason they held it was because the press hyped it, and they got world publicity that they never dreamed of. And Scotty Reston is the man who is the most critical of this. As he says, it was the sonorous toning of the days on the evening news, “This is the 344th day of the captivity of the hostages.” As my … As Scotty Reston, I’m quoting Scotty Reston. And who was saying this? It was the Ayatollah Cronkite, you see. And there’s a real reason to believe that those hostages stayed 442 days more than they should have because guys like Cronkite hyped it. I think this is a fair criticism.

    So what I’m saying is that I think we’re all culpable. We all failed to analyze Vietnam correctly. I think the press has a peculiar guilt in that they hyped it, they blew it up.

    Addendum

    This interview from 1969 contains, among other things, two very important pieces of information. On page 7, Hilsman says Bobby Kennedy wanted to negotiate out of Vietnam in 1963. On page 21, he states JFK was thinking of recognizing Red China in 1961.

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

  • Ken Silverstein and Jeffrey St. Clair Get Counterpunched

    Ken Silverstein and Jeffrey St. Clair Get Counterpunched

    counterpunchAs more than one commentator has observed, generally speaking, the Right has so much power in America that it does not have to worry about things like accuracy and morality. A good example was the journalistic trumpeting about the false charge that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. After all, people do not go to conservative martinets like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity for facts and honesty in reporting.  Usually it’s the left-of-center writers and reporters who are relied upon for such things.  For, as Michael Parenti once noted, reality tends to be radical. Which is the reason that it sometimes has to be propagandized.  Or else how does one provoke something as stupid as the 2003 American invasion of Iraq?  Those on the Left insisted there was no reliable evidence for that invasion, while the MSM pretty much accepted the (ersatz) words of Colin Powell at the United Nations.

    But what happens when the Left abandons its concern for such things as accuracy, morality and fact-based writing?  What does one call such reporting then?  Does it then not become—for whatever reason—another form of propaganda?

    The above reflection was instigated by the comments of a couple of the former founders of Counterpunch magazine, namely, Jeffrey St. Clair and Ken Silverstein.

    Counterpunch was started by Silverstein back in 1994. It was then based in Washington D. C.  Silverstein was later joined by St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn. At this point, in 1996, Silverstein left and Cockburn and St. Clair became the co-editors. Silverstein stayed on as a regular contributor.  The magazine’s headquarters now shifted to northern California.

    At times, Counterpunch does good work. This writer used some of its work about the Hollywood film industry for the The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today.  But owing to the influence of the late Alexander Cockburn, when it comes to anything dealing with the Kennedys, they begin to abuse the profession.  That is, the guidelines of accuracy, morality and fact-based reporting go out the window. Counterpunch becomes the left-wing version of Fox News.

    This is clearly a recurrent syndrome for that journal. About three months ago, I reported on their last attack on JFK.  About three months prior to that, I answered the falsities in another article, this time by a man named Matt Stevenson.  In that piece, Stevenson actually tried to say that President Kennedy’s withdrawal plan for Vietnam was just “speculation”. Stevenson then said that President Johnson’s colossal escalation in Indochina was merely a continuation of Kennedy’s policies there; or as he wrote, Johnson was “singing from Kennedy’s hymnal together with his choir.”  As I noted in that article, the declassified records on this issue show that this is utter nonsense. And we have the evidence now in Johnson’s own words—on tape.

    So what makes Counterpunch, an otherwise respectable journal, debase itself on this issue? As noted above, it is most likely the influence of the late co-editor Alexander Cockburn. As most of us know, when Oliver Stone’s film JFK came out in late 1991, the Establishment went completely batty.  This included what I consider to be the Left Establishment, i.e., Noam Chomsky at Z Magazine and Cockburn at The Nation. The Cockburn/Chomsky axis reacted to the film pretty much as the MSM did.  The Dynamic Duo wrote that the central tenets of Stone’s film were wrong: Kennedy was not withdrawing from Indochina at the time of his assassination; JFK was not killed as a result of any upper level plot; and the Warren Commission was correct in its verdict about Oswald acting alone. For the last, Cockburn brought former Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler onto the pages of The Nation. As if he was being interviewed by Tom Brokaw for NBC, Liebeler was allowed to pontificate on the fascinating flight path of CE 399, that is the Magic Bullet, as well as on how Oswald got off three shots in six seconds with a manually operated bolt-action rifle, two of them being direct hits.  When an allegedly muckraking journalist softballs an attorney who later became a member of the Charles Koch funded George Mason School of Law, something is bonkers someplace (see NY Times, May 5, 2018, “What Charles Koch and other donors to George Mason got for their Money”).

    What made that spectacle even worse was the fact that Cockburn had previously co-written an essay on the Robert Kennedy assassination.  That piece was penned with RFK investigator Betsy Langman. It ran in the January 1975 issue of Harper’s. The article carefully laid out the problems with the evidence in the RFK assassination and how those problems tended to exonerate the convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan. But now, in 1991-92, Cockburn gave his previous essay the back of his hand. He now wrote that Bobby Kennedy had turned his head, and this is how Sirhan, standing in front of RFK, shot him from behind in the back of the skull. 

    In typical MSM manner, Cockburn never commented on the following:

    1. If that was so, why did no one see it?
    2. How did Sirhan get within one inch of Senator Kennedy’s rear skull from a distance of about five feet away?
    3. How could Sirhan shoot Kennedy in the head with hotel maître d’ Karl Uecker holding his gun hand down on a table? Wouldn’t Uecker remember such a thing?
    4. Who delivered the other shots into Kennedy’s back then?

    As the reader can see, by this time, Cockburn had joined up with his friend Chomsky—who had once harbored doubts about the JFK case.  They had now both learned that discretion was the better part of valor in the murders of the Kennedys. After all, look what happened to Oliver Stone. Both men now joyfully threw overboard the Left’s shibboleths about accuracy and morality.  I mean, what kind of morality is it to give safe harbor to someone like Wesley Liebeler?

    It would have been one thing to have just ignored the issue.  After all, if one did not think President Kennedy’s assassination was important, all right, just let it pass by.  But Cockburn and Chomsky deliberately went out of their way to attack and ridicule anyone who thought differently. And they did this on numerous occasions. Since Cockburn wrote regularly for The Nation, and Chomsky was widely distributed by Pacifica Radio and Z Magazine, many on the Left were exposed to their false assumptions and smears. And that impact persists until this day.

    In the August 10th issue of Counterpunch, St. Clair has a kind of round-up column that he labels, “Roaming Charges: The Grifter’s Lament”.  In that string of paragraph-long notices about current events, the reader finds the following:

    “Barack Obama is about to be presented with the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights. RFK, the red-baiting, anti-communist zealot who desperately wanted to assassinate Fidel? Sounds about right for the President of Drones.”

    This is an excellent and made-to-order example of what I mean about the Left losing its moorings on the cases of John and Robert Kennedy. As more than one commentator has noted, both of these charges about Robert Kennedy are simply false.  But St. Clair decided that he was not going to do any research. In order to stay the Cockburn/Chomsky course, he would just play the mindless stooge for them. 

    As William Davy noted in his fine talk at VMI University last year, the declassified version of the CIA’s Inspector General Report about the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro admits that the Agency had no presidential approval for enacting those attempts to kill Castro.  In those pages, it is easy to see this is especially clear with regard to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, since the CIA sent two men to brief him on the plots when J. Edgar Hoover found out about them in 1962.  The obvious question is: Why did Kennedy have to be briefed if he had approved them?  The answer is that he had not—that is why the CIA had to tell him about them.  But even more egregiously, the Agency briefers told RFK that the plots had been terminated when in reality they had not been.   Again, why would they lie if they did not have to?

    As the reader can see from the link above, this document has been declassified for a number of years.  It is available on the web in more than one place.  If St. Clair had any qualms about not being a dupe or, on the other hand, if he had thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t smear a dead man without checking the record?”, he could have easily consulted the adduced facts in the case without doing very much work at all.  He chose not to.

    But it’s actually even worse than that, because as part of the record that St. Clair chose to ignore, one of the authors of that report left behind his own comments on their investigation.  This man was Scott Breckinridge, who testified to the Church Committee about this issue.  He stated that they simply could not find any credible evidence that the CIA plots had any kind of presidential approval.  When asked who gave the approval to lie to Bobby Kennedy about the ongoing nature of the plots, Breckinridge said that this went all the way up to Richard Helms, the CIA Director at the time.  (see Davy’s talk)

    In other words, in this case, St. Clair is actually siding with the cover-up about these plots that was supposed to save the CIA’s skin.  It kept them ongoing by concealing them from Bobby Kennedy. And then later, through his trusted flunky Sam Halpern, Helms could put out a disinformation story saying that the Kennedys knew about them. (David Talbot, Brothers, pp. 122-24)  Helms knew he could get away with this since the documents revealing the actual facts were classified.  But today, such is not the case.  Which leaves Mr. St. Clair with no excuse, not even a fig leaf, for writing what he did about RFK. Helms and Halpern would have been smiling at their dirty work.

    The other half of the smear concerns Bobby Kennedy’s service on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.  This was done at his father’s request to his personal friend Senator Joe McCarthy.  McCarthy had appointed attorney Roy Cohn as the committee’s chief counsel.  Kennedy violently disagreed with the way that Cohn and McCarthy ran the committee.  And as anyone can see, he steered clear of their finger pointing tactics at certain targets like Annie Lee Moss and Irving Peress. The work that Kennedy did was actually praised even by the committee’s critics.  This was a study of how the trade practices of American allies helped China during the Korean War, thereby increasing aid to our opponent North Korea.  (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 104-11)

    Kennedy resigned over his disagreements with Cohn after six months.  He then was asked back by the Democrats on the committee when they were in a stronger position.  He now became their chief counsel.  He retired the Moss and Peress cases, dismissed the unfounded charges of defense plant infiltration, and furnished questions for the senators in their examination of Cohn and McCarthy. He then played a large role in writing the Democratic report, which strongly attacked both men.  In fact, that report was so critical that some Democrats would not sign on to it. (Schlesinger, pp. 114-19) It constitutes the beginning of the Senate’s maneuvering to censure McCarthy. In other words, the actual record states that it was RFK who helped exculpate the victims of Cohn and McCarthy.  And it was RFK who began their toboggan ride to ruin.  The Democrats knew this would be the case, which is why they hired him as their chief counsel.

    This information has been out there since 1978.  Anyone could have availed themselves of the facts, instead of MSM malarkey. That St. Clair decided not to print the facts—for the second time—shows us how worthless his writing is on the matter. This is nothing but playing to the crowd.  That, of course, is what the Right (e.g., Ann Coulter) is famous for doing.

    Which brings us to the third founder of Counterpunch, Ken Silverstein.  Previously, I have reviewed for this site the fascinating volume by Robert Kennedy Jr., entitled Framed.  That book was about the MSM hysteria over the Michael Skakel case, a hysteria induced by Mark Fuhrman and the late Dominick Dunne.  In that review I tried to show how Dunne had enlisted in the ranks of the right-wing echo chamber in order to find a way to convict a Kennedy, or any Kennedy relation, in the unsolved 1975 murder of Martha Moxley.  (Michael Skakel was Kennedy’s first cousin from Ethel Kennedy’s family.)  Dunne assiduously worked toward this goal for years, through a variety of flimsy and dubious methods, which I detailed in that review. Dunne then enlisted Fuhrman into the quest. He obediently did the same. Since both men had high profiles with both the MSM and the Right-wing Noise Machine, and across all platforms—radio, TV, magazines, and book publishing—they now managed to transform Michael Skakel into their prime target in the Moxley murder, despite the fact that at the time of her murder, Skakel was not considered a suspect.

    Bowing to the unremitting pressure of Dunne and Fuhrman, the local Connecticut authorities then employed some rather bizarre techniques in order to indict Michael Skakel.  For example, they used a one-man grand jury, rewrote the state law as to the statute of limitations, and then tried Michael as an adult even though they said he committed the crime as a youth.  Throughout all of this, the MSM followed the spectacle like a herd of lemmings, even though Dunne was really not an investigative reporter (he more closely resembled an exalted gossip columnist).  And, to put it mildly, Fuhrman had a somewhat checkered past as a detective. In spite of all this, not one journalist cross-checked their work. Meanwhile, the supermarket tabloids egged the spectacle on. Because of the compromising publicity and an incompetent defense attorney, in 2002 Michael Skakel was convicted.

    Finally, Robert Kennedy Jr. decided this was enough bread and circuses in the Colosseum.  In early 2003, he penned a long and detailed magazine essay on the case. Incredibly, this was the first public questioning of the writings of Dunne and Fuhrman in the twelve years they had been writing on the case. Kennedy’s essay made Dunne look like the aggrandized celebrity gossip columnist that he was; in some ways, it made Fuhrman look even worse.

    Robert Kennedy Jr. cooperated with the series of defense attorneys who helped to air the problems with the Dunne/Fuhrman posturings. In 2016, he wrote his book on the case.  That book clearly had an impact on both the public and the legal system in Connecticut.  It was really the first full-scale forensic study of both the murder and the (ersatz) work of the Dunne/Fuhrman team.  It made them look like the Keystone Kops—perhaps even more asinine.  This evidence was so compelling that the state Supreme Court has now decided to free Skakel because his defense attorney ignored a credible alibi witness who placed him far away from the crime scene.

    Returning to Counterpunch founder Ken Silverstein:  When Bobby Kennedy Jr. was finishing up his book on the case, he wanted someone to review it to see if everything was in place. Through David Talbot, he asked Silverstein if he wanted to act as his researcher and offered to pay him $12,500 dollars for a month’s work.

    Silverstein turned down the offer.  But with typical St. Clair/Cockburn snarkiness he decided to go public. And by doing that he made himself look like an ignoramus.  He said that Michael had been the boyfriend of Moxley, which was wrong.  But that was not enough for Ken.  He then had to add that Skakel was obviously guilty. What is so incredible about that statement is that he made it without reading the Kennedy book!  Again, this is just what the so-called Left is not supposed to do.

    But that still was not enough.  Without reading the book, Silverstein now said that there was “a wealth of evidence demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that Skakel is guilty”.  To show just how far Silverstein had bought into the Dunne/Fuhrman paradigm, he actually recommended for reading Dunne’s book on the case, A Season in Purgatory.  Can the man be real? Dunne’s book is a novel that insinuated that John Kennedy Jr. was Moxley’s killer.  With a straight face, Silverstein called the book “amazing”.  What is amazing is that Silverstein could be that much of a sucker for Dunne.

    But even that ludicrous display was not enough for Silverstein.  He then attacked Robert Kennedy Jr. personally.  How?  He goes all the way over and uses a book by Jerry Oppenheimer to do so.  Oppenheimer is the equivalent of, say, Randy Taraborrelli, or perhaps even David Heymann, in the field of literary biography.  After all, who else would write a book entitled The Kardashians: An American Drama?

    Back in 1992, when Cockburn bowed down to the Allen Dulles/John McCloy led Warren Commission and softballed Wesley Liebeler, The Progressive posed the question: Why is Alexander Cockburn shaking hands with the Devil? As the record shows, these are the kinds of people—Dunne and Oppenheimer—a writer has to jump into bed with once one discards one’s code of honor and enlists in the Cockburn/Chomsky abasement program.  After all, Dulles and McCloy were two of the worst Americans of that era, and in his mad mania to trash Oliver Stone’s JFK, Cockburn ignored all the evil they had done. Silverstein and St. Clair cannot go back and say:  “Well Alex was really all wrong about that film JFK.  He made a mistake and we apologize for that.”  No, that would be admitting too much.  So instead, they take the easy way out and continue to use spurious information and cheesy New YorkPost type writers.  To the point that they not only discard any standards of scholarship, but also rub noses with the worst parts of the MSM.  This is how much Chomsky and Cockburn scorched the earth on this issue:  up is down, Left is Right, and we don’t care who we mislead or smear. 

    See also this provocative article from 2012 by author Douglas Valentine.

  • King in the Wilderness

    King in the Wilderness

    There were three documentaries prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination: Hope and Fury was a production of NBC; I am MLK Jr. was prepared by the Viacom network;  but perhaps the most interesting of the productions was HBO’s King in the Wilderness.

    Peter Kunhardt is an experienced filmmaker who has previously produced and directed documentaries on a wide variety of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon.  Kunhardt chose to direct this production and he collaborated with a writer he knew, Chris Chuang, who had worked with on a documentary from the previous year about Warren Buffett.

    King in the Wilderness has two defining qualities that differentiate it from the other two films and from previous King documentaries I have seen.  First, it does not deal with King’s entire career—not even close. It limits itself to the last years of his life. The focus is on the time interval from the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 until his death in Memphis and the following funeral in Atlanta in 1968.  Second, it does not feature the usual professional pundits as talking heads.  So, thankfully, we are spared pretentious gasbags like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw.

    The film begins with shots of the King home in Atlanta.  We then learn that several of King’s friends and working colleagues gathered there for the anniversary of his death.  They will be the interview subjects for the film. When they appear, we see them in close-up looking directly at the camera. Thus we listen to King’s attorney Clarence Jones, his close colleague in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Andrew Young, his friend the actor and singer Harry Belafonte, Dianne Nash of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), singer and activist Joan Baez, and SCLC Chicago representative Jesse Jackson, among others.

    I should note one other distinguishing feature.  In criticizing the documentaries of actor Tom Hanks, I have written that, aesthetically, they are purely assembly line productions.  As far as the way they are made, there is nothing at all distinguishing about them. With Hanks and his company Playtone, it is almost as if stylistically acute documentaries like The Power of Nightmares and The Kid Stays in the Picture had never been made.  Kunhardt’s film is not a cornucopia of new ideas in that respect, but it does have some visual panache and interest to it.

    In fact, it begins with the viewer going behind the scenes of a news interview with King.  Sander Vanocur, NBC’s national correspondent at the time, is seen rehearsing an interview with the civil rights leader—clapboard included.  King recalls his famous “I Have a Dream” speech made during the March on Washington in August of 1963.  That speech was made in aid of passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  He comments that in light of what has happened to America in the meantime, the dream he spoke about has now become something of a nightmare.  The reference points he is speaking about are, of course, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the recurrent rioting, and accompanying fatalities, that had become so frequent by 1967.

    The film tries to elucidate some of his chagrin by depicting both sides of a taped discussion of the 1965 Watts riot between King and President Johnson. He tells the president that unless he does something to give people in the black slum areas some hope, he fears that those areas will become tinderboxes of violence. Which, as we know, they did.  Johnson did not do very much to offer any change or hope for those living in places like Watts because of his escalation of the Vietnam War—a theme to be developed later.

    The film then sketches in another dispute that King was having in this time period.  Because of these recurrent riots, and because so many of them began with an instance of police brutality, and because of the continuing violent acts by white terrorists—for instance the shooting of James Meredith during his March Against Fear in Mississippi—King began to catch some heat from what many saw as an unlikely source.

    For instance, after Meredith was wounded and hospitalized by a white man, King’s group, the SCLC, stepped in to complete the march.  But so did other groups, like the SNCC.  By 1966, Stokely Carmichael had become the leading public figure in the SNCC.  During the completion of this march, Carmichael started to use a previously unmentioned term: “Black Power”.  This signaled the beginning of a different type of approach from King’s Gandhi-inspired civil disobedience through non-violent techniques (for example, lunch counter sit-ins).  Carmichael’s message, which he deliberately made in King’s presence, was closer to what Malcolm X had been preaching in New York, and would lead to the creation of the Black Panthers in the San Francisco/Oakland area.  King was placed on the spot by Carmichael’s provocation.  He replied that, while he supported Carmichael, he did not endorse the connotations of the message. The film depicts this colloquy with the two figures standing next to each other.  Carmichael then responds by saying that he is not as committed to non-violence as Dr. King is.

    After this point is addressed, the film takes up another pressure point on the civil rights leader.  In a taped phone call between Mayor Richard Daley and President Johnson, Daley tells the president that he knows that King is not with him on the war in Vietnam.  Daley knows this since King has now turned his civil rights demonstrations north into Daley’s city of Chicago.  This was in fact in response to an issue that Bobby Kennedy had been trying to raise awareness of for years prior to this move. As Kennedy had said at the time: What good does it do for an African-American to be able to sit at a lunch counter if he doesn’t have the money to pay for the lunch?  So King and SCLC coordinator James Bevel decided to target the city of Chicago to address a more insidious pattern of racism in the north.

    To say that King was not welcome in the north understates the antipathy that awaited him in the Windy City. During his marches he was greeted with rock throwing, loud racial slurs like “Niggers go home!”, and ugly signs. For instance, one placard said, “We Want Wallace”, meaning Alabama governor George Wallace. Another, in direct opposition to Carmichael, said “White Power”.  It got so bad that King needed police protection.  Further, Daley proved a formidable counter-puncher. Understanding his past successes, he was determined not to put King in jail. And when he heard the police had placed some of his demonstrators behind bars, he immediately ordered their release.

    As Young comments, he was not so sure that King should have taken this project on at the time.  Chicago was a huge city with a very entrenched power structure.  He did not think the SCLC had the money or manpower to manage such a crusade.  King did get an agreement after several months, concerning fair housing and integration of the city work force.  Whether or not the city abided by it afterwards has been a point of controversy among scholars and writers ever since.

    Around this time, in late 1966, King decided to meet with Carmichael to discuss precisely what he meant by the phrase “Black Power”.  Carmichael and another SNCC representative, Cleveland Sellers, countered King by asking him when he was going to come out against the war in Vietnam.  Carmichael memorably said, “No Vietnamese ever called me a Nigger.”  This was a risky step. As Johnson domestic aide Joe Califano observes, LBJ thought he had some compromising information on King, which the FBI had given him.  This referenced certain sexual activities by the civil rights leader and also presumed communist influences in his camp.  But by this time, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was in full bloom.  Consequently, J. Edgar Hoover was now using spies in King’s camp and also arranging counter-intelligence programs against these kinds of groups.

    But as the film shows, it was actually Coretta King who began to push her husband into opposing the war.  She was actually speaking out against it and demonstrating before he was.  King therefore decided to make his famous attack on Johnson’s war policy at Riverside Church in April of 1967.

    Johnson, Hoover and the MSM did not appreciate King’s stand. Newspapers openly criticized him by saying that he had now “Crossed over the Line” or he had “Bordered on Treason”, claiming this now compromised his position as a civil rights leader.  Hoover used this to play on Johnson’s feelings about King.  But in addition to these, there were people inside the civil rights movement—like Roy Wilkins—who also questioned the open attack on the White House. The break with Johnson also hurt the finances of the SCLC.  The man who had been praised for his stand on civil rights was now being attacked and vilified for his opposition to the war.

    As King had warned Johnson, the slum areas in northern cities were piles of tinder waiting to explode.  They did so in the summer of 1967. At that time, over twenty cities erupted in riots.  Some of them, for instance Newark and Detroit, were among the most deadly in American history.  The final toll was over 100 people dead.  Oddly, the film does not discuss the appointment of the Kerner Commission by Johnson. Otto Kerner was the governor of Illinois. The White House requested he form a committee to study the causes of the riots and propose solutions.  Kerner appointed a distinguished panel consisting of people like Wilkins, Mayor John Lindsay of New York, and Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma. Their report is one of the most honest and searing documents ever written on racial tensions in America at the time.  It sold over two million copies.  Its most famous line was, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”  Kerner focused on poor housing and education in the slum areas, but he also pointed criticism at the media for not devoting time or empathy to these problems.

    The important thing about this presidential report was this: Johnson ignored it.  He did not even do the customary photo opportunity with the committee once the report was done. Johnson’s reaction was defined by two parameters.  First, Hoover’s talking in his ear and supplying him dirt had estranged him from King.  And now this report concurred with what King had told him after Watts.  Secondly, what Kerner was proposing was going to be expensive.  Johnson’s escalation of the war had already caused budget deficits, which he was trying to disguise with accounting tricks and borrowing from the Social Security fund.   As many have commented, the goals of Johnson’s Great Society were run aground by the war in Vietnam.

    After Johnson’s failure to act, King decided to take Bobby Kennedy’s advice about a national demonstration against poverty. RFK had told NAACP attorney Marian Edelman that a good idea would be to have a mass demonstration in Washington as had been done with the March on Washington in 1963.  Not everyone liked the idea, but King did.  King appeared on the Tonight  Show in February of 1968.  The guest host was his friend Harry Belafonte.  He talked about this problem of poverty and how it had actually gotten worse in the last four years.  He also addressed fears of his mortality by saying it was not how long a person lived but what he did with that time—a message he would more or less repeat the night before his assassination in Memphis.

    The SCLC began to design the Poor People’s March as a coalition.  It would not include just African Americans, but also Mexican Americans, Native Americans and poor whites.  King now began to talk about a coalition of the poor and to bring back ideas from FDR’s New Deal program and the proposals of Senator Huey Long—specifically, a declaration of economic rights and a guaranteed annual income.  As King said at the time, when wealthy people or corporations get these things, it’s called a subsidy; when poor people get them, it’s called a dole.

    The film now transitions to 1968 and the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.  King was reluctant to go to Memphis, but he did.  As the film notes, King’s first appearance there ended in a riot and looting and some bad publicity from city leaders.  Because of this black eye to the SCLC, King decided he had to return. As Andrew Young comments, the Riverside Church in New York, a huge and wealthy operation, now offered him a temporary pastorship, which King turned down.  The program then shows King’s famous speech on April 3rd, the night before his assassination.

    We then cut to news stories about the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel and the national wave of assassination riots that broke out afterward. Regarding the Martin Luther King assassination, Carmichael urged it on by saying: “White America killed Dr. King. We declare war on America!”  The film underplays Bobby Kennedy’s role in the Atlanta funeral that followed.  Kennedy called Coretta King after the murder, arranged to have King’s body transferred to Atlanta, and then booked dozens of rooms for incoming dignitaries to attend. We watch a film of Jackie Kennedy walking up to the church, and there is a touching black and white picture of both widows facing each other in black dresses. Wisely, Kunhardt holds on to that phofor a few seconds to expand their loss into our loss.

    The film ends with a quite pithy remark by Young.  He says, “We were not able to stay together without him.  And the movement began to fragment.”  That comment, following the picture of Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King, sums up the loss of what should have been a great decade.

    This was the best of the three documentaries and it will be available on DVD soon.

  • 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.