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  • The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein

    The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein

    Part 1: “Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein”

    Part 3: “Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?” (Probe vol 7 no 1, 1999)

    epstein leader 2On his web site, Edward Epstein preserved his article published in The Atlantic in 1993 on Jim Garrison. To my knowledge, that is the only place one can find it since (thankfully) it does not appear to be available at The Atlantic web site. A few months earlier, in late 1992, he had just published a hit piece on Garrison in the ever-accommodating New Yorker. This was written on the occasion of Garrison’s death. Epstein now used the excuse that Oliver Stone was coming out with a double VHS box set of his film JFK to justify a second hatchet job. This allowed him to widen his focus a bit. Now he could include both Stone and his consultant Fletcher Prouty in his machine-gun strike.

    And make no mistake. That is what these two pieces are, out and out drive-bys. One definition of a hatchet job is that the author ignores the record, distorts the record, or even worse, deliberately misrepresents it. All done in order to disguise what is an act, not of reportage, but of propaganda. As we shall see, there is no evidence that Epstein ever once consulted the original records of Jim Garrison’s investigation for either of these two articles.. These were available to him from three sources at that time. First, there was a collection of them at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) in Washington DC. Second, co-screenwriter of the film JFK Zachary Sklar had many of them. Third, Jim Garrison had what was probably the largest collection of them at his home. I never heard of any attempt by Epstein to consult these records for either of his two articles.

    Because of that, this allows him to say, in the second paragraph of his 1993 Atlantic piece, that the idea that Clay Shaw had participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy was based on nothing but the testimony of Perry Russo. So right out of the gate, Epstein commits a faux pas. For Garrison did not make Shaw a person of interest because of Russo. The way that Garrison came to be interested in Shaw was through the testimony of lawyer Dean Andrews in the Warren Commission volumes. There, Andrews said that he had been called by a person named Clay Bertrand within 24 hours of the assassination. Bertrand wanted him to go to Dallas and volunteer to defend Lee Harvey Oswald. That call was corroborated by at least four sources, including Andrews’ secretary and his investigator. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 51) When Garrison talked to Andrews, he refused to reveal who Bertrand was. Just as he had previously refused to reveal the man’s true name to Mark Lane, and he would later refuse to do so with Anthony Summers. He claimed he would be in physical danger if he did reveal the name. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 181)

    Consequently, Garrison sent out his investigators to find out who Bertrand was. It turned out to be Shaw. Again, there are plentiful references to this in Garrison’s files, which Epstein did not survey. (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88) But beyond that, even the FBI knew that Shaw was Bertrand. And they knew this as far back as 1963, because his name had come up in their original investigation. (Davy, p. 192) Since he is either unaware of, or wants to ignore, this information, Epstein can 1.) Deny this evidence and 2.) Attribute the whole Shaw/Bertrand case to Russo.

    II

    Before we begin to address Epstein’s over-the-top attack on Russo, let us lay down some facts, which Epstein does not do. Without these facts, there is no baseline to form any kind of informed discussion. And informed discussion is what Epstein wishes to avoid.

    Garrison’s assistant Andrew Sciambra first interviewed Russo in Baton Rouge on February 25, 1967. Russo stated that he had attended a gathering at David Ferrie’s apartment in September of 1963. During this gathering, the talk turned to an assassination plot to kill President Kennedy. Some anti-Castro Cubans were on hand as well as Ferrie, a man Russo called Clem Bertrand, and a man he called Leon Oswald. Sciambra gave Russo photos to identify, and he picked out photos of Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald. Sciambra took notes on a legal pad and marked the photos the witness had identified. He concluded by telling Russo he should come down to New Orleans for further discussion.

    In the office on Monday, Sciambra began transcribing his notes. He was in the process of doing this when Russo arrived. Garrison wanted to test his testimony, so he was taken to Mercy Hospital and given Sodium Pentothal (truth serum) and later placed under hypnosis by Dr. Nicolas Chetta. Russo told the same story to Chetta as he did to Sciambra in Baton Rouge. (Davy, p. 121) Chetta told Garrison assistant Alvin Oser that there was no chance one could lie under truth serum; what Russo said had to have happened. (Joe Biles, In History’s Shadow, p. 38) Russo’s story was partly corroborated by his friend Niles Peterson, who had left the gathering early but recalled the presence there of a Leon Oswald. On February 28, Sciambra drove Russo by Shaw’s apartment, where Russo identified Shaw from a parked car. Finally, posing as an insurance salesman, he greeted Shaw at his door. This finalized the identification.

    Sciambra then drafted his first completed memo based on the Chetta sessions. In fact, it is dated February 28, the day after the truth serum was administered. Later on he finished a second memo. This related the things outside the scope of that gathering at Ferrie’s, and was the actual second memo Sciambra composed. (See Biles, p. 44) When Lou Ivon typed up a search warrant for Shaw’s apartment, he referred to what Sciambra told him about the conversation he had with Russo in Baton Rouge, which was reaffirmed by the truth serum session. This information is right in the warrant, before Sciambra even typed up his second memo. Ivon could only have gotten the information from Sciambra. And Sciambra could only have gotten it from Russo. (ibid)

    What Epstein does to confuse matters is to borrow the same scheme that the late James Phelan used back in 1967. After reporter Phelan met with the DA in Las Vegas, Garrison unwisely let him copy the memos. The DA was obviously unaware that Phelan had been a conduit for the Saturday Evening Post to write government-sanctioned stories. And, in fact, Phelan had three meetings with the FBI about Jim Garrison, urging them to intercede with the DA. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 245) Phelan took his copies of the memos and said that, since one mentioned the gathering at Ferrie’s and one did not, this meant that the one that did not came first, and the one that did came second. Therefore all the information about an assassination discussion was induced into Russo by hypnosis. This is rendered false by both the date on the first memo and by Ivon’s search warrant.

    But let us go further with Phelan. Phelan went to visit Russo in Baton Rouge and he took photographer Matt Herron with him. He later said that on this occasion, Russo told Herron and himself that he never mentioned the assassination discussion in Baton Rouge, only in New Orleans. Phelan later told author James Kirkwood that Herron would back him up on this point. When this writer contacted Mr. Herron, this was exposed as a lie. Herron told me that Russo strongly stated that he first mentioned the gathering in Baton Rouge. (ibid, p. 246) Even further, Phelan said he had taped this conversation with Russo. Under cross-examination at the Shaw trial, Phelan admitted this was false also. (Biles, p. 46)

    But there was still another fallback position that Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers then took. They said that once you looked at the two sessions done by Chetta with Russo, the reader could see that Russo was prompted by Chetta to recall Bertrand. It turned out that this was another deliberate misrepresentation. Only when the second session is placed first and the first session placed second is that the case. But in Garrison’s files they are properly labeled as A and B. When they are read in this order, it is plainly seen that Russo recalls Bertrand’s name without any prompting. (DiEugenio, p. 247)

    Now, at the time Epstein wrote this article, in 1993, he could have discovered all this information on his own. He could have spoken to Matt Herron, Andrew Sciambra, and Lou Ivon. If he wanted written evidence, he could have asked Garrison for the memos and the search warrant. Apparently, he did not think that was important. And he also either believed Phelan, or thought that Phelan’s scheme could not be exposed. Well, it was exposed. This proves that 1.) Epstein did not do on the ground research for his article, and 2.) That he had an agenda from the moment he started writing it.

    But further revealing his shabby research methods, Epstein does not even seem to understand that Russo was not supposed to be Garrison’s lead witness. The lead witness was supposed to be a man named Clyde Johnson. Johnson was a preacher turned reactionary politician who told Garrison he had met with Shaw, Leon Oswald, Jack Ruby and a Cuban in a Baton Rouge hotel in 1963. Shaw gave him money for his campaign, two thousand dollars, the equivalent of about $17,000 today. When he went to the bathroom, he heard them talking about “getting someone”, and he became apprehensive. But it turned out they were talking about Kennedy, and using Johnson’s attacks on him to lure him to the south. Johnson had a witness who partly collaborated his story about Shaw’s support. He also had a contemporaneous address book, in which he had made notes about Shaw and Ruby. Johnson did not testify at Shaw’s trial even though Garrison had hid him outside of town. His office was so infiltrated and wired for sound that Johnson’s location was discovered. During the trial he was beaten to a bloody pulp. He was hospitalized and could not testify. (Davy, pp. 72-73) Again, Epstein could have found out about Johnson if he had asked Garrison for documents. He apparently did not think it was important.

    III

    Building on his foundation of sand, Epstein now decides to jump to a scene from the film JFK. This is a scene that focuses on the man who was Garrison’s chief suspect. The film shows us David Ferrie in a panic after Garrison’s investigation had been prematurely exposed in the local press. He calls Lou Ivon at Garrison’s office and says that this is a fatal development for him. Investigator Ivon, Garrison and a third assistant then go to visit him at a hotel room that Ivon has secured for Ferrie. Now, to be fair, let us grant the screenwriters a degree of dramatic license. In reality only Ivon was there (Davy, p. 66), since he was the one person in Garrison’s office that Ferrie trusted. But in terms of the film narrative, one had to have Garrison there since he is the central character. And contrary to what Epstein said at a debate in New York sponsored by The Nation magazine, Garrison did write about this incident in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. (see pp. 138-39) Epstein can scream until the cows come home, but there is very little in this scene that stretches the facts about Ferrie. Let us do something that none of Stone’s critics have done. Let us break it down.

    Ferrie first says he worked for the CIA. This fact was reported to Anthony Summers by CIA officer Victor Marchetti for his book Conspiracy. Ferrie also mentioned it to at least one of his friends. (see Summers, p. 300; also Davy, p. 28) Ferrie then says that Shaw had a high clearance, and this is also true. Shaw had a clearance for the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division codenamed QK/ENCHANT. This was the same clearance Howard Hunt had. (Davy, pp. 195-96) Ferrie then adds that both the Cuban exiles and Oswald were also associated with the CIA. There is no doubt that Sergio Arcacha Smith, Ferrie’s closest Cuban friend, was a CIA operative. He had been sanctioned as such by Howard Hunt for the local leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This was a sort of a government in exile for Cuba that the CIA set up before the Bay of Pigs invasion. (ibid, p. 9) Eladio Del Valle, another Cuban exile, paid Ferrie for flights into Cuba. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 119)

    Ferrie then says that the CIA and Mob had been working together against Castro for years. This is such a commonplace, even back then, that it should not even be noted. But Ferrie was in a good position to know about it since he had a sideline of working for an attorney who represented Carlos Marcello. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 135) And his aforementioned paymaster for flights into Cuba, Eladio del Valle, had ties to Santo Trafficante, who actually was part of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. (Summers, pp. 319, 491)

    “I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that.” ~Jim Garrison

    Concerning Oswald and the CIA, the odds are high that, as Garrison wrote, he was acting as a CIA agent provocateur, especially in light of the revelations in John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA. But even in 1993, with all that was known about Oswald being at Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street through books by Garrison, Philip Melanson, and Anthony Summers, plus Oswald’s visit to the Clinton/Jackson area with Shaw and Ferrie, most objective people would have had to grant this. What else would a “communist” be doing hanging out with so many right-wingers?

    When Ferrie mentions that he knows things about Ruby, there is also evidence for that. This comes from Clyde Johnson, as mentioned above, and also Ferrie associates William Morris and Thomas Beckham. (See Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 79, 124) As far as Ferrie saying that Ruby ran guns to Castro in the early days, there were records that Ruby did do that prior to the Cuban revolution. This was even written about by reporter Earl Golz in the Dallas Morning News. (See August 18, 1978; also John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 177) What this all exposes is not Stone’s flawed writing, but Epstein’s non-existent research.

    We now come to the exchange that drove Epstein up the wall. Garrison asks Ferrie, “Who killed the president?” It is clear that he does not mean that Ferrie was in on it. It is simply an exploratory query. Ferrie says he does not know. He says no one knows, not even the assassins. Because these kinds of things are all wrapped up in a layered cover operation. But the odd thing is this. If Epstein had looked, there was evidence in Garrison’s files that Ferrie at least planned an assassination attempt.

    Most us know from Garrison’s Playboy interview that Ferrie had a rather rare preoccupation. He measured trajectory angles and distances of shells ejecting out of rifles. (DiEugenio, p. 215) One would not need to do that for guerilla fighting or firefights during Operation Mongoose—which Ferrie was a part of. (Davy, p. 28) But you might need it for a covert operation that included assassination.

    Jim Garrison had planted a mole on Ferrie. Actually, two of them. One was named Max Gonzalez and one was Jimmy Johnson. Johnson said that he had gone through some of Ferrie’s documents and come across a folder marked “Files 1963”. In that folder he found a set of papers that looked like a diagram for an assassination plot against Fidel Castro. From the markings on the paper, the plot seemed to have to do with killing Castro from a plane. (DiEugenio, p. 215)

    But a different witness found a different diagram in Ferrie’s desk in attorney G. Wray Gill’s office. Clara Gay was a Gill client who knew Ferrie. After the assassination, she called Gill’s office: the word was that Garrison had questioned Ferrie about the Kennedy case. She heard what sounded like some panicky voices in the background. So she went over to Gill’s office. Walking over to Ferrie’s desk she saw what appeared to be a diagram of Dealey Plaza: it depicted a car from the perspective of a high angle with tall buildings around it. When Clara tried to pick it up, the secretary came over and pulled it back. But during the struggle, Clara noticed the words “Elm Street” written on the diagram. (Ibid, p. 216)

    Epstein’s idea that Ferrie would somehow be alien to crafting assassination plots is not backed up by the evidence. And clearly, Garrison made a mistake by not listening to Ivon and having Ferrie testify before a grand jury after this tense discussion with him. (Garrison, pp. 139-40)

    Once the record is referred to, we can conclude that there really is little or nothing in this scene that cannot be justified by information that the DA had about David Ferrie. Consequently, when the facts are adduced, Epstein’s howls about violations of the record are the equivalent of a stray dog barking in the night. What makes it worse is that there is really no excuse for his journalistic irresponsibility. Because when Stone and co-scenarist Zach Sklar released the volume The Book of the Film in 1992, it included the script’s research notes. On page 88, the text reads that although Garrison’s book refers to this episode in passing, the exchange is actually based on interviews with investigator Lou Ivon. This reviewer called Ivon back in 1993. When Garrison’s investigator was asked if a man named Ed Epstein ever got in contact with him about the Kennedy case, he replied that, back in 1968, yes. I asked him, what about more recently, since Stone’s movie came out? Ivon replied, no, not recently. Epstein thought it was unimportant to consult the primary source.

    IV

    Epstein couples his howls over this scene with similar complaints about one that shortly follows. After a scene showing Garrison discovering that his office has been wired for sound—which it was—Ivon gets a phone call. (For the electronic surveillance see DiEugenio, p. 232, and pp. 264-65) He is alerted that Ferrie has been found dead. Garrison and some of his assistants rush over to his apartment. As Garrison goes through the place, he discovers an empty bottle of Proloid, which is used for low metabolism. As the photographs taken at the time reveal, there are many other empty pill bottles around. When Garrison had the Proloid drug checked out, his expert said that excessive use of it in someone like Ferrie, who had hypertension at the time, could cause death without a trace. (DiEugenio, p. 225)

    What makes this even more suggestive is that two forensic pathologists reviewed the autopsy photos in advance of the film’s release. They both noted contusions on the inside of Ferrie’s mouth. Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Frank Minyard said these could be indicative of someone inserting some kind of tube with the pills in solution down Ferrie’s throat. In fact, one of the cuts is on the inside of the lower lip, where the tube may have been inserted. (DiEugenio, p. 226; Sklar and Stone, p. 102)

    There were other oddities about the scene. According to one of the local newspapers, Ferrie’s body was first found by someone who said he did not know Ferrie. He told the police he just happened to wander in, even though Ferrie lived on the second floor. (New Orleans Times Picayune 2/22/67) Ferrie also left two typed, unsigned suicide notes. (Flammonde, on pp. 34-36, features their text) Also, there was the nearly concurrent death of Eladio Del Valle, who was shot and hacked to death within the same 24-hour period. Unknowingly, Garrison had sent CIA infiltrator Bernardo De Torres to find Del Valle in Miami. The note Garrison got back about his death read as follows: “He was shot in the chest and it appears ‘gangland style’ and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES apartment.” (DiEugenio, p. 227)

    Then there was the time of death. First the coroner said that Ferrie had died late in the evening of the previous day. But then reporter George Lardner came forward and stated that he had been with Ferrie until four AM on the day his body was discovered, which was February 22, 1967. (Davy, p. 66) Because of this, the coroner now revised his estimated time of death—by over four hours. This is a real stretch. Most coroners will say that expanding the estimated time of death by four hours is unusual.

    Then there were the observations of Dr. Martin Palmer, Ferrie’s physician. He criticized the official verdict of a ruptured blood vessel, or beury aneurysm, as the cause of death. Palmer called the autopsy “slipshod”. He went on to say it was incomplete since they did not open the brain case. Further, there was no iodine test done, and Ferrie’s blood samples were not kept. (Mellen, pp. 106-07)

    So why did Coroner Chetta rule as he did, that the cause of death was a natural one, by beury aneurysm? As Minyard told this reviewer, no one could recall a case in which the deceased left a suicide note—in this case two of them—and then died of a seemingly natural cause. (DiEugenio, p. 226) Chetta apparently wanted to play it safe in the face of the tremendous publicity Ferrie’s death had caused. Which included a phone call to him from Robert Kennedy. (Mellen, p. 107))

    What Stone and Sklar do in this scene is to contrast Garrison and his staff going through Ferrie’s apartment while picking up some of the odd artifacts, like the two suicide notes, or the empty pill bottles. Stone then intercuts shots of what Garrison was thinking may have happened: some Cuban exiles forcing the drugs down Ferrie’s mouth. The first time we see this, Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is staring in a mirror; the second time, the coroner literally asks him what he is thinking. These brief cutaways—which include a depiction of the death of Del Valle—are shot in high contrast black and white, as opposed to the actual film, which is in color. In the parlance of film grammar, these are called subjective scenes, since they depict what a character in the film is thinking. Given all the evidence I have presented here, they are completely justified. Epstein ignores it all.

    V

    Then there are Epstein’s transgressions about the character of Willie O’Keefe, played by Kevin Bacon. Epstein calls O’Keefe a fictional character. This is not accurate. He is a composite character. That is, the screenwriters collapsed certain real life characters into one. This is not an uncommon practice, and most film critics accept it as a way of getting information across while saving time. Again, it is very hard to believe that Epstein is not aware of this, because this information is clearly conveyed in The Book of the Film. This includes the shooting script plus the research notes. It was published in 1992, many months before Epstein’s essay appeared. On page 66 of that book, scenarists Stone and Zach Sklar reveal that O’Keefe is made up of four people: David Logan, Perry Russo, Ray Broshears, and William Morris. Logan was interviewed by assistant DA Jim Alcock. Logan is the source for the dinner at Shaw’s luxurious apartment where a homosexual party follows, which includes Ferrie. Logan’s testimony about Shaw’s sex habits was quite explicit and, if anything, is understated in the film. (Mellen, p. 123) William Morris was in prison when Garrison’s assistant DA found him and talked to him. This is why the first time we see O’Keefe he is in jail. Like Logan, he also knew Shaw as Bertrand. Shaw used him for sexual purposes and he was procured for Shaw by a man who appears to have been Shaw’s pimp, Eugene Davis. (ibid, p. 124) Broshears figures in Garrison’s book and also in the work of author Dick Russell. Except he was closer to Ferrie personally and had only been introduced to Shaw. Broshears said that Ferrie had confided in him what he knew about the JFK assassination. Namely, that he had been marginally involved, was supposed to be an escape pilot and that is what he was doing in Houston on the day of the assassination. (Garrison, pp. 120-21) Somehow we are supposed to believe that Epstein was not aware of any of this.

    Epstein ends his hysterical screed with a multiple-page rant against the Mr. X character in the film. This is the former military man who meets with Garrison in Washington. Mr. X, who was originally to be performed by Marlon Brando, is played by Donald Sutherland. This mysterious character is based upon Fletcher Prouty, who was one of the technical advisors on the film. Both Stone and Sklar understood that Prouty did not actually meet with Garrison until after the Shaw trial. But they wanted to convey information to the audience about the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination. And in The Book of the Film, the scenarists actually quote Garrison on this point:

    I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that. (p. 106)

    This is why Prouty is portrayed in the film. Now, in the film, the Mr. X character details his past history in the military. Prouty was the military support officer for intelligence operations and he interfaced with the CIA when they needed arms and munitions they did not have in their supply depots. Therefore he had knowledge of certain of these secret operations, which are briefly described in the film. Since he served until the end of 1963, he had inside knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, and Kennedy’s withdrawal plan for Vietnam. And these are the main points he is meant to discuss.

    Col. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001)

    Incredibly, Epstein pretty much ignores these. Which is kind of shocking, since the climax of the scene is X/Prouty’s participation in Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam in the fall of 1963. Epstein deals with this keystone concept in exactly one sentence. And even that is done tangentially. With Epstein, there is no reference to NSAM 263, the Taylor/McNamara report which was the basis for that Vietnam withdrawal memo, nor does he refer to Lyndon Johnson’s NSAM 273, which, after Kennedy’s death, partly reversed that earlier action memorandum. Nor is there any reference to how the latter memorandum opened the door to direct American involvement in Vietnam, something that Kennedy consciously resisted. (See John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 445-49) To ignore all of this is simply inexplicable.

    As noted in the film, Prouty was directly involved with the Vietnam plans, along with his friend and colleague, Marine officer Victor Krulak. They were so intimately involved that they understood that the whole McNamara/Taylor report was not written in Saigon, which is where Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor had been sent in the fall of 1963. It was written in Washington by Krulak and Prouty, under the supervision of Robert Kennedy, upon the orders of the president. (p. 401) President Kennedy was not leaving anything to chance about his withdrawal plan. In October of 1963, he was taking control of it himself, even if he had to write it and ramrod it through some reluctant advisors. That ghost-written report, secretly written by Kennedy, would be the basis for NSAM 263. And that memo would begin a withdrawal of American troops that December, to be completed in 1965. This information is in John Newman’s landmark book on the subject, JFK and Vietnam. Again, since that book was published in 1992, Epstein could have found it in those pages. Or he could have called Victor Krulak, who was alive at that time. Apparently, Epstein had no intention of doing either. Because that would have meant the film was correct and Prouty’s information was accurate: Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam, as Garrison had figured out decades previously.

    Since he cannot launch a frontal assault, Epstein decides to discredit the information by doing a smear of Prouty. To call it a smear is actually being gentle. Prouty’s career is pretty much well described in more than one source. (Click here) He was a well-rounded, intelligent, candid, curious man. He dealt in banking, military affairs, and education. He wrote both articles and books about his past military experience. And he served as a consultant to several media projects, including JFK. For Epstein to deny some of these things is silly.
    Documents pertaining to Colonel Prouty’s service record

    But Epstein has to contest what Mr. X says about the Secret Service regulations in place at that time. Or else, what the film implies—that a huge Secret Service failure took place in Dallas—would be accurate. Which, as we know today, is the case. So Epstein says that, contrary to what Mr. X says, the Secret Service manual did not demand that all windows on the motorcade route be sealed, or that teams should monitor rooftops, or there should be a constant speed during motorcades. No one knows more about this aspect than author Vince Palamara. He has written two books on the subject and has a third coming out soon. In an email communication to this reviewer, Vince had the following to say about these topics. After consulting with two top-level Secret Service officers, one who authored the manual, he wrote: windows along a motorcade route were to be, at the least, monitored. Building rooftops were to be guarded. And the motorcade route was to be regulated at a top speed of 35 miles per hour. (Palamara email of April 6, 2017) Obviously, these strictures were all disobeyed in Dallas.

    Contrary to what Epstein writes, Len Osanic—who knew Prouty for over ten years—related to me that Prouty was not an editorial advisor to the Church of Scientology. They asked him to look at some documents about L. Ron Hubbard. He did and rendered his opinion. There was discussion of a book, but that never materialized. His association with the Liberty Lobby was that they republished his book The Secret Team. He delivered one of his standard addresses at a seminar of theirs, concerning the Kennedy case and the secret team. But Osanic does not recognize the quotes Epstein attributes to Prouty in his article. By including them, Epstein can now inject the rather standard smear of anti-Semitism. (For Prouty’s actual statements concerning the Arabs, Israelis and the price of oil, see chapter 3 of Understanding Special Operations; after clicking here, scroll down to “The Changing Nature of Warfare: From a Military to an Economic Basis”.) Further, contrary to what Epstein implies, Prouty’s meeting with General Edward Lansdale about sending him to the South Pole was not worked out months or even weeks in advance. As depicted in the film, it was a November, 1963 surprise to him. (Phone communication with Osanic, April 7, 2017) Probably no one alive knows more about Prouty than Osanic, and I refer anyone who is interested in the man to his web site, prouty.org.

    Epstein concludes his wild rant against Prouty by saying that the colonel thought that Leonard Lewin’s 1967 book Report from Iron Mountain was a work of non-fiction. This is supposed to show that Stone should never have trusted Prouty. He couldn’t figure out fiction from non-fction. But what it demonstrates is how abstract the reality of Epstein’s warped world is. For if one goes to Prouty’s web site, as posthumously managed by Osanic, one can click on the “more articles” tab and scroll down to the bottom. There you will see a link to a 1972 NY Times report of Lewin saying that the book is not a work of non-fiction. It is a satiric novel. Osanic told me that when he was setting up the site, Prouty insisted on this link. If one goes to the Black Op Radio site, and clicks Archived Shows, and scrolls down to Program 825, one will be able to listen to an interview Prouty did with Sean Mackenzie. If one goes to the 49:00 mark, one will hear a discussion of Lewin’s book. Prouty, no less than four times, calls it a novel. But he appreciated the satiric edge of the novel, since many people he knew in the Pentagon talked as Lewin depicted: we cannot abandon the warfare state.

    Anyone familiar with propaganda techniques can see what Epstein has done. To distract from the solid information about Vietnam in the film JFK, he has abstracted certain aspects from Prouty’s life to present them under the worst possible light. That The Atlantic printed this hatchet job says a lot about their editorial standards.

    But there is a larger issue here. And it relates not to just how bad the media is in America, but also to certain elements of the JFK critical community. Jim Garrison had his secret JFK murder probe exposed by the local media in New Orleans. From there on in, it was crippled, because the larger media decided to zero in on it, just as they would later target Richard Sprague when he took command of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Reporter/agents like Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth and Walter Sheridan created a barrage of smears and phony stories that the MSM ran with, and much of the public swallowed. This now became the paradigm about the Garrison inquiry—even in the research community! There, the largest proponents of this paradigm were Peter Scott, Paul Hoch, and Josiah Thompson. It was not until the ARRB collected and declassified Garrison’s files that we had an opportunity to look at what his real evidence was. That release, combined with memoranda from other sources, has allowed a different paradigm to now circulate. As I have written elsewhere, we will never really know the complete extent of Garrison’s files, because so many of them were lost, stolen or incinerated by his successor, the disastrous Harry Connick. But what did survive reduces Epstein’s weird world to rubble.

  • In Honor of Martin Luther King Day, January 16, 2017

    In Honor of Martin Luther King Day, January 16, 2017

    He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.  He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

    ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

    This year, the recurrence of the national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., is particularly poignant, given the climate of the times, the recent election and the upcoming inauguration.   We are reminded in this regard of the Poor People’s March on Washington which Dr. King was helping to organize when he was downed by an assassin’s bullet.   This year also marks the 50th anniversary of his Riverside Church speech in which he publicly denounced the war in Vietnam.

    In tribute to Dr. King, we thought it appropriate to recall from the Probe archives three of the best pieces which appeared in that magazine on the subject of his assassination.

    The first, an early piece from 1997 by Lisa Pease, reports on Dexter King’s meeting with James Earl Ray, which led eventually to the civil trial in Memphis in which the jury confirmed the latter’s innocence in the April 4, 1968 shooting.

    Lisa Pease, “Martin Luther King’s Son Says: James Earl Ray Didn’t Kill MLK!”

    The second is a transcript by Dick Russell of Judge Brown’s remarks made on the 30th anniversary of the assassination (April 3, 1998) at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis (of note is his expert opinion concerning the alleged murder weapon).

    Dick Russell, “Judge Brown Slams Memphis Over the King Case”

    Finally, Jim Douglass’ excellent summary of what happened in the much covered up and distorted civil trial in Memphis in 1999 continues to be one of the best things written on it.  Thanks to him, Probe was the only media outlet where readers could find the truth at the time.

    James W. Douglass, “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis”

    Given its critical importance, we also link here to the Riverside Church speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”, delivered exactly one year to the day before King was murdered.  This speech is largely ignored by the MSM and is not as well known to most Americans as is the “I’ve Got A Dream” speech from 1963; it deserves much wider attention.   We have also embedded the YouTube link at the bottom of the page so that one may follow along by listening to it.

     

    quotation1967

     Text of the Riverside Speech

  • In Honor of Martin Luther King Day, January 16, 2017

    In Honor of Martin Luther King Day, January 16, 2017

    He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.  He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

    ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

    This year, the recurrence of the national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., is particularly poignant, given the climate of the times, the recent election and the upcoming inauguration.   We are reminded in this regard of the Poor People’s March on Washington which Dr. King was helping to organize when he was downed by an assassin’s bullet.   This year also marks the 50th anniversary of his Riverside Church speech in which he publicly denounced the war in Vietnam.

    In tribute to Dr. King, we thought it appropriate to recall from the Probe archives three of the best pieces which appeared in that magazine on the subject of his assassination.

    The first, an early piece from 1997 by Lisa Pease, reports on Dexter King’s meeting with James Earl Ray, which led eventually to the civil trial in Memphis in which the jury confirmed the latter’s innocence in the April 4, 1968 shooting.

    Lisa Pease, “Martin Luther King’s Son Says: James Earl Ray Didn’t Kill MLK!”

    The second is a transcript by Dick Russell of Judge Brown’s remarks made on the 30th anniversary of the assassination (April 3, 1998) at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis (of note is his expert opinion concerning the alleged murder weapon).

    Dick Russell, “Judge Brown Slams Memphis Over the King Case”

    Finally, Jim Douglass’ excellent summary of what happened in the much covered up and distorted civil trial in Memphis in 1999 continues to be one of the best things written on it.  Thanks to him, Probe was the only media outlet where readers could find the truth at the time.

    James W. Douglass, “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis”

    Given its critical importance, we also link here to the Riverside Church speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”, delivered exactly one year to the day before King was murdered.  This speech is largely ignored by the MSM and is not as well known to most Americans as is the “I’ve Got A Dream” speech from 1963; it deserves much wider attention.   We have also embedded the YouTube link at the bottom of the page so that one may follow along by listening to it.

     

    quotation1967

     Text of the Riverside Speech

  • The 2016 Election, Historical Amnesia and Deep Politics

    By now, I think it is safe to say that everyone is kind of sick of discussing the 2016 election season. However nauseating it may have been, it proved to be unprecedented and monumental in various ways. Unprecedented, for example, in the fact that the two major party candidates were the most disliked in modern political history. The Republican candidate, now President-elect, who touts himself as a good businessman yet probably couldn’t tell you the difference between Keynes and Marx, has run perhaps the most hate-filled, deplorable campaign in recent memory. He often speaks of running the country like a business and harps on immigration as one of the major problems facing this country. Yet he never discusses substantive issues in detail (for example, the tens of millions of poverty- and hunger-stricken children living in the United States alone), and frequently demonstrates a poor grasp of them (such as the nuclear triad). In fact, he compulsively prevaricates and can’t seem to string two cohesive sentences together. Therefore it is hard in many cases to see where he actually stands. (For a revealing example of this, watch this clip.)

    The former Democratic candidate, on the other hand, bears a resemblance to an Eisenhower Republican. She is an intelligent and experienced politician full of contradictions. She was certainly preferable to Trump on domestic issues, e.g., women’s rights, race, and overall economic policy—not to mention global scientific matters like climate change. Nevertheless, there are serious problems with Hillary Clinton’s record. While Trump compulsively exaggerates and prevaricates, Hillary Clinton is not the epitome of honesty or integrity either. Up until 2013, she didn’t support same-sex marriage, yet got defensive and lied about the strength of her record on this issue. 1 Despite the fact that FBI Director James Comey publicly stated that classified material was indeed sent over Clinton’s unsecure server, she continued to dance around that subject as if she still didn’t know the public was privy to Comey’s statements.

    I could expand on the former Secretary of State’s flip-flopping and dishonesty over the years when it comes to problems like email security. And the disturbing fact that five people in her employ took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress in open session on the subject. However, in spite of their receiving a great deal of media attention, failings such as these are far from being her main flaw, and are, in this author’s opinion, a distraction from much deeper issues. As previously alluded to, Clinton’s foreign policy bears much more of a resemblance to the Eisenhower/Dulles brothers’ record than it does to what one might expect from someone who describes herself as taking a back seat to no-one when it comes to progressive values.

    Allen & John Foster Dulles
    Mossadegh & Shah Pahlavi

    For those who might not be aware, Allen Dulles (former Director of the CIA) and his brother John Foster Dulles (former Secretary of State) essentially orchestrated foreign policy under the Eisenhower administration. They were former partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, which was the preeminent law firm for Wall Street in the fifties. Allen and Foster married global corporate interests and covert military action into a well-oiled machine that promoted coups, assassinations and the blood-soaked destruction of democracies around the world. After Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh vowed to nationalize his country’s oil and petroleum resources, the Dulles brothers—who represented Rockefeller interests like Standard Oil— designed a phony indigenous overthrow that installed the corporately complicit Reza Shah Pahlavi into power in 1953. His brutal and repressive reign lasted until 1979, and his downfall provoked a fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran.

    Arbenz centennial (2013)
    Castillo Armas (with Nixon)

    In 1954, the Dulles brothers were at it again in Guatemala with operation PBSUCCESS. Jacobo Arbenz, the labor-friendly and democratically elected leader of the country, was going toe to toe with other corporate interests such as the Rockefeller/Sullivan & Cromwell associated company United Fruit. Arbenz was pushing for reform that sought to curtail the neo-colonial power of United Fruit by providing more in resources for the people of Guatemala. To the Dulles brothers and other Wall Street types with vested interests, this was unacceptable and was to be depicted as nothing short of communism. Arbenz was ousted from the country in what was largely a psychological warfare operation. He was replaced with a ruthless dictator by the name of Castillo Armas. The CIA provided the Armas regime with “death lists” of all Arbenz government members and sympathizers, and through the decades that followed, tens of thousands of people either were brutally killed or went missing at the hands of the dictatorship. 2 This constant state of upheaval, terror and violence did not subside until a United Nations resolution took hold in 1996.

    II

    Hillary Clinton, whether she knows it or not—and it’s a big stretch to say that she doesn’t—has advocated for the same interventionist foreign policy machine created by the likes of the Dulles brothers. There are at least three major areas of foreign affairs in which she resembles the Dulles brothers more than Trump does: 1.) The Iraq War 2.) American /Russian relations 3.) American actions against Syria. In fact, she actually made Trump look Kennedyesque in this regard, no mean feat.

    Clinton & Kissinger

    Nowadays, Clinton refers to her vote for the Iraq War as a “mistake”, but it certainly doesn’t seem like one considering the context of her other decisions as Secretary of State. Secretary Clinton’s friendships and consultations with Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright raised eyebrows in progressive circles. (Click here for the Clinton/Kissinger relationship.) Kissinger’s record as Secretary of State/National Security Adviser was most certainly one of the worst in U.S. history when it came to bloody, sociopathic, interventionist policy around the globe. During the disastrous and unnecessary crisis in Vietnam, Kissinger would nonchalantly give President Nixon death tallies in the thousands regarding Vietnamese citizens as if they were some Stalinesque statistic. Kissinger then agreed to expand that war in an unprecedented way into Cambodia and Laos—and then attempted to conceal these colossal air war actions. Of course, this was a further reversal and expansion of that war, which went even beyond what Lyndon Johnson had done in the wake of JFK’s death. President Kennedy’s stated policy was to withdraw from Indochina by 1965.

    Salvador Allende
    Augusto Pinochet

    Kissinger was also an instrumental force for the CIA coup in Chile, which ended in the death of Salvador Allende. About Allende, he allegedly stated he did not understand why the USA should stand by and let Chile go communist just because the citizenry were irresponsible enough to vote for it. (A Death in Washington, by Don Freed and Fred Landis, p. 8) The CIA overthrow of Allende led to years of brutal fascism under military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

     

    Clinton & Albright

    Madeleine Albright demonstrated similar hawkishness. (Click here for more on the Clinton/Albright relationship.) When asked about the refusal of the United States to lift UN Sanctions against Iraq and the resulting deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Albright stated that the deaths had been “worth it.”3 Predictably, Albright’s statement was met with stunned surprise. In May of 1998, Albright said something just as surprising. At that time, riots and demonstrations against the brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto were raging all over the archipelago; there were mock funerals being conducted, and his figure was being burned in effigy. Here was a prime opportunity for Albright and the Clinton administration to step forward and cut off relations with a despot who had looted his nation to the tune of billions of dollars. Or at the very least, join the chorus of newspapers and journals requesting he step down. What did Albright do? She asked for “more dialogue”. Even in the last two days of Suharto’s reign, when major cities were in flames, when Senators John Kerry and the late Paul Wellstone were asking the State Department to get on the right side of history, Albright chose to sit on the sidelines. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 5, pp. 3-5)

    Hajji Muhammad Suharto with Nixon, Ford & Kissinger, Reagan, Bush Sr. & Bill Clinton

    In this regard, let us recall that Suharto came to power as a result of a reversal of President Kennedy’s foreign policy. Achmed Sukarno had been backed by President Kennedy throughout his first term, all the way up to his assassination. And JFK was scheduled to visit Jakarta in 1964, before the election. As opposed to the silence of Albright and Bill Clinton, after Suharto resigned, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center wrote a letter to his successor asking for an investigation of the role of the military in suppressing the demonstrations that led to his fall. (ibid)

    During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton displayed an American imperiousness akin to the previous examples. Whether the former Secretary’s intentions in Libya truly aimed at ending what she called a “genocidal” regime under Gaddafi doesn’t really matter. She personally pushed for a NATO sanctioning of bombings in Libya. (This NATO assault in Africa followed the standard set by Albright in Kosovo in 1999, which was the first offensive attack NATO had ever performed.) The assault on Libya eventually led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. And that paved the way for a dangerous political power vacuum in which various elements, including Islamic extremists, are vying for power. It is safe to say that she left Libya in such a shambles that the USA had to reenter the civil war.

    Clinton’s decision to arm Syrian “rebels” against Bashar al Assad has also helped create bloody conflict with no end in sight. (Click here for why this may be a strategic mistake.) Bombings occur on a daily basis, especially in areas like Aleppo, leaving tens of thousands of innocents dead. As a candidate, she wanted to establish a “no-fly zone” over Syria—much as she did in Libya. This was a euphemism for controlling the air so that American proxies could control the ground. And as many suspect, and as alluded to in the above-linked story, that likely would have led to fundamentalist dominance in Syria, resembling the endgames in Iraq and Libya. But beyond that, this would probably have ended up provoking Russia, since Russia backs Assad. (Ibid, n. 3)

    “Pacific Rubiales:
    How to get rich in a
    country without regulations”

    Secretary Clinton’s policy regarding Latin America, another topic avoided by the media during the last election cycle, also demonstrates knowing or unknowing complicity with colonial/imperial interests. In Colombia, for instance, a petroleum company by the name of Pacific Rubiales, which has ties to the Clinton Foundation, has been at the center of a humanitarian controversy. The fact that Pacific Rubiales is connected with the Clinton Foundation isn’t the main issue, however. The real problem is the manner in which positions were changed on Clinton’s part in exchange for contributions. During the 2008 election season, then-Senator Clinton opposed the trade deal that allowed companies like Pacific Rubiales to violate labor laws in Colombia. After becoming Secretary of State, Clinton did an about-face. As summed up by David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Matthew Cunningham-Cook:

    At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record (despite having evidence to the contrary), her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation—supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself—Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact.” 4

    Clinton & Zelaya (2009)

    Despite recent denials, the former Secretary also played a role in the 2009 coup that ousted the democratically elected and progressive human rights administration of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. Recent editions of Clinton’s autobiography Hard Choices have been redacted to conceal the full extent of her role in the overthrow. Since the coup, and in opposition to the supposed goals of the overthrow itself, government-sponsored death squads have returned to the country, killing hundreds of citizens, including progressive activists like Berta Cáceres. Before her assassination, Cáceres berated Secretary Clinton for the role she played in overthrowing Zelaya, stating that it demonstrated the role of the United States in “meddling with our country,” and that “we warned it would be very dangerous and permit a barbarity.” 5

    In addition, the U.S.-backed coup in Honduras demonstrates the ongoing trend of outsourcing when it comes to intelligence work. A private group called Creative Associates International (CAI) was involved in “determining the social networks responsible for violence in the country’s largest city,” and subcontracted work to another private entity called Caerus. A man by the name of David Kilcullen, the head of Caerus, was previously involved in a $15 million US AID program that helped determine stability in Afghanistan. Kilcullen’s associate, William Upshur, also contributed to the Honduras plans. Upshur is now working for Booz Allen Hamilton, another private company involved in U.S. intelligence funding. (Ibid, n. 5)

    In his 2007 book, Tim Shorrock explained how substantial this kind of funding is. Shorrock stated that approximately 70 percent of the government’s 60-billion-dollar budget for intelligence is now subcontracted to private entities such as Booz Allen Hamilton or Science Applications International Corporation. 6

    Puerto Rico, a country in the midst of a serious debt crisis, is another key topic when it comes to Clinton’s questionable foreign policy decisions. Hedge funds own much of Puerto Rico’s massive debt, and a piece of legislation, which was put forward to deal with the issue, has rightly been labeled by Bernie Sanders as a form of colonialism. The bill in question would hand over control of financial dealings to a U.S. Government Board of Regulators, which would likely strip vital social spending in Puerto Rico. The bill already imposes a $4.25 minimum wage clause for citizens under 25. While Sanders opposed this bill, Clinton supported it. 7 This may serve as no surprise, being that the former Secretary of State receives hefty sums from Wall Street institutions like Goldman Sachs, who benefit from this form of vulture capitalism. I am not asserting that Hillary Clinton is solely responsible for these foreign policy decisions, but that she has been complicit with the American Deep State that commits or is heavily involved in these operations. (An explanation of the term “Deep State” will follow.) If the results of this 2016 election, and the success of both Trump and Sanders in the primaries, teach us something, it is that we have to move away as quickly as possible from policy compromised by corporate influence if we truly want to move forward. The American public has clearly had enough with establishment politics.

    III

    With the election of Donald Trump, the viability of establishment politics has been seriously breached, effectively ending the age of lesser-evil voting by the proletariat. Although Hillary Clinton was the preferred candidate regarding things like domestic social issues and scientific issues, it wasn’t enough to tame the massive insurgency of citizens who were so fed up with the status quo that they would rather see the country possibly go up in flames than vote for more of the same. Nor did it inspire an overlooked independent voter base to come out and make a substantial difference in the Democratic vote. In the aftermath of this potential disaster of an election, it is our duty, as a collective, to look deeply into some troubling fundamental issues. One of these has to do with the fact that racism, xenophobia and sexism are still very much alive in this country.

    I will not go so far as to label all Trump supporters as racist, homophobic or sexist. And throughout the primary/general election season, I have tried to remain receptive to their frustrations. However, I can most certainly tell you that, based on my experiences of this election season alone, these sentiments do indeed exist. During a delegate selection process for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I met and ended up having discussions with some Trump supporters. I asked them questions about why they thought Trump would make a good president, all the while disagreeing with them, but listening nonetheless. Two of the men I was speaking with were very civil, but one in particular seemed to be bursting at the seams with frustration over what he thought were the main problems with the country. While ignoring the facts I was presenting him regarding corporate welfare, this man went into relentless diatribes about why “Tacos”, his label for Hispanic people, were wreaking havoc. He exhibited no shame in expressing his distaste for other ethnicities either. During this dismaying exchange, I brought up the continued mistreatment of Native American peoples. In response, this man tried to question the severity of the atrocities committed against them and even went so far as to imply that my use of the term genocide in describing their plight was incorrect.

    Steve Mnuchin

    This may well serve to exemplify the hateful attitudes of mistrust and resentment that have been put under a black light during the course of this election. They’ve lingered dormant under the surface and have reached a boiling point thanks to Donald Trump. To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, Trump was able to channel the frustration of a destitute middle class and convert it into unconstructive anger. While Trump made references to how the “establishment” was a major problem, like many of his policy points, he didn’t ever describe in detail what was to be done to correct it. Instead, with his references to a wall with Mexico and to mass deportations, he encouraged the belief in his supporters that minorities were ruining the country. Yet in spite of his campaign promise to “drain the swamp”, many of the Trump cabinet appointees are among the most Establishment type figures one could imagine. For example, Steve Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs executive famous for foreclosures and hedge fund deals, has been appointed Secretary of Treasury.

    The election of a man like Donald Trump, who can’t seem to expound any of his policies in any sort of detail and is openly demeaning towards women, people of other races, and the disabled, makes clear that we have a cancerous political system which has metastasized in large part thanks to establishment politicians beholden to corporate interests. And these politicians are wildly out of touch with the needs of the average American. This created a very wide alley that the new Trump managed to rumble through. (I say “new” because in one of the many failings of the MSM, no one bothered to explain why Trump had reversed so many of the proposals he made back in 2000, when he was going to run on the Reform Party ticket.) Some commentators have claimed there can be little doubt that there was a liberal disillusionment following President Obama’s election. Hillary Clinton could not convince enough people that she was even the “change candidate” that Obama was. Therefore, in the search for answers for why their lives weren’t improving, many citizens had to find alternate sources of information outside of corporate influenced organizations (i.e. The Republican Party, Democratic Party and the Mainstream Media), given those groups won’t admit to the public that they are subservient to the same big money interests. This explains the rise of figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and even rightwing populist/conspiracy demagogue Alex Jones. Their collective answer is to paint minorities and welfare recipients as the principal ills of American society, all the while failing to recognize the deep connection between government policy and corporate influence. In short, this election warns us that when the real reasons behind government dysfunction are ignored and go unchallenged, one risks the upsurge of fascist sentiments. 8

    In addition to reminding us of Hillary’s relationship with Kissinger, Bernie Sanders reminded a large portion of the U.S. populace about the other fundamental issue lying beneath the surface: corporate power. And Sanders could have neutralized Trump’s appeal among the shrinking working and middle classes, which the latter earned by invoking the need for tariffs and the threat of trade wars. This certainly was another reason for Trump’s popularity in the Mideast states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, where he broke through the supposed Democratic firewall. (As to why, listen to this this segment by Michael Moore.) With Secretary of State Clinton’s and President Bill Clinton’s views on NAFTA and the Columbia Free Trade Agreement, and Hillary’s original stance on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), she could not mount a genuine counter-offensive to Trump’s tactics in those states, for the simple reason that the Clintons were perceived as being free-traders rather than fair-traders. Thanks to their record, a Democratic presidential candidate appeared to favor a globalization policy that began decades ago with David Rockefeller—a policy that was resisted by President Kennedy. (See Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p. 59)

    Awareness of any problem is the first step toward fixing it. But I think we must go beyond simple awareness when it comes to confronting our nation’s collective “shadow”, as Carl Jung would have called it — meaning all the darker, repressed aspects of the unconscious that, when ignored, can result in psychological backlash. How do we get beneath the surface appearances of corporate greed (for instance, the increasing wealth inequality amongst classes, or the amount of tax money allocated to corporate subsidies)? I suggest that an exploration of our past guided by a concept that Peter Dale Scott labels “Deep Politics” can help us come to terms, in a more profound way, with the problems facing us.

    This concept embraces all of the machinations occurring beneath the surface of government activity and which go unnoticed in common analysis, such as in news reports or textbooks. Or, as Scott states in his 2015 book The American Deep State, it “…involves all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”9 A “Deep Political” explanation of major world events goes beyond the ostensible or normally accepted models of cause and effect. One example of a “Deep Event” is the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which provided a motive, or casus belli, to escalate the Vietnam War into a full-scale invasion by American ground forces. Given that President Johnson had already, in stark contrast to President Kennedy’s policy, approved the build-up of combat troops in Vietnam in 1964, all that was needed was some sort of impetus in order for United States involvement to move to the next stage. As the author describes, many of the intelligence reports received by the Johnson administration regarding this supposed incident did not signal any sort of instigation on North Vietnam’s behalf. However, those same reports were ignored in order to claim that North Vietnam had engaged in an act of war against the United States. 10

    Other examples of Deep Events include the previously mentioned instances of CIA, corporate and State Department interference in the economic and governmental affairs of foreign nations. It is evident that these coups did not occur for the sake of saving other countries from the grip of communism or the reign of dictators; such would only be at best a surface explanation. The deeper explanation is that a nexus of corporate, military, paramilitary, government and, on occasion, underworld elements (viz, the workings of the Deep State) had a vested interest in the outcome. The Bush administration’s lies regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”, presented to the American people and Congress as a reason to invade Iraq, could most certainly be classified as a Deep Event. No entities benefitted more from America’s long-term occupation of Iraq than companies like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. KBR Inc., a Halliburton subsidiary, “was given $39.5 billion (emphasis added) in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.” 11

    Included under the umbrella of Deep Politics are the major assassinations of the 1960s — those of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Poll after poll has indicated that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but even today many apparently have not reasoned beyond the fact that there is something fishy about the “official” version in order to understand this murder in its fullest context. It behooves us to inquire more deeply into this historically critical event. Before I go any further, however, let me assert here—and I do so quite confidently—that anyone who still buys into the government version of events regarding, for example, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, is either not looking carefully enough, or is not really familiar with the case.

    IV

    A suggestive point of departure for such an inquiry are the parallels between the 2016 election and that of 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968, racial tensions were high and a presidential primary season was in full swing. Opposition towards the Vietnam War was strong and one candidate in particular represented the last best hope for minorities, anti-war voters, and the middle, as well as lower classes. That candidate was Robert Kennedy, and by the early morning of June 5th, it was becoming clear that he would likely be the Democratic candidate to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. Within a matter of moments of making his victory speech for the California primary, Robert Kennedy was assassinated when he walked into the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In those moments, the Sixties ended—and so did the populist hopes and dreams for a new era.

    Chicago DNC 1968
    Philedelphia DNC 2016

    The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was attended by the protests of disillusioned voters who felt cheated out of a more liberal, populist candidate. They ended up rioting in the streets. Hubert Humphrey, who was receiving flack for not taking a strong enough stance on the situation in Vietnam, was selected as the nominee. Similarly, there were many dissatisfied delegates and voters at the 2016 Philadelphia Democratic convention. But in a tightly controlled operation, their actions were kept hidden off screen. And the threat of stripping them of their credentials was often used to suppress any protest on the convention floor. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was nominated and her candidacy helped give us Donald Trump. In 1968, the immediate result was Richard Nixon as president. But the subsequent results included the massive increase in loss of life not just in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia, and the continuing trend away from the New Deal, anti-globalist policies of John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.

    Alger Hiss, America’s Dreyfus
    Rep. Voorhis, defeated by
    Nixon’s smear campaign

    In fact, Nixon had been a part of the effort to purge New Deal elements from the government during the McCarthy era. Whether it was conducting hearings on men like Alger Hiss and making accusations of Soviet spycraft, or using his California Senate campaign to falsely accuse incumbent Congressman Jerry Voorhis of being a communist, Nixon contributed to the growing, exaggerated fear of communism in the United States. This fear allowed men like Allen Dulles to be seen as pragmatists in the face of supposed communist danger. Dulles’ and the CIA’s dirty deeds on behalf of corporate power were carried out under the guise of protecting the world from communism. As described in the Allen Dulles biography by David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, sociologist C. Wright Mills called this mentality “crackpot realism.”12 It is ironic that Nixon ended up distrusting the CIA, the institution so closely associated with Allen Dulles, a man who had championed Nixon’s rise to power as both a congressman and senator.

    Flash forward to 2016 and, once again, we witness the results of a Democratic Party choosing to ignore the populist outcry for reform, and of a government compromised by corporate coercion, one subject to the hidden workings of the Deep State. Bernie Sanders represented the New Deal aspirations of a working class tired of corporate-run politics. As revealed by Wikileaks, the upper echelons of the Democratic Party chose not to heed their voices, thereby indirectly aiding the election of Donald Trump, who offered a different and unconstructive form of populism.

    Pence & Reagan
    Rex Tillerson

    Being that the political spectrum has shifted far to the right as compared to 1968, this year’s election results are more extreme. Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments reflect this extremist mentality; especially in his Vice Presidential pick Mike Pence — a man so out of touch with reality that he has tried to argue that women shouldn’t be working. In 1997, Pence stated that women should stay home because otherwise their kids would “get the short end of the emotional stick.” The soon to be Vice President Pence also sees LGBT rights as a sign of “societal collapse.”13 And as for Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp”, when it comes to establishment figures, it only gets worse, considering his appointment of Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. Despite the fact that Trump appears to be “off the grid”, so to speak, when it comes to the political or Deep Political apparatus, his recent choices for cabinet positions are some of the worst imaginable for the populist of any ilk. In some cases he has actually leapt into the arms of the very establishment he warned his supporters against.

    In the face of all this, Sanders continues to inspire his followers to remain politically active. We all need to be involved more than ever, and the Democratic/socialist senator from Vermont has always urged that true change lies in us having the courage to do things ourselves when it comes to reforming government. The more we stay involved, the less likely it will be that the momentum created by political movements will be squandered in the wake of a setback. The major setbacks of the 1960s came in the form of assassinations of inspiring political leaders. Yet even in the wake of such tragedies it is possible, indeed imperative, to find a glimmer of hope. To do so, however, requires, as this essay has been arguing, the insight afforded by a critical analysis of the past, and its continuities with the present. The touchstone for this historical understanding, I believe, lies precisely in the way the policies of President Kennedy have been consistently overturned by subsequent administrations.

    V

    As mentioned above, John Kennedy was not in favor of the neo-colonialist policies of the Dulles/Eisenhower era. Instead of wanting to occupy foreign nations for the sake of corporate profit, Kennedy believed strongly that the resources of such nations rightly belonged to their people, and that the right to self-determination was critical, as evident in his 1957 speech on French colonialism in Algeria.

    Soviet stamp
    commemorating Lumumba
    MobutuNixon
    Nixon and Mobutu at the White House

    In the aftermath of a CIA-assisted coup to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist leader of the Congo, President Kennedy fought alongside the U.N. to ensure that a nationwide coalition government was formed. Civil war was imminent as militant and corporately complicit leaders like Colonel Mobutu vied for power and promoted the secession of Katanga, the region of Congo that held vast amounts of mineral resources. JFK supported the more centrist elements of the potential coalition government and felt that the resources of Katanga didn’t belong to Belgian, U.S. or British mining interests. The President’s death ended hope for the pursuit of any stable government in Congo, along with the hope of halting widespread violence. 14 It should be noted that Nixon actually welcomed Mobutu to the White House after he took control of Congo.

    Sukarno at the White House

    As noted previously, President Kennedy also worked towards re-establishing a relationship with Indonesia and its leader Achmed Sukarno. This was after the Dulles brothers had been involved in attempts to overthrow the Indonesian leader. Decades earlier, it had been discovered by corporate backed explorers that certain areas in Indonesia contained extremely dense concentrations of minerals such as gold and copper. After Kennedy was killed, Sukarno was overthrown with help of the CIA in one of the bloodiest coup d’états ever recorded. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians perished during both the overthrow, and the subsequent reign of the new leader Suharto. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition pp. 374-75) Need we add that Nixon also met with Suharto in Washington. In December of 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger journeyed to Jakarta and gave Suharto an implicit OK to invade East Timor. This is the tradition that Hillary Clinton and her husband were involved with. For when almost every democratically elected western nation was shunning Suharto in the late nineties, Bill Clinton was still meeting with him. (Op. cit. Probe Magazine.)

    President Kennedy’s policies regarding Central and South America were also a threat to corporate interests. David Rockefeller took it upon himself to publicly criticize Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which had been established to aid less developed nations, like those south of the United States, to become economically self-reliant. Men like Rockefeller, along with the Wall-Street-connected media (e.g.,Wall Street Journal and Time/Life) also berated the President for “undermining a strong and free economy,” and inhibiting “basic American liberties.” (14, p. 57) The Wall Street Journal flat out criticized Kennedy for being a “self-appointed enforcer of progress” (Ibid p. 66). JFK’s 1962 clash with U.S. Steel, a J.P. Morgan/Rockefeller company, provoked similar remarks.

    After President Kennedy had facilitated an agreement between steel workers and their corporate executives, the latter welshed on the deal. It was assumed that the workers would agree to not have their wages increased in exchange for the price of steel also remaining static. After the agreement was reached, U.S. Steel defied the President’s wishes and undermined the hard work to reach that compromise by announcing a price increase. The corporate elite wanted Kennedy to buckle, but instead, he threatened to investigate them for price-fixing and to have his brother Bobby examine their tax returns. Begrudgingly, U.S. Steel backed off and accepted the original terms. Kennedy’s policies, both domestic and foreign, were aimed at enhancing social and economic progress. Like Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin, JFK sought to use government powers to protect the masses from corporate domination. His tax policy was aimed at channeling investment into the expansion of productive means or capital. The investment tax credit, for instance, provided incentives for business entities that enhanced their productive abilities through investment in the upkeep or updating of equipment inside the United States. (Gibson pp. 21-22) While Kennedy’s policies were focused on strengthening production and labor power, his opponents in the Morgan/Rockefeller world were focused on sheer profit.

    David Rockefeller & Henry Luce  in 1962

    It should serve as no surprise that the media outlets responsible for condemning the president were tied into the very corporate and political establishment entities being threatened. As described by sociologist Donald Gibson in his fine book Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency, the elite of Wall Street, media executives and certain powerful political persons or groups were so interconnected as to be inbred. Allen Dulles himself was very much involved in these circles, and had close relationships with men like Henry Luce of the Time, Life and Fortune magazine empire, along with executives or journalists at the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project designed to use various media outlets for propaganda, was exposed during the Church Committee hearings, revealing the collaboration of hundreds of journalists and executives at various media organizations including CBS, NBC, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Newsweek and other institutions.15)

    John Kennedy wasn’t only trying to curtail corporate power with his Hamilton/Gallatin, New Deal-like economic policies. His decisions concerning military engagement abroad were greatly at odds with the hard-line Cold Warriors of his administration and the Central Intelligence Agency. Time after time, Kennedy refused to commit U.S. combat troops abroad despite the nagging insistence of his advisors. Although the President publicly accepted responsibility for the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, privately he was livid at the CIA for deceiving him. Through materials such as inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick’s report on the Bay of Pigs, and other declassified CIA documents, it is now evident that a major deception had occurred. The Agency had assured Kennedy that their group of anti-Castro Cuban invaders would be the spark that would set off a revolt against Fidel Castro just waiting to happen. This was not the case, and the CIA-backed Cubans were outnumbered by Castro’s forces 10 to 1. Even worse, as noted in the Kirkpatrick report, was the fact that the CIA had stocked the invading force with C-Level operatives. (2, p. 396) It was almost as if the surface level plan presented to the President was designed to fail in order to force his hand and commit the military into invading Cuba. A declassified CIA memo acknowledges the fact that securing the desired beach area in Cuba was not possible without military intervention. 16

    When Kennedy refused to commit U.S. troops as the operation crumbled, he became public enemy number one in the CIA’s eyes. This sentiment that Kennedy was soft on communism, or even a communist sympathizer, augmented as he continued to back away from military intervention in other situations. The President reached an agreement with the Soviet Union to keep Laos neutral, and despite his willingness to send advisors to Vietnam, he ultimately worked to enact a policy resulting in the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel from the country. Kennedy’s assassination ended this movement toward disengagement from Saigon.

    What was likely even worse to the Cold Warriors and CIA patriots during this time was the President’s attempts at détente with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. During, and in the period following, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were involved in back channel dialogue with one another. Discussion moved toward talks about détente; despite the fact that the two men’s respective countries had differing views, they agreed it was imperative, for the sake of the planet, to come to an understanding. This, along with JFK’s unwillingness to bomb Cuba during the Missile Crisis, were nothing short of traitorous to the covert and overt military power structure of the United States. In the final months of his life, the President also extended a secret olive branch toward Fidel Castro in hopes of opening a dialogue. Excited by the prospect, Castro was painfully upset when he got word of Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy most certainly had his enemies, and was making decisions that drove a stake into the very heart of corporate, military and intelligence collusion. If he had been elected President, Bobby Kennedy was most certainly going to continue, and most likely even expand, the policies of his late brother. (ibid, pp. 25-33) Like Jack and Bobby, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X expressed opposition toward the continuation of the Vietnam War.

    VI

    The concept of Deep Politics may provide a helpful alternative to the term “conspiracy theory”, which has become so stigmatized and so overused as to be meaningless. Abandoning the idea of conspiracy altogether, however, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water, for it raises legitimate questions about what lurks beneath the surface of the affairs of state. The enemies that John and Robert Kennedy were facing were not some fictional or hypothetical “illuminati” group or groups. They were very real, dangerous and powerful interests, and those forces are still with us in 2016. Deep Politics does not imply that there is some singular group or set of groups that meet in secret to plot colossal calamities that affect the entire world, but rather that the events themselves arise from the milieu(s) created by a congruence of unaccountable, supra-constitutional, covert, corporate and illegal interests, sometimes operating in a dialectical manner. A more recent example would be the networking of several of these interests to orchestrate the colossal Iran/Contra project.

    Other writers have also described these subterranean forces using other terms. The late Fletcher Prouty called it the Secret Team. Investigative journalist Jim Hougan calls it a Shadow Government. Florida State professor Lance DeHaven Smith, with respect to its activities, coined the term “State Crime Against Democracy”, or SCAD. (Click here for his definition.) Smith wrote one of the best books about how, with the help of the MSM, these forces stole the 2000 election in Florida from Al Gore. He then wrote a book explaining how the term “conspiracy theorist” became a commonly used smear to disarm the critics of the Warren Commission. It was, in fact, the CIA which started this trend with its famous 1967 dispatch entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report”. (See this review for the sordid details.)

    Whether it be extralegal assassinations, unwarranted domestic surveillance, interventionist wars at the behest of corporate interests, torture or other activities of that stripe, these all in essence have their roots in the Dulles era in which covert, corporate power developed into a well-oiled and unaccountable machine running roughshod. These forces have continued to operate regardless of who is elected president, whether Democrat or Republican. (See Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda for a trenchant analysis of the operation against Richard Nixon that came to be called Watergate.)

    It is my opinion that we must come to terms with these dark or, to use James W. Douglass’ term, “unspeakable” realities. And we must do so in a holistic way if we are to take more fundamental steps toward progress as a nation. George Orwell coined the term Crime Stop to describe the psychological mechanism by which humans ignore uncomfortable or dangerous thoughts. Through discussions with people young and old, it has become evident to me that this Crime Stop mechanism is at work in the subconscious of many Americans. We need to be willing to face the darker aspects of our recent past that have been at work below the surface and percolating up into view for many years.

    In a very tangible way, the refusal to face these dark forces has caused the Democratic Party to lose its way. And this diluted and uninspiring party has now given way to Donald Trump. As alluded to throughout this essay, this party has abandoned the aims and goals of the Kennedys, King and Malcolm X to the point that it now resembles the GOP more than it does the sum total of those four men. To understand what this means in stark political terms, consider the following. Today, among all fifty states, there are only 15 Democratic governors. In the last ten years, the Democrats have lost 900 state legislative seats. When Trump enters office, he will be in control of not just the White House, but also the Senate and the House of Representatives. Once he nominates his Supreme Court candidate to replace Antonin Scalia, he will also be in control of that institution.

    Bernie Sanders was the only candidate whose policies recalled the idea of the Democratic party of the Sixties. And according to a poll of 1,600 people run by Gravis Marketing, he would have soundly defeated Trump by 12 points. The Democrats have to get the message, or they run the risk of becoming a permanent minority party. They sorely need to look at themselves, and ask, What happened? As a starting point, they can take some of the advice contained in this essay.

    Notes

    1. “Hillary Clinton Snaps At NPR Host After Defensive Gay Marriage Interview.” YouTube. WFPL News, 12 June 2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgIe2GKudYY>.

    2. David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. New York, NY: Harper, 2015.

    3. Gary Leupp, “Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Resumé: What the Record Shows.” , 03 May 2016.

    4. Greg Grandin, “A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America.” The Nation, 18 April 2016.

    5. Tim Shorrock, “How Hillary Clinton Militarized US Policy in Honduras.” The Nation, 06 April 2016.

    6. Peter Dale Scott, “The Deep State and the Bias of Official History.” Who What Why, 20 January 2015.

    7. Ben Norton, “Sanders Condemns Pro-austerity ‘Colonial Takeover’ of Puerto Rico; Clinton Supports It.” Salon, 27 May 2016.

    8. “Chomsky on Liberal Disillusionment with Obama.” YouTube, 03 April 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Jbnq5V_1s>.

    9. Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and The Attack On U.S. Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015: Chapter 2, p. 12.

    10. “Project Censored 3.1 – JFK 50 – Peter Dale Scott – Deep Politics.” YouTube, Project Sensored, 19 December 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0CFpMej3mA>.

    11. Angelo Young, “And The Winner For The Most Iraq War Contracts Is . . . KBR, With $39.5 Billion In A Decade.” International Business Times, 19 March 2013.

    12. Zawn Villines, “The Four Worst Things Mike Pence Has Said About Women.” Daily Kos, 21 July 2016.

    13. Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

    14. Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency. New York: Sheridan Square, 1994.

    15. Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977 <http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php>.

    16. David Talbot, Brothers, p. 47.

  • The 2016 Election, Historical Amnesia and Deep Politics

    By now, I think it is safe to say that everyone is kind of sick of discussing the 2016 election season. However nauseating it may have been, it proved to be unprecedented and monumental in various ways. Unprecedented, for example, in the fact that the two major party candidates were the most disliked in modern political history. The Republican candidate, now President-elect, who touts himself as a good businessman yet probably couldn’t tell you the difference between Keynes and Marx, has run perhaps the most hate-filled, deplorable campaign in recent memory. He often speaks of running the country like a business and harps on immigration as one of the major problems facing this country. Yet he never discusses substantive issues in detail (for example, the tens of millions of poverty- and hunger-stricken children living in the United States alone), and frequently demonstrates a poor grasp of them (such as the nuclear triad). In fact, he compulsively prevaricates and can’t seem to string two cohesive sentences together. Therefore it is hard in many cases to see where he actually stands. (For a revealing example of this, watch this clip.)

    The former Democratic candidate, on the other hand, bears a resemblance to an Eisenhower Republican. She is an intelligent and experienced politician full of contradictions. She was certainly preferable to Trump on domestic issues, e.g., women’s rights, race, and overall economic policy—not to mention global scientific matters like climate change. Nevertheless, there are serious problems with Hillary Clinton’s record. While Trump compulsively exaggerates and prevaricates, Hillary Clinton is not the epitome of honesty or integrity either. Up until 2013, she didn’t support same-sex marriage, yet got defensive and lied about the strength of her record on this issue. 1 Despite the fact that FBI Director James Comey publicly stated that classified material was indeed sent over Clinton’s unsecure server, she continued to dance around that subject as if she still didn’t know the public was privy to Comey’s statements.

    I could expand on the former Secretary of State’s flip-flopping and dishonesty over the years when it comes to problems like email security. And the disturbing fact that five people in her employ took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress in open session on the subject. However, in spite of their receiving a great deal of media attention, failings such as these are far from being her main flaw, and are, in this author’s opinion, a distraction from much deeper issues. As previously alluded to, Clinton’s foreign policy bears much more of a resemblance to the Eisenhower/Dulles brothers’ record than it does to what one might expect from someone who describes herself as taking a back seat to no-one when it comes to progressive values.

    Allen & John Foster Dulles
    Mossadegh & Shah Pahlavi

    For those who might not be aware, Allen Dulles (former Director of the CIA) and his brother John Foster Dulles (former Secretary of State) essentially orchestrated foreign policy under the Eisenhower administration. They were former partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, which was the preeminent law firm for Wall Street in the fifties. Allen and Foster married global corporate interests and covert military action into a well-oiled machine that promoted coups, assassinations and the blood-soaked destruction of democracies around the world. After Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh vowed to nationalize his country’s oil and petroleum resources, the Dulles brothers—who represented Rockefeller interests like Standard Oil— designed a phony indigenous overthrow that installed the corporately complicit Reza Shah Pahlavi into power in 1953. His brutal and repressive reign lasted until 1979, and his downfall provoked a fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran.

    Arbenz centennial (2013)
    Castillo Armas (with Nixon)

    In 1954, the Dulles brothers were at it again in Guatemala with operation PBSUCCESS. Jacobo Arbenz, the labor-friendly and democratically elected leader of the country, was going toe to toe with other corporate interests such as the Rockefeller/Sullivan & Cromwell associated company United Fruit. Arbenz was pushing for reform that sought to curtail the neo-colonial power of United Fruit by providing more in resources for the people of Guatemala. To the Dulles brothers and other Wall Street types with vested interests, this was unacceptable and was to be depicted as nothing short of communism. Arbenz was ousted from the country in what was largely a psychological warfare operation. He was replaced with a ruthless dictator by the name of Castillo Armas. The CIA provided the Armas regime with “death lists” of all Arbenz government members and sympathizers, and through the decades that followed, tens of thousands of people either were brutally killed or went missing at the hands of the dictatorship. 2 This constant state of upheaval, terror and violence did not subside until a United Nations resolution took hold in 1996.

    II

    Hillary Clinton, whether she knows it or not—and it’s a big stretch to say that she doesn’t—has advocated for the same interventionist foreign policy machine created by the likes of the Dulles brothers. There are at least three major areas of foreign affairs in which she resembles the Dulles brothers more than Trump does: 1.) The Iraq War 2.) American /Russian relations 3.) American actions against Syria. In fact, she actually made Trump look Kennedyesque in this regard, no mean feat.

    Clinton & Kissinger

    Nowadays, Clinton refers to her vote for the Iraq War as a “mistake”, but it certainly doesn’t seem like one considering the context of her other decisions as Secretary of State. Secretary Clinton’s friendships and consultations with Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright raised eyebrows in progressive circles. (Click here for the Clinton/Kissinger relationship.) Kissinger’s record as Secretary of State/National Security Adviser was most certainly one of the worst in U.S. history when it came to bloody, sociopathic, interventionist policy around the globe. During the disastrous and unnecessary crisis in Vietnam, Kissinger would nonchalantly give President Nixon death tallies in the thousands regarding Vietnamese citizens as if they were some Stalinesque statistic. Kissinger then agreed to expand that war in an unprecedented way into Cambodia and Laos—and then attempted to conceal these colossal air war actions. Of course, this was a further reversal and expansion of that war, which went even beyond what Lyndon Johnson had done in the wake of JFK’s death. President Kennedy’s stated policy was to withdraw from Indochina by 1965.

    Salvador Allende
    Augusto Pinochet

    Kissinger was also an instrumental force for the CIA coup in Chile, which ended in the death of Salvador Allende. About Allende, he allegedly stated he did not understand why the USA should stand by and let Chile go communist just because the citizenry were irresponsible enough to vote for it. (A Death in Washington, by Don Freed and Fred Landis, p. 8) The CIA overthrow of Allende led to years of brutal fascism under military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

     

    Clinton & Albright

    Madeleine Albright demonstrated similar hawkishness. (Click here for more on the Clinton/Albright relationship.) When asked about the refusal of the United States to lift UN Sanctions against Iraq and the resulting deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Albright stated that the deaths had been “worth it.”3 Predictably, Albright’s statement was met with stunned surprise. In May of 1998, Albright said something just as surprising. At that time, riots and demonstrations against the brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto were raging all over the archipelago; there were mock funerals being conducted, and his figure was being burned in effigy. Here was a prime opportunity for Albright and the Clinton administration to step forward and cut off relations with a despot who had looted his nation to the tune of billions of dollars. Or at the very least, join the chorus of newspapers and journals requesting he step down. What did Albright do? She asked for “more dialogue”. Even in the last two days of Suharto’s reign, when major cities were in flames, when Senators John Kerry and the late Paul Wellstone were asking the State Department to get on the right side of history, Albright chose to sit on the sidelines. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 5, pp. 3-5)

    Hajji Muhammad Suharto with Nixon, Ford & Kissinger, Reagan, Bush Sr. & Bill Clinton

    In this regard, let us recall that Suharto came to power as a result of a reversal of President Kennedy’s foreign policy. Achmed Sukarno had been backed by President Kennedy throughout his first term, all the way up to his assassination. And JFK was scheduled to visit Jakarta in 1964, before the election. As opposed to the silence of Albright and Bill Clinton, after Suharto resigned, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center wrote a letter to his successor asking for an investigation of the role of the military in suppressing the demonstrations that led to his fall. (ibid)

    During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton displayed an American imperiousness akin to the previous examples. Whether the former Secretary’s intentions in Libya truly aimed at ending what she called a “genocidal” regime under Gaddafi doesn’t really matter. She personally pushed for a NATO sanctioning of bombings in Libya. (This NATO assault in Africa followed the standard set by Albright in Kosovo in 1999, which was the first offensive attack NATO had ever performed.) The assault on Libya eventually led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. And that paved the way for a dangerous political power vacuum in which various elements, including Islamic extremists, are vying for power. It is safe to say that she left Libya in such a shambles that the USA had to reenter the civil war.

    Clinton’s decision to arm Syrian “rebels” against Bashar al Assad has also helped create bloody conflict with no end in sight. (Click here for why this may be a strategic mistake.) Bombings occur on a daily basis, especially in areas like Aleppo, leaving tens of thousands of innocents dead. As a candidate, she wanted to establish a “no-fly zone” over Syria—much as she did in Libya. This was a euphemism for controlling the air so that American proxies could control the ground. And as many suspect, and as alluded to in the above-linked story, that likely would have led to fundamentalist dominance in Syria, resembling the endgames in Iraq and Libya. But beyond that, this would probably have ended up provoking Russia, since Russia backs Assad. (Ibid, n. 3)

    “Pacific Rubiales:
    How to get rich in a
    country without regulations”

    Secretary Clinton’s policy regarding Latin America, another topic avoided by the media during the last election cycle, also demonstrates knowing or unknowing complicity with colonial/imperial interests. In Colombia, for instance, a petroleum company by the name of Pacific Rubiales, which has ties to the Clinton Foundation, has been at the center of a humanitarian controversy. The fact that Pacific Rubiales is connected with the Clinton Foundation isn’t the main issue, however. The real problem is the manner in which positions were changed on Clinton’s part in exchange for contributions. During the 2008 election season, then-Senator Clinton opposed the trade deal that allowed companies like Pacific Rubiales to violate labor laws in Colombia. After becoming Secretary of State, Clinton did an about-face. As summed up by David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Matthew Cunningham-Cook:

    At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record (despite having evidence to the contrary), her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation—supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself—Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact.” 4

    Clinton & Zelaya (2009)

    Despite recent denials, the former Secretary also played a role in the 2009 coup that ousted the democratically elected and progressive human rights administration of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. Recent editions of Clinton’s autobiography Hard Choices have been redacted to conceal the full extent of her role in the overthrow. Since the coup, and in opposition to the supposed goals of the overthrow itself, government-sponsored death squads have returned to the country, killing hundreds of citizens, including progressive activists like Berta Cáceres. Before her assassination, Cáceres berated Secretary Clinton for the role she played in overthrowing Zelaya, stating that it demonstrated the role of the United States in “meddling with our country,” and that “we warned it would be very dangerous and permit a barbarity.” 5

    In addition, the U.S.-backed coup in Honduras demonstrates the ongoing trend of outsourcing when it comes to intelligence work. A private group called Creative Associates International (CAI) was involved in “determining the social networks responsible for violence in the country’s largest city,” and subcontracted work to another private entity called Caerus. A man by the name of David Kilcullen, the head of Caerus, was previously involved in a $15 million US AID program that helped determine stability in Afghanistan. Kilcullen’s associate, William Upshur, also contributed to the Honduras plans. Upshur is now working for Booz Allen Hamilton, another private company involved in U.S. intelligence funding. (Ibid, n. 5)

    In his 2007 book, Tim Shorrock explained how substantial this kind of funding is. Shorrock stated that approximately 70 percent of the government’s 60-billion-dollar budget for intelligence is now subcontracted to private entities such as Booz Allen Hamilton or Science Applications International Corporation. 6

    Puerto Rico, a country in the midst of a serious debt crisis, is another key topic when it comes to Clinton’s questionable foreign policy decisions. Hedge funds own much of Puerto Rico’s massive debt, and a piece of legislation, which was put forward to deal with the issue, has rightly been labeled by Bernie Sanders as a form of colonialism. The bill in question would hand over control of financial dealings to a U.S. Government Board of Regulators, which would likely strip vital social spending in Puerto Rico. The bill already imposes a $4.25 minimum wage clause for citizens under 25. While Sanders opposed this bill, Clinton supported it. 7 This may serve as no surprise, being that the former Secretary of State receives hefty sums from Wall Street institutions like Goldman Sachs, who benefit from this form of vulture capitalism. I am not asserting that Hillary Clinton is solely responsible for these foreign policy decisions, but that she has been complicit with the American Deep State that commits or is heavily involved in these operations. (An explanation of the term “Deep State” will follow.) If the results of this 2016 election, and the success of both Trump and Sanders in the primaries, teach us something, it is that we have to move away as quickly as possible from policy compromised by corporate influence if we truly want to move forward. The American public has clearly had enough with establishment politics.

    III

    With the election of Donald Trump, the viability of establishment politics has been seriously breached, effectively ending the age of lesser-evil voting by the proletariat. Although Hillary Clinton was the preferred candidate regarding things like domestic social issues and scientific issues, it wasn’t enough to tame the massive insurgency of citizens who were so fed up with the status quo that they would rather see the country possibly go up in flames than vote for more of the same. Nor did it inspire an overlooked independent voter base to come out and make a substantial difference in the Democratic vote. In the aftermath of this potential disaster of an election, it is our duty, as a collective, to look deeply into some troubling fundamental issues. One of these has to do with the fact that racism, xenophobia and sexism are still very much alive in this country.

    I will not go so far as to label all Trump supporters as racist, homophobic or sexist. And throughout the primary/general election season, I have tried to remain receptive to their frustrations. However, I can most certainly tell you that, based on my experiences of this election season alone, these sentiments do indeed exist. During a delegate selection process for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I met and ended up having discussions with some Trump supporters. I asked them questions about why they thought Trump would make a good president, all the while disagreeing with them, but listening nonetheless. Two of the men I was speaking with were very civil, but one in particular seemed to be bursting at the seams with frustration over what he thought were the main problems with the country. While ignoring the facts I was presenting him regarding corporate welfare, this man went into relentless diatribes about why “Tacos”, his label for Hispanic people, were wreaking havoc. He exhibited no shame in expressing his distaste for other ethnicities either. During this dismaying exchange, I brought up the continued mistreatment of Native American peoples. In response, this man tried to question the severity of the atrocities committed against them and even went so far as to imply that my use of the term genocide in describing their plight was incorrect.

    Steve Mnuchin

    This may well serve to exemplify the hateful attitudes of mistrust and resentment that have been put under a black light during the course of this election. They’ve lingered dormant under the surface and have reached a boiling point thanks to Donald Trump. To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, Trump was able to channel the frustration of a destitute middle class and convert it into unconstructive anger. While Trump made references to how the “establishment” was a major problem, like many of his policy points, he didn’t ever describe in detail what was to be done to correct it. Instead, with his references to a wall with Mexico and to mass deportations, he encouraged the belief in his supporters that minorities were ruining the country. Yet in spite of his campaign promise to “drain the swamp”, many of the Trump cabinet appointees are among the most Establishment type figures one could imagine. For example, Steve Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs executive famous for foreclosures and hedge fund deals, has been appointed Secretary of Treasury.

    The election of a man like Donald Trump, who can’t seem to expound any of his policies in any sort of detail and is openly demeaning towards women, people of other races, and the disabled, makes clear that we have a cancerous political system which has metastasized in large part thanks to establishment politicians beholden to corporate interests. And these politicians are wildly out of touch with the needs of the average American. This created a very wide alley that the new Trump managed to rumble through. (I say “new” because in one of the many failings of the MSM, no one bothered to explain why Trump had reversed so many of the proposals he made back in 2000, when he was going to run on the Reform Party ticket.) Some commentators have claimed there can be little doubt that there was a liberal disillusionment following President Obama’s election. Hillary Clinton could not convince enough people that she was even the “change candidate” that Obama was. Therefore, in the search for answers for why their lives weren’t improving, many citizens had to find alternate sources of information outside of corporate influenced organizations (i.e. The Republican Party, Democratic Party and the Mainstream Media), given those groups won’t admit to the public that they are subservient to the same big money interests. This explains the rise of figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and even rightwing populist/conspiracy demagogue Alex Jones. Their collective answer is to paint minorities and welfare recipients as the principal ills of American society, all the while failing to recognize the deep connection between government policy and corporate influence. In short, this election warns us that when the real reasons behind government dysfunction are ignored and go unchallenged, one risks the upsurge of fascist sentiments. 8

    In addition to reminding us of Hillary’s relationship with Kissinger, Bernie Sanders reminded a large portion of the U.S. populace about the other fundamental issue lying beneath the surface: corporate power. And Sanders could have neutralized Trump’s appeal among the shrinking working and middle classes, which the latter earned by invoking the need for tariffs and the threat of trade wars. This certainly was another reason for Trump’s popularity in the Mideast states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, where he broke through the supposed Democratic firewall. (As to why, listen to this this segment by Michael Moore.) With Secretary of State Clinton’s and President Bill Clinton’s views on NAFTA and the Columbia Free Trade Agreement, and Hillary’s original stance on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), she could not mount a genuine counter-offensive to Trump’s tactics in those states, for the simple reason that the Clintons were perceived as being free-traders rather than fair-traders. Thanks to their record, a Democratic presidential candidate appeared to favor a globalization policy that began decades ago with David Rockefeller—a policy that was resisted by President Kennedy. (See Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p. 59)

    Awareness of any problem is the first step toward fixing it. But I think we must go beyond simple awareness when it comes to confronting our nation’s collective “shadow”, as Carl Jung would have called it — meaning all the darker, repressed aspects of the unconscious that, when ignored, can result in psychological backlash. How do we get beneath the surface appearances of corporate greed (for instance, the increasing wealth inequality amongst classes, or the amount of tax money allocated to corporate subsidies)? I suggest that an exploration of our past guided by a concept that Peter Dale Scott labels “Deep Politics” can help us come to terms, in a more profound way, with the problems facing us.

    This concept embraces all of the machinations occurring beneath the surface of government activity and which go unnoticed in common analysis, such as in news reports or textbooks. Or, as Scott states in his 2015 book The American Deep State, it “…involves all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”9 A “Deep Political” explanation of major world events goes beyond the ostensible or normally accepted models of cause and effect. One example of a “Deep Event” is the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which provided a motive, or casus belli, to escalate the Vietnam War into a full-scale invasion by American ground forces. Given that President Johnson had already, in stark contrast to President Kennedy’s policy, approved the build-up of combat troops in Vietnam in 1964, all that was needed was some sort of impetus in order for United States involvement to move to the next stage. As the author describes, many of the intelligence reports received by the Johnson administration regarding this supposed incident did not signal any sort of instigation on North Vietnam’s behalf. However, those same reports were ignored in order to claim that North Vietnam had engaged in an act of war against the United States. 10

    Other examples of Deep Events include the previously mentioned instances of CIA, corporate and State Department interference in the economic and governmental affairs of foreign nations. It is evident that these coups did not occur for the sake of saving other countries from the grip of communism or the reign of dictators; such would only be at best a surface explanation. The deeper explanation is that a nexus of corporate, military, paramilitary, government and, on occasion, underworld elements (viz, the workings of the Deep State) had a vested interest in the outcome. The Bush administration’s lies regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”, presented to the American people and Congress as a reason to invade Iraq, could most certainly be classified as a Deep Event. No entities benefitted more from America’s long-term occupation of Iraq than companies like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. KBR Inc., a Halliburton subsidiary, “was given $39.5 billion (emphasis added) in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.” 11

    Included under the umbrella of Deep Politics are the major assassinations of the 1960s — those of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Poll after poll has indicated that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but even today many apparently have not reasoned beyond the fact that there is something fishy about the “official” version in order to understand this murder in its fullest context. It behooves us to inquire more deeply into this historically critical event. Before I go any further, however, let me assert here—and I do so quite confidently—that anyone who still buys into the government version of events regarding, for example, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, is either not looking carefully enough, or is not really familiar with the case.

    IV

    A suggestive point of departure for such an inquiry are the parallels between the 2016 election and that of 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968, racial tensions were high and a presidential primary season was in full swing. Opposition towards the Vietnam War was strong and one candidate in particular represented the last best hope for minorities, anti-war voters, and the middle, as well as lower classes. That candidate was Robert Kennedy, and by the early morning of June 5th, it was becoming clear that he would likely be the Democratic candidate to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. Within a matter of moments of making his victory speech for the California primary, Robert Kennedy was assassinated when he walked into the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In those moments, the Sixties ended—and so did the populist hopes and dreams for a new era.

    Chicago DNC 1968
    Philedelphia DNC 2016

    The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was attended by the protests of disillusioned voters who felt cheated out of a more liberal, populist candidate. They ended up rioting in the streets. Hubert Humphrey, who was receiving flack for not taking a strong enough stance on the situation in Vietnam, was selected as the nominee. Similarly, there were many dissatisfied delegates and voters at the 2016 Philadelphia Democratic convention. But in a tightly controlled operation, their actions were kept hidden off screen. And the threat of stripping them of their credentials was often used to suppress any protest on the convention floor. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was nominated and her candidacy helped give us Donald Trump. In 1968, the immediate result was Richard Nixon as president. But the subsequent results included the massive increase in loss of life not just in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia, and the continuing trend away from the New Deal, anti-globalist policies of John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.

    Alger Hiss, America’s Dreyfus
    Rep. Voorhis, defeated by
    Nixon’s smear campaign

    In fact, Nixon had been a part of the effort to purge New Deal elements from the government during the McCarthy era. Whether it was conducting hearings on men like Alger Hiss and making accusations of Soviet spycraft, or using his California Senate campaign to falsely accuse incumbent Congressman Jerry Voorhis of being a communist, Nixon contributed to the growing, exaggerated fear of communism in the United States. This fear allowed men like Allen Dulles to be seen as pragmatists in the face of supposed communist danger. Dulles’ and the CIA’s dirty deeds on behalf of corporate power were carried out under the guise of protecting the world from communism. As described in the Allen Dulles biography by David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, sociologist C. Wright Mills called this mentality “crackpot realism.”12 It is ironic that Nixon ended up distrusting the CIA, the institution so closely associated with Allen Dulles, a man who had championed Nixon’s rise to power as both a congressman and senator.

    Flash forward to 2016 and, once again, we witness the results of a Democratic Party choosing to ignore the populist outcry for reform, and of a government compromised by corporate coercion, one subject to the hidden workings of the Deep State. Bernie Sanders represented the New Deal aspirations of a working class tired of corporate-run politics. As revealed by Wikileaks, the upper echelons of the Democratic Party chose not to heed their voices, thereby indirectly aiding the election of Donald Trump, who offered a different and unconstructive form of populism.

    Pence & Reagan
    Rex Tillerson

    Being that the political spectrum has shifted far to the right as compared to 1968, this year’s election results are more extreme. Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments reflect this extremist mentality; especially in his Vice Presidential pick Mike Pence — a man so out of touch with reality that he has tried to argue that women shouldn’t be working. In 1997, Pence stated that women should stay home because otherwise their kids would “get the short end of the emotional stick.” The soon to be Vice President Pence also sees LGBT rights as a sign of “societal collapse.”13 And as for Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp”, when it comes to establishment figures, it only gets worse, considering his appointment of Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. Despite the fact that Trump appears to be “off the grid”, so to speak, when it comes to the political or Deep Political apparatus, his recent choices for cabinet positions are some of the worst imaginable for the populist of any ilk. In some cases he has actually leapt into the arms of the very establishment he warned his supporters against.

    In the face of all this, Sanders continues to inspire his followers to remain politically active. We all need to be involved more than ever, and the Democratic/socialist senator from Vermont has always urged that true change lies in us having the courage to do things ourselves when it comes to reforming government. The more we stay involved, the less likely it will be that the momentum created by political movements will be squandered in the wake of a setback. The major setbacks of the 1960s came in the form of assassinations of inspiring political leaders. Yet even in the wake of such tragedies it is possible, indeed imperative, to find a glimmer of hope. To do so, however, requires, as this essay has been arguing, the insight afforded by a critical analysis of the past, and its continuities with the present. The touchstone for this historical understanding, I believe, lies precisely in the way the policies of President Kennedy have been consistently overturned by subsequent administrations.

    V

    As mentioned above, John Kennedy was not in favor of the neo-colonialist policies of the Dulles/Eisenhower era. Instead of wanting to occupy foreign nations for the sake of corporate profit, Kennedy believed strongly that the resources of such nations rightly belonged to their people, and that the right to self-determination was critical, as evident in his 1957 speech on French colonialism in Algeria.

    Soviet stamp
    commemorating Lumumba
    MobutuNixon
    Nixon and Mobutu at the White House

    In the aftermath of a CIA-assisted coup to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist leader of the Congo, President Kennedy fought alongside the U.N. to ensure that a nationwide coalition government was formed. Civil war was imminent as militant and corporately complicit leaders like Colonel Mobutu vied for power and promoted the secession of Katanga, the region of Congo that held vast amounts of mineral resources. JFK supported the more centrist elements of the potential coalition government and felt that the resources of Katanga didn’t belong to Belgian, U.S. or British mining interests. The President’s death ended hope for the pursuit of any stable government in Congo, along with the hope of halting widespread violence. 14 It should be noted that Nixon actually welcomed Mobutu to the White House after he took control of Congo.

    Sukarno at the White House

    As noted previously, President Kennedy also worked towards re-establishing a relationship with Indonesia and its leader Achmed Sukarno. This was after the Dulles brothers had been involved in attempts to overthrow the Indonesian leader. Decades earlier, it had been discovered by corporate backed explorers that certain areas in Indonesia contained extremely dense concentrations of minerals such as gold and copper. After Kennedy was killed, Sukarno was overthrown with help of the CIA in one of the bloodiest coup d’états ever recorded. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians perished during both the overthrow, and the subsequent reign of the new leader Suharto. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition pp. 374-75) Need we add that Nixon also met with Suharto in Washington. In December of 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger journeyed to Jakarta and gave Suharto an implicit OK to invade East Timor. This is the tradition that Hillary Clinton and her husband were involved with. For when almost every democratically elected western nation was shunning Suharto in the late nineties, Bill Clinton was still meeting with him. (Op. cit. Probe Magazine.)

    President Kennedy’s policies regarding Central and South America were also a threat to corporate interests. David Rockefeller took it upon himself to publicly criticize Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which had been established to aid less developed nations, like those south of the United States, to become economically self-reliant. Men like Rockefeller, along with the Wall-Street-connected media (e.g.,Wall Street Journal and Time/Life) also berated the President for “undermining a strong and free economy,” and inhibiting “basic American liberties.” (14, p. 57) The Wall Street Journal flat out criticized Kennedy for being a “self-appointed enforcer of progress” (Ibid p. 66). JFK’s 1962 clash with U.S. Steel, a J.P. Morgan/Rockefeller company, provoked similar remarks.

    After President Kennedy had facilitated an agreement between steel workers and their corporate executives, the latter welshed on the deal. It was assumed that the workers would agree to not have their wages increased in exchange for the price of steel also remaining static. After the agreement was reached, U.S. Steel defied the President’s wishes and undermined the hard work to reach that compromise by announcing a price increase. The corporate elite wanted Kennedy to buckle, but instead, he threatened to investigate them for price-fixing and to have his brother Bobby examine their tax returns. Begrudgingly, U.S. Steel backed off and accepted the original terms. Kennedy’s policies, both domestic and foreign, were aimed at enhancing social and economic progress. Like Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin, JFK sought to use government powers to protect the masses from corporate domination. His tax policy was aimed at channeling investment into the expansion of productive means or capital. The investment tax credit, for instance, provided incentives for business entities that enhanced their productive abilities through investment in the upkeep or updating of equipment inside the United States. (Gibson pp. 21-22) While Kennedy’s policies were focused on strengthening production and labor power, his opponents in the Morgan/Rockefeller world were focused on sheer profit.

    David Rockefeller & Henry Luce  in 1962

    It should serve as no surprise that the media outlets responsible for condemning the president were tied into the very corporate and political establishment entities being threatened. As described by sociologist Donald Gibson in his fine book Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency, the elite of Wall Street, media executives and certain powerful political persons or groups were so interconnected as to be inbred. Allen Dulles himself was very much involved in these circles, and had close relationships with men like Henry Luce of the Time, Life and Fortune magazine empire, along with executives or journalists at the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project designed to use various media outlets for propaganda, was exposed during the Church Committee hearings, revealing the collaboration of hundreds of journalists and executives at various media organizations including CBS, NBC, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Newsweek and other institutions.15)

    John Kennedy wasn’t only trying to curtail corporate power with his Hamilton/Gallatin, New Deal-like economic policies. His decisions concerning military engagement abroad were greatly at odds with the hard-line Cold Warriors of his administration and the Central Intelligence Agency. Time after time, Kennedy refused to commit U.S. combat troops abroad despite the nagging insistence of his advisors. Although the President publicly accepted responsibility for the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, privately he was livid at the CIA for deceiving him. Through materials such as inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick’s report on the Bay of Pigs, and other declassified CIA documents, it is now evident that a major deception had occurred. The Agency had assured Kennedy that their group of anti-Castro Cuban invaders would be the spark that would set off a revolt against Fidel Castro just waiting to happen. This was not the case, and the CIA-backed Cubans were outnumbered by Castro’s forces 10 to 1. Even worse, as noted in the Kirkpatrick report, was the fact that the CIA had stocked the invading force with C-Level operatives. (2, p. 396) It was almost as if the surface level plan presented to the President was designed to fail in order to force his hand and commit the military into invading Cuba. A declassified CIA memo acknowledges the fact that securing the desired beach area in Cuba was not possible without military intervention. 16

    When Kennedy refused to commit U.S. troops as the operation crumbled, he became public enemy number one in the CIA’s eyes. This sentiment that Kennedy was soft on communism, or even a communist sympathizer, augmented as he continued to back away from military intervention in other situations. The President reached an agreement with the Soviet Union to keep Laos neutral, and despite his willingness to send advisors to Vietnam, he ultimately worked to enact a policy resulting in the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel from the country. Kennedy’s assassination ended this movement toward disengagement from Saigon.

    What was likely even worse to the Cold Warriors and CIA patriots during this time was the President’s attempts at détente with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. During, and in the period following, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were involved in back channel dialogue with one another. Discussion moved toward talks about détente; despite the fact that the two men’s respective countries had differing views, they agreed it was imperative, for the sake of the planet, to come to an understanding. This, along with JFK’s unwillingness to bomb Cuba during the Missile Crisis, were nothing short of traitorous to the covert and overt military power structure of the United States. In the final months of his life, the President also extended a secret olive branch toward Fidel Castro in hopes of opening a dialogue. Excited by the prospect, Castro was painfully upset when he got word of Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy most certainly had his enemies, and was making decisions that drove a stake into the very heart of corporate, military and intelligence collusion. If he had been elected President, Bobby Kennedy was most certainly going to continue, and most likely even expand, the policies of his late brother. (ibid, pp. 25-33) Like Jack and Bobby, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X expressed opposition toward the continuation of the Vietnam War.

    VI

    The concept of Deep Politics may provide a helpful alternative to the term “conspiracy theory”, which has become so stigmatized and so overused as to be meaningless. Abandoning the idea of conspiracy altogether, however, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water, for it raises legitimate questions about what lurks beneath the surface of the affairs of state. The enemies that John and Robert Kennedy were facing were not some fictional or hypothetical “illuminati” group or groups. They were very real, dangerous and powerful interests, and those forces are still with us in 2016. Deep Politics does not imply that there is some singular group or set of groups that meet in secret to plot colossal calamities that affect the entire world, but rather that the events themselves arise from the milieu(s) created by a congruence of unaccountable, supra-constitutional, covert, corporate and illegal interests, sometimes operating in a dialectical manner. A more recent example would be the networking of several of these interests to orchestrate the colossal Iran/Contra project.

    Other writers have also described these subterranean forces using other terms. The late Fletcher Prouty called it the Secret Team. Investigative journalist Jim Hougan calls it a Shadow Government. Florida State professor Lance DeHaven Smith, with respect to its activities, coined the term “State Crime Against Democracy”, or SCAD. (Click here for his definition.) Smith wrote one of the best books about how, with the help of the MSM, these forces stole the 2000 election in Florida from Al Gore. He then wrote a book explaining how the term “conspiracy theorist” became a commonly used smear to disarm the critics of the Warren Commission. It was, in fact, the CIA which started this trend with its famous 1967 dispatch entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report”. (See this review for the sordid details.)

    Whether it be extralegal assassinations, unwarranted domestic surveillance, interventionist wars at the behest of corporate interests, torture or other activities of that stripe, these all in essence have their roots in the Dulles era in which covert, corporate power developed into a well-oiled and unaccountable machine running roughshod. These forces have continued to operate regardless of who is elected president, whether Democrat or Republican. (See Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda for a trenchant analysis of the operation against Richard Nixon that came to be called Watergate.)

    It is my opinion that we must come to terms with these dark or, to use James W. Douglass’ term, “unspeakable” realities. And we must do so in a holistic way if we are to take more fundamental steps toward progress as a nation. George Orwell coined the term Crime Stop to describe the psychological mechanism by which humans ignore uncomfortable or dangerous thoughts. Through discussions with people young and old, it has become evident to me that this Crime Stop mechanism is at work in the subconscious of many Americans. We need to be willing to face the darker aspects of our recent past that have been at work below the surface and percolating up into view for many years.

    In a very tangible way, the refusal to face these dark forces has caused the Democratic Party to lose its way. And this diluted and uninspiring party has now given way to Donald Trump. As alluded to throughout this essay, this party has abandoned the aims and goals of the Kennedys, King and Malcolm X to the point that it now resembles the GOP more than it does the sum total of those four men. To understand what this means in stark political terms, consider the following. Today, among all fifty states, there are only 15 Democratic governors. In the last ten years, the Democrats have lost 900 state legislative seats. When Trump enters office, he will be in control of not just the White House, but also the Senate and the House of Representatives. Once he nominates his Supreme Court candidate to replace Antonin Scalia, he will also be in control of that institution.

    Bernie Sanders was the only candidate whose policies recalled the idea of the Democratic party of the Sixties. And according to a poll of 1,600 people run by Gravis Marketing, he would have soundly defeated Trump by 12 points. The Democrats have to get the message, or they run the risk of becoming a permanent minority party. They sorely need to look at themselves, and ask, What happened? As a starting point, they can take some of the advice contained in this essay.

    Notes

    1. “Hillary Clinton Snaps At NPR Host After Defensive Gay Marriage Interview.” YouTube. WFPL News, 12 June 2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgIe2GKudYY>.

    2. David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. New York, NY: Harper, 2015.

    3. Gary Leupp, “Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Resumé: What the Record Shows.” , 03 May 2016.

    4. Greg Grandin, “A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America.” The Nation, 18 April 2016.

    5. Tim Shorrock, “How Hillary Clinton Militarized US Policy in Honduras.” The Nation, 06 April 2016.

    6. Peter Dale Scott, “The Deep State and the Bias of Official History.” Who What Why, 20 January 2015.

    7. Ben Norton, “Sanders Condemns Pro-austerity ‘Colonial Takeover’ of Puerto Rico; Clinton Supports It.” Salon, 27 May 2016.

    8. “Chomsky on Liberal Disillusionment with Obama.” YouTube, 03 April 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Jbnq5V_1s>.

    9. Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and The Attack On U.S. Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015: Chapter 2, p. 12.

    10. “Project Censored 3.1 – JFK 50 – Peter Dale Scott – Deep Politics.” YouTube, Project Sensored, 19 December 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0CFpMej3mA>.

    11. Angelo Young, “And The Winner For The Most Iraq War Contracts Is . . . KBR, With $39.5 Billion In A Decade.” International Business Times, 19 March 2013.

    12. Zawn Villines, “The Four Worst Things Mike Pence Has Said About Women.” Daily Kos, 21 July 2016.

    13. Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

    14. Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency. New York: Sheridan Square, 1994.

    15. Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977 <http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php>.

    16. David Talbot, Brothers, p. 47.

  • A Coup in Camelot

    A Coup in Camelot

    Considering the large number of films and TV specials about the assassination of President Kennedy that have appeared over the last ten or fifteen years, genuinely worthwhile documentaries on the subject are sadly few and far between. The likes of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement and Chip Selby’s Reasonable Doubt were fine for their day but given the wealth of information and technological tools that have become available in the time since those films were produced they appear more than a little outdated now. Sadly, the majority of well budgeted, slickly produced documentaries of the 21st century have been created solely to push the delusory mythology of the Warren Commission. Aside from Shane O’Sullivan’s mostly worthwhile Killing Oswald there has been very little of note that has even attempted to counter the MSM’s seemingly endless deluge of propaganda with reliable evidence and solid reasoning. A Coup in Camelot clearly aims to fill that void. Unfortunately, however, it falls considerably short of the mark because it consistently confuses theory with fact.

    The film begins strongly enough with a ten minute introduction that briefly discusses Kennedy’s intention to withdraw American troops from Vietnam then outlines the reasons for his trip to Dallas and explains how, within hours of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was fingered as the lone nut assassin. From there A Coup in Camelot moves swiftly into one of its strongest segments, featuring respected author and researcher Vince Palamara as its main talking head. Over the years, through his diligent hard work in locating and interviewing members of the Secret Service, Palamara has made himself the go-to expert on the subject of President Kennedy’s protection―or lack thereof―in Dallas. I must admit that I have never been convinced the Secret Service was actively involved in the assassination. Yet Palamara’s work most certainly gives reason to at least consider the idea that JFK’s protection on November 22, 1963, was intentionally compromised.

    Secret Service authority
    Vince Palamara

    Palamara details just how many of the Secret Service’s usual practices were not followed that day. For example, it was standard procedure during an open motorcade for agents to be walking or jogging alongside the Presidential limousine. In fact there were two hand rails in place for agents to hold onto as they stood on the rear running boards of the car. As Palamara points out, “Secret Service agents are powerless to really do much of anything if they’re not close to the President.” And yet there were no agents on or near the limousine in Dallas. Defenders of the official mythology have long claimed that Kennedy himself had ordered the agents off the back of the car because he wanted the public to get a good look at him. But when Palamara spoke with Gerald Behn, the Special Agent in charge of the White House detail, Behn told him in no uncertain terms that he had never heard any such request from the President. Palamara then contacted numerous other Secret Service agents and White House aides and each one of them told him the same thing: Kennedy had not ordered the agents off of the car.

    Lone nut mythologists also tend to blame Kennedy for the fact that the limousine’s plexiglass bubble top was not used that day. Although the bubble top was not bullet proof or resistant it was, as Palamara notes, “a psychological deterrent because most people assumed it was bullet proof…The bottom line what the bubble top would have done is it would have obscured an assassin’s view via the sun’s glare.” To discover whether or not Kennedy really had ordered its removal, Palamara spoke with Special Agent Sam Kinney who was the driver of the Secret Service follow-up car. “Sam Kinney adamantly on three different occasions told me that President Kennedy had nothing to do with it; it was solely his responsibility.”

    Houston, 11/21/63

    Another procedure not followed in Dallas involved the additional protection customarily provided by local law enforcement. Whenever and wherever there was to be a motorcade, the Secret Service would usually work hand in hand with local police who would provide a motorcycle escort of six to nine officers that would ride in a wedge formation in front of and beside the Presidential limousine. This formation had been in place on all of the previous stops along Kennedy’s Texas trip. Yet in Dallas the escort was reduced to just four motorcycle officers who ended up riding behind the limo instead of beside it. As Palamara notes, “The formation was meaningless. It offered no protection at all…They left Kennedy a sitting duck.”

    II

    Having detailed these and many other irregularities in JFK’s protection, A Coup in Camelot moves on to a discussion of the “Blood, Bullets & Ballistics”, focusing largely on the conclusions of retired crime scene investigator, Sherry Fiester. It is Fiester’s contention that the massive spray of blood seen in frame 313 of the Zapruder film represents “back spatter” from a frontal shot. She further asserts that, despite numerous witnesses believing they heard shots or saw smoke coming from behind the fence on top of the “grassy knoll”, her own trajectory analysis excludes it as the source of the head shot. The actual source of the shot, she claims, was on the other side of Elm Street at the southern end of the triple overpass. But despite her impressive credentials and her 30 years experience with the Dallas police, Fiester’s conclusions fail to convince.

    Medical, scientific and ballistics experts such as Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Donald Thomas, and Larry Sturdivan agree that, by itself, the explosion of blood, bone and brain matter seen in the Zapruder film actually tells us very little about the direction in which the projectile was travelling. That is because it does not occur at the point of entrance or exit but near the mid-point of the bullet’s trajectory. Rifle wounds of the skull can be a very different matter than gunshot wounds to other parts of the body. The skull is a closed vessel containing fluid contents that cannot be compressed. The energy and momentum imparted to the skull by the passage of the bullet creates a temporary cavity. The result of cavitation in an enclosed skull containing blood and brain is a hydraulic pressure applied to the cranium causing it to burst open. As Aguilar and Wecht explain, the resultant “spew” of blood and tissue is “radial to the bullet’s path and is separate from the inshoot and outshoot splatter.” (Aguilar & Wecht, Letter to the Editor, AFTE Journal, Volume 48 Number 2, p. 76) This is what is known as the “Krönleinschuss” effect―named for the German ballistics expert who first demonstrated it using skulls filled with clay.

    This type of effect was demonstrated during filmed simulations performed in the Biophysics laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in 1964 when rifle bullets were fired into numerous skulls filled with ballistic gelatin. Describing a typical example Sturdivan writes, “The bullet entered the back of the skull and exited in a small spray at the front in the space of one frame of the high-speed movie. Only after the bullet was far down-range did the internal pressure generated by its passage split open the skull and relieve the pressure inside by spewing the contents through the cracks. A similar type explosion would have taken place if the bullet had gone through in the opposite direction. The only way to distinguish the direction of travel of the bullet is to examine the cratering effect on the inside of the skull on entrance and on the outside of the skull at exit.” (Sturdivan, The JFK Myths, p. 171)

    The empirical evidence, therefore, demonstrates that Fiester is mistaken in believing the explosive spray of matter we see in the Zapruder film is back spatter. In fact, forward spatter and back spatter are not seen in the film; probably because of the limitations of Zapruder’s camera. The film of the Edgewood simulation shows little to no back spatter and only a very small amount of forward matter which, as Sturdivan explains, was only visible “because of the strong lighting, a close-up view, and (especially) a very high framing rate…over 200 times the framing speed of the Zapruder movie…” (ibid. p. 174)

    Sherry Fiester

    Fiester’s trajectory analysis is also deeply flawed because it assumes something there is no reason to assume. Namely, that the bullet followed a straight path through the skull. In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) hired a NASA scientist to perform the same type of backward projection analysis, the committee’s forensic pathology panel cautioned against placing too much faith in it. The panel noted that, in their experience, “if a missile strikes an object capable of creating a shearing force, such as the skull, the bullet’s pathway in the body might be significantly different from the line of its trajectory prior to impact.” (7HSCA168) In other words, a bullet striking a dense, resistant skull bone is likely to become deformed and be deflected. Sturdivan writes that “The path of a deformed bullet through a body is never straight…Of the thousands of examples of yawed, deformed, and broken rifle bullets fired into gelatin tissue simulant at the Biophysics Division lab and other similar facilities, none had a perfectly straight trajectory. Few were even close.” (ibid. p. 208) So drawing a line between the presumed entrance and exit points in JFK’s skull will not tell us where the gunman was located no matter how far that line is extended into Dealey Plaza.

    Far from being excluded as Fiester asserts, the grassy knoll remains the most likely location for a frontal shooter. Not only because it was the location to which numerous witnesses pointed, but also because two teams of America’s top acoustical scientists agreed that the Dallas Police dictabelt recording they analyzed on behalf of the HSCA contained the acoustic fingerprint of a gunshot fired from the knoll. And the dictabelt recording synchronizes perfectly with the Zapruder film when―and only when―the knoll shot is aligned with frame 313.

    Featured alongside Fiester’s theories in this segment of A Coup in Camelot is the claim that President Kennedy was shot in the throat from the front. Yet aside from a brief reference to the way the wound was “described by doctors at Parkland Hospital”, no detail is provided to substantiate this assertion. As most readers will no doubt be aware, the Parkland physicians were indeed under the initial impression that the wound might have been an entrance; describing it as small, round, clean cut, and measuring little more than 5 mm in diameter. But those who hold these descriptions up as proof that a bullet entered the throat need to deal with the fact that studies have shown emergency room doctors to be frequently wrong in their assessment of bullet wounds. This is precisely why the premiere textbook for trauma room physicians, Rosen’s Emergency Medicine, cautions that “Clinicians should not describe wounds as ‘entrance’ or ‘exit’ but should document, using appropriate forensic terminology, a detailed description of the wound, including its appearance, characteristics, and location without attempting to interpret the wound type or bullet caliber. Exit wounds are not always larger than entrance wounds, and wound size does not consistently correspond to bullet caliber.” (Rosen’s Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice, p. 828)

    Those who propose that a bullet entered the throat must also deal with the fact that said bullet would have had to have disappeared entirely almost immediately after piercing the skin. Because not only was there no exit in the rear and no bullet found anywhere in the body, there was also no damage to the spine as there would almost certainly have had to have been had a missile entered Kennedy’s throat near the midline. It is for these reasons that, despite its appearance, the wound is extremely unlikely to have been one of entrance.

    III

    A Coup in Camelot moves from Dallas to Bethesda for a lengthy discussion of JFK’s autopsy, centred largely around the highly controversial theories of Douglas Horne. In a nutshell, Horne believes that Kennedy’s gunshot wounds were altered to hide evidence of a frontal shooter. This, of course, is not a new idea. It was first popularized by author David Lifton in his 36-year-old book, Best Evidence. But whereas Lifton postulated that unknown conspirators had hijacked the President’s body en route to Bethesda and altered his wounds to fool the autopsy surgeons, Horne suggests that the prosectors themselves altered the head wound during a secret “pre-autopsy” at the Navy morgue. For what purpose and to fool whom is never really made clear.

    Doug Horne

    At the very heart of Horne’s hypothesis is a comment made by Tom Robinson―an embalmer who was present for most of the autopsy―during a 1996 interview for the Assassination Records Review Board. When shown a photo displaying a large defect in the top of Kennedy’s head Robinson recalled that this was “what the doctors did”. He then explained that the autopsy surgeons had cut the scalp open and “reflected it back in order to remove bullet fragments.” (ARRB MD180) He also recalled seeing that “some sawing was done to remove some bone before the brain could be removed.” (ibid) What Robinson described is, of course, a perfectly normal part of an autopsy and he himself called what he saw a “normal craniotomy procedure.” (ibid) Yet somehow Horne construes Robinson’s remarks as evidence of some clandestine pre-autopsy activity. Why?

    The reason, according to Horne, is that “Dr. Humes always denied having to saw the skull open, he always maintained that the wound was so big that he just removed the brain with a minimum of cutting of the scalp; he never had to cut any bone.” However, as this passage from Hume’s sworn deposition for the ARRB demonstrates, Horne is entirely mistaken :

    GUNN: But just let me start out first: Where was the first incision made?

    HUMES: I believe, of course, the top of the skull to remove the skull plate of the brain. To remove what remained of the calvarium and to approach the removal of the brain.

    GUNN: And was that incision simply of the scalp, or did you need to cut –

    HUMES: No, we had to cut some bone as well. [my emphasis]

    * * *

    GUNN: Where did you cut the bone?

    HUMES: I find that–it’s hard to recall. Once we got the scalp laid back, some of those pieces could just be removed, you know, by picking them up, picking them up because they were just not held together very well, other than by the dura, I suppose. So other than that, we probably made it like we normally do, in a circumferential fashion from books, like right above the ear around. But it was a real problem because it was all falling apart, the skull. And I can’t recall the details of exactly how we managed to maneuver that, because it was a problem. (ARRB Deposition of James J. Humes, pgs. 101-102)

    As the reader can see, not only did Humes not deny having to saw the skull, he specifically testified to doing so. But Horne does not quote Humes himself and instead refers to a report written in 1965 by autopsy surgeon Dr. Pierre Finck―who did not arrive at Bethesda until after the brain had already been removed―in which Finck recalled being told that “no sawing of the skull was necessary”. What this means, therefore, is that the basis of Horne’s claim that “Humes always denied having to saw the skull open” is not any direct quotation from Humes himself, but the hearsay claim of a man who wasn’t even present when the brain was removed. This type of methodology is extremely difficult to defend. And what makes it all the more confounding is that Horne himself was actually present for the deposition during which Humes specifically swore to cutting the skull bone.

    Sadly, this is not the only instance in A Coup in Camelot in which Humes’ words are misconstrued in support of pre-autopsy surgery. The film’s co-writer, Art Van Kampen, suggests that “Something had to have happened to that body before the photos were taken”, and in the case of some photos that is indeed true. But Van Kampen claims that “Dr. Humes is very clear that no autopsy work had been done on the President’s skull before either photos or X-rays were taken.” This, again, is a clear misinterpretation of what Humes actually said. When asked during his ARRB deposition whether or not any incisions were made before the photographs were taken, Humes responded, “Well, depending on which photographs you’re talking about. We didn’t photograph the wound in the occiput until the brain was removed, you know. Sure, we had to make an incision to remove the brain and so forth, but no, generally speaking, no, we didn’t make any incisions at all [my emphasis].” (ibid. p. 95) Humes was then shown the photographs of the top of the head and asked whether or not, before the photo was taken, he had pulled the scalp back “in order to be able to have a better look at the injury” to which he responded “Yes, I probably did.” (ibid. p. 162) So, as should be perfectly clear, Humes confirmed that “generally speaking” most of the photographs were taken before any incisions took place but that some were indeed taken during the course of the autopsy. He also said essentially the same thing as Tom Robinson, which is that the photographs of the top of the head were taken after the scalp had been manipulated. There is, then, no meaningful discrepancy between what the autopsy pictures show and what Humes testified to.

    There has been confusion over Kennedy’s head wounds ever since the Warren Commission issued its findings. In large part this is due to there being two entirely different descriptions of the wounds on record. By and large the doctors at Parkland Hospital recalled seeing one fairly large hole that was located near the right rear of the head. Yet the autopsy report describes a massive defect involving almost the entire right side of the cranium. It was to explain this discrepancy that the body alteration hypothesis was first offered. However, as Dr. Aguilar has noted, “that the wound was described as larger at autopsy than noted by emergency personnel is not proof that it was surgically enlarged. Wounds picked apart during an autopsy are often found to be larger than they first appeared to emergency personnel.” (Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 187)

    There is a simpler, far more reasonable explanation than clandestine alteration. One that, ironically enough, is touched upon in A Coup in Camelot. Shortly before discussion of the autopsy begins, the film’s narrator correctly informs viewers that “In the Zapruder film, a flap of skull can be seen opening up after the head strike. During the frantic ride to Parkland Hospital the flap had been folded back into place where the blood acted like glue and sealed the wound.” Indeed, Jackie Kennedy later testified to trying to hold her husband’s skull together on the way to the hospital. As Dr. Aguilar writes, “It is not hard to imagine the possibility that during the time it took the Presidential limousine to get to Parkland Hospital, clot had formed gluing a portion of disrupted scalp down making JFK’s skull defect appear smaller to treating surgeons than it later would to autopsy surgeons.” (ibid) In other words, because the flap had been closed up, the emergency room staff only saw the rearmost portion of the wound.

    IV

    The idea that something out of the ordinary occurred at Bethesda is buttressed by stories of multiple coffins being brought into the morgue on the night of the autopsy. At Parkland Hospital, Kennedy’s body had been placed into an ornamental bronze casket. However, in A Coup in Camelot it is alleged that the body actually arrived at Bethesda in an aluminium shipping casket at around 6:35 pm. This means that when the bronze casket was brought into the morgue at 7:17 pm it was, unbeknownst to the FBI agents who accompanied it, completely empty. Or so we are told. Horne further alleges that for some reason the Dallas casket then “made a second entry that night…at 20:00 hours military time.”

    Once again the evidence does not support the theory. As presented in the film, the idea that Kennedy’s body arrived in an aluminium shipping casket is based on the recollection of Naval petty officer, Dennis David, who recalled helping carry one into morgue. Yet, as the summary of his ARRB interview states, David “emphasized that he had no direct knowledge, by observation, that President Kennedy was in the gray shipping casket…” (ARRB MD177) The reality is that, being as Bethesda was a morgue, there is no reason to believe that Kennedy’s body was the only one to be brought there that night. In fact, FBI agent Francis O’Neill specifically recalled being told that one of the four drawers in the anteroom adjacent to the autopsy room contained the body of a child “that had died that day.” (O’Neill ARRB deposition, p. 57)

    Perhaps more importantly, the claim that the bronze casket was empty when brought into the mortuary is belied by the testimony of both O’Neill and his FBI colleague, James Sibert. These two agents who helped unload the casket from the ambulance swore that they stayed with it until it was opened and saw with their own eyes the President’s body taken out. O’Neill stated without hesitation during his ARRB deposition that there was “no time” from the time he first saw the casket “until the time it was opened and the body taken out that the casket was not in my view…” (ibid. p. 59) Similarly, when asked whether or not there had been any time between being unloaded from the ambulance and being opened that the casket had been out of his sight, Sibert responded, “I was there until it was opened.” (Sibert ARRB deposition, p. 45) There is, therefore, no basis for claiming that the casket was “certainly empty” as Horne does.

    Finally, the supposed 20:00 re-entry of the casket is based on a time notation which appears in an unsigned, undated document titled “The Joint Casket Bearer Team.” This document describes the activities of a group containing one officer and seven enlisted men “from each branch of the Armed Forces” who were “trained to carry the casket to and from the ceremony sites and to fold the flag which draped the casket following the internment service.” (ARRB MD163) This team, as A Coup in Camelot correctly informs, was also known as the “honor guard”. It appears quite apparent that, far from being proof of a second entry for the bronze casket, the 20:00 hours time notation on this document is nothing more than a mistake. Why? Because despite the film’s claim that Sibert and O’Neill had carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm alongside Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer, O’Neill explained in his ARRB deposition that, in actual fact, it was the honor guard who had physically lifted the coffin at that time. (O’Neill deposition, p. 57) So unless anyone wants to believe that the honor guard carried it in twice, they are going to have to accept that the unknown writer of the document was in error and there was only one entry for the bronze casket.

    A coup in Camelot intermingles these stories of casket-swapping and wound tampering with claims that the autopsy X-rays and photographs have also been altered. This, once again, is not a new theory. In fact it has been a commonly held belief amongst students of the assassination for decades. And yet nothing approaching proof of alteration has ever emerged. The most commonly cited reason for believing the photos have been tampered with, the one repeated in A Coup in Camelot, is that the pictures appear to show the back of the head completely intact. This is, of course, at odds with the testimony of the Parkland physicians who recalled seeing a large wound in the right rear. But as autopsy surgeon J. Thornton Boswell explained to both the HSCA and the ARRB, the reason the rear skull damage is not seen in the photographs is because the scalp is being held up and “pulled forward up over the forehead, toward the forehead.” (Boswell ARRB deposition, p. 150) This has the effect of hiding the wound underneath.

    Those who choose to ignore Boswell’s words are still stuck with the reality that the autopsy photographer, John Stringer, authenticated the photographs during his own ARRB deposition, repeatedly stating that he had no reason to believe the existing photographs were anything other than the ones that he himself took on the night of the autopsy. The same is true of the X-rays. The technician responsible for taking them, Jerrol Custer, repeatedly swore to the accuracy and authenticity of the existing X-rays for the ARRB. For example, when shown the anterior/posterior view:

    GUNN: Is there any question in your mind whether the X-ray that’s in front of you right now is the original X-ray taken at the autopsy?

    CUSTER: No question.

    GUNN: And the answer is––

    CUSTER: It is the original film. (p. 122-123)

    And when shown the right lateral skull X-ray:

    GUNN: … Mr. Custer, can you identify the film that is in front of you right now as having been taken by you on the night of the autopsy of President Kennedy?

    CUSTER: Correct. Yes, I do, sir.

    GUNN: And how are you able to identify that as being––

    CUSTER: My marker in the lower mandibular joint. (p. 124)

    With the men who took them―and all three autopsy doctors―swearing to their authenticity, there seems little doubt that the autopsy photographs and X-rays would have been admitted into evidence were there to be a trial in the Kennedy case. And with questions of validity settled, a more important question would be asked: What do the skull X-rays actually show? The answer to that, as a number of experts including neuroscientist Dr. Joseph Riley and radiologist Dr. Randy Robertson have attested, is that the official theory of a single shot from the rear simply cannot be true.

    As Dr. Humes explained in his Warren Commission testimony, the pathologists found an entrance wound that was 2.5 cm to the right, and “slightly above” the external occipital protuberance―a small bump located very low down in the rear of the skull―and “a huge defect over the right side” involving “both the scalp and the underlying skull…” After a “careful examination of the margins of the large bone defect” on the right side, the doctors were unable to find a point of exit, which Humes put down to the fact that they “did not have the bone.” However, the pathologists concluded that a single bullet was responsible for all the damage, having entered the rear and exited the right side. In support of this contention, Humes implied that the path of the bullet was laid out by a trail of metallic fragments that could be seen on the X-rays “traversing a line from the wound in the occiput to just above the right eye…” (Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. II, p. 351-353)

    Annotated X ray

    Unfortunately for Dr. Humes, the X-rays do not show what he claimed. The entrance wound in the lower rear of the skull is indeed visible. So too is the trail of bullet fragments. But the two are in no way related. In fact, the trail lies along the very top of the skull, several inches above the entrance site. Therefore, those fragments could not have been left behind by a bullet which entered near the external occipital protuberance. As Aguilar and Wecht have noted, “…the fragment trail alone almost completely eliminates the official theory JFK was struck from above and behind by a single bullet that entered his skull low…” (Aguilar & Wecht, Op. cit. p. 78) Dr. Joseph Riley, who has a Ph.D in neuroscience and specializes in neuroanatomy and experimental neuropathology, noted decades ago that the medical evidence as it stands is only compatible with two separate bullet strikes. It is for that very reason that I see little logic in suggesting that the X-rays have been altered to support the official story.

    V

    These largely specious claims about the medical evidence form the centrepiece of A Coup in Camelot and, clocking in at nearly 40 minutes, comprise well over a third of the film’s running time. For those who are familiar with the facts that are being misinterpreted and/or overlooked, this time will not pass quickly. Things do pick up, however, for the final 20 minutes of the film which deals partially with the enigmatic Lee Harvey Oswald. Whether or not Oswald was on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a rifle in his hands at the time of the assassination has never been conclusively established. But A Coup in Camelot demonstrates, through the pioneering research of former investigative reporter Barry Ernest, that in all likelihood Oswald was where he claimed to be when the shots were fired; on the first floor of the building eating lunch.

    Barry Ernest

    Ernest centred his research on an often overlooked witness named Victoria Adams who had viewed the assassination from a fourth floor window of the depository building. As most students of the case know, Oswald was seen by his boss Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker in the second floor lunch room approximately 90 seconds after the shots were fired. Baker was on his way to the roof where he believed the gunman might be located but, upon spotting Oswald alone in the lunch room, he halted his ascent and demanded Oswald identify himself. Truly quickly informed Baker that Oswald was an employee and the pair then continued their dash up the stairs. Oswald later told police that he had gone from the first floor to the second in order to purchase a Coke. But, of course, the Warren Commission claimed that he had actually rushed down from the sixth floor immediately after shooting the President.

    In that regard, Victoria Adams was a problematic witness for the Commission. After watching the motorcade pass by with three co-workers, she had stayed at the fourth floor window for what she said was around 15 to 30 seconds and then quickly made her way down to the first floor. What this means, as Ernest explains, is that “she would have been on the stairs at the same time Oswald was descending from the sixth floor.” The problem is “…she did not see or hear anyone on the stairs during that period.” The Commission’s handling of her story typified its approach to the investigation. It did not bother to question any of those who had stood at the window with her to watch the motorcade―not even Sandra Styles who had accompanied Adams down the stairs―and instead suggested that she was simply mistaken about the time she left the fourth floor window.

    Victoria Adams

    In support of this contention, the Commission alleged that Adams had testified to seeing two other employees of the building, William Shelley and Billy Lovelady, when she arrived on the first floor. And because Shelley and Lovelady had testified to being outside on the depository steps during the shooting and not re-entering the building until several minutes later, the Commission claimed that Adams’ “…estimate of the time when she descended from the fourth floor is incorrect, and she actually came down the stairs several minutes after Oswald and after Truly and Baker as well.” (Warren Report, p. 154) The problem with the Commission’s argument is that when Ernest tracked Adams down she “flat-out denied” ever saying she had seen Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor. In order to confirm or refute her assertions, Ernest searched the National Archives for the stenographic tape of Adams’ testimony. Not surprisingly, however, he soon discovered that there is no record of her April 7, 1964, testimony and the stenographic tape has gone mysteriously “missing.”

    But in 1999 Ernest discovered a bombshell document in the Archives in the form of a June 2, 1964, letter written by Assistant United States Attorney, Martha Joe Stroud, to Warren Commission Chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin. This letter contains the only known reference in the Commission’s files to an interview with Dorothy Garner, who was Adams’ supervisor and one of those with whom she had stood at the fourth floor window. The letter notes matter-of-factly that “Miss Garner…stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.” Thus Garner provided complete corroboration for Adams’ testimony. Just as she swore, Adams had indeed descended those old wooden steps at the same time Oswald was supposed to have been on them. And the corroboration of this fact was completely ignored by the Commission who made no mention of Garner’s interview whatsoever.

    As Ernest details in his indispensable book, The Girl on the Stairs, he went on to locate and interview Garner for himself. He asked her about her own activities following the assassination and Garner explained to him that as Adams and Styles made their way downstairs, she herself went to a storage area by the stairway. It was from there that she was able to see Baker and Truly ascend the stairs. Garner said that she was “right behind” Adams and Styles in leaving the window and although she didn’t actually see them enter the stairway, she heard them “after they started down” because “the stairs were very noisy.” (The Girl on the Stairs, p. 268) Garner, it appears, had arrived on the fourth floor landing area only seconds after Adams and was there long enough to see Baker and Truly. Quite obviously, then, if Oswald had descended from the sixth floor during that time as he would have had to have done in order to make it to his second floor encounter with Baker, then Garner was in a position to see him. Yet, as she told Ernest, “I don’t remember seeing him at all that day…except on TV.” (ibid)

    It is impossible to overstate how damaging all of this is to the case against Oswald. It is clear that he could not have made it down to the second floor ahead of Adams because he did not have the time. This means he would have had to have descended long enough after Adams for her not to have heard his footsteps. Yet if he was 10 or 15 seconds behind her on the stairwell, it seems highly unlikely that he would not have been spotted by Garner who did not see or hear him on the noisy old stairs, even though she stayed on the fourth floor landing area long enough to see Truly and Baker. The most logical conclusion to be drawn is that when Oswald arrived at his second floor meeting with Baker, he had not come from the sixth floor but from the first, just as he said he had. And that would mean that, whatever else he did that day, Oswald did not shoot President Kennedy.

    VI

    A Coup in Camelot finishes with a brief discussion of how Kennedy’s plans to pull American military personnel out of Vietnam were reversed after his death and how private US contractors profited from the all-out war that followed. However none of this is explored in any detail and no attempt is made to show how it can be directly connected to the assassination. Had the writers and producers chosen to focus more heavily on these areas they may well have created a more valuable and compelling film than this one.

    It is clear that the filmmakers wanted to offer forensic proof of a conspiracy and, in fact, at the end of the film it is claimed they have done just that. “We have proven through modern forensics”, narrator Peter Coyote says, “that a shot or shots were fired from the front.” Yet, as I have demonstrated above, proof of such is not offered in A Coup in Camelot. What is provided instead is a bloodspatter theory that, whilst plausible on the surface, is entirely contradicted by empirical evidence. Instead of relying on the opinions of one individual, the filmmakers should have consulted with other, perhaps better qualified experts to ensure that what was being proposed had really been put to the test. How else can one claim to have proven something? There are numerous medical and scientific professionals who are well-versed in the facts of the assassination―such as Doctors Wecht, Aguilar, Robertson, and Thomas―who, I am sure, would have been more than happy to share their expertise.

    As I see it, this is the fatal flaw of A Coup in Camelot. Theory is all too readily accepted and promoted by the filmmakers without any independent verification or even basic fact-checking. How difficult would it have been to have had somebody actually read Dr. Humes’ various testimonies to see if he really had “always denied having to saw the skull open”? Or to have studied the deposition of Francis O’Neill to discover who had physically carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm? A clearer understanding of these two points alone would have been enough to call into serious question the highly dubious claims of multiple casket entries and wound tampering at Bethesda.

    Theories about the Kennedy assassination―many of them nutty―have been promulgated for far too long and they are not convincing anyone outside of the so-called “research community”. When you attempt to counter the ballistics experiments and slickly-produced computer simulations featured in mainstream lone gunman documentaries with something as bizarre-sounding and ill-founded as the body alteration hypothesis you are not likely to win many converts amongst the general population. What is needed is real expert opinion and cold, hard evidence presented in a compelling manner. A Coup in Camelot is skilfully produced on what appears to have been a reasonable budget and if the filmmakers had consulted the right individuals and doubled down on their facts they could well have produced something of real value. For that reason the film strikes me as a wasted opportunity.

  • A Coup in Camelot

    A Coup in Camelot

    Considering the large number of films and TV specials about the assassination of President Kennedy that have appeared over the last ten or fifteen years, genuinely worthwhile documentaries on the subject are sadly few and far between. The likes of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement and Chip Selby’s Reasonable Doubt were fine for their day but given the wealth of information and technological tools that have become available in the time since those films were produced they appear more than a little outdated now. Sadly, the majority of well budgeted, slickly produced documentaries of the 21st century have been created solely to push the delusory mythology of the Warren Commission. Aside from Shane O’Sullivan’s mostly worthwhile Killing Oswald there has been very little of note that has even attempted to counter the MSM’s seemingly endless deluge of propaganda with reliable evidence and solid reasoning. A Coup in Camelot clearly aims to fill that void. Unfortunately, however, it falls considerably short of the mark because it consistently confuses theory with fact.

    The film begins strongly enough with a ten minute introduction that briefly discusses Kennedy’s intention to withdraw American troops from Vietnam then outlines the reasons for his trip to Dallas and explains how, within hours of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was fingered as the lone nut assassin. From there A Coup in Camelot moves swiftly into one of its strongest segments, featuring respected author and researcher Vince Palamara as its main talking head. Over the years, through his diligent hard work in locating and interviewing members of the Secret Service, Palamara has made himself the go-to expert on the subject of President Kennedy’s protection―or lack thereof―in Dallas. I must admit that I have never been convinced the Secret Service was actively involved in the assassination. Yet Palamara’s work most certainly gives reason to at least consider the idea that JFK’s protection on November 22, 1963, was intentionally compromised.

    Secret Service authority
    Vince Palamara

    Palamara details just how many of the Secret Service’s usual practices were not followed that day. For example, it was standard procedure during an open motorcade for agents to be walking or jogging alongside the Presidential limousine. In fact there were two hand rails in place for agents to hold onto as they stood on the rear running boards of the car. As Palamara points out, “Secret Service agents are powerless to really do much of anything if they’re not close to the President.” And yet there were no agents on or near the limousine in Dallas. Defenders of the official mythology have long claimed that Kennedy himself had ordered the agents off the back of the car because he wanted the public to get a good look at him. But when Palamara spoke with Gerald Behn, the Special Agent in charge of the White House detail, Behn told him in no uncertain terms that he had never heard any such request from the President. Palamara then contacted numerous other Secret Service agents and White House aides and each one of them told him the same thing: Kennedy had not ordered the agents off of the car.

    Lone nut mythologists also tend to blame Kennedy for the fact that the limousine’s plexiglass bubble top was not used that day. Although the bubble top was not bullet proof or resistant it was, as Palamara notes, “a psychological deterrent because most people assumed it was bullet proof…The bottom line what the bubble top would have done is it would have obscured an assassin’s view via the sun’s glare.” To discover whether or not Kennedy really had ordered its removal, Palamara spoke with Special Agent Sam Kinney who was the driver of the Secret Service follow-up car. “Sam Kinney adamantly on three different occasions told me that President Kennedy had nothing to do with it; it was solely his responsibility.”

    Houston, 11/21/63

    Another procedure not followed in Dallas involved the additional protection customarily provided by local law enforcement. Whenever and wherever there was to be a motorcade, the Secret Service would usually work hand in hand with local police who would provide a motorcycle escort of six to nine officers that would ride in a wedge formation in front of and beside the Presidential limousine. This formation had been in place on all of the previous stops along Kennedy’s Texas trip. Yet in Dallas the escort was reduced to just four motorcycle officers who ended up riding behind the limo instead of beside it. As Palamara notes, “The formation was meaningless. It offered no protection at all…They left Kennedy a sitting duck.”

    II

    Having detailed these and many other irregularities in JFK’s protection, A Coup in Camelot moves on to a discussion of the “Blood, Bullets & Ballistics”, focusing largely on the conclusions of retired crime scene investigator, Sherry Fiester. It is Fiester’s contention that the massive spray of blood seen in frame 313 of the Zapruder film represents “back spatter” from a frontal shot. She further asserts that, despite numerous witnesses believing they heard shots or saw smoke coming from behind the fence on top of the “grassy knoll”, her own trajectory analysis excludes it as the source of the head shot. The actual source of the shot, she claims, was on the other side of Elm Street at the southern end of the triple overpass. But despite her impressive credentials and her 30 years experience with the Dallas police, Fiester’s conclusions fail to convince.

    Medical, scientific and ballistics experts such as Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Donald Thomas, and Larry Sturdivan agree that, by itself, the explosion of blood, bone and brain matter seen in the Zapruder film actually tells us very little about the direction in which the projectile was travelling. That is because it does not occur at the point of entrance or exit but near the mid-point of the bullet’s trajectory. Rifle wounds of the skull can be a very different matter than gunshot wounds to other parts of the body. The skull is a closed vessel containing fluid contents that cannot be compressed. The energy and momentum imparted to the skull by the passage of the bullet creates a temporary cavity. The result of cavitation in an enclosed skull containing blood and brain is a hydraulic pressure applied to the cranium causing it to burst open. As Aguilar and Wecht explain, the resultant “spew” of blood and tissue is “radial to the bullet’s path and is separate from the inshoot and outshoot splatter.” (Aguilar & Wecht, Letter to the Editor, AFTE Journal, Volume 48 Number 2, p. 76) This is what is known as the “Krönleinschuss” effect―named for the German ballistics expert who first demonstrated it using skulls filled with clay.

    This type of effect was demonstrated during filmed simulations performed in the Biophysics laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in 1964 when rifle bullets were fired into numerous skulls filled with ballistic gelatin. Describing a typical example Sturdivan writes, “The bullet entered the back of the skull and exited in a small spray at the front in the space of one frame of the high-speed movie. Only after the bullet was far down-range did the internal pressure generated by its passage split open the skull and relieve the pressure inside by spewing the contents through the cracks. A similar type explosion would have taken place if the bullet had gone through in the opposite direction. The only way to distinguish the direction of travel of the bullet is to examine the cratering effect on the inside of the skull on entrance and on the outside of the skull at exit.” (Sturdivan, The JFK Myths, p. 171)

    The empirical evidence, therefore, demonstrates that Fiester is mistaken in believing the explosive spray of matter we see in the Zapruder film is back spatter. In fact, forward spatter and back spatter are not seen in the film; probably because of the limitations of Zapruder’s camera. The film of the Edgewood simulation shows little to no back spatter and only a very small amount of forward matter which, as Sturdivan explains, was only visible “because of the strong lighting, a close-up view, and (especially) a very high framing rate…over 200 times the framing speed of the Zapruder movie…” (ibid. p. 174)

    Sherry Fiester

    Fiester’s trajectory analysis is also deeply flawed because it assumes something there is no reason to assume. Namely, that the bullet followed a straight path through the skull. In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) hired a NASA scientist to perform the same type of backward projection analysis, the committee’s forensic pathology panel cautioned against placing too much faith in it. The panel noted that, in their experience, “if a missile strikes an object capable of creating a shearing force, such as the skull, the bullet’s pathway in the body might be significantly different from the line of its trajectory prior to impact.” (7HSCA168) In other words, a bullet striking a dense, resistant skull bone is likely to become deformed and be deflected. Sturdivan writes that “The path of a deformed bullet through a body is never straight…Of the thousands of examples of yawed, deformed, and broken rifle bullets fired into gelatin tissue simulant at the Biophysics Division lab and other similar facilities, none had a perfectly straight trajectory. Few were even close.” (ibid. p. 208) So drawing a line between the presumed entrance and exit points in JFK’s skull will not tell us where the gunman was located no matter how far that line is extended into Dealey Plaza.

    Far from being excluded as Fiester asserts, the grassy knoll remains the most likely location for a frontal shooter. Not only because it was the location to which numerous witnesses pointed, but also because two teams of America’s top acoustical scientists agreed that the Dallas Police dictabelt recording they analyzed on behalf of the HSCA contained the acoustic fingerprint of a gunshot fired from the knoll. And the dictabelt recording synchronizes perfectly with the Zapruder film when―and only when―the knoll shot is aligned with frame 313.

    Featured alongside Fiester’s theories in this segment of A Coup in Camelot is the claim that President Kennedy was shot in the throat from the front. Yet aside from a brief reference to the way the wound was “described by doctors at Parkland Hospital”, no detail is provided to substantiate this assertion. As most readers will no doubt be aware, the Parkland physicians were indeed under the initial impression that the wound might have been an entrance; describing it as small, round, clean cut, and measuring little more than 5 mm in diameter. But those who hold these descriptions up as proof that a bullet entered the throat need to deal with the fact that studies have shown emergency room doctors to be frequently wrong in their assessment of bullet wounds. This is precisely why the premiere textbook for trauma room physicians, Rosen’s Emergency Medicine, cautions that “Clinicians should not describe wounds as ‘entrance’ or ‘exit’ but should document, using appropriate forensic terminology, a detailed description of the wound, including its appearance, characteristics, and location without attempting to interpret the wound type or bullet caliber. Exit wounds are not always larger than entrance wounds, and wound size does not consistently correspond to bullet caliber.” (Rosen’s Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice, p. 828)

    Those who propose that a bullet entered the throat must also deal with the fact that said bullet would have had to have disappeared entirely almost immediately after piercing the skin. Because not only was there no exit in the rear and no bullet found anywhere in the body, there was also no damage to the spine as there would almost certainly have had to have been had a missile entered Kennedy’s throat near the midline. It is for these reasons that, despite its appearance, the wound is extremely unlikely to have been one of entrance.

    III

    A Coup in Camelot moves from Dallas to Bethesda for a lengthy discussion of JFK’s autopsy, centred largely around the highly controversial theories of Douglas Horne. In a nutshell, Horne believes that Kennedy’s gunshot wounds were altered to hide evidence of a frontal shooter. This, of course, is not a new idea. It was first popularized by author David Lifton in his 36-year-old book, Best Evidence. But whereas Lifton postulated that unknown conspirators had hijacked the President’s body en route to Bethesda and altered his wounds to fool the autopsy surgeons, Horne suggests that the prosectors themselves altered the head wound during a secret “pre-autopsy” at the Navy morgue. For what purpose and to fool whom is never really made clear.

    Doug Horne

    At the very heart of Horne’s hypothesis is a comment made by Tom Robinson―an embalmer who was present for most of the autopsy―during a 1996 interview for the Assassination Records Review Board. When shown a photo displaying a large defect in the top of Kennedy’s head Robinson recalled that this was “what the doctors did”. He then explained that the autopsy surgeons had cut the scalp open and “reflected it back in order to remove bullet fragments.” (ARRB MD180) He also recalled seeing that “some sawing was done to remove some bone before the brain could be removed.” (ibid) What Robinson described is, of course, a perfectly normal part of an autopsy and he himself called what he saw a “normal craniotomy procedure.” (ibid) Yet somehow Horne construes Robinson’s remarks as evidence of some clandestine pre-autopsy activity. Why?

    The reason, according to Horne, is that “Dr. Humes always denied having to saw the skull open, he always maintained that the wound was so big that he just removed the brain with a minimum of cutting of the scalp; he never had to cut any bone.” However, as this passage from Hume’s sworn deposition for the ARRB demonstrates, Horne is entirely mistaken :

    GUNN: But just let me start out first: Where was the first incision made?

    HUMES: I believe, of course, the top of the skull to remove the skull plate of the brain. To remove what remained of the calvarium and to approach the removal of the brain.

    GUNN: And was that incision simply of the scalp, or did you need to cut –

    HUMES: No, we had to cut some bone as well. [my emphasis]

    * * *

    GUNN: Where did you cut the bone?

    HUMES: I find that–it’s hard to recall. Once we got the scalp laid back, some of those pieces could just be removed, you know, by picking them up, picking them up because they were just not held together very well, other than by the dura, I suppose. So other than that, we probably made it like we normally do, in a circumferential fashion from books, like right above the ear around. But it was a real problem because it was all falling apart, the skull. And I can’t recall the details of exactly how we managed to maneuver that, because it was a problem. (ARRB Deposition of James J. Humes, pgs. 101-102)

    As the reader can see, not only did Humes not deny having to saw the skull, he specifically testified to doing so. But Horne does not quote Humes himself and instead refers to a report written in 1965 by autopsy surgeon Dr. Pierre Finck―who did not arrive at Bethesda until after the brain had already been removed―in which Finck recalled being told that “no sawing of the skull was necessary”. What this means, therefore, is that the basis of Horne’s claim that “Humes always denied having to saw the skull open” is not any direct quotation from Humes himself, but the hearsay claim of a man who wasn’t even present when the brain was removed. This type of methodology is extremely difficult to defend. And what makes it all the more confounding is that Horne himself was actually present for the deposition during which Humes specifically swore to cutting the skull bone.

    Sadly, this is not the only instance in A Coup in Camelot in which Humes’ words are misconstrued in support of pre-autopsy surgery. The film’s co-writer, Art Van Kampen, suggests that “Something had to have happened to that body before the photos were taken”, and in the case of some photos that is indeed true. But Van Kampen claims that “Dr. Humes is very clear that no autopsy work had been done on the President’s skull before either photos or X-rays were taken.” This, again, is a clear misinterpretation of what Humes actually said. When asked during his ARRB deposition whether or not any incisions were made before the photographs were taken, Humes responded, “Well, depending on which photographs you’re talking about. We didn’t photograph the wound in the occiput until the brain was removed, you know. Sure, we had to make an incision to remove the brain and so forth, but no, generally speaking, no, we didn’t make any incisions at all [my emphasis].” (ibid. p. 95) Humes was then shown the photographs of the top of the head and asked whether or not, before the photo was taken, he had pulled the scalp back “in order to be able to have a better look at the injury” to which he responded “Yes, I probably did.” (ibid. p. 162) So, as should be perfectly clear, Humes confirmed that “generally speaking” most of the photographs were taken before any incisions took place but that some were indeed taken during the course of the autopsy. He also said essentially the same thing as Tom Robinson, which is that the photographs of the top of the head were taken after the scalp had been manipulated. There is, then, no meaningful discrepancy between what the autopsy pictures show and what Humes testified to.

    There has been confusion over Kennedy’s head wounds ever since the Warren Commission issued its findings. In large part this is due to there being two entirely different descriptions of the wounds on record. By and large the doctors at Parkland Hospital recalled seeing one fairly large hole that was located near the right rear of the head. Yet the autopsy report describes a massive defect involving almost the entire right side of the cranium. It was to explain this discrepancy that the body alteration hypothesis was first offered. However, as Dr. Aguilar has noted, “that the wound was described as larger at autopsy than noted by emergency personnel is not proof that it was surgically enlarged. Wounds picked apart during an autopsy are often found to be larger than they first appeared to emergency personnel.” (Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 187)

    There is a simpler, far more reasonable explanation than clandestine alteration. One that, ironically enough, is touched upon in A Coup in Camelot. Shortly before discussion of the autopsy begins, the film’s narrator correctly informs viewers that “In the Zapruder film, a flap of skull can be seen opening up after the head strike. During the frantic ride to Parkland Hospital the flap had been folded back into place where the blood acted like glue and sealed the wound.” Indeed, Jackie Kennedy later testified to trying to hold her husband’s skull together on the way to the hospital. As Dr. Aguilar writes, “It is not hard to imagine the possibility that during the time it took the Presidential limousine to get to Parkland Hospital, clot had formed gluing a portion of disrupted scalp down making JFK’s skull defect appear smaller to treating surgeons than it later would to autopsy surgeons.” (ibid) In other words, because the flap had been closed up, the emergency room staff only saw the rearmost portion of the wound.

    IV

    The idea that something out of the ordinary occurred at Bethesda is buttressed by stories of multiple coffins being brought into the morgue on the night of the autopsy. At Parkland Hospital, Kennedy’s body had been placed into an ornamental bronze casket. However, in A Coup in Camelot it is alleged that the body actually arrived at Bethesda in an aluminium shipping casket at around 6:35 pm. This means that when the bronze casket was brought into the morgue at 7:17 pm it was, unbeknownst to the FBI agents who accompanied it, completely empty. Or so we are told. Horne further alleges that for some reason the Dallas casket then “made a second entry that night…at 20:00 hours military time.”

    Once again the evidence does not support the theory. As presented in the film, the idea that Kennedy’s body arrived in an aluminium shipping casket is based on the recollection of Naval petty officer, Dennis David, who recalled helping carry one into morgue. Yet, as the summary of his ARRB interview states, David “emphasized that he had no direct knowledge, by observation, that President Kennedy was in the gray shipping casket…” (ARRB MD177) The reality is that, being as Bethesda was a morgue, there is no reason to believe that Kennedy’s body was the only one to be brought there that night. In fact, FBI agent Francis O’Neill specifically recalled being told that one of the four drawers in the anteroom adjacent to the autopsy room contained the body of a child “that had died that day.” (O’Neill ARRB deposition, p. 57)

    Perhaps more importantly, the claim that the bronze casket was empty when brought into the mortuary is belied by the testimony of both O’Neill and his FBI colleague, James Sibert. These two agents who helped unload the casket from the ambulance swore that they stayed with it until it was opened and saw with their own eyes the President’s body taken out. O’Neill stated without hesitation during his ARRB deposition that there was “no time” from the time he first saw the casket “until the time it was opened and the body taken out that the casket was not in my view…” (ibid. p. 59) Similarly, when asked whether or not there had been any time between being unloaded from the ambulance and being opened that the casket had been out of his sight, Sibert responded, “I was there until it was opened.” (Sibert ARRB deposition, p. 45) There is, therefore, no basis for claiming that the casket was “certainly empty” as Horne does.

    Finally, the supposed 20:00 re-entry of the casket is based on a time notation which appears in an unsigned, undated document titled “The Joint Casket Bearer Team.” This document describes the activities of a group containing one officer and seven enlisted men “from each branch of the Armed Forces” who were “trained to carry the casket to and from the ceremony sites and to fold the flag which draped the casket following the internment service.” (ARRB MD163) This team, as A Coup in Camelot correctly informs, was also known as the “honor guard”. It appears quite apparent that, far from being proof of a second entry for the bronze casket, the 20:00 hours time notation on this document is nothing more than a mistake. Why? Because despite the film’s claim that Sibert and O’Neill had carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm alongside Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer, O’Neill explained in his ARRB deposition that, in actual fact, it was the honor guard who had physically lifted the coffin at that time. (O’Neill deposition, p. 57) So unless anyone wants to believe that the honor guard carried it in twice, they are going to have to accept that the unknown writer of the document was in error and there was only one entry for the bronze casket.

    A coup in Camelot intermingles these stories of casket-swapping and wound tampering with claims that the autopsy X-rays and photographs have also been altered. This, once again, is not a new theory. In fact it has been a commonly held belief amongst students of the assassination for decades. And yet nothing approaching proof of alteration has ever emerged. The most commonly cited reason for believing the photos have been tampered with, the one repeated in A Coup in Camelot, is that the pictures appear to show the back of the head completely intact. This is, of course, at odds with the testimony of the Parkland physicians who recalled seeing a large wound in the right rear. But as autopsy surgeon J. Thornton Boswell explained to both the HSCA and the ARRB, the reason the rear skull damage is not seen in the photographs is because the scalp is being held up and “pulled forward up over the forehead, toward the forehead.” (Boswell ARRB deposition, p. 150) This has the effect of hiding the wound underneath.

    Those who choose to ignore Boswell’s words are still stuck with the reality that the autopsy photographer, John Stringer, authenticated the photographs during his own ARRB deposition, repeatedly stating that he had no reason to believe the existing photographs were anything other than the ones that he himself took on the night of the autopsy. The same is true of the X-rays. The technician responsible for taking them, Jerrol Custer, repeatedly swore to the accuracy and authenticity of the existing X-rays for the ARRB. For example, when shown the anterior/posterior view:

    GUNN: Is there any question in your mind whether the X-ray that’s in front of you right now is the original X-ray taken at the autopsy?

    CUSTER: No question.

    GUNN: And the answer is––

    CUSTER: It is the original film. (p. 122-123)

    And when shown the right lateral skull X-ray:

    GUNN: … Mr. Custer, can you identify the film that is in front of you right now as having been taken by you on the night of the autopsy of President Kennedy?

    CUSTER: Correct. Yes, I do, sir.

    GUNN: And how are you able to identify that as being––

    CUSTER: My marker in the lower mandibular joint. (p. 124)

    With the men who took them―and all three autopsy doctors―swearing to their authenticity, there seems little doubt that the autopsy photographs and X-rays would have been admitted into evidence were there to be a trial in the Kennedy case. And with questions of validity settled, a more important question would be asked: What do the skull X-rays actually show? The answer to that, as a number of experts including neuroscientist Dr. Joseph Riley and radiologist Dr. Randy Robertson have attested, is that the official theory of a single shot from the rear simply cannot be true.

    As Dr. Humes explained in his Warren Commission testimony, the pathologists found an entrance wound that was 2.5 cm to the right, and “slightly above” the external occipital protuberance―a small bump located very low down in the rear of the skull―and “a huge defect over the right side” involving “both the scalp and the underlying skull…” After a “careful examination of the margins of the large bone defect” on the right side, the doctors were unable to find a point of exit, which Humes put down to the fact that they “did not have the bone.” However, the pathologists concluded that a single bullet was responsible for all the damage, having entered the rear and exited the right side. In support of this contention, Humes implied that the path of the bullet was laid out by a trail of metallic fragments that could be seen on the X-rays “traversing a line from the wound in the occiput to just above the right eye…” (Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. II, p. 351-353)

    Annotated X ray

    Unfortunately for Dr. Humes, the X-rays do not show what he claimed. The entrance wound in the lower rear of the skull is indeed visible. So too is the trail of bullet fragments. But the two are in no way related. In fact, the trail lies along the very top of the skull, several inches above the entrance site. Therefore, those fragments could not have been left behind by a bullet which entered near the external occipital protuberance. As Aguilar and Wecht have noted, “…the fragment trail alone almost completely eliminates the official theory JFK was struck from above and behind by a single bullet that entered his skull low…” (Aguilar & Wecht, Op. cit. p. 78) Dr. Joseph Riley, who has a Ph.D in neuroscience and specializes in neuroanatomy and experimental neuropathology, noted decades ago that the medical evidence as it stands is only compatible with two separate bullet strikes. It is for that very reason that I see little logic in suggesting that the X-rays have been altered to support the official story.

    V

    These largely specious claims about the medical evidence form the centrepiece of A Coup in Camelot and, clocking in at nearly 40 minutes, comprise well over a third of the film’s running time. For those who are familiar with the facts that are being misinterpreted and/or overlooked, this time will not pass quickly. Things do pick up, however, for the final 20 minutes of the film which deals partially with the enigmatic Lee Harvey Oswald. Whether or not Oswald was on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a rifle in his hands at the time of the assassination has never been conclusively established. But A Coup in Camelot demonstrates, through the pioneering research of former investigative reporter Barry Ernest, that in all likelihood Oswald was where he claimed to be when the shots were fired; on the first floor of the building eating lunch.

    Barry Ernest

    Ernest centred his research on an often overlooked witness named Victoria Adams who had viewed the assassination from a fourth floor window of the depository building. As most students of the case know, Oswald was seen by his boss Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker in the second floor lunch room approximately 90 seconds after the shots were fired. Baker was on his way to the roof where he believed the gunman might be located but, upon spotting Oswald alone in the lunch room, he halted his ascent and demanded Oswald identify himself. Truly quickly informed Baker that Oswald was an employee and the pair then continued their dash up the stairs. Oswald later told police that he had gone from the first floor to the second in order to purchase a Coke. But, of course, the Warren Commission claimed that he had actually rushed down from the sixth floor immediately after shooting the President.

    In that regard, Victoria Adams was a problematic witness for the Commission. After watching the motorcade pass by with three co-workers, she had stayed at the fourth floor window for what she said was around 15 to 30 seconds and then quickly made her way down to the first floor. What this means, as Ernest explains, is that “she would have been on the stairs at the same time Oswald was descending from the sixth floor.” The problem is “…she did not see or hear anyone on the stairs during that period.” The Commission’s handling of her story typified its approach to the investigation. It did not bother to question any of those who had stood at the window with her to watch the motorcade―not even Sandra Styles who had accompanied Adams down the stairs―and instead suggested that she was simply mistaken about the time she left the fourth floor window.

    Victoria Adams

    In support of this contention, the Commission alleged that Adams had testified to seeing two other employees of the building, William Shelley and Billy Lovelady, when she arrived on the first floor. And because Shelley and Lovelady had testified to being outside on the depository steps during the shooting and not re-entering the building until several minutes later, the Commission claimed that Adams’ “…estimate of the time when she descended from the fourth floor is incorrect, and she actually came down the stairs several minutes after Oswald and after Truly and Baker as well.” (Warren Report, p. 154) The problem with the Commission’s argument is that when Ernest tracked Adams down she “flat-out denied” ever saying she had seen Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor. In order to confirm or refute her assertions, Ernest searched the National Archives for the stenographic tape of Adams’ testimony. Not surprisingly, however, he soon discovered that there is no record of her April 7, 1964, testimony and the stenographic tape has gone mysteriously “missing.”

    But in 1999 Ernest discovered a bombshell document in the Archives in the form of a June 2, 1964, letter written by Assistant United States Attorney, Martha Joe Stroud, to Warren Commission Chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin. This letter contains the only known reference in the Commission’s files to an interview with Dorothy Garner, who was Adams’ supervisor and one of those with whom she had stood at the fourth floor window. The letter notes matter-of-factly that “Miss Garner…stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.” Thus Garner provided complete corroboration for Adams’ testimony. Just as she swore, Adams had indeed descended those old wooden steps at the same time Oswald was supposed to have been on them. And the corroboration of this fact was completely ignored by the Commission who made no mention of Garner’s interview whatsoever.

    As Ernest details in his indispensable book, The Girl on the Stairs, he went on to locate and interview Garner for himself. He asked her about her own activities following the assassination and Garner explained to him that as Adams and Styles made their way downstairs, she herself went to a storage area by the stairway. It was from there that she was able to see Baker and Truly ascend the stairs. Garner said that she was “right behind” Adams and Styles in leaving the window and although she didn’t actually see them enter the stairway, she heard them “after they started down” because “the stairs were very noisy.” (The Girl on the Stairs, p. 268) Garner, it appears, had arrived on the fourth floor landing area only seconds after Adams and was there long enough to see Baker and Truly. Quite obviously, then, if Oswald had descended from the sixth floor during that time as he would have had to have done in order to make it to his second floor encounter with Baker, then Garner was in a position to see him. Yet, as she told Ernest, “I don’t remember seeing him at all that day…except on TV.” (ibid)

    It is impossible to overstate how damaging all of this is to the case against Oswald. It is clear that he could not have made it down to the second floor ahead of Adams because he did not have the time. This means he would have had to have descended long enough after Adams for her not to have heard his footsteps. Yet if he was 10 or 15 seconds behind her on the stairwell, it seems highly unlikely that he would not have been spotted by Garner who did not see or hear him on the noisy old stairs, even though she stayed on the fourth floor landing area long enough to see Truly and Baker. The most logical conclusion to be drawn is that when Oswald arrived at his second floor meeting with Baker, he had not come from the sixth floor but from the first, just as he said he had. And that would mean that, whatever else he did that day, Oswald did not shoot President Kennedy.

    VI

    A Coup in Camelot finishes with a brief discussion of how Kennedy’s plans to pull American military personnel out of Vietnam were reversed after his death and how private US contractors profited from the all-out war that followed. However none of this is explored in any detail and no attempt is made to show how it can be directly connected to the assassination. Had the writers and producers chosen to focus more heavily on these areas they may well have created a more valuable and compelling film than this one.

    It is clear that the filmmakers wanted to offer forensic proof of a conspiracy and, in fact, at the end of the film it is claimed they have done just that. “We have proven through modern forensics”, narrator Peter Coyote says, “that a shot or shots were fired from the front.” Yet, as I have demonstrated above, proof of such is not offered in A Coup in Camelot. What is provided instead is a bloodspatter theory that, whilst plausible on the surface, is entirely contradicted by empirical evidence. Instead of relying on the opinions of one individual, the filmmakers should have consulted with other, perhaps better qualified experts to ensure that what was being proposed had really been put to the test. How else can one claim to have proven something? There are numerous medical and scientific professionals who are well-versed in the facts of the assassination―such as Doctors Wecht, Aguilar, Robertson, and Thomas―who, I am sure, would have been more than happy to share their expertise.

    As I see it, this is the fatal flaw of A Coup in Camelot. Theory is all too readily accepted and promoted by the filmmakers without any independent verification or even basic fact-checking. How difficult would it have been to have had somebody actually read Dr. Humes’ various testimonies to see if he really had “always denied having to saw the skull open”? Or to have studied the deposition of Francis O’Neill to discover who had physically carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm? A clearer understanding of these two points alone would have been enough to call into serious question the highly dubious claims of multiple casket entries and wound tampering at Bethesda.

    Theories about the Kennedy assassination―many of them nutty―have been promulgated for far too long and they are not convincing anyone outside of the so-called “research community”. When you attempt to counter the ballistics experiments and slickly-produced computer simulations featured in mainstream lone gunman documentaries with something as bizarre-sounding and ill-founded as the body alteration hypothesis you are not likely to win many converts amongst the general population. What is needed is real expert opinion and cold, hard evidence presented in a compelling manner. A Coup in Camelot is skilfully produced on what appears to have been a reasonable budget and if the filmmakers had consulted the right individuals and doubled down on their facts they could well have produced something of real value. For that reason the film strikes me as a wasted opportunity.

  • Caroline Kennedy: JFK wouldn’t have escalated US in Vietnam

    By Matthew Jaffe, University of Chicago Institute of Politics, At: CNN Politics

  • Warren Hinckle and the Glory that was Ramparts

    Warren Hinckle and the Glory that was Ramparts

    Warren Hinckle passed away on August 25th,  at age 77. Hundreds at the Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach, San Francisco, attended his funeral service. He was buried on Tuesday the 30th. Some of the luminaries who attended his funeral were historian Kevin Starr, the founder of Salon David Talbot, and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

    CTKA carried a notice upon his passing, one from the online version of the Chronicle, the paper he used to write for. Among several others, there were notices in the New York Times, The Nation, and the online magazine Politico. This author read most of them. Not one even came close to recalling or measuring the journalistic brilliance of the man, or the eternal glory of his most significant creation, the last great American magazine, Ramparts.  Considering the standard set by that glossy monthly periodical, I understand the reluctance to remind us of Hinckle’s achievement.

    For those too young to recall it, Ramparts is hard to describe.  For the simple reason that there is nothing today that even resembles it. Which says a lot. Because today we live in the era of online publication; which means journals are much cheaper to produce and maintain, and therefore there is much more freedom  to create. The fact that, to this day, no one has equaled Hinckle’s 1964-69 editorial achievement at Ramparts is what makes what he did the stuff of legend.  After all, it was nearly half a century ago.

    Edward Keating

    Before trying to detail the pure excitement that Ramparts represented,  it is necessary to tell the reader a bit about Hinckle’s background. He was born in San Francisco in 1938.  His father was a shipyard worker.  He attended parochial schools before studying philosophy at the University of San Francisco. There he edited the student newspaper, The Foghorn. Under his editorship it became quite an unusual student newspaper. For instance, it was one of only 14 college newspapers classified as a daily. As editor of a daily, Hinckle went to Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe for two weeks to cover the 1960 Winter Olympics.  From Tahoe, he ran The Foghorn via telephone and telegraph. As he later noted, its readers read little about their college in the college newspaper. For Hinckle featured Herblock cartoons, and headlines like “Dorothy Day Asks: Who Baptized Capitalism?”  (USF was a Jesuit college) He once stole the entire press run of the rival San Francisco State newspaper.  Needless to say, because of disputes with the college administration, he left USF without graduating.

    From there he took a job at the San Francisco Chronicle.  His first outpost was in Oakland, which Hinckle called the Siberia of the Chronicle stations.  Working the police beat, he discovered an unwritten rule about the paper’s Oakland coverage.  The coverage of a homicide  largely depended upon where the victim lived.  To quote from his memoir: “Ghetto murders, being regarded as natural black events, were rarely considered newsworthy.  White trash murders stood a poor to even chance of getting in the paper…..”   There was also a rule of thumb similar to this in the area of fatal car accidents: “No niggers after 11 PM on weekdays, 9 PM on Saturdays (as the Sunday paper went to press early).”  To this rule there was one exception, in the area of quantity: “If two black persons died in a late evening auto crash, that event had a fair chance of making the news columns.” (Hinckle,, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade,  pgs. 31-. 32)

    Eventually, he made it back to San Francisco, where he was given a bit of leeway.  One of his favorite stories was about a former slave from Alabama who emigrated to California.  He got rich in the pinball machine business and  legally adopted the children of his former master.  Then, in the fall of 1961, Hinckle took a temporary leave of absence to help invigorate an ambitious and intellectual Catholic quarterly.

    Hinckle had been moonlighting in the public relations business.  A friend of his, Harry Stiehl, decided to introduce him to a man named Ed Keating.  Keating was a converted Catholic who wanted to start a quarterly periodical that was meant to begin a dialogue between laity and the clergy of the Catholic Church.  He also wanted to begin to spawn a new generation of Catholic intellectuals who had a gift for writing and communicating.  With his PR connections, Stiehl thought Hinckle could help promote Keating’s new journal. It was called Ramparts.

    Howard Gossage

    Keating had a wealthy wife and some famous contributors, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and John Griffin, who wrote the bestseller Black Like Me.  In 1964, Keating tried to raise his journal’s profile by defending the highly controversial play The Deputy which had just opened on Broadway. Hinckle arranged a huge press conference in Keating’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.  Keating and his magazine got exposure;  the play opened successfully and ran for a year.  As Hinckle wrote in his book, this episode became the model for what he later termed activist journalism.

    It also increased the circulation of the magazine.  Keating liked that and he appreciated what Hinckle had done.  So Hinckle did it again. But this time he channeled all the PR into an issue that very much interested him—the murders of three civil rights workers in  Neshoba County, Mississippi in June of 1964. Hinckle promoted a man named Louis Lomax as the Ramparts author of this sensational article.  Lomax did not come through. But like the British at Dunkirk,  Hinckle turned an expected disaster into a triumph by promising the details of the Lomax piece in a future issue.  (Although Hinckle does not deal with this episode in his book, Peter Richardson does in his chronicle of the magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue.)

    There were two factors that allowed Hinckle to gain control of the magazine from Keating.  First, because of the success Hinckle had in promoting Ramparts, Keating made him executive editor.  Second, Keating was becoming financially overextended.  Or as he told Hinckle, “I do have one shopping center left.”  (Hinckle, p. 95)  Therefore Hinckle now had to find alternative sources of funding himself.  Which he did.  Thus began Hinckle’s five year reign.  He was greatly aided by the PR skills and connections of one Howard Gossage.  Gossage was an advertising executive in the Bay Area who was generally described as an innovator and iconoclast in the field.  At age 36, he founded his own agency called Wiener and Gossage.   He would often have salons at his office headquarters, inviting many of the cutting edge thinkers in the San Francisco area, including Hinckle.  (Click here for more on Gossage http://www.howardluckgossage.com/)  

    To describe in detail the contents of what Hinckle produced in those five years would take a medium sized book. And I don’t mean the machinations that went on at the magazine headquarters, or just naming some of the big stories Ramparts produced.  But to detail the contents of what the magazine exposed about America, who Hinckle decided to take on, the methods he employed and the price he was willing to pay, all these—and more—were, to my knowledge, unprecedented before him, and unmatched afterwards. Ramparts was so effective and influential that it became a regular target of the MSM, especially Time magazine and the New York Times, which obviously did not like being exposed as the poseurs they were. Beyond that, the CIA launched operations against Ramparts.  These were commissioned by Desmond Fitzgerald, supervised by Richard Ober, and executed by Edgar Applewhite. As detailed in his book Secrets, the late Angus McKenzie showed how this program grew into MHCHAOS, the massive CIA spying on and infiltration of leftist protest groups in that decade.

    Madame Nhu as depicted on cover of Ramparts

    What got the CIA so angry?  For starters, Ramparts exposed a program the Agency was running out of Michigan State University. (Click here http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357L/357LMSUinVietnam.pdf) It taught CIA interns how to train interrogators in South Vietnam to torture dissidents in Saigon. This created an uproar. Not just for the story, but also because of the hilariously outrageous Ramparts cover, which featured the immortal image of Madame Nhu in an MSU  cheerleaders’ outfit waving an MSU flag.  The image suggesting the Vietnam War was now controlling the agenda of American colleges. (Click here for a time capsule reaction http://msupaper.org/issues/The_Paper_1966-04-21.pdf)

    Then there was Donald Duncan.  Duncan was a Special Forces Sergeant who served in Vietnam and taught at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  He resigned his commission and returned to Berkeley, California. There, in February of 1966, Duncan graced another memorable Ramparts cover. He was pictured in a long sleeved uniform, topped with a Green Beret cap. Above him were the words, “I quit”. Above that was the quote: “The whole thing was a lie.”  In this emblematic story, Duncan described his ten years in the military, capped by a nearly two year tour in Vietnam.  He said he went to Vietnam to fight communism.  But what he learned there about the American effort forced him to retire from the service forever.  Duncan first focused on the fact that there really was no government of South Vietnam—it was simply constructed and propped up by the USA.  And it was in no way a democracy. Secondly, he wrote that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was wildly overrated as a source of supplies for the Viet Cong. Most of the material came over the border or from the sea. Thirdly, he said that the US military was involved in atrocities that violated the rules of warfare, and this extended to the civilian population.  Duncan was really the first former GI to open up the path for Mark Lane’s book Conversations with Americans, the Winter Soldier Hearings, and the exposure of the My Lai Massacre.  (http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1966-02-Donald-W.-Duncan-The-Whole-Thing-Was-A-Lie-Ramparts.pdf)

    In the March 1967 issue Hinckle exposed another instance of the CIA operating domestically. Ramparts now revealed that the Agency was secretly funding the National Students Association.  (http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967mar-00029) In other words the largest college student association in America–featuring a large annual convention picturing a celebration of youthful democracy–was secretly funded, infiltrated and channeled by the Agency. Many of the top officers knew about it and were briefed on that association.  Further, several of them had case officers, code names, and reporting requirements.  Incredibly, some of their overseas representatives were actually career CIA agents from Langley.  The aim of the program was multi-leveled.  First, the Agency would moderate any radical or leftist tendencies in the largest student organization in the world. Second, they would use the overseas voyages of the students to collect information and try and moderate any radical leaders abroad. And third, the propaganda  goal was to portray  our young representatives as independent citizens, while many of the people they met abroad were communist stooges programmed from Moscow. (Hinckle, p. 185)

    Eldridge Cleaver

    NSA officer Michael Wood had a pang of conscience about it and was talking to Hinckle. Unlike other top officers, Wood had not signed a non-disclosure agreement.  Further, Wood had records, not just about the NSA, but other related fronts that the CIA had established.  For example, Stephen Spender’s Anglo-American journal Encounter. Wood also showed how the CIA very often used large legal firms in big cities to channel their clandestine funding.  Usually these firms had a former OSS officer as a founding member.  (One is reminded here of the firm Monroe and Leeman in New Orleans, which helped fund Walter Sheridan’s hit piece on Jim Garrison.  See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition by James DiEugenio, p. 238)

    MHCHAOS operations officer Richard Ober heard about Wood’s talks with Hinckle.  He tried to find a way to stop publication.  But he couldn’t find a legal pretext.  So he then arranged a press conference in New York.  At this conference the officers would pretend that this was all a thing of the past, and they were now reformed. Therefore, the Ramparts story was old hat.  Hinkle got wind of this plan.  He memorably said, “ I was damned if I was going to let the CIA scoop me.”  (Hinckle, p.  190) Ramparts then bought two full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post to expose the illegal association (the CIA is forbidden by its charter to operate domestically) and what the Agency had done to cover it up.  When word of the ads leaked, Ober’s press conference collapsed. 

    The New York Times now started a couple of weeks of reporting on other CIA fronts here and abroad that was influencing cultural affairs. This was one of the many triumphs of Ramparts. In many ways, at many times, it  actually led the news cycle.  By repeatedly scooping the MSM, it became a model of what they were not doing. At the same time that—out of pure humiliation—the magazine became an object of attack. Ramparts did what the MSM was supposed to be doing but did not—actual investigative reporting.  It was showing what the real world around the reader was composed of and what it was all about. But the fact that it was camouflaged made it hard for the average person to detect. So Ramparts did it for them.  Which is why as Jeff Cohen, a student at Michigan, told Peter Richardson, Ramparts was passed around the dorm there to the point it was wrinkled and dog eared by the time he got it. “It really was a radicalizing tool of its own.  It ripped your head off. “ He added that it had turned his cousin’s fraternity into an SDS chapter.

    Ramparts cover November 1966

    At its pinnacle, Ramparts had a circulation of about 250,000.  One can imagine how the CIA felt when Hinckle started featuring stories about the conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy, and then putting such things on the cover. For this topic, there was another cover for the ages.  The November 1966 issue featured the face of JFK made up like a jigsaw puzzle, with several pieces missing.  That was followed  two months later by “The Case for Three Assassins” written by David Welsh and David Lifton. (Click here to view).

    The Welsh/Lifton article began with the following words: “No less than three gunmen fired on the Presidential motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963…” It was a long, illustrated, annotated examination of the ballistics, medical, and eyewitness testimony. It all indicated a triangulation of gunfire in Dealey Plaza.  To my knowledge, it was the first time such an intricate discussion reached a mass audience. That issue was then followed by two long pieces on the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans. (Click here for the first one).

    These were  both penned by former FBI agent William Turner, who was actually working with Garrison. Therefore, Turner had access to the DA and some of his files.  Ramparts  was one of the very few media outlets that actually treated Garrison and his evidence with respect. Until Jim Garrison published On the Trail of the Assassins, Turner’s articles were–along with Paris Flammonde’s book, The Kennedy Conspiracy—prime reference works for anyone interested in the non-MSM view of Garrison.

    Hinckle met resistance inside his office on this issue.  Reporters like Bob Scheer did not want to cover the assassinations of the sixties at all.  As he once told Turner, such writing amounted to “mental masturbation”.  Hinckle disagreed.  For the simple reason that he had read the official report and most of the accompanying volumes of evidence.  He concluded the Warren Report was impossible to believe:  “Anyone who has read those 26 volumes…knows that the function of the Warren Commission was not to ferret out the truth, but to put the citizens at ease that there was no conspiracy.” (Hinckle, p. 217)  About Jim Garrison, Hinckle wrote, “… no man I have known had more legitimate reasons to become paranoid than Garrison; there actually were people constantly plotting against him.”  (Hinckle, p, 209) With the declassified files of the Assassination Records Review Board, we know that to be, not just true, but an understatement.  (See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, Chapters 11 and 12)

    The Ramparts “I Quit” cover

    To chronicle the endless triumphs of Hinckle’s editorship could go on and on, taking scores of pages. But to mention just two other exceptional aspects of Hinckle’s stewardship: Ramparts was the first and only widely read publication to champion the Black Panthers.  And again, there was an iconic cover design by art director Durgald Stermer to signify it:  Huey Newton in a wicker chair with a spear in one hand and a loaded carbine in the other.  Eldridge Cleaver actually became a contributing editor, and Ramparts released his book Soul on Ice through its publishing imprint.

    There was also a photo essay “The Children of Vietnam” put together by William Pepper.  (http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967jan-00045) That 1967 visual article showed just how extensive, indiscriminate and destructive the massive  American firepower unleashed in Indochina was. It was laying waste to the civilian population, including tens of thousands of women and children. Martin Luther King picked that issue up off a newsstand before taking a working vacation in Jamaica.  When he returned he began making his first speeches against President Johnson and his conduct of the war.  Again, Ramparts was leading the news cycle.

    The power and the glory all came to an end in early 1969.  For three reasons.  First, if Ramparts had one failing it was Hinckle’s lack of interest in the arts and the so called counter culture in San Francisco. For instance, there was no Dwight MacDonald or Robert Christgau at Ramparts to review movies or music. And many people wanted to read both.  Therefore, young Jann Wenner left Ramparts to start up something called Rolling Stone.  Which then became a competitor.  There was also an internal coup against Hinckle by new staff members who were tired of his profligate spending.  For instance, he had sent a team of 15 correspondents to cover the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968.  And he had put up ten of them at the four star Ambassador Hotel.  Finally, when Hinckle found someone who was interested in bailing him out, Scheer got into a stupid and senseless argument with the man and his entourage.  (Hinckle, pgs. 371-78)  Hinckle was now out. The magazine declared bankruptcy and reorganized around new leadership.

    The new principals were Robert Scheer and David Horowitz.  This, of course, meant that Hinckle’s daring, “nothing sacred” approach would be abandoned.  Because those two men represented a much more doctrinaire, New Left approach. Therefore instead of writers like William Turner and Bill Pepper, we now got people who really were not all that unusual  or new e.g. Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Kozol. The subjects now also became those of the doctrinaire left: Earth Day and the environment, food safety, oil spills in Santa Barbara, and the plight of Native Americans. Without Hinckle, Ramparts had lost its singular, contemporary jazz riff.

    Huey Newton as he appeared in Ramparts

    Later, Scheer was moved out by Horowitz and replaced by a new second in command: Peter Collier.  The irony being that it was Scheer who brought both men to Ramparts in the first place.  But, predictably, the magazine now began to lose its  large circulation.  Seeing the writing on the wall, Horowitz and Collier decided to transition their way out.  In 1973 they met with Abby and Marion Rockefeller, part of the Rockefeller clan who were outsiders because of their contrary political beliefs—which is why they backed Ramparts.  The two men now contracted to do a history of the clan.  They got a sizeable advance, and then signed on a new management team for Ramparts.  Their book, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty,  sold quite well.  It was published in 1976, the year after Ramparts went under for good.

    Ramparts was so unusual, so blindingly meteoric, so politically potent, that, when it fell, it actually dropped the seeds of its own reaction.  By 1975, the Sixties were pretty much killed off.  And Ramparts, in its new form, did not do a lot to preserve it.  Richard Nixon was now president, with the likes of Spiro Agnew as his VP.

    Men like Pat Buchanan and William Safire were writing his speeches.  And from 1969-75, Henry Kissinger was doing the final reversals of whatever was left of John Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy, specifically in Africa, the Middle East and the continuation and expansion of the Indochina war.

    It was within this new political milieu that men like Horowitz, Collier, Sol Stern and Martin Peretz began their  migration to what would become the New Right, neoconservative movement.  Financial backer Peretz did not like the evenhanded approach Scheer wanted to take in the Middle East.  So he pulled out of Ramparts.  He now purchased the liberal New Republic from Gilbert Harrison.  In a remarkably short time period, Peretz pretty much reversed the trajectory of that journal’s foreign policy pages. By about the mid-eighties, many were calling the New Republic a neoconservative bastion.  Which, for all intents and purposes, it was; most notably on the Middle East and Central America.

    Sol Stern, who actually wrote the Ramparts article on the NSA scandal, eventually found a home at the Manhattan Institute.  This is a New Right think tank that was actually co-founded by the deceased CIA chief Bill Casey. Manhattan Institute has sponsored books by Charles Murray, who was actually a fellow there when he wrote his anti-welfare polemic  Losing Ground.  Stern’s specialty today is to promote voucher system education, which would almost surely undermine the public school system.

    Peter Collier

    After their tome on the Rockefellers, Horowitz and Collier then wrote books on other wealthy families:  the Kennedys, the Fords, and the Roosevelts.  Their book on the Kennedys is so bad that this author included it in his review of the anti-Kennedy literature in the essay “The Posthumous Assassination of JFK.” Predictably, that book provided the occasion for the pair to proclaim their conversion to Reagan Republicanism.  This was announced in the Washington Post under the banner “Lefties for Reagan”.  (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 357).  They then went on and became beneficiaries of the largesse of the wealthy conservative class.  They founded organizations like Encounter Books, FrontPageMagazine.com, the David Horowitz Freedom center, and Discover the Networks. All of these are meant to undermine the things that Ramparts represented: the liberal ideals of an open and more egalitarian society.  And with the collapse of the Sixties, and the killing off of its leaders—JFK, Malcolm X, RFK and King, plus the FBI sponsored extermination of the Panthers—that was not really difficult to do.

    Hinckle never did anything of the kind.  He tried to start up another monthly magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly.  But I have it on two sources that the Nixon administration used the IRS and the USPS to obstruct its  distribution and circulation. Consequently it closed down in less than a year.  He next edited Francis Coppola’s City magazine, which lasted until 1976.  He then did something that no one thought possible: he revived The Argonaut, which had closed down in 1956.  He did this in 1991, and that publication is still around in both print and online versions.

    Besides that, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Francisco in 1987.  He also wrote about ten non-fiction books.  There are two that are mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Sixties and the assassinations. In 1974, on the eve of the final dissolution of Ramparts, Hinckle wrote a memoir about his editorship of that magazine.  It was called If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade.  To me, there is nothing at all like it in the literature.  It is, at once, funny, pungent, candid, and nostalgic without being sentimental. A definite must read. Then, in 1981, he co-wrote, with Bill Turner, The Fish is Red.  That book was later reissued as Deadly Secrets in 1992.  Up until that time, and until this day, it is one of the best JFK assassination books written from the point of view of the Cuban exiles’ association with the CIA.

    In the late nineties, this author considered reviving Ramparts. I won’t go extensively into why I decided against it. But one of the reasons I didn’t was because I thought that, with the surge of online journalism, surely someone, maybe more than one, would now use the opportunity to emulate Ramparts, or Art Kunkin’s LA Free Press.  The latter was an extraordinary newsweekly that complemented Ramparts. Together, they formed the last pinnacle of American journalism.  To say the least, those online expectations were not fulfilled by the likes of Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, and Josh Marshall.  In fact, this so called internet revolution was so stillborn that it made Ramparts and the LA Free Press look like even greater achievements.  (See here for my particular disputes)  In fact, that online result recalls Hinckle’s answer as to why Ramparts was so exceptional, he replied, “Because the rest of the media was so shitty.”  I would add: But it took Ramparts to show us how shitty they were.

    Today, to do anything like what Ramparts did, a single publishing journal would have to been the first to:

    1. Shown in detail how George W. Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections in Florida and Ohio
    2. Demonstrated how the FBI and CIA left us unprotected on 9-11
    3. Revealed the secrets of NSA illegal spying
    4. Exposed Colin Powell’s phony UN speech justifying the war with Iraq
    5. Visited Iraq with a camera crew to show us the terrible civilian toll Bush’s phony war took on the populace.

    And they  would have to have achieved the above in just five years, from about 2001-2005 I think the reader will agree that any such comparison suggests science fiction today.  But Hinckle did it.

    Therefore, Ramparts stands alone in the history of contemporary American journalism; much as Citizen Kane towers in the history of  the American sound film.  It is often written that, in that picture, Orson Welles took the art of  film direction to a point that no other American has since matched or surpassed. With the death of Warren Hinckle we can say  that no other American has produced or edited a magazine, or online journal, that has matched or surpassed what he did at Ramparts.  And, from my point of view, it looks like no one else will do so for a long time.  For that, among other things, he deserves to be properly saluted upon his passing.  He set a standard for us all by reminding us what real journalism can and should be.

    ~ Jim DiEugenio

  • Rory Kennedy, Last Days in Vietnam

    No one who saw the films and photos of America’s 1975 retreat from Indochina can forget them. America was leaving the country. But they had made little or no accommodation for the people of South Vietnam, many of whom did not want to stay behind. In fact, the whole thing was so haphazard that it did not look like we had planned very carefully for the Americans to get out either. (Which, as we shall see, was the case.)

    As a result of all this capriciousness, the media captured the agonizing images of the Vietnamese “boat people” floating on rafts in the Pacific; of helicopters landing atop the American Embassy with refugees packed in like sardines; and above all: a helicopter on top of the CIA building in dramatic silhouette, with an endless line of civilians trying to get on board – until finally, the copter could not take any more people. And the refuges were left behind with arms outstretched trying to hang on. That image was so haunting that it has been used several times since in films about the subject, e.g. The Deer Hunter.

    For many people, especially those critical of the war, those searing – and in some ways, humiliating – images seemed to epitomize America’s long involvement in Vietnam. We were now finally leaving a country in the same way we had entered it and occupied it: in the same half-assed, scattershot manner. It appeared that again, no one in charge understood the plan – or even if there was one.

    But as bad as that disorganized exit was for the Americans, it was even worse for the people in South Vietnam who actually believed in America’s commitment to the country. Many of them had heard about North Vietnamese atrocities committed during the war. Many had actually worked out of the embassy or the CIA building as agents and/or informants. Yet now, with a collapse imminent, these people were mixed together with the tens of thousands who just wanted out before the fall. As CIA counter-intelligence analyst Frank Snepp later wrote, those people received no special consideration for their past work.

    Snepp was so angry at what had happened that he quit the Agency in 1976. He then decided to write a book about America’s disastrous exit. That book was called Decent Interval. From its title on down, the book was an eye-opener as to what had really happened from 1973-75, and what caused the ultimate American embarrassment, one that was, in large part, broadcast on television to millions of people at home.

    The power of Snepp’s book was in his insider knowledge of both the inner workings of the CIA station in Saigon, and the American embassy. This allowed Snepp to name names: CIA station chief Tom Polgar, CIA Director Bill Colby, American ambassador Graham Martin, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. And he laid bare their incredible lack of judgment in allowing what he considered a national disgrace to happen.

    But to Snepp, the ultimate betrayal went even further. First of all, neither the CIA nor the embassy had assembled lists of South Vietnamese who had helped America during the war. This would have been necessary in order to give them priority during the evacuation.

    What made that even worse was that the exit was done so willy-nilly that neither the embassy nor the CIA had completely shredded their intelligence files before the last helicopter left. Therefore, once the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon, those files could be retrieved, and with Russian or Chinese help, translated. From these translated files, whole networks of CIA informants and collaborators could be rebuilt, and a series of arrests made. Which is what happened.

    On the other hand, President Nguyen Van Thieu, who, as we shall see, bears much of the blame for the sudden rout, was treated quite differently. When he was ready to leave, a car arrived at his door. As it did so, a group of assistants appeared out of the nearby woods. They carried large luggage bags with them. When the escort offered his help, they refused. Once the car started on its way to the airport, one could hear the sounds of metal clanging against metal. Thieu was leaving with the last of South Vietnam’s gold bullion. He had gotten the bulk out earlier, and this was just small change. America’s anointed leader was allowed to loot its client state, while those further down the food chain were left for the re-education camps. This is how America said goodbye to South Vietnam: a country it had just about created in 1954.

    These events occurred mostly in March and April of 1975. It was part of the controversial, and now thoroughly exposed, “decent interval” strategy. This was the exit plan formulated by the foreign policy leaders of our nation in 1973. That is, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Nixon and Kissinger had been looking for a way to get out of Vietnam by either intimidating the North, or finding what they called “Peace with Honor”. When they discovered neither was possible, they decided on the 1973 Peace Accords, even though they themselves knew the accords would lead to a South Vietnamese defeat in anywhere from two to three years. But they felt that if the defeat occurred with Americans out of the war, and 24-36 months after the 1972 election, they would not be politically impacted by it. Thus originated the decent interval strategy, i.e., announce “Peace with Honor”, knowing that it was a mirage and Saigon had no way of winning once America was out. The evidence for this adduced by scholars like Ken Hughes and Jeff Kimball is overwhelming today. After promising Thieu we would not forsake him, Nixon and President Ford did just that. (See “Exposing Nixon’s Vietnam Lies”)

    Very few people seemed to realize what exactly Nixon and Kissinger had planned. That is, the 1973 Peace Accords that they so triumphantly announced prior to the 1972 presidential election was simply camouflage to disguise the inevitable American and South Vietnamese defeat. There was no way that Thieu’s army, the ARVN, could stave off defeat from the combined forces of the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam. But again, it’s hard to imagine that Nixon and Kissinger could have foreseen the disorganized rout that America’s last days in Vietnam became in 1975.

    Frank Snepp, who was stationed in Vietnam for the entire downfall, was one of the few who did realize what Nixon and Kissinger had done. Hence the title of his 1977 book. Since he knew the people involved and watched it all happen – he drove the car that got Thieu out of Saigon – he was able to name names and relate the actual events that caused the embarrassing mess it all ended up as. In other words, the book provided the back story to the pictures.

    CIA Director Stansfield Turner decided not to try and stop the book prior to its publication. He recalled what happened in the Pentagon Papers case. So the CIA sued Snepp afterwards on the basis that he had violated his non-disclosure agreement. The CIA won the case on the (humorous) grounds that the author had caused irreparable harm to national security. As a result, Snepp had to forfeit all royalties to the Agency, and clear any future books in advance with them.

    But the problem did not go away. Snepp’s book sold well. Plus, it was packed with information that showed just how badly the upper levels of government had performed during a crisis moment, one which it should have been well prepared to surmount. Other authors have since built on the exposure of this decent interval strategy. Documentary director Rory Kennedy decided she wanted to make a film about the decent interval concept after she saw how George W. Bush had ended American involvement in Iraq: that is, without a real exit strategy.

    Rory Kennedy made Snepp one of the main talking heads in her documentary film Last Days in Vietnam. This fascinating film has now come to Netflix, and is available on Amazon. When the film was originally released theatrically, it was attacked from both the right and left. The LA Times wanted to know if Kennedy – a child of Bobby Kennedy – thought her uncle would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived. The review in The Nation, by Nick Turse, wasn’t really a review. It was essentially a polemic against Kennedy for making a film that tried to find any heroism in the American effort in Vietnam. According to Turse, the war was too awful for that. Therefore the film was not worth discussing or analyzing.

    The problem with both of these approaches is that they violate the central function of criticism, which is to describe and illuminate the work in front of the reviewer. Rory Kennedy was not making a film about the Kennedy years in Vietnam. Neither was she making an overall examination of why America was there and what went wrong with the war effort. (The latter would take an extended series to even superficially explore.) Her subject is the last two years of American involvement in Vietnam. A time when, in fact, American soldiers were not involved in combat operations. They had left in 1973.

    To be sure, there are some problems with the film, and this review will discuss those faults. But they should be analyzed in the context of the documentary in front of us, not some non-existent film that the reviewer wishes had been made.

    Last Days in Vietnam begins with a brief flash forward to 1975. As we watch the aimless. confused, overpopulated streets of Saigon, we hear the voice of then Captain Stuart Herrington. He describes his predicament at that time: How to get men who had helped military intelligence out of Saigon before the city collapsed before the North Vietnamese onslaught.

    After setting this topic sentence, the film flashes backward. We now see a newsreel of President Nixon announcing the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords ending American combat involvement in Vietnam.

    Director Kennedy then introduces four of the main characters who will fill in the story line of her film. In addition to Herrington, we also see embassy guard Juan Valdez, Frank Snepp, and most importantly and intriguingly, Graham Martin, the last American ambassador in South Vietnam. This montage begins to describe the central problem the film will try to comprehend, namely: in addition to perhaps as many as 7,000 Americans still in country, there were well over a 100,000 Vietnamese who did not want to stay behind under a communist regime. Yet there was no formal evacuation plan presented by Martin, or announced by him – ever. This includes the last two days of the collapse.

    As she should, Kennedy spends some time on the enigma of Graham Martin (who died in 1990). Martin was a veteran State Department employee. He had served as ambassador to both Thailand and Italy before Nixon appointed him to head the Saigon embassy in 1973. For reasons stated above, Martin clearly carries a large part of the responsibility for this final American debacle in Vietnam. Some of those who knew him try and explain his inexplicable reluctance to prepare, announce and arrange the evacuation in various ways. He is described as a classic Cold Warrior, who also had lost a son in Vietnam. Therefore, he simply could not bring himself to admit that America had lost the war on his watch. Others say he completely overrated the power and dedication of the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN). Others try and explain it by saying he did not want to announce an evacuation because it may have caused a stampede. If the last was his reason, then his silence did little to ameliorate such a stampede. Martin comes across in this film as a man who never should have been in charge of the Saigon embassy. But further, under these circumstances, he should have been removed.

    The film then proceeds with Frank Snepp describing how flimsy the 1973 Paris Accords were. By 1974, when Nixon was forced to resign due to the Watergate scandal, Hanoi was encouraged to mount a major offensive, since they felt America was in a weak position to reply to it. As Snepp says, the 1973 accords were riddled with so many loopholes that there were dozens of violations. By late 1974, when the North Vietnamese decided to make their push, they had more than doubled the amount of troops they had in the south: from approximately 155,00 to around 370,000.

    Hence the North Vietnamese attack was already fairly successful at the outset. But it became even more successful when, in March of 1975, Thieu decided to abandon the Central Highlands area and ordered a disorganized retreat to defend the southernmost regions.

    Thieu made this even worse by changing his mind about the defense of the ancient city of Hue. He first said that he wanted to make a stand there. He then announced that it was not a priority. This caused a decline in morale of the ARVN, and the clogging of roads and highways by civilians caught headlong between the advancing army of North Vietnam and Thieu’s indecisiveness. The film does not mention Thieu’s reversals, but I think they would have helped explain the sudden rout, because all of this led to the disorganized spectacle that ended up taking place in Saigon on April 30, 1975, and which now included soldiers deserting from the ARVN. (Kennedy includes a memorable shot of a soldier extending outward from a raft to get on a boat and falling into the water.)

    As the retreat began to assume a momentum of its own, there were inevitable appeals to Washington for aid. These were directly presented by President Ford to Congress. Kennedy cuts here to interviews with GOP Representatives Pete McCloskey and the late Millicent Fenwick, to explain why these requests for aid were not honored. No one could accept spending hundreds of millions of dollars in 1975, when tens of billions had not done the job in the previous twenty years.

    I think the film missed another opportunity here. If Ford had presented a plan to just finance the evacuation itself, that would have been one thing. But the proposal for 722 million also included funds for renewed military operations. And that is what sunk it. Secondly, if Ford was really interested in an orderly evacuation, why could he have not scraped together the funds for that – which would have been much less than the amount he was asking – from other emergency accounts?

    The film now cuts back to Snepp. The CIA officer says that, from a reliable source, he found out that the target date for the taking of Saigon was early May. The idea was for the North Vietnamese army to celebrate Ho Chi Minh’s birthday in Saigon. In early April, with the ARVN in complete disarray, there were about 500,000 refugees crowding the highways south into Saigon; they were being followed by an army of about 140,000 regulars from North Vietnam. Even at this point, Martin denied to the press that Vietnam was now lost. Snepp tried to deal with Martin, so he could begin to face the facts of what to do about the impending collapse. Martin told Snepp he did not want to hear any more of this negative chatter.

    At this point in the film, Kennedy introduces her real topic, and her real theme. The former is the decision of certain people on the ground level to take matters into their own hands. Realizing that the upper echelons had committed a FUBAR of giant proportions, they decided to do whatever they could to help set things right, even though these attempts were in violation of accepted policy. In other words, the work done by men like Herrington to help South Vietnamese escape was done in the dark. The film actually uses the words “black operations” in regards to them. In fact, Martin began firing people when he heard the target was to get their allies in South Vietnam to Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

    An example would be Richard Armitage. Most people know Armitage as a State Department employee who – according to him – inadvertently leaked Valerie Plame’s name to reporter Robert Novak. Back then, Armitage was assigned as the Defense Attaché to the Saigon embassy. His last orders were to make sure that none of the many ships the USA had given to South Vietnam would fall into the hands of the enemy. His plan was to have them manned by their usual sailors, take them to a point in the South China Sea, evacuate the personnel, and then destroy them.

    But when Armitage went out to sea to count the ships, they had approximately 30,000 people on board. And they weren’t all navy ships. Some of them were fishing vessels. Aboard the USS Kirk, Armitage decided the only thing to do was to disobey orders and lead the flotilla over a thousand miles to Subic Bay in the Philippines.

    But to delineate further why this had to be done, it is important to note the appearance of Gerald Berry in the film. In 1975, Captain Berry was a helicopter pilot in the Marines. Whether or not he wanted to hear them, it was the military’s job to outline avenues of evacuation to Martin. Berry and his colleagues put together four different options for the ambassador to choose from. The first was to float the mass of people down the Saigon River to the docks near the Pacific Ocean. The second was to use commercial aircraft at Tan Son Nhut airport to fly out the mass of refugees through the main air base outside of Saigon. The third option was to use the same airport, but in this case, to mobilize a fleet of military aircraft for the evacuation.

    The final option, and the one Berry only offered to Graham as a last resort, was a helicopter evacuation. Berry noted two serious shortcomings with this alternative: 1) Helicopters could only handle small amounts of people per flight; 2) Choppers were much slower than fixed wing aircraft, thus requiring many more sorties to ferry everyone out.

    Martin’s intransigence forced Berry to utilize the last option. As the film explains, option (1) had to be prepared in advance, since it was a long haul floating tens of thousands of people down the river. Options (2) and (3) were also wiped out by the ambassador’s delays. Because Martin waited so long to begin his impromptu escape, the North Vietnamese were on the outskirts of Saigon. Realizing what the best exit strategy was, they began to bombard Tan Son Nhut airport with artillery and rockets. Therefore, out of necessity, the Marines used the helicopter option. Berry himself flew an amazing 34 sorties in a bit over 18 hours. His last flight got Martin out. He asked for more pilots to prepare a rest rotation. That request was denied.

    But there were so many helicopter flights coming in that they would back up into each other. As Snepp notes, the security guards had to cut down a tree in the compound to make way for another helipad. What further made it all so difficult was that the ships used to land on were not aircraft carriers. Some, like the Kirk, were destroyers, whose space for landing was very limited and which could only handle medium sized choppers. This explains one of the most memorable images from the evacuation. Because of the limited space, and the number of flights, at times it became necessary to simply push a helicopter off the deck into the sea so another one could land. As we see in the film, this did not happen just once. It happened three times.

    This directly relates to one of the high points of this riveting film. A South Vietnamese pilot was using a Chinook helicopter to get his brother and his family out of Saigon. But the ship he was trying to land on could not accommodate a Chinook, which is a twin engine, long, troop transport type of chopper. So the sailors on board came out on deck and yelled at him, waving him off. Since he was low on fuel and had nowhere to go, he decided to hover over the deck. He then began dropping his family members to the sailors below. This included little children who were actually caught in the air. When the pilot was the only one left, he flew the chopper out about 25 feet away from the ship. He stayed at the controls as he began to strip out of his flight suit. (As one American sailor says on screen, he still doesn’t know how the heck he did that.) Once he was out of his suit he then ditched the chopper into the water, jumped out, and swam to the ship. This gripping sequence is not described. It is shown.

    This is a good point to accent just how well made this documentary is. It is very clear that the producers of the picture really went through just about every bit of film they could find on the subject. It is that complete. But beyond that, it is what they have done with this footage that makes the film so remarkable to see. For many decades, and in many schools, documentaries were simply that: a recorded film of an event. One plopped down the camera in front of, say, a parade, and that was it. There were exceptions, of course; e.g., Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad and Triumph of the Will. But, by and large, most documentaries did not use the techniques available to film to add to or alter what we saw on screen.

    With the introduction of modern technology, including CGI, that has changed today. This film uses digital imaging very well to illustrate things like escape routes out of Saigon to the airport, or to the docks. In one particularly telling image, Kennedy irises into the airport digital image – that is, she encloses it with a narrow circle effect – but then explodes the circle into the live action of the North Vietnamese bombing. She also uses the device of cross-cutting between films and photos adroitly. And she also uses the photographic effect of zooming in on a still photograph to accent a person in it. In one case, it is Martin, and the device accents his isolation from circumstances. The editing by Don Kleszy is also very skillful. In his montages of crowd confusion, it is notable how he cuts between one shot of people running in one direction, and the next shot of people running the opposite way, thus capturing the chaos and confusion of those final days.

    But amid the good things in this film, I would be remiss if I did not note a serious flaw. Namely, the presence of Henry Kissinger. To put it simply: No film made by any member of the Kennedy family should have Kissinger in it. Especially a film that deals with Vietnam. As time goes on, and more documents are declassified, the better President Kennedy looks, and the worse Nixon, Ford and Kissinger look. We now understand better why Kissinger never advanced in the Kennedy White House, but rose to the top under Nixon and Ford. Today, Kissinger stands exposed as one of the worst foreign policy practitioners in recent memory. From Vietnam, to Cambodia, to the Middle East, to the Pakistan/India dispute, the Kissinger/Nixon policies all proved disastrously wrong. It was only through their manipulation of the press that their failures had been disguised, e.g., as in the Kalb brothers’ fawning 1974 biography. Today, most authorities agree that the Nixon-Kissinger years are more aptly characterized in William Bundy’s 1998 volume A Tangled Web. That coruscating study was so pungent that Kissinger himself replied to a positive review of it in The New York Review of Books (see here).

    Near the beginning of the film, Kissinger actually states that, with the 1973 Peace Accords, he and Nixon were attempting to achieve a co-existence between North and South Vietnam, somewhat like that between North and South Korea.

    This is completely wrong. And Ken Hughes demonstrates its falsity in his book Fatal Politics. He does it with transcribed tapes from the Nixon library. Hughes shows that Kissinger, in his own words, never believed for a moment that the cease-fire of 1973 would hold, or that Hanoi would have any real problem in conquering the south.

    This leads to another false statement that Kissinger makes in the film. He says that the USA had three goals in the final days: to get as many people out as possible, to ensure that South Vietnam was not stabbed in the back, and to preserve the honor of America. This statement is not just flatulent, it is incomprehensible.

    As the film shows, if the objective was to get out as many as possible, the official US effort was a complete and utter failure. And Kissinger, as Secretary of State, carries a lot of the blame for that. Tens of thousands were evacuated not because of what he did, but in spite of it. And this film honors those who were actually responsible.

    As per stabbing South Vietnam in the back, again, the work of authors like Ken Hughes and Jeffrey Kimball belies that. As does the title of Snepp’s book. Kissinger and Nixon’s cease-fire was a device to delay the fall of South Vietnam until after the 1972 election when, the two felt, most people would have forgotten about the subject. One can also look at Jerrold L. Schecter’s 1986 book, The Palace File, which contains a series of 31 letters from Presidents Nixon and Ford to Thieu. In those letters, among other things, Ford and Nixon promised South Vietnam full diplomatic and military support, before and after the signing of the peace accords. Needless to say, the support never materialized.

    The film includes another false statement by Kissinger. Ford’s White House – with Kissinger on stage during the press conference – made a premature announcement that all the Americans who wanted to leave Saigon, were now out. This was not true. The final platoon of security guards had not left the embassy at that time. The film shows the platoon leader recalling his problem during departure: he kept on counting the men who should have been there. He was one short. He would not leave anyone behind. The last man was Valdez, who we saw at the beginning. He was pulled onto the helicopter by those on board, and the film contains a photo of him after he was just inside the open tailgate. After Kissinger’s false statement, this is a nice thematic closing to the film.

    Kissinger’s presence here, and his continuing duplicity, mar the sterling work Rory Kennedy has done. She has assembled a finely textured, intricately planned salute to those in the lower ranks. Those who had to live with the horrible mistakes people like Henry Kissinger made.

    Except they decided not to live with them. They did something about it. And they succeeded in spite of the huge odds arrayed against them.

    Overall, the Vietnam War was, at first , a huge mistake. It then became a terrible epic tragedy. For both the USA and Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger senselessly expanded that tragedy into Cambodia. The whole time, both men knew that – as they were dropping thousands of tons of bombs over Indochina – America could not win the war.

    They then decided on their “decent interval” masquerade: The war would not actually be lost by America, but by a combination of Thieu’s incompetence and a lack of support by Congress. This was nothing but an empty, and terribly destructive, charade. And Kissinger was a major part of it. In fact, as Ken Hughes shows, he essentially pushed Nixon into it.

    It would have been nice to see a film about that. Just as it would be nice to see a film about the difference between President Kennedy’s strategy on Vietnam, and those who followed him in the White House. A film on the latter could have shown why Kissinger did not advance under Kennedy, but rose to the top under Nixon and Ford.

    After this, maybe Rory Kennedy will make a film with that kind of epic scope. But for now, she has decided to do a well wrought, smaller piece of chamber music. James Joyce once gave his hero , Stephen Dedalus the memorable line, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” This film tells the story of how part of that Vietnam nightmare was constructed. And it chronicles the efforts of those who did what they could to try and correct that nightmare.