Countryconstitutionalists,
So we meet again, huddled around the lavapit. The fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination has come and gone, but vapors continue to rise. Let us investigate further.
One upshot that this reinvigorated national interest in JFK and the Kennedys appears to have encouraged is a movement to revise and sanitize history, to rub away elements of reality that boosters, or the family, or implicated elements of the power structure continue to find uncomfortable. In my last blog I alluded to the insistence by Joe Kennedy's latest biographer, Professor David Nasaw, that Joe had nothing to do with the American underworld throughout his long, contentious career. The fact is, there is a compounding record, from FBI documents to testimony by Joe's co-conspirators in the underworld to relatives of the Ambassador -- one, John Davis, refers without apology to Joe as "a bootlegger" in his important books, while another, Gore Vidal, recounts in his memoirs having walked in on Joe and Frank Costello, the boss of the New York crime families, both bollicky bareass on adjacent tables in Joe's apartment off Central Park South being ministered to by a Teamster masseur. Gus Russo's solid books document Joe Kennedy's traffic with the Chicago Outfit virtually week to week once JFK was in play. Hearsay, Professor Nasaw would maintain, not from authenticated documents.
When my book Bobby and J. Edgar came out I got mail from experts of every political persuasion. Conservative Richard Whalen, whose The Founding Father stands as definitive on Joe, called it "A major contribution to the vast literature of the Kennedys. I believe that [Hersh's] original research on [Joe Kennedy's] secret mob connections and his bootlegging career among other revelations shed important new light on this mystery-shrouded subject." Robert Maheu, Howard Hughes' uniquely connected longtime alter ego, who reintroduced the CIA to the principal chiefs of the Mafia, wrote, "This is an amazing book. It covers the history of the period to a depth I've never run into before."
Before my last blog even got distributed I got a telephone call from the deeply affronted Professor Nasaw.
What seemed to offend him most was my observation that his biography was "Apparently sponsored by Jean Smith, Joe's surviving child...." Nasaw would admit that he had been prompted to write the book by Smith, and that arrangements had been finalized by a brief talk with Ted Kennedy. Then there had been an exchange of lawyers' papers, with the understanding that Nasaw was to receive complete access to Joe's papers in the Kennedy Library but was under no obligation to let the family vet the manuscript. Webster's defines sponsorship as "person or agency that gives endorsement or vouches for some person or thing." Let the reader parse the implications. Having myself had total access to Joe Kennedy's papers -- no lawyers, no pre-arrangements -- I discovered even in this well-culled archive a number of letters back and forth with everybody from well connected Mob affiliates to the senior economist on Hermann Goering's staff. You just had to know who was who.
Another development that should prove alarming to civil libertarians is the takeover by right-wing billionaires of what had previously been comparatively free-wheeling media outlets. For years The History Channel explored alternative versions as to what happened when JFK was shot, even featuring the recollections of a previously unknown girlfriend of Oswald's from New Orleans, with whom Oswald supposedly conducted cancer research the summer before the shooting. Some were on target; others would be harder to substantiate. Then Rupert Murdoch bought the outlet. From then on -- straight Warren Commission apologia, no investigative reporting whatsoever.
More recent was a Nova segment built around the testimony of a father-son team of purported ballistics experts, Luke and Michael Haag, who claim to base their conclusions as to the validity of The Magic Bullet projection on recently developed laser and Doppler technology. Their reading presumes that Kennedy was leaning forward when the fatal shots were fired and that he took a bullet at the base of his neck, both presumptions nullified by the Zapruder and other films of the event and the findings of Dr. Charles Cranshaw, the surgeon at Parkland Hospital who examined the stricken president immediately after he was brought in and determined that the first bullet hit him in mid-back. The back of his head was gone, an exit wound the size of a cantaloupe. Most observers, including Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers, riding in the car behind the president, saw the muzzle flash from the fence above the Grassy Knoll and watched the back of JFK's head fly off, with Jackie scrambling to grab her husband's skull and brains bouncing along the trunk of the convertible. Both Governor Connally and his wife insisted that there were two shots from the rear, then one from the front -- a conspiracy. When the U. S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations studied the evidence, it came to the same conclusions.
The Haags would maintain that the bullet from Oswald's old mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle "came out" of JFK and "started tumbling...and that's how it hit Connally...these are not really tough shots." Oswald. they claim, was a crack shot and could have hit these moving targets several hundred feet away, through heavy foliage. The fact was, Oswald was a limited shooter -- he barely qualified on the range as a Marine, a "marksman," and hadn't been practicing regularly. Marine sharpshooters were unable to duplicate these "not really tough shots," and in their laboratories FBI technicians were unable to get Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano to fire.
What is most notable about this "expert testimony" is that it appeared on Nova at all. Perhaps there is something of an explanation in the fact that David Koch, bankroller of hard-right causes across the board, is now a principal underwriter of the PBS series. Another -- of three -- is the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. In America these days, our history is apparently turning into what Big Money decides it is.
Keep those Christmas lights on!
Burton Hersh
are all available in a highly affordable electronic format at treefarmbooks.com
Showing posts with label JFK assassination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JFK assassination. Show all posts
Monday, December 9, 2013
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Dealey Plaza Revisited
Countryconnoisseurs,
Yes, yes, I know. It has been too long a wait between blogs, my flock is parched for spiritual relief, the worry is universal that the well might have gone dry. Be not afraid. More opinions, more shafts of insight are on the way. In the end even the most ardent are likely to feel thoroughly shafted.
Partly the problem has been the maddening internet, where the infatuated elves can't leave well enough alone. Partly it has been the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination. I have been doing a fair amount of speaking, for the media and a number of groups, so you have been a little neglected, oh my faithful brethren.
But here we are. I realize that I have growled and thrown my weight around on this subject before, but what with all the adulation the Kennedy era seems to have pulled in around us this week we are probably overdue for another look, a consideration of what really happened, and when, and why.
In a piece that appeared a week ago, November 17, in The Tampa Bay Times, I attempted to deal with several books that have appeared lately on the subject. I brushed off Bill O'Reilly's featherweight bestseller Killing Kennedy as an atrociously researched puff piece. Of more concern is the recently published biography by David Nasaw, The Patriarch. Apparently sponsored by Jean Smith, Joe's surviving child, the author alleges that Joe had nothing to do with organized crime, that whatever people thought was based on gossip among mobsters. Apart from my exhaustively footnoted biography, Bobby and J. Edgar, virtually every recent work of substance on the Kennedys has detailed -- and substantiated -- Joe's business, political and recreational involvement with organized crime throughout his fascinating career. Others have now come forward -- Christopher Buckley, among many -- so this naive whitewash of reality probably won't stand up.
More than this sort of truckling misrepresentation of the family's history, another kind of opportunism threatens to corrupt our reading of our own past. There is a rash of Kennedy conspiracy books out right now that amount to sand in the eyes of those who have long doubted the conclusions of the Warren Commission and have done courageous and important work to get at the facts. One author maintains Kennedy's Secret Service driver turned and shot him dead. Another book pins it all on Lyndon Johnson, with little solid evidence. What all these works accomplish is to discredit the efforts of several generations of genuine investigative reporters who have tracked down the details over the decades and come up with proof of a comprehensive conspiracy, involving many individuals, in and out of government. The public understands this. In the e-book edition of Bobby and J. Edgar that just came out with Basic Books I have laid out the many important facts that have surfaced recently.
Our history is what we were. Our respect for its authenticity will determine what we are becoming. The truth, as they say, is what sets us free.
A happy Thanksgiving to all of you,
Burton Hersh
Yes, yes, I know. It has been too long a wait between blogs, my flock is parched for spiritual relief, the worry is universal that the well might have gone dry. Be not afraid. More opinions, more shafts of insight are on the way. In the end even the most ardent are likely to feel thoroughly shafted.
Partly the problem has been the maddening internet, where the infatuated elves can't leave well enough alone. Partly it has been the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination. I have been doing a fair amount of speaking, for the media and a number of groups, so you have been a little neglected, oh my faithful brethren.
But here we are. I realize that I have growled and thrown my weight around on this subject before, but what with all the adulation the Kennedy era seems to have pulled in around us this week we are probably overdue for another look, a consideration of what really happened, and when, and why.
In a piece that appeared a week ago, November 17, in The Tampa Bay Times, I attempted to deal with several books that have appeared lately on the subject. I brushed off Bill O'Reilly's featherweight bestseller Killing Kennedy as an atrociously researched puff piece. Of more concern is the recently published biography by David Nasaw, The Patriarch. Apparently sponsored by Jean Smith, Joe's surviving child, the author alleges that Joe had nothing to do with organized crime, that whatever people thought was based on gossip among mobsters. Apart from my exhaustively footnoted biography, Bobby and J. Edgar, virtually every recent work of substance on the Kennedys has detailed -- and substantiated -- Joe's business, political and recreational involvement with organized crime throughout his fascinating career. Others have now come forward -- Christopher Buckley, among many -- so this naive whitewash of reality probably won't stand up.
More than this sort of truckling misrepresentation of the family's history, another kind of opportunism threatens to corrupt our reading of our own past. There is a rash of Kennedy conspiracy books out right now that amount to sand in the eyes of those who have long doubted the conclusions of the Warren Commission and have done courageous and important work to get at the facts. One author maintains Kennedy's Secret Service driver turned and shot him dead. Another book pins it all on Lyndon Johnson, with little solid evidence. What all these works accomplish is to discredit the efforts of several generations of genuine investigative reporters who have tracked down the details over the decades and come up with proof of a comprehensive conspiracy, involving many individuals, in and out of government. The public understands this. In the e-book edition of Bobby and J. Edgar that just came out with Basic Books I have laid out the many important facts that have surfaced recently.
Our history is what we were. Our respect for its authenticity will determine what we are becoming. The truth, as they say, is what sets us free.
A happy Thanksgiving to all of you,
Burton Hersh
Monday, August 27, 2012
Edward Kennedy Redux IV
Countrycollectivists,
So. We find ourselves swinging around for one more pass at the life and times of EMK, fondly remembered and sorely missed. The occasion for this one is the response to one of my recent blogs from Joan Mellen, our versatile and frequently trenchant colleague in the intelligence field. Joan wrote an important book about the attempt by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison to dig up the roots of the conspiracy to murder Jack Kennedy, A Farewell to Justice. Joan wrote me:
"I don't know if I missed this segment, but people keep asking, why did Teddy stand in the way of the investigation of the death of his brother JFK? Because he certainly did, following Bobby's lead, maybe, but Bobby was dead. What was the rationale?"
In his memoir, True Compass, published shortly before he died, Edward Kennedy wrote that "Late in 1964, Bobby asked me to review the Warren Commission's newly released report on the assassination because emotionally he couldn't do it." Earl Warren gave Ted a briefing, and "made the case for me."
In Bobby and J. Edgar I dealt in some detail with Robert Kennedy's response to the shooting, his suggestion to Warren that he include on the Commission Allen Dulles and John McCone -- two go-along types unlikely to challenge a cover-up. When Garrison began his investigation, Bob sent Walter Sheridan -- his most reliable demolition expert -- to undermine the inquiry. And so forth.
I responded as follows to Joan:
"You didn't miss the segment. I always found Ted ambivalent about the JFK murder, not anything he would talk about. He once told me that "Dad had a lot of friends and contacts we didn't really know anything about," which was as close as he dared go. I suppose when Ted was handing around cash that originated with the mob in 1960 in West Virginia he must have had an inkling that there were family associations he had to protect. Underneath, Ted felt dependent on his father's support and afraid of what the old man might do to him -- he remembered -- and told me about -- the way Joe had deep-sixed Rosemary, as I spelled out in Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography.
"In Bobby and J. Edgar I attempted to lay out the entire scenario. While running Mongoose Bobby had himself worked closely with syndicate types like Johnny Rosselli, who had become assets of the CIA. Eager to justify another invasion of Cuba, on the pretext of a purported assassination attempt by Oswald, who had been set up as a pro-Castro fanatic while working as a CIA agent in New Orleans, Bobby had probably signed off on the whole big-store operation, which the Agency's mob associates had been brought in to front. Then Jack got popped, Oswald survived the original planning to take him out and everybody involved scrambled to cover up his tracks. I assume that Ted had figured out enough of all this to realize that Bob was implicated, however inadvertently. Loyalty to his brother -- or at least the public perception of his brother -- no doubt lay behind the rather tepid support Kennedy gave to the Warren Commisssion conclusions in his memoirs. Interestingly, a number of people closest to Ted, whom I still see regularly, have come around to accepting my overall conclusions.
"In outline, that's what I think."
A slice of history, bound to be controversial.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
So. We find ourselves swinging around for one more pass at the life and times of EMK, fondly remembered and sorely missed. The occasion for this one is the response to one of my recent blogs from Joan Mellen, our versatile and frequently trenchant colleague in the intelligence field. Joan wrote an important book about the attempt by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison to dig up the roots of the conspiracy to murder Jack Kennedy, A Farewell to Justice. Joan wrote me:
"I don't know if I missed this segment, but people keep asking, why did Teddy stand in the way of the investigation of the death of his brother JFK? Because he certainly did, following Bobby's lead, maybe, but Bobby was dead. What was the rationale?"
In his memoir, True Compass, published shortly before he died, Edward Kennedy wrote that "Late in 1964, Bobby asked me to review the Warren Commission's newly released report on the assassination because emotionally he couldn't do it." Earl Warren gave Ted a briefing, and "made the case for me."
In Bobby and J. Edgar I dealt in some detail with Robert Kennedy's response to the shooting, his suggestion to Warren that he include on the Commission Allen Dulles and John McCone -- two go-along types unlikely to challenge a cover-up. When Garrison began his investigation, Bob sent Walter Sheridan -- his most reliable demolition expert -- to undermine the inquiry. And so forth.
I responded as follows to Joan:
"You didn't miss the segment. I always found Ted ambivalent about the JFK murder, not anything he would talk about. He once told me that "Dad had a lot of friends and contacts we didn't really know anything about," which was as close as he dared go. I suppose when Ted was handing around cash that originated with the mob in 1960 in West Virginia he must have had an inkling that there were family associations he had to protect. Underneath, Ted felt dependent on his father's support and afraid of what the old man might do to him -- he remembered -- and told me about -- the way Joe had deep-sixed Rosemary, as I spelled out in Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography.
"In Bobby and J. Edgar I attempted to lay out the entire scenario. While running Mongoose Bobby had himself worked closely with syndicate types like Johnny Rosselli, who had become assets of the CIA. Eager to justify another invasion of Cuba, on the pretext of a purported assassination attempt by Oswald, who had been set up as a pro-Castro fanatic while working as a CIA agent in New Orleans, Bobby had probably signed off on the whole big-store operation, which the Agency's mob associates had been brought in to front. Then Jack got popped, Oswald survived the original planning to take him out and everybody involved scrambled to cover up his tracks. I assume that Ted had figured out enough of all this to realize that Bob was implicated, however inadvertently. Loyalty to his brother -- or at least the public perception of his brother -- no doubt lay behind the rather tepid support Kennedy gave to the Warren Commisssion conclusions in his memoirs. Interestingly, a number of people closest to Ted, whom I still see regularly, have come around to accepting my overall conclusions.
"In outline, that's what I think."
A slice of history, bound to be controversial.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
Monday, February 27, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? The Critics
Countrysnoops,
Hello again. Back after it, turning over several of the more unfamiliar rocks of history in hopes of identifying the reptiles who deranged our history.
I think I began to understand why the killing of JFK has gone so long without conclusive investigation once my own treatment of the event, Chapter XIX of Bobby and J. Edgar, began to pull in flak. Characteristically -- as when it helped get the drums beating prior to the invasion of Iraq -- The New York Times has continued to defend the Warren Commission conclusions, emphasized at the time by its liberal drum-beater Anthony Lewis. A lot of history is agreed upon at Georgetown cocktail parties.
When Bobby and J. Edgar appeared in 2007 the review fell to David Corn, stammering out opinions at the time as a punster for The Nation. Having identified the stricken president as "a sex-crazed, drug-dependent, ailment-ridden party-boy politician," Corn attenpted to delegitimize my book on the basis of my having interviewed only fifty-four new subjects, "about a quarter of them..authors and journalists...." Since Jack Kennedy started out as a journalist after World War II, and a number of his closest friends were writers, I couldn't quite figure out how their profession disqualified these sources, especially since many of them worked in Kennedy's administration. Why bring up the hundreds of interviews supporting my two prior books about Edward Kennedy? But these are apparently finer distinctions than Corn can permit himself.
Had he looked at the seventy-two pages of source notes in the back -- thousands of entries, a great many from the FBI files and Kennedy family archives to which I had unlimited access -- he would have known why many informed reviewers and commentators tend to attach the adjective "meticulous" to my preparation of material.
After attacking the appropriateness of my bibliographical sources -- almost all of which were books written by players, people in the room, as the Kennedy years were unfolding, and many of whom -- Bobby Baker, Robert Maheu, Richard Goodwin, et. al. -- I took pains to pin them down with extensive interviews of my own. Corn asserts that "when the book reaches Nov. 22, 1963..it truly jumps the rails." I cite "one book of uncertain credibility" on a statement of Gerald Ford -- since backed up on the Watergate tapes by Richard Nixon -- , while books written by the Giancana family and based on first-hand testimony by the Giancana's daughter and nephew and brother, Corn dismisses as "unreliable."
Corn -- like my other critics -- apparently cannot trouble himself to produce one morsel of evidence to counter the hard and detailed specifics -- ballistic, surgical, autopsy, documentary, forensic -- that I was able to produce in support of my interpretation of events. Always the dismissive adjective -- "sleazy, eye-popping, discredited" -- in lieu of any investment of serious journalistic digging to counter my reading. Much easier to brush it off. The Attorney General of Texas testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald was on the FBI payroll? Well, J. Edgar Hoover says he wasn't, so that's that. What Corn -- and The Times -- appear to maintain their confidence in is the inherently contradictory and largely unsubstiantated case thrown together in the months following the Kennedy assassination against a dupe dispatched promptly by a Mafia hireling before Oswald could be interrogated anywhere near a court.
Davis Corn has been around a while. Earlier in his career he wrote a book about Ted Shackley, a hard-nosed operations specialist for the CIA who ran "low-intensity" wars during the sixties and seventies, a covert-warfare manager I knew fairly well. We had lunch regularly when I was in D.C. researching The Old Boys. Corn's book was spotty, poorly focused, and missed the substance of Shackley's career while subsisting on inaccurate rumors. Corn met Shackley once, at Shackley's insistence exclusively in the presence of Shackley's lawyers.
On July 17th, 1979, the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Louis Stokes, called a press conference to announce the committee's final report after almost a decade spent investigating the murder of JFK. The report specified that "Scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy." There had been a conspiracy. Media across the spectrum scrambled to ignore or dismiss these results. A new wave of Warren Commission apologists was soon being lined up to hit the beaches of public opinion.
But that must wait until our next blog, Countrysnoops. Enjoy what's left of February.
Burton Hersh
Hello again. Back after it, turning over several of the more unfamiliar rocks of history in hopes of identifying the reptiles who deranged our history.
I think I began to understand why the killing of JFK has gone so long without conclusive investigation once my own treatment of the event, Chapter XIX of Bobby and J. Edgar, began to pull in flak. Characteristically -- as when it helped get the drums beating prior to the invasion of Iraq -- The New York Times has continued to defend the Warren Commission conclusions, emphasized at the time by its liberal drum-beater Anthony Lewis. A lot of history is agreed upon at Georgetown cocktail parties.
When Bobby and J. Edgar appeared in 2007 the review fell to David Corn, stammering out opinions at the time as a punster for The Nation. Having identified the stricken president as "a sex-crazed, drug-dependent, ailment-ridden party-boy politician," Corn attenpted to delegitimize my book on the basis of my having interviewed only fifty-four new subjects, "about a quarter of them..authors and journalists...." Since Jack Kennedy started out as a journalist after World War II, and a number of his closest friends were writers, I couldn't quite figure out how their profession disqualified these sources, especially since many of them worked in Kennedy's administration. Why bring up the hundreds of interviews supporting my two prior books about Edward Kennedy? But these are apparently finer distinctions than Corn can permit himself.
Had he looked at the seventy-two pages of source notes in the back -- thousands of entries, a great many from the FBI files and Kennedy family archives to which I had unlimited access -- he would have known why many informed reviewers and commentators tend to attach the adjective "meticulous" to my preparation of material.
After attacking the appropriateness of my bibliographical sources -- almost all of which were books written by players, people in the room, as the Kennedy years were unfolding, and many of whom -- Bobby Baker, Robert Maheu, Richard Goodwin, et. al. -- I took pains to pin them down with extensive interviews of my own. Corn asserts that "when the book reaches Nov. 22, 1963..it truly jumps the rails." I cite "one book of uncertain credibility" on a statement of Gerald Ford -- since backed up on the Watergate tapes by Richard Nixon -- , while books written by the Giancana family and based on first-hand testimony by the Giancana's daughter and nephew and brother, Corn dismisses as "unreliable."
Corn -- like my other critics -- apparently cannot trouble himself to produce one morsel of evidence to counter the hard and detailed specifics -- ballistic, surgical, autopsy, documentary, forensic -- that I was able to produce in support of my interpretation of events. Always the dismissive adjective -- "sleazy, eye-popping, discredited" -- in lieu of any investment of serious journalistic digging to counter my reading. Much easier to brush it off. The Attorney General of Texas testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald was on the FBI payroll? Well, J. Edgar Hoover says he wasn't, so that's that. What Corn -- and The Times -- appear to maintain their confidence in is the inherently contradictory and largely unsubstiantated case thrown together in the months following the Kennedy assassination against a dupe dispatched promptly by a Mafia hireling before Oswald could be interrogated anywhere near a court.
Davis Corn has been around a while. Earlier in his career he wrote a book about Ted Shackley, a hard-nosed operations specialist for the CIA who ran "low-intensity" wars during the sixties and seventies, a covert-warfare manager I knew fairly well. We had lunch regularly when I was in D.C. researching The Old Boys. Corn's book was spotty, poorly focused, and missed the substance of Shackley's career while subsisting on inaccurate rumors. Corn met Shackley once, at Shackley's insistence exclusively in the presence of Shackley's lawyers.
On July 17th, 1979, the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Louis Stokes, called a press conference to announce the committee's final report after almost a decade spent investigating the murder of JFK. The report specified that "Scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy." There had been a conspiracy. Media across the spectrum scrambled to ignore or dismiss these results. A new wave of Warren Commission apologists was soon being lined up to hit the beaches of public opinion.
But that must wait until our next blog, Countrysnoops. Enjoy what's left of February.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? V
Countryconspirators,
So. Here we are again, circling reality a half century later and hoping enough dots will come up to connect. The following might help set the focal distance.
Last week I tried to tip in enough detail about Lee Harvey Oswald to suggest that he was neither a solitary nut case taking potshots at the presidential motorcade through heavy foliage nor an innocent passerby, essentially unconnected to the events of the afternoon. Oswald was a player -- a minor player, complicitous in the anti-Castro intelligence scrimmaging of the previous summer in New Orleans and apparently in touch with the cast of underworld technicians and mid-level Agency operatives that converged on Dallas that weekend in November to welcome the president.
CIA files remain largely embargoed, but FBI records tell quite a lot. I have to conclude that the Bureau came fairly late to the party, and got dragged in mostly for the cover-up. What could be more embarrassing for Hoover, after all, than to have to admit that Oswald was on the Bureau's payroll for a year before the shooting? Early Bureau warnings that Kennedy was at risk had headed off motorcades in Chicago and Miami -- the rabid segregationist Joseph Milteer had inadvertently alerted the Bureau. Combing out Bureau records while researching Bobby and J. Edgar, I myself ran into extremely telling documents. A regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee, who had since 1956 been flying the top "strategizer" for the Chicago Outfit, Johnny Rosselli, on Company errands, asserted in an affidavit that Rosselli was on "a mission, we were told, to abort a pending attempt on the President's life...."
Another heavy clue turns up in the transcription of a telephone call between LBJ and Hoover the day after the assassination. The freshly sworn-in president wants more information about Oswald's purported visit to Mexico City in September. "No, that's one angle that's very confusing for this reason," J. Edgar responds. ""We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Empassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and tape do not correspond" to Oswald. It had started to dawn on individuals at the top of the government that the scenario they were depending on to hang this crime on Oswald was already falling apart.
What makes the most sense is the projection developed by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann in Ultimate Sacrifice. Kennedy administration officials as high as ex-Secretary of State Dean Rusk have acknowledged U.S. military planning -- troops training -- throughout the Caribbean just then in anticipation of "C-Day." This meant another attempt to invade Cuba late in 1963, to expunge Communism "ninety miles from America's shore," as JFK so often put it, and guarantee the president's reelection in 1964. What was obviously needed was a pretext, a "bloody shirt" with which to enrage the citizenry and assure widespread public backing.
An attempted assassination of the president ought to light the fuse. The "legend" the disinformation specialists around the Agency had concocted for Oswald -- a fervent "Fair Play for Cuba" advocate, purported to conspire with a Soviet assassination expert in Mexico City -- left him the perfect fall guy. But Johnny Rosselli's boss, Sam Giancana, Al Capone's successor -- after single-handedly raising enough money and stuffing enough ballot boxes in Illinois to get JFK elected as a personal favor to well-connected old Joe -- found himself hammered day and night by tough guys from Bob Kennedy's Justice Department. Along with Johnny Rosselli, Giancana sent down James Files and Charlie Nicoretti, his two best button men, who took out the president. Giancana reasoned that the government was far too implicated by then to blow the whistle, and he was right. The planners still had Oswald, at least as long as he never got to trial.
All this is well documented in Bobby and J. Edgar. Perhaps the most tragic survivor was Robert Kennedy. I knew Bob fairly well the final couple of years of his life. He was profoundly troubled. Often -- and correctly -- referred to as the "co-president" during his brother's days in power -- "I couldn't have done it without him," Bobby liked to gibe, Bob was a frustrated and defensive senator. Catholic that he was, guilt played a very large part. In 1967, interviewed by Jack Anderson, Rosselli concluded that "Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother." He added that the oil boys put up the money for this big-store operation.
Bobby wanted Castro's scalp, perhaps a little too badly, as he himself would remark sadly while running for president. During the Mongoose years Robert Kennedy had worked closely with Johnny Rosselli, who had been busting heads and arranging payoffs for Joseph P. Kennedy since the nineteen-twenties. But whatever
either Robert Kennedy or the Agency had scripted that afternoon in Dallas, it was Sam Giancana who seems to have decided the outcome.
Once it had happened, everybody involved started shoveling. Robert Kennedy recommended Allen Dulles -- whom his brother had canned for incompetence -- and John McCloy, the go-along voice of The Establishment. When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began to investigate the New Orleans prelude to the assassination, Bob sent his investigative attack dog Walter Sheridan down in the role of producer of an NBC documentary to discredit Garrison's witnesses. Bob moved his brother's brain around -- an early examination might have determined the angle of the entry wound and the character of the bullet -- for years. One day he himself would get at the truth behind the loss of his brother, Bobby assured the curious. That was apparently enough.
One additional note. This President's Day would mark the eightieth birthday of Edward M. Kennedy, were he still with us. I wish he were. His compelling personality and unique knowledge of even the finest detail of pending legislation made the Congress workable for decades. He had his susceptibilities, but he had so much to offer the country that his loss proved crippling, immediately. I knew him from his undergraduate days in college, wrote about him for four decades, and ultimately put together Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography. Most critics have concluded that it is definitive, and I hope they are right. I expect to point up his amazing record on these pages before long. Let us commemorate here his life and career.
Burton Hersh
So. Here we are again, circling reality a half century later and hoping enough dots will come up to connect. The following might help set the focal distance.
Last week I tried to tip in enough detail about Lee Harvey Oswald to suggest that he was neither a solitary nut case taking potshots at the presidential motorcade through heavy foliage nor an innocent passerby, essentially unconnected to the events of the afternoon. Oswald was a player -- a minor player, complicitous in the anti-Castro intelligence scrimmaging of the previous summer in New Orleans and apparently in touch with the cast of underworld technicians and mid-level Agency operatives that converged on Dallas that weekend in November to welcome the president.
CIA files remain largely embargoed, but FBI records tell quite a lot. I have to conclude that the Bureau came fairly late to the party, and got dragged in mostly for the cover-up. What could be more embarrassing for Hoover, after all, than to have to admit that Oswald was on the Bureau's payroll for a year before the shooting? Early Bureau warnings that Kennedy was at risk had headed off motorcades in Chicago and Miami -- the rabid segregationist Joseph Milteer had inadvertently alerted the Bureau. Combing out Bureau records while researching Bobby and J. Edgar, I myself ran into extremely telling documents. A regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee, who had since 1956 been flying the top "strategizer" for the Chicago Outfit, Johnny Rosselli, on Company errands, asserted in an affidavit that Rosselli was on "a mission, we were told, to abort a pending attempt on the President's life...."
Another heavy clue turns up in the transcription of a telephone call between LBJ and Hoover the day after the assassination. The freshly sworn-in president wants more information about Oswald's purported visit to Mexico City in September. "No, that's one angle that's very confusing for this reason," J. Edgar responds. ""We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Empassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and tape do not correspond" to Oswald. It had started to dawn on individuals at the top of the government that the scenario they were depending on to hang this crime on Oswald was already falling apart.
What makes the most sense is the projection developed by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann in Ultimate Sacrifice. Kennedy administration officials as high as ex-Secretary of State Dean Rusk have acknowledged U.S. military planning -- troops training -- throughout the Caribbean just then in anticipation of "C-Day." This meant another attempt to invade Cuba late in 1963, to expunge Communism "ninety miles from America's shore," as JFK so often put it, and guarantee the president's reelection in 1964. What was obviously needed was a pretext, a "bloody shirt" with which to enrage the citizenry and assure widespread public backing.
An attempted assassination of the president ought to light the fuse. The "legend" the disinformation specialists around the Agency had concocted for Oswald -- a fervent "Fair Play for Cuba" advocate, purported to conspire with a Soviet assassination expert in Mexico City -- left him the perfect fall guy. But Johnny Rosselli's boss, Sam Giancana, Al Capone's successor -- after single-handedly raising enough money and stuffing enough ballot boxes in Illinois to get JFK elected as a personal favor to well-connected old Joe -- found himself hammered day and night by tough guys from Bob Kennedy's Justice Department. Along with Johnny Rosselli, Giancana sent down James Files and Charlie Nicoretti, his two best button men, who took out the president. Giancana reasoned that the government was far too implicated by then to blow the whistle, and he was right. The planners still had Oswald, at least as long as he never got to trial.
All this is well documented in Bobby and J. Edgar. Perhaps the most tragic survivor was Robert Kennedy. I knew Bob fairly well the final couple of years of his life. He was profoundly troubled. Often -- and correctly -- referred to as the "co-president" during his brother's days in power -- "I couldn't have done it without him," Bobby liked to gibe, Bob was a frustrated and defensive senator. Catholic that he was, guilt played a very large part. In 1967, interviewed by Jack Anderson, Rosselli concluded that "Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother." He added that the oil boys put up the money for this big-store operation.
Bobby wanted Castro's scalp, perhaps a little too badly, as he himself would remark sadly while running for president. During the Mongoose years Robert Kennedy had worked closely with Johnny Rosselli, who had been busting heads and arranging payoffs for Joseph P. Kennedy since the nineteen-twenties. But whatever
either Robert Kennedy or the Agency had scripted that afternoon in Dallas, it was Sam Giancana who seems to have decided the outcome.
Once it had happened, everybody involved started shoveling. Robert Kennedy recommended Allen Dulles -- whom his brother had canned for incompetence -- and John McCloy, the go-along voice of The Establishment. When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began to investigate the New Orleans prelude to the assassination, Bob sent his investigative attack dog Walter Sheridan down in the role of producer of an NBC documentary to discredit Garrison's witnesses. Bob moved his brother's brain around -- an early examination might have determined the angle of the entry wound and the character of the bullet -- for years. One day he himself would get at the truth behind the loss of his brother, Bobby assured the curious. That was apparently enough.
One additional note. This President's Day would mark the eightieth birthday of Edward M. Kennedy, were he still with us. I wish he were. His compelling personality and unique knowledge of even the finest detail of pending legislation made the Congress workable for decades. He had his susceptibilities, but he had so much to offer the country that his loss proved crippling, immediately. I knew him from his undergraduate days in college, wrote about him for four decades, and ultimately put together Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography. Most critics have concluded that it is definitive, and I hope they are right. I expect to point up his amazing record on these pages before long. Let us commemorate here his life and career.
Burton Hersh
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? IV
Countryculprits,
So here we are, closing in on it, tiptoeing deeper and deeper into The Heart of Darkness. This week I want to take a closer look at Lee Harvey Oswald, who was either the primary perpetrator or peripheral to the JFK assassination, depending on which camp you've managed to join at this point. Either the solitary demonic shooter or a fall guy caught up in the assassination.
The flunkies who drafted the Warren Commission Report tended to treat Oswald as some kind of twitchy obsessive, extremely unstable, a low-rent cultural drifter who acted on impulse that day in Dallas to claim his place in history. All this bears very little resemblance to what becomes apparent upon a careful examination of Oswald's authentic biography. To anybody familiar with the processes through which the intelligence community develops its assets, Oswald's undercover history probably begins with his months as a Marine stationed at the U.S. Naval Facility outside Atsugi, Japan, from where the U-2s that overflew the Soviet Union originated. Half-educated, highly neurotic, Oswald abruptly developed such an interest in Russia that he buckled down and picked up this very difficult language in his off-hours, arranged for an early discharge -- not an easy thing to get during the Cold-War fifties -- and defected by way of Helsinki, proclaiming to the English-language press once he had made his way to Moscow that he had a lot of U-2 technology to share with the Soviets.
This was an era when the CIA was scratching around somewhat desperately for whatever it could find out about the "denied areas," the Soviet Union especially. CIA Counterintelligence, overseen by James J. Angleton, had a defector-redefector program designed to infiltrate people into Russia and then bring them back with whatever they could pick up. Jane Roman, who helped run this arrangement, indicated to me when I was researching The Old Boys that Oswald had participated. Interestingly, after flagrantly announcing that he was in Moscow to sell out vital American secrets, Oswald was permitted by U.S. authorities to come back immediately when largely on a whim he decided to, no fuss at all.
Back in the United States Oswald skipped from job to job in Texas while establishing a close working relationship with that mysterious Baltic Baron George de Mohrenschild, an important CIA asset in the Domestic Contact Program. By the spring and summer of 1963 his handlers had obviously decided that Oswald was ready to play a more meaningful part here. He turned up in New Orleans -- where Oswald had grown up and where his uncle, "Dutz" Murret, was an important functionary in the Carlos Marcello branch of the Cosa Nostra. According to the CIA case officer who ran him, Hunter Leake, Oswald helped out with CIA training operations on Lake Pontchartrain while doubling as an agent provocateur around The Big Easy, promoting his Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I have gone deeply into all of this in the text and the second-edition expanded notes for Bobby and J. Edgar.
Back in the Dallas area Oswald seems to have bounced around throughout that fateful summer and fall of 1963. I interviewed Ruth Paine, a no-nonsense Quaker lady who sublet an apartment to Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, and their daughter on the Paine property on the outskirts of Dallas; as the fall wore on Oswald rented an in-town place near the Texas Schoolbook Depository, where he had started a job. The previous summer Ruth Paine, concerned about Marina's well-being, had visited the Oswalds in their squalid little flat in New Orleans. Like so many others, Ruth found Oswald abrupt, hard to track, difficult to mother, and utterly self-interested. She remembered him toying with the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he is so often pictured holding, and in the end she concluded that Oswald was indeed involved in the shooting of John Kennedy.
In all probability he was, one way or another. A scenario was quite clearly being worked up with Lee Harvey Oswald in a major role. Whichever interests were masterminding the event regarded Oswald as available, serviceable. The key here was creating a persona -- not always populated by the tangible Oswald -- who would seem to be taking a series of steps that would leave him convincingly in position to fire a weapon out the sixth-floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository while John Kennedy was passing below. Thus it became convenient to generate one or more stand-ins, quasi-Oswalds, to sign Oswald's nom-de-guerre, Alek Hidell, at the post office for delivery of the identifiable weapon, or storm around Mexico City to enlist a Soviet assassination specialist, or show up at a soiree for revenge-seeking Cubans. As with so many Agency operations, the important thing at that stage was to flesh out the back story.
A great deal of important detail comes through in the extensive private investigation of the JFK killing undertaken by a Dutch businessman, Willem Dankbaar, who hired three veteran FBI retirees to track down anybody implicated in the tragedy and sort the whole thing out. The great find was James Files, already implicated in books by the Giancana family, finishing out a full life of inspired bloodletting in the Illinois State penetentiary. Long a dependable button man for the Outfit, Files claimed to have fired the hollow-point bullet from the Grassy Knoll that blew Kennedy's brains out.
As interesting to assassination buffs was Files' rendition of events during the week preceding the shooting. Files maintained that he had been flown into Dallas from Chicago and squired around the city by Oswald, who Files knew in any case after collaborating with him earlier in the year running submachine guns to the Cuban resistance. Oswald supposedly took Files to a rifle range to sharpen up his eye and recommended the vantage point on the Grassy Knoll. Then Files drove Johnny Rosselli -- flown into Fort Worth by a regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee -- to a meeting in a Fort Worth Pancake House with Jack Ruby.
Another of those borderline-underworld types so useful to the Agency who showed up in Dallas was Chauncy Holt. Also a dependable pilot, Holt procured the Secret Service badges-of-the-day flashed by the ersatz Secret Service operatives who shooed away the curious from the Grassy Knoll before and after the muzzle flash there. A lot of technical talent had started to materialize in Dallas that week.
Everybody had his contribution. Part of Oswald's utility stemmed from his enhanced -- and deniable -- background as low-level functionary for several federal agencies. Apart from what by 1963 had turned into a wide-ranging assortment of covert chores for CIA, Oswald had been picking up a regular paycheck as an FBI informant. Stymied in his efforts to conduct a proper state investigation of the Kennedy assassination -- police paraffin tests had revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't fired a rifle the day of the shooting -- Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr -- see Wikipedia -- would testify before the Warren Commission that "Oswald was working as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and received $200 a month from September 1962 until his death in November 1963." Hoover shrugged his shoulders, and denied everything.
By then, of course, what had probably been intended and what had happened that noontime in Dallas had diverged, catastrophically. The game of creating a pretext for invading Cuba had turned in moments into the game of bureaucratic survival. Lee Harvey Oswald would be the first to be sacrificed.
For chapter and verse, there will be another installment. Wait!
Burton Hersh
So here we are, closing in on it, tiptoeing deeper and deeper into The Heart of Darkness. This week I want to take a closer look at Lee Harvey Oswald, who was either the primary perpetrator or peripheral to the JFK assassination, depending on which camp you've managed to join at this point. Either the solitary demonic shooter or a fall guy caught up in the assassination.
The flunkies who drafted the Warren Commission Report tended to treat Oswald as some kind of twitchy obsessive, extremely unstable, a low-rent cultural drifter who acted on impulse that day in Dallas to claim his place in history. All this bears very little resemblance to what becomes apparent upon a careful examination of Oswald's authentic biography. To anybody familiar with the processes through which the intelligence community develops its assets, Oswald's undercover history probably begins with his months as a Marine stationed at the U.S. Naval Facility outside Atsugi, Japan, from where the U-2s that overflew the Soviet Union originated. Half-educated, highly neurotic, Oswald abruptly developed such an interest in Russia that he buckled down and picked up this very difficult language in his off-hours, arranged for an early discharge -- not an easy thing to get during the Cold-War fifties -- and defected by way of Helsinki, proclaiming to the English-language press once he had made his way to Moscow that he had a lot of U-2 technology to share with the Soviets.
This was an era when the CIA was scratching around somewhat desperately for whatever it could find out about the "denied areas," the Soviet Union especially. CIA Counterintelligence, overseen by James J. Angleton, had a defector-redefector program designed to infiltrate people into Russia and then bring them back with whatever they could pick up. Jane Roman, who helped run this arrangement, indicated to me when I was researching The Old Boys that Oswald had participated. Interestingly, after flagrantly announcing that he was in Moscow to sell out vital American secrets, Oswald was permitted by U.S. authorities to come back immediately when largely on a whim he decided to, no fuss at all.
Back in the United States Oswald skipped from job to job in Texas while establishing a close working relationship with that mysterious Baltic Baron George de Mohrenschild, an important CIA asset in the Domestic Contact Program. By the spring and summer of 1963 his handlers had obviously decided that Oswald was ready to play a more meaningful part here. He turned up in New Orleans -- where Oswald had grown up and where his uncle, "Dutz" Murret, was an important functionary in the Carlos Marcello branch of the Cosa Nostra. According to the CIA case officer who ran him, Hunter Leake, Oswald helped out with CIA training operations on Lake Pontchartrain while doubling as an agent provocateur around The Big Easy, promoting his Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I have gone deeply into all of this in the text and the second-edition expanded notes for Bobby and J. Edgar.
Back in the Dallas area Oswald seems to have bounced around throughout that fateful summer and fall of 1963. I interviewed Ruth Paine, a no-nonsense Quaker lady who sublet an apartment to Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, and their daughter on the Paine property on the outskirts of Dallas; as the fall wore on Oswald rented an in-town place near the Texas Schoolbook Depository, where he had started a job. The previous summer Ruth Paine, concerned about Marina's well-being, had visited the Oswalds in their squalid little flat in New Orleans. Like so many others, Ruth found Oswald abrupt, hard to track, difficult to mother, and utterly self-interested. She remembered him toying with the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he is so often pictured holding, and in the end she concluded that Oswald was indeed involved in the shooting of John Kennedy.
In all probability he was, one way or another. A scenario was quite clearly being worked up with Lee Harvey Oswald in a major role. Whichever interests were masterminding the event regarded Oswald as available, serviceable. The key here was creating a persona -- not always populated by the tangible Oswald -- who would seem to be taking a series of steps that would leave him convincingly in position to fire a weapon out the sixth-floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository while John Kennedy was passing below. Thus it became convenient to generate one or more stand-ins, quasi-Oswalds, to sign Oswald's nom-de-guerre, Alek Hidell, at the post office for delivery of the identifiable weapon, or storm around Mexico City to enlist a Soviet assassination specialist, or show up at a soiree for revenge-seeking Cubans. As with so many Agency operations, the important thing at that stage was to flesh out the back story.
A great deal of important detail comes through in the extensive private investigation of the JFK killing undertaken by a Dutch businessman, Willem Dankbaar, who hired three veteran FBI retirees to track down anybody implicated in the tragedy and sort the whole thing out. The great find was James Files, already implicated in books by the Giancana family, finishing out a full life of inspired bloodletting in the Illinois State penetentiary. Long a dependable button man for the Outfit, Files claimed to have fired the hollow-point bullet from the Grassy Knoll that blew Kennedy's brains out.
As interesting to assassination buffs was Files' rendition of events during the week preceding the shooting. Files maintained that he had been flown into Dallas from Chicago and squired around the city by Oswald, who Files knew in any case after collaborating with him earlier in the year running submachine guns to the Cuban resistance. Oswald supposedly took Files to a rifle range to sharpen up his eye and recommended the vantage point on the Grassy Knoll. Then Files drove Johnny Rosselli -- flown into Fort Worth by a regular CIA pilot, Robert "Tosh" Plumlee -- to a meeting in a Fort Worth Pancake House with Jack Ruby.
Another of those borderline-underworld types so useful to the Agency who showed up in Dallas was Chauncy Holt. Also a dependable pilot, Holt procured the Secret Service badges-of-the-day flashed by the ersatz Secret Service operatives who shooed away the curious from the Grassy Knoll before and after the muzzle flash there. A lot of technical talent had started to materialize in Dallas that week.
Everybody had his contribution. Part of Oswald's utility stemmed from his enhanced -- and deniable -- background as low-level functionary for several federal agencies. Apart from what by 1963 had turned into a wide-ranging assortment of covert chores for CIA, Oswald had been picking up a regular paycheck as an FBI informant. Stymied in his efforts to conduct a proper state investigation of the Kennedy assassination -- police paraffin tests had revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't fired a rifle the day of the shooting -- Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr -- see Wikipedia -- would testify before the Warren Commission that "Oswald was working as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and received $200 a month from September 1962 until his death in November 1963." Hoover shrugged his shoulders, and denied everything.
By then, of course, what had probably been intended and what had happened that noontime in Dallas had diverged, catastrophically. The game of creating a pretext for invading Cuba had turned in moments into the game of bureaucratic survival. Lee Harvey Oswald would be the first to be sacrificed.
For chapter and verse, there will be another installment. Wait!
Burton Hersh
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