Countrycrusaders,
So here we are, about to go to the mat for the last time -- this winter -- with the residual consequences of the JFK assassination. Each inquiry exacts a price. "Most 'respectable' academics, journalists, and news organizations don't want to get near the matter, lest they be labeled conspiracy nuts," Russ Baker points out early in his study of the connections among the oil boys, the Bushes and the CIA. Family of Secrets tracks decades of off-stage plotting intended to bring down successive administrations, what Peter Dale Scott has called the "deep politics" surrounding the murder of JFK.
As competent investigators have picked the Warren Commission Report apart, and writers in this field have been relegated to the badlands of publishing, several establishment publishers have stepped forward in the belated attempt to recusscitate the Warren Commission's moribund conclusions. Whatever credibility the Report once had got banged around throughout even the comparatively peripheral hearings conducted by Senators Schweiker and Church during the mid-1970s. The remnants got torn up pretty badly when the Select Committee on Assassinations went to work in the House of Representatives.
The counterattack was mounted in 1993, when Random House published Gerald Posner's Case Closed.
Rather than reinforcing the demonstrably skewed evidence the Warren Report depended on, Posner seemed to spend his energy attempting to discredit individual critics of the Report with whom he preferred to disagree -- after months lost poring over the notional material J. Edgar Hoover concocted in FBI archives -- along with key witnesses. Anthony Summers' important interviews with Guy Banister's secretary, Delphine Roberts, must be discounted entirely because Summers paid her to sit down with him. And besides, Delphine was Banister's mistress. One of the lead investigators on chief counsel Robert Blakey's staff on the House Committee was the astute Gaeton Fonzi, whom Posner dismisses as "an unusual choice for an inquiry" because he had written magazine pieces dubious about the Report before and after the House Committee announced its verdict: There had indeed been a conspiracy. Better a rubber stamp, a skeptic is unconscionable on a staff conducting an investigaztion. No amount of testimony holds up for Posner. A mere six witnesses saw Oswald and mob pilot David Ferrie together in Clinton, Louisiana the summer of 1963? Out of hundreds interviewed? Not good enough for Posner, no matter what the House Assassination Committee concluded.
In time Posner himself would run into trouble. Individuals he quoted denied that they had ever talked with the author, while both of the pathologists who had conducted autopsies on JFK's remains insisted they had not said anything like what Posner quoted them as saying. Kennedy had been shot from the front, a hollow-point bullet had blown out the back of his skull, and the medical staffs in Parkland Hospital in Dallas and at Bethesda agreed about that.
Posner's problems have compounded. Repeated charges of plagiarism have haunted him and led to his dismissal as chief investigative reporter for The Daily Beast. The Warren Report obviously needed a sturdier champion. In 2007 Norton published Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, the author of Helter Skelter. At 1612 pages this eight-pound tome is unsuitable for bedtime reading. Any attempt to verify its contents becomes agonizing because the notes are purportedly to be found in the attached CD, a collating kerfuffle even the most dedicated savant would attempt to duck.
As I attempted to indicate in my notes for the trade paperback edition of Bobby and J. Edgar, Bugliosi seems to think he has solved the primary inconsistencies through the sort of reasoning he takes to the medical evidence, noting with no small bemusement that "the most honest people in the world can think they saw the darnedest things." Parkland Hospital surgeon Robert McClelland appeared to remain "fixated on this large gaping hole in the back of the president's head," for all Bugliosi's earnest efforts to persuade McClelland that the wound must have been delusional. Bugliosi tracks virtually hour by hour Oswald's return to New Orleans the summer of 1963 but leaves out Oswald's well-verified dance with Guy Banister, David Ferrie and the rest of the gnomes around whom New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison would build his case. Like Posner, Bugliosi's method remains mostly to insult or dismiss his critics rather than come up with even a shred of meaningful counter-evidence.
The truth is, many have come forward. What happened on November 22, 1963 is reasonably clear. Why this happened -- whose geopolitical purposes were served, who benefited in the short run, who financed our national nightmare -- even all this is slowly coming into view.
But that must wait for another winter.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
are all available in a highly affordable electronic format at treefarmbooks.com
Showing posts with label Kennedy assassination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kennedy assassination. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? III
Countrycynics,
We move on now to another phase of the investigation. What happened that noon in Dallas? A comment came in from one of you out there named "Richard," semi-nameless but right to the point. "It's very unlikely that the CIA or any government entity played a role in JFK's murder," he notes. "Those institutions are hardwired to wreck havoc in somebody else's sandbox." Then he cites Richard Posner, yet, on Oswald's guilt.
"Richard" is probably right, in a way, and wrong here. In Bobby and J. Edgar I laid out the extent to which, in 1963, the CIA had bases to support Operation Mongoose all around the Caribbean rim, from Opa Locka near Miami to Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. As I hope I established last week, at the operational level distinctions between CIA operatives and talent recruited from penitentiaries and exile groups and the executive level of well-integrated gangland organizations tended to fall away. The Church and Schweiker Committee investigations in the Senate during the mid-seventies staked all that out. Senator Richard Schweiker would later comment to Mark Lane that, under investigation, the Warren Committee Report " had collapsed like a house of cards...snuffed out before it began ..by senior officials who directed the cover-up." Insofar as CIA involvement is concerned, the real question is where, at what level, the traditional compartmentation and the sharing of information on a need-to-know basis breaks down and responsibility begins.
When the word of his brother's shooting reached him at Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy's first impulse was to call in the director of the CIA, whom his brother had installed to replace Allen Dulles in September of 1961, the California industrialist John McCone, and demand of McCone: "Did you kill my brother?" McCone, a somber Catholic layman and a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, never quite got the hang of intelligence work -- partly because his savvier underlings made sure they told him very little -- and assured the attorney general that he had not. Next down the chain of command was the head of the Directorate of Plans -- the Ivy-League gentlemen involved at that stage were still too delicate to call their shop Operations - , Richard Helms. The fact was, the senior intelligence staff around the Agency never really liked the administration's plotting against Cuba. As I noted earlier, Helms sat out the Bay of Pigs. His right-hand man, Sam Halpern, whom I always found amazingly outspoken when I interviewed him for The Old Boys, later commented that "Everyone at CIA was surprised at Kennedy's obsession with Fidel....It was a personal thing. The Kennedy family felt personally burnt by the Bay of Pigs and sought revenge."
By now we are getting down to the operational stalwarts. Perhaps the key figure here was E. Howard Hunt, "Eduardo," a snobby covert-warfare adept who moved over from his post as a staff assistant to Helms to help train the leadership of Brigade 2506, the fifteen hundred or so Cuban irregulars sacrificed in the feckless invasion. Hunt would remain very close to the Cuban survivors, as would David Atlee Phillips, who roamed the Western Hemisphere for decades, convulsing democracies objectionable to Washington.
I knew Phillips fairly well: early in the eighties I was a founding member of the David Atlee Phillips New England Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Phillips showed up at our weekend meetings, regularly. A former actor, Phillips made sure to look the part -- hat brim pulled down, trenchcoat, dark aviator glasses, a terse, insider delivery, a dedicated chain-smoker. An English publication accused Phillips of having had a hand in the Kennedy assassination; Phillips sued in England, and won. Phillips always professed to be very indignant at the charge that he or the Agency might have taken out an American president. Failing finally, Phillips -- who had to have been instrumental in setting up the Mexico City "legend" prior to Oswald's purported visit -- confessed that "My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people."
My own guess at this point is that there was in fact a CIA involvement at a number of points in the big-store operation that resulted in the shooting of John Kennedy in Dallas, but that important individuals like Helms, who never were permitted to get anywhere near the details, realized afterwards that they had been complicit -- if always well insulated, at arms-length -- in the execution of a very sophisticated game plan calculated to achieve an entirely different outcome. Afterwards, the frenzy of cover-your-ass extended halfway across the bureaucracy.
How this could be must wait until my next blog.
Be patient,
Burton Hersh
We move on now to another phase of the investigation. What happened that noon in Dallas? A comment came in from one of you out there named "Richard," semi-nameless but right to the point. "It's very unlikely that the CIA or any government entity played a role in JFK's murder," he notes. "Those institutions are hardwired to wreck havoc in somebody else's sandbox." Then he cites Richard Posner, yet, on Oswald's guilt.
"Richard" is probably right, in a way, and wrong here. In Bobby and J. Edgar I laid out the extent to which, in 1963, the CIA had bases to support Operation Mongoose all around the Caribbean rim, from Opa Locka near Miami to Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. As I hope I established last week, at the operational level distinctions between CIA operatives and talent recruited from penitentiaries and exile groups and the executive level of well-integrated gangland organizations tended to fall away. The Church and Schweiker Committee investigations in the Senate during the mid-seventies staked all that out. Senator Richard Schweiker would later comment to Mark Lane that, under investigation, the Warren Committee Report " had collapsed like a house of cards...snuffed out before it began ..by senior officials who directed the cover-up." Insofar as CIA involvement is concerned, the real question is where, at what level, the traditional compartmentation and the sharing of information on a need-to-know basis breaks down and responsibility begins.
When the word of his brother's shooting reached him at Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy's first impulse was to call in the director of the CIA, whom his brother had installed to replace Allen Dulles in September of 1961, the California industrialist John McCone, and demand of McCone: "Did you kill my brother?" McCone, a somber Catholic layman and a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, never quite got the hang of intelligence work -- partly because his savvier underlings made sure they told him very little -- and assured the attorney general that he had not. Next down the chain of command was the head of the Directorate of Plans -- the Ivy-League gentlemen involved at that stage were still too delicate to call their shop Operations - , Richard Helms. The fact was, the senior intelligence staff around the Agency never really liked the administration's plotting against Cuba. As I noted earlier, Helms sat out the Bay of Pigs. His right-hand man, Sam Halpern, whom I always found amazingly outspoken when I interviewed him for The Old Boys, later commented that "Everyone at CIA was surprised at Kennedy's obsession with Fidel....It was a personal thing. The Kennedy family felt personally burnt by the Bay of Pigs and sought revenge."
By now we are getting down to the operational stalwarts. Perhaps the key figure here was E. Howard Hunt, "Eduardo," a snobby covert-warfare adept who moved over from his post as a staff assistant to Helms to help train the leadership of Brigade 2506, the fifteen hundred or so Cuban irregulars sacrificed in the feckless invasion. Hunt would remain very close to the Cuban survivors, as would David Atlee Phillips, who roamed the Western Hemisphere for decades, convulsing democracies objectionable to Washington.
I knew Phillips fairly well: early in the eighties I was a founding member of the David Atlee Phillips New England Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Phillips showed up at our weekend meetings, regularly. A former actor, Phillips made sure to look the part -- hat brim pulled down, trenchcoat, dark aviator glasses, a terse, insider delivery, a dedicated chain-smoker. An English publication accused Phillips of having had a hand in the Kennedy assassination; Phillips sued in England, and won. Phillips always professed to be very indignant at the charge that he or the Agency might have taken out an American president. Failing finally, Phillips -- who had to have been instrumental in setting up the Mexico City "legend" prior to Oswald's purported visit -- confessed that "My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people."
My own guess at this point is that there was in fact a CIA involvement at a number of points in the big-store operation that resulted in the shooting of John Kennedy in Dallas, but that important individuals like Helms, who never were permitted to get anywhere near the details, realized afterwards that they had been complicit -- if always well insulated, at arms-length -- in the execution of a very sophisticated game plan calculated to achieve an entirely different outcome. Afterwards, the frenzy of cover-your-ass extended halfway across the bureaucracy.
How this could be must wait until my next blog.
Be patient,
Burton Hersh
Friday, January 27, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK? II
Countrysleuths,
My blogette of January 9 on the death of JFK stirred up responses across the cybergalaxy. A correspondent in Germany was excited by my brief autopsy of the JFK assassination and divulged that this blog is developing a following in Central Europe. An acquaintance closer to home was affronted, and demanded to be taken off the access list. One professional skeptic in Minneapolis seemed to question whether Lee Harvey Oswald stopped by the Texas Book Depository that fateful noon primarily to grab a Coke.
A thoughtful follower of this blog and a fellow longtime student of assassination literature, Joyce Hall of Dallas, tended to second what I laid out in the piece but obviously felt that I hadn't gone far enough. She recommended JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglas, a personal friend of hers. As it happens, I'd read Douglas' very solid book shortly after it came out and cited in in the trade paperback edition of Bobby and J. Edgar. Douglas' excellent study bristles with the implication that the JFK assasination was the result of a government-wide conspiracy, the sort of plotting suggested by Oliver Stone in JFK.
The backup villain in this sort of projection is usually the CIA. Having myself spent the nineteen-eighties researching the Agency and inteviewing its top veterans for my 1992 book The Old Boys, over many, many hours of personal contact I had developed a fairly profound relationship with a number of of the CIA's key functionaries during the sixties, especially the operations chieftains Richard Helms and Dick Bissell and that dreaded counterintelligence sparkplug James Jesus Angleton. I had found all three to be as cagey as they needed to be yet in the end individuals of character, worried about our direction under Reagan, with CIA Director William Casey currently ramping up our shadow war with Nicaragua.
By 1963 Bissell was out, along with Allen Dulles, victims of the foul-ups that produced the Bay of Pigs. Helms was running operations. Richard Helms was the consummate bureaucrat -- fussy, protective of his subordinates, sensitive to the intentions of his bosses but willing to dissent when he felt an operation was ill-advised; Helms had risked his career by refusing to attend the planning sessions prior to the Bay of Pigs, which he had decided was doomed from the start. A well-bred Ivy-League moderate, Helms was a regular around the liberal Georgetown social circuit frequented by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- a fellow OSS veteran -- and Senator John Kennedy.
Conspiracy theorists since Mark Lane have tended to lumber the Agency with the primary responsibility for the Kennedy assassination. Mafia participation was secondary; Mob involvement would provide a fallback explanation in case investigators got too close. Court cases and near-deathbed confessions have established that middle-level CIA operations professionals like E. Howard Hunt and Gerry Patrick Hemming did indeed have advance knowledge of some sort of plot involving the president and were in fact moving weapons into Dallas before the shooting. In Mexico City the seasoned CIA disinformation specialist David Attlee Phillips was helping contrive a "legend" around a purported visit in September of 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald during which he ostensibly visited the Soviet Embassy and attempted to speak with KGB assassination honcho Valery V. Kostikov. There were sightings of a supposed second Oswald, often passing under his cover name, Alek Hidell, buying weapons or barging in on Silvia Odio, the daughter of an important anti-Castro activist. The CIA was clearly preparing the ground and setting Oswald up.
The logic here depends on a misperception of the covert warfare culture of the period. The distinction between CIA line operations and bump-and-run mobster-style wipeouts was arbitrary. As Watergate demonstrated, White House-mandated crews like The Plumbers never hesitated to break and enter and pillage and intimidate without benefit of any court order. By agreement with the U.S. government, the top figures in the Cosa Nostra took on a contract to ice Fidel Castro. Lee Harvey Oswald was pulling in stipends from both the CIA and the FBI during the months before the president was shot, and Jack Ruby, a regular with the Chicago Outfit, ran guns to Castro as part of an Agency reinsurance scheme before Castro came to power and carried enough cash to Cuba later on to bail Santo Trafficante out of a Cuban lockup. The top Mob "facilitator," Johnny Rosselli, wore the bars of a U.S. Army colonel and worked directly under Bobby Kennedy through much of 1962 while he was attempting to mount raids and sabotage Cuban sugar refineries during Operation Mongoose.
To comprehend what twitched throughout the entire spider's web you will have to look at Chapter XIX of my book Bobby and J. Edgar. My point here is that cross-connections had developed. Senior gangsters had collaborated with government agencies since World War II, when Lucky Luciano arranged with the OSS for his Cosa Nostra pals to take out the Nazi defenses in Sicily ahead of the Allied landings. Once the orders had gone out, no by-the-book intelligence officer had a lot of control.
Individuals like James Files, who probably did shoot the president from the Grassy Knoll, worked directly for the Outfit while dropping out to moonlight for the Agency, in Files' case in Laos. In the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination a senior CIA official at Helms' level obviously felt he had no choice except to try and protect such feckless operatives as Howard Hunt and subsequently, when Lee Harvey Oswald's New Orleans CIA files surfaced, to destroy them immediately. But this does not mean Helms signed off on -- or knew in advance about -- any supposed Agency scheme to murder the president. There is a lot of evidence that the Agency's scenario and the Mob's scenario in Dallas diverged, sharply. On the ground, it was the Mob that pulled the triggers. It was in Helms' nature to protect his subordinates, as he would prove when he stonewalled the Warren Commission and refused to release relevant CIA cables. Years later Helms was caught lying about the Agency's involvement with Chile by a Congressional Committee and heavily fined. This he accepted too, with aplomb.
Invective tends to be simple, but history is complicated. Ransacking FBI files, I came across a good many clues as to what in fact did happen that history-convulsing noon in Dallas. Don't miss my next blog. Meanwhile, you can get my no-holds-barred treatment of the first decades of the CIA, The Old Boys, directly from us, electronically, at a very modest price. For a deeper vision of how the secret world works read my novel The Nature of the Beast. Also available as a document; go to http://www.treefarmbooks.com/
This blog is a little late -- Google crashed into our blogger universe earlier this week and reorganized everything. I hope we are OK now -- and that you all are too.
Burton Hersh
My blogette of January 9 on the death of JFK stirred up responses across the cybergalaxy. A correspondent in Germany was excited by my brief autopsy of the JFK assassination and divulged that this blog is developing a following in Central Europe. An acquaintance closer to home was affronted, and demanded to be taken off the access list. One professional skeptic in Minneapolis seemed to question whether Lee Harvey Oswald stopped by the Texas Book Depository that fateful noon primarily to grab a Coke.
A thoughtful follower of this blog and a fellow longtime student of assassination literature, Joyce Hall of Dallas, tended to second what I laid out in the piece but obviously felt that I hadn't gone far enough. She recommended JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglas, a personal friend of hers. As it happens, I'd read Douglas' very solid book shortly after it came out and cited in in the trade paperback edition of Bobby and J. Edgar. Douglas' excellent study bristles with the implication that the JFK assasination was the result of a government-wide conspiracy, the sort of plotting suggested by Oliver Stone in JFK.
The backup villain in this sort of projection is usually the CIA. Having myself spent the nineteen-eighties researching the Agency and inteviewing its top veterans for my 1992 book The Old Boys, over many, many hours of personal contact I had developed a fairly profound relationship with a number of of the CIA's key functionaries during the sixties, especially the operations chieftains Richard Helms and Dick Bissell and that dreaded counterintelligence sparkplug James Jesus Angleton. I had found all three to be as cagey as they needed to be yet in the end individuals of character, worried about our direction under Reagan, with CIA Director William Casey currently ramping up our shadow war with Nicaragua.
By 1963 Bissell was out, along with Allen Dulles, victims of the foul-ups that produced the Bay of Pigs. Helms was running operations. Richard Helms was the consummate bureaucrat -- fussy, protective of his subordinates, sensitive to the intentions of his bosses but willing to dissent when he felt an operation was ill-advised; Helms had risked his career by refusing to attend the planning sessions prior to the Bay of Pigs, which he had decided was doomed from the start. A well-bred Ivy-League moderate, Helms was a regular around the liberal Georgetown social circuit frequented by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- a fellow OSS veteran -- and Senator John Kennedy.
Conspiracy theorists since Mark Lane have tended to lumber the Agency with the primary responsibility for the Kennedy assassination. Mafia participation was secondary; Mob involvement would provide a fallback explanation in case investigators got too close. Court cases and near-deathbed confessions have established that middle-level CIA operations professionals like E. Howard Hunt and Gerry Patrick Hemming did indeed have advance knowledge of some sort of plot involving the president and were in fact moving weapons into Dallas before the shooting. In Mexico City the seasoned CIA disinformation specialist David Attlee Phillips was helping contrive a "legend" around a purported visit in September of 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald during which he ostensibly visited the Soviet Embassy and attempted to speak with KGB assassination honcho Valery V. Kostikov. There were sightings of a supposed second Oswald, often passing under his cover name, Alek Hidell, buying weapons or barging in on Silvia Odio, the daughter of an important anti-Castro activist. The CIA was clearly preparing the ground and setting Oswald up.
The logic here depends on a misperception of the covert warfare culture of the period. The distinction between CIA line operations and bump-and-run mobster-style wipeouts was arbitrary. As Watergate demonstrated, White House-mandated crews like The Plumbers never hesitated to break and enter and pillage and intimidate without benefit of any court order. By agreement with the U.S. government, the top figures in the Cosa Nostra took on a contract to ice Fidel Castro. Lee Harvey Oswald was pulling in stipends from both the CIA and the FBI during the months before the president was shot, and Jack Ruby, a regular with the Chicago Outfit, ran guns to Castro as part of an Agency reinsurance scheme before Castro came to power and carried enough cash to Cuba later on to bail Santo Trafficante out of a Cuban lockup. The top Mob "facilitator," Johnny Rosselli, wore the bars of a U.S. Army colonel and worked directly under Bobby Kennedy through much of 1962 while he was attempting to mount raids and sabotage Cuban sugar refineries during Operation Mongoose.
To comprehend what twitched throughout the entire spider's web you will have to look at Chapter XIX of my book Bobby and J. Edgar. My point here is that cross-connections had developed. Senior gangsters had collaborated with government agencies since World War II, when Lucky Luciano arranged with the OSS for his Cosa Nostra pals to take out the Nazi defenses in Sicily ahead of the Allied landings. Once the orders had gone out, no by-the-book intelligence officer had a lot of control.
Individuals like James Files, who probably did shoot the president from the Grassy Knoll, worked directly for the Outfit while dropping out to moonlight for the Agency, in Files' case in Laos. In the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination a senior CIA official at Helms' level obviously felt he had no choice except to try and protect such feckless operatives as Howard Hunt and subsequently, when Lee Harvey Oswald's New Orleans CIA files surfaced, to destroy them immediately. But this does not mean Helms signed off on -- or knew in advance about -- any supposed Agency scheme to murder the president. There is a lot of evidence that the Agency's scenario and the Mob's scenario in Dallas diverged, sharply. On the ground, it was the Mob that pulled the triggers. It was in Helms' nature to protect his subordinates, as he would prove when he stonewalled the Warren Commission and refused to release relevant CIA cables. Years later Helms was caught lying about the Agency's involvement with Chile by a Congressional Committee and heavily fined. This he accepted too, with aplomb.
Invective tends to be simple, but history is complicated. Ransacking FBI files, I came across a good many clues as to what in fact did happen that history-convulsing noon in Dallas. Don't miss my next blog. Meanwhile, you can get my no-holds-barred treatment of the first decades of the CIA, The Old Boys, directly from us, electronically, at a very modest price. For a deeper vision of how the secret world works read my novel The Nature of the Beast. Also available as a document; go to http://www.treefarmbooks.com/
This blog is a little late -- Google crashed into our blogger universe earlier this week and reorganized everything. I hope we are OK now -- and that you all are too.
Burton Hersh
Monday, January 9, 2012
Now, Finally -- Who Really Did Murder JFK?
Countrypartisans,
I know, I know -- this subject has come up before. It will again. The fact is, the circumstances that led to the shooting of JFK work like a bleeding ulcer at the belly of our history, they sap us and confuse us, they prevent us from understanding properly how our society works and what the risks really are for anybody -- at any level -- who takes on entrenched American power.
I was reminded of the potency of our unacknowledged fears recently by an e-mail from a friend of more than forty years, a kindly and generous-spirited lawyer who has been a backroom presence in top Democratic circles going back to the Eleanor-Roosevelt-Adlai Stevenson era. My friend has important connections in the filmmaking business. I recently developed a film script based on my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and it occurred to me that my friend might be inclined to pass along the script to one of his Hollywood friends.
A week after he received the script my friend got back with his appraisal. He was still unshakably loyal to the Kennedy family, my friend wrote, and beyond that "...I must in good conscience disagree with many of the scenes in your screenplay... no one has been able to prove indisputably that the Mob killed JFK...that Hoffa tried to strangle Bobby, that the Kennedys arranged to have Marilyn killed, etc. etc..."
I replied at once. My script -- see my book Bobby and J. Edgar for details -- never suggested that the Kennedys arranged to kill Marilyn Monroe -- the point was that the Mob tracked Bob Kennedy to Marilyn's house in Brentwood, hours before she died, and sent their own specialists in to dispatch her in order to frame Bobby, who as attorney general had started to round up key members of the Mob. Hoffa's attempt to strangle Bobby comes directly from a book by Frank Ragano, Hoffa's lawyer, who was there. But most wounding and inaccurate of all was the familiar statement that "no one" has proved "indisputably" that the Mob killed JFK.
I hear this sort of thing from time to time and I am reminded of the arguments put forward by the defenders of creationism, who point out miniscule gaps in the fossil record in hopes of discrediting the theory of evolution. Such statements are profoundly uninformed. "If Oswald wasn't the only shooter, why haven't the conspirators stepped forward by now?" is the standard challenge.
The truth is, at all levels, dozens and dozens of people implicated in the Kennedy assassination have indeed stepped forward. For chapter and verse have a look at Bobby and J. Edgar and the extensive notes on Chapter Nineteen. Starting with his fellow workers in the second floor cafeteria of the Dallas Schoolbook Depository, who watched Oswald having a soft drink while he was purportedly four floors higher shooting Kennedy several hundred feet away through the foliage, to the eyewitnesses who testified overwhelmingly that the fatal shot came from the front, the "grassy knoll," the evidence against Oswald was contradicted from the start. Surgeons at Parkland hospital who attempted to save Kennedy would insist that the entry wound was found in the president's right temple. The police who grabbed Oswald found no indication of powder burns on his cheek or hands, unavoidable if he had discharged a weapon that day. James Files has testified from the Illinois State Penetentiary that he was stationed on the grassy knoll, and that he pulled the trigger.
The chief counsel who conducted a years-long investigation of the shooting for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, the distinguished Notre Dame Law Professor Robert Blakey, concluded that there were several shooters -- a conspiracy -- and that the Mob was likely to have been behind it. When the two key mobsters who probably saw to the orchestration of the assassination, Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana, were subpoenaed to appear before the Church Committee, both were found murdered days before they could testify, Giancana with a "Corsican necklace" of bullet wounds around his neck and Rosselli chopped up like chicken parts and floating in an oil drum in Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, key CIA records dealing with the assassination remain sequestered, until the middle of the twenty-first century. Not a conspiracy?
You decide. At least as fascinating is what led up to the assassination and what it would lead us into. Richard Nixon, no mean hand when it came to conspiracies himself, remarked on one of the Watergate tapes that the Warren Commission Report remained "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated" on the American people. Of course, that was decades before the lead-up to the war in Iraq.
Have a wonderful 2012.
Burton
I know, I know -- this subject has come up before. It will again. The fact is, the circumstances that led to the shooting of JFK work like a bleeding ulcer at the belly of our history, they sap us and confuse us, they prevent us from understanding properly how our society works and what the risks really are for anybody -- at any level -- who takes on entrenched American power.
I was reminded of the potency of our unacknowledged fears recently by an e-mail from a friend of more than forty years, a kindly and generous-spirited lawyer who has been a backroom presence in top Democratic circles going back to the Eleanor-Roosevelt-Adlai Stevenson era. My friend has important connections in the filmmaking business. I recently developed a film script based on my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and it occurred to me that my friend might be inclined to pass along the script to one of his Hollywood friends.
A week after he received the script my friend got back with his appraisal. He was still unshakably loyal to the Kennedy family, my friend wrote, and beyond that "...I must in good conscience disagree with many of the scenes in your screenplay... no one has been able to prove indisputably that the Mob killed JFK...that Hoffa tried to strangle Bobby, that the Kennedys arranged to have Marilyn killed, etc. etc..."
I replied at once. My script -- see my book Bobby and J. Edgar for details -- never suggested that the Kennedys arranged to kill Marilyn Monroe -- the point was that the Mob tracked Bob Kennedy to Marilyn's house in Brentwood, hours before she died, and sent their own specialists in to dispatch her in order to frame Bobby, who as attorney general had started to round up key members of the Mob. Hoffa's attempt to strangle Bobby comes directly from a book by Frank Ragano, Hoffa's lawyer, who was there. But most wounding and inaccurate of all was the familiar statement that "no one" has proved "indisputably" that the Mob killed JFK.
I hear this sort of thing from time to time and I am reminded of the arguments put forward by the defenders of creationism, who point out miniscule gaps in the fossil record in hopes of discrediting the theory of evolution. Such statements are profoundly uninformed. "If Oswald wasn't the only shooter, why haven't the conspirators stepped forward by now?" is the standard challenge.
The truth is, at all levels, dozens and dozens of people implicated in the Kennedy assassination have indeed stepped forward. For chapter and verse have a look at Bobby and J. Edgar and the extensive notes on Chapter Nineteen. Starting with his fellow workers in the second floor cafeteria of the Dallas Schoolbook Depository, who watched Oswald having a soft drink while he was purportedly four floors higher shooting Kennedy several hundred feet away through the foliage, to the eyewitnesses who testified overwhelmingly that the fatal shot came from the front, the "grassy knoll," the evidence against Oswald was contradicted from the start. Surgeons at Parkland hospital who attempted to save Kennedy would insist that the entry wound was found in the president's right temple. The police who grabbed Oswald found no indication of powder burns on his cheek or hands, unavoidable if he had discharged a weapon that day. James Files has testified from the Illinois State Penetentiary that he was stationed on the grassy knoll, and that he pulled the trigger.
The chief counsel who conducted a years-long investigation of the shooting for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, the distinguished Notre Dame Law Professor Robert Blakey, concluded that there were several shooters -- a conspiracy -- and that the Mob was likely to have been behind it. When the two key mobsters who probably saw to the orchestration of the assassination, Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana, were subpoenaed to appear before the Church Committee, both were found murdered days before they could testify, Giancana with a "Corsican necklace" of bullet wounds around his neck and Rosselli chopped up like chicken parts and floating in an oil drum in Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, key CIA records dealing with the assassination remain sequestered, until the middle of the twenty-first century. Not a conspiracy?
You decide. At least as fascinating is what led up to the assassination and what it would lead us into. Richard Nixon, no mean hand when it came to conspiracies himself, remarked on one of the Watergate tapes that the Warren Commission Report remained "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated" on the American people. Of course, that was decades before the lead-up to the war in Iraq.
Have a wonderful 2012.
Burton
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