Washington Decoded

A Theory Too Far

 

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James H. Johnston
MURDER, Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy
Potomac Books. 343 pp. $32.95

 

Johnston responds to Colhoun’s review here.

 

 

By Jack Colhoun

 

 

    “Did his [President John Kennedy’s] pursuit of freedom for Cuba lead to his paying the ultimate price?” former Church Committee lawyer James Johnston asks provocatively in his book MURDER, Inc.: The CIA Under Kennedy.

    Johnston tries to make the case that when Cuban leader Fidel Castro learned the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was plotting to kill him, he retaliated by assassinating President Kennedy. One of the sources Johnston relies on most heavily in constructing this narrative is Edward P. Morgan, a well-connected Washington attorney and former chief inspector in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Johnny Rosselli

    Morgan learned about the Castro retaliation narrative from his client Johnny Rosselli, the principal liaison with the Agency during the peak years, 1960-1963, of the alleged CIA-Mafia plots. Rosselli’s primary job at the time was representing the interests of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in Las Vegas, making Rosselli friends with such top Vegas entertainers as Frank Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis, and Louis Prima.[1]

    In late 1966, Rosselli hired Morgan to represent his interests in Washington. Morgan planted the seeds of the Castro retaliation scenario in an information operation that involved key officials and lasted several months. Morgan began the effort on 13 January 1967 by briefing journalist Drew Pearson. Together with Jack Anderson, Pearson wrote the “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” a column syndicated in The Washington Post and 600 other newspapers. Pearson, eager to pursue Morgan’s stunning information, conveyed the gist of Morgan’s account to President Lyndon Johnson within a matter of days.[2]

    Three days after telling the president, Pearson contacted his good friend Chief Justice Earl Warren, former head of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Pearson advised Warren that what Morgan had told him challenged the Warren Commission’s conclusion that there was no evidence linking Lee Harvey Oswald to a foreign conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. As Warren listened he paced about in “distress.” The chief justice subsequently passed Morgan’s information to James Rowley, chief of the Secret Service, who, in turn, informed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.[3]

    The Castro retaliation information blitz instigated by Morgan soon culminated in the first public disclosure of the top-secret CIA-Mafia assassination plots. In early March 1967, Pearson and Anderson not only broke the story of the conspiracy to assassinate Castro in two successive columns, but also suggested that former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, now a Democratic senator from New York, had been deeply involved. According to Pearson and Anderson, one of the plots approved by the attorney general “possibly backfired” against his brother the president.[4]

    Morgan discussed Rosselli’s Castro turnaround allegations with the FBI in an interview in March 1967. “The [CIA-Mafia assassination] project almost reached fruition when Castro became aware of it and arrested a number of suspects,” Morgan told the FBI. “By pressuring captured suspects he was able to learn the full details of the plot against him and decided `if that is the way President Kennedy wanted it, he too could engage in the same tactics.’ Castro thereafter employed teams of individuals who were dispatched to the United States for the purpose of assassinating President Kennedy,” Morgan asserted.[5]

    While provocative and superficially logical, Johnston’s Castro retaliation thesis, adopted from Morgan, rests on a shaky foundation. The first problem is that the original source was Mafioso Johnny Rosselli. Considerable evidence in the declassified records of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFKARC) at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, calls into question Rosselli’s Castro retaliation allegations—beginning with the Mafioso’s own stunning about-face on the issue he promoted for a decade.

 

The Charm of Saddam

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John Nixon
Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein
Blue Rider Press. 242 pp. $25

Eric Maddox with Davin Seay
Mission Black List #1: The Inside Story of the Search for Saddam Hussein
        —As Told by the Soldier Who Masterminded His Capture
HarperCollins. 267 pp. $32

George Piro
“Saddam’s Confessions” CBS 60 Minutes, 27 January 2008;
“Saddam’s Interrogator,” PowerPoint presentation, George H. W. Bush Presidential                                                                 Library, 7 November 2008;
Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI: Twenty Interviews and Five Conversations
        with High Value Detainee # 1 in 2004, 2009;
“Interrogating Saddam Hussein,” National Geographic Channel, 30 May 2010

Robert Ellis with Marianna Riley
Caring for Victor: A US Army Nurse and Saddam Hussein
Reedy Press. 200 pp. $42

 

By Gary Kern

 

    Tyrants are charming, especially when they hold power, but sometimes even after they have lost it. What is that power? A chain of command with men in position to carry out orders and enforce them, a government structure prepared to legalize and record them, a body of collaborators and admirers happy to approve and applaud them, and a mass of subjects obliged to suffer and obey them. Plus one thing more: the mentality of the commander who believes himself supremely entitled to give them, and considers himself correct–or at least justified–in every one that he gives.

     The charm comes when he temporarily suspends his brutalities and sits down to tea with a guest or interviewer; here he reveals unexpected style and grace, though not really much more than does the common man. The difference is that he could kill you–or once could–but chooses not to, and that gives his personality a boost. He tells a little joke or funny story, and when you laugh, he laughs along with you. It’s the gentleness of the butcher–wily Uncle Joe Stalin, fascinating Marshal Hermann Göring, lovable Fidel Castro. And the Butcher of Baghdad, charming Saddam Hussein.

    Despite the humiliating and deflating photos of his capture, his rumpled appearance in front of the camera and the dismal “spider hole” from which he was evicted, plus a video shown repeatedly on the world screen of military medics searching his head for lice and shining a flashlight in his mouth in search of anything else (indicating that they must have shined it in the end as well), the deposed president of Iraq soon recovered his aplomb and sense of superiority–all it took was a good bath, a lot of rest, regular meals, a haircut and a trim of his new beard. Add a suit and a crisp white shirt without tie, and voilà!–his body lightened by nine months of roughing it cut a dashing figure. (The tie no doubt was denied so that he couldn’t hang himself.) John Nixon, the first man to get a chance to question him, describes how the tyrant at his very first debriefing subtly favored the translations of one interpreter over another, sowed dissension between the two (CIA and Army) and chuckled for an hour as the Americans squabbled in front of him. In the twinkling of an eye, he sat in the driver’s seat, except that, of course, he was a prisoner and wasn’t going anywhere.

A Lie on Every Page

 

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A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Lisa Pease
Feral House. 512 pp. $29.95

 

 

“As long as there are people who think I didn’t do it, I’ll never admit anything.”

                                                   Sirhan Sirhan, during an interview

                                        with journalist Dan Moldea

 

 

By Mel Ayton

 

 

    Since the publication of The Forgotten Terrorist in 2007, Sirhan Sirhan has continued to claim he is innocent of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Another shooter was actually responsible, Sirhan asserts, adding, in contradiction, that he has no memory of the event. He was a “hypnotized assassin” and therefore not responsible.

    Sirhan’s defenders chime in that he was not in a position to shoot Kennedy in the head, and thus a second assassin in the pantry must have been culpable. They also say an audio tape recording of the shooting “proves” there was a second gunman.

    During these same 12 years, the US media have carefully followed Sirhan’s efforts to persuade the courts and the California Parole Board he should be released, after 51 years of confinement. These news stories, with very few exceptions, have re-propagated the tall tales of conspiracy advocates. One recurring refrain is that of purported “assassination witnesses” who disavow their original testimonies and now support the notion that Kennedy was killed by someone other than Sirhan. It goes without saying that vital evidence to the contrary is always omitted during the breathless presentation of such bogus revelations.[1]

    There is no doubt the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) investigation of the assassination was less than optimal. Some possible leads were not exhausted, some evidence was handled incorrectly, and the all-important ballistics investigation was not one for the textbooks.

    Yet the same could be said of nearly every major criminal investigation. The likelihood of human error is compounded in high-profile crimes because of the vast amounts of paperwork and physical evidence that must be processed. Anomalies are perhaps the major reason why conspiracy advocates have been able to plant doubt in the minds of the American public, by representing simple or inadvertent mistakes as conspiratorial shenanigans.[2]

    Conspiracy advocates have promoted a false history of the RFK assassination (the same as their JFK brethren do) by deliberately skewing evidence in the case to suit their agenda. And unfortunately, in too many cases they have been aided and abetted by gullible journalists who do not know their way around the mountains of evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the LAPD. The media is thereby complicit in leaving the public confused.

    These are the six central myths about the Robert Kennedy assassination that have been concocted by conspiracy theorists and given credence by a too-credulous mainstream press:

• Sirhan was never in a position to fire the fatal shot that killed Senator Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of 4/5th June 1968. Conspiracists posit that a security guard positioned behind the senator fired the fatal shot.
• An audio recording of the shooting allegedly recorded 13 or 14 shots being fired in the pantry. If so, this proves there was a second gunman since Sirhan’s revolver held only eight bullets.
• Sirhan was a hypnotized assassin, programmed to kill. He was also programmed to forget who hypnotized him and the circumstances of the shooting.
• Sirhan’s amnesia about the assassination is genuine.
• Sirhan was aided by a “girl in a polka-dot dress,” who was seen with Sirhan in the days before the assassination.
• Sirhan was not interested in politics and therefore had no motive to commit political murder.

    The most recent incarnation of these fables appears in A Lie Too Big to Fail, by Lisa Pease. The theories in her book relentlessly recycle just about every fabrication and falsehood conspiracists have managed to dredge up in the five decades since the 1968 assassination, inserting them into public discourse.

Odyssey of a Recovering Conspiracist

 

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I Was A Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak
Fred Litwin
NorthernBlues Books. 271 pp. $17.00.

 

By Max Holland

 

    One of the oddities about the Kennedy assassination research community is that very few people change their minds after having staked out their initial position. The aphorism, possibly apocryphal, that is attributed to the famous economist John Maynard Keynes—“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”—seldom applies.

    But when it does happen, even short of going all the way, the consequences are often notable. Some of the most important contributors and writers in the field are former full-fledged conspiracy buffs, people who dramatically or incrementally changed their minds and were not embarrassed to admit as much. Paul Hoch, David Reitzes, Gus Russo, Dale Myers, and the late Gary Mack come to mind.

    Now Fred Litwin, in his new book, I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, traces his transformation from a young, energetic conspiracist to the vigorous debunker he is today. The result is a brisk, bracing, witty, and surprisingly comprehensive read, and one that ought to be considered by anyone in Generation Z who is intrigued by the assassination and thinking of joining the research community.

    A caveat is required: Litwin favorably cites some of my work on the assassination in his text and source notes, so this review might not be regarded as disinterested. So be it.

Bombshell or Dud? Earle Cabell’s CIA Connections

 

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    We have an opportunity to redeem ourselves when the president pays us a visit next month. Whatever our political affiliation, whatever our political choice, the presidency of the United States is the world’s highest office, and the man who holds it should be accorded the highest respect possible. But good behavior is not enough. This cancer on the body politic must be removed. There is a precedent Dallas can remember with pride. When the Ku Klux Klan in the early twenties barreled through the South, Dallas was the Southwest hate capital of Dixie. But men and women of good will were ashamed. They saw their shame turn into courage. They stood against this whirlwind of hate, repudiated it, and saw it fade and die. What has been done once, can and must be done again.

–Earle Cabell on the Adlai Stevenson incident[1]

 

 

By Steve Roe

 

 

    Last July, the National Archives began releasing previously withheld and redacted documents from the JFK Assassination Records Collection at the National Archives.

    Two documents attracted the attention of John Newman, a prominent conspiracy theorist looked upon favorably by Oliver Stone. Both concerned Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas on 22 November 1963, who was subsequently elected to Congress in 1964.

    Although Cabell had not figured in Newman’s conspiracy theorizing about CIA involvement before, suddenly, on the basis of these two documents, the mayor was promoted to leading culprit—although neither Newman nor others enthusiastic about the revelation ever bothered to explain exactly what Cabell’s alleged role was. Guilt by loose association (with the CIA) was sufficient to insinuate that Cabell was now a key cog in the conspiracy.[2]

    One of the two documents was a standard “Secrecy Agreement” with the CIA that Cabell signed on 17 October 1956. The agreement stated that Cabell might possibly receive information regarding CIA operational matters and bound him not to reveal this information publicly. The other document was a standard “201” personality file that the CIA opened on Cabell on 23 May 1957. A 201 file is nothing more or less than information about the subject of the file. It might contain personal information; information about operational matters; or anything else related to the subject, including newspapers clippings.  

 

Left to right: Earle Cabell, with his brothers Charles and Ben in 1951. Photograph used with permission of the Dallas Public Library.

    The aspect that cemented Cabell’s alleged role in a conspiracy, according to Newman’s innuendo, was the fact that Earle Cabell’s brother, Charles Pearre Cabell, had been deputy director of the CIA under Allen Dulles from April 1953 to January 1962. Theorists have long been aware of this public coincidence, of course, and have speculated in the past that Dulles and Charles Cabell ostensibly conspired against JFK because they were forcibly retired from the CIA following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961. In this sense Newman—and the conspiracy website Who.What.Why., which was the first to report this “major revelation”—are merely picking up an old, threadbare tale and attempting to give it a sinister new life. Earle Cabell did not conspire merely out of some misplaced sense of fraternal solidarity with Charles, you see. He did so because he was also an agency asset.[3]

    Even though Newman offered not a scintilla of proof that Cabell interfered in the motorcade route—or in any other aspect of what was supposed to be a brief presidential visit to Dallas—questions naturally arise. Who exactly was Earle Cabell? And how did he ever come to need or receive a security clearance from the CIA?

    To answer that question, it’s useful to put Cabell in context by understanding his family background and career arc.

 

Angleton Unrevealed

 

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Click here for Morley’s response to this review.

 

Click here for Robarge’s rejoinder to Morley.

 

Click here for Morley’s response to Robarge’s rejoinder.

 

Click here for Robarge’s 2nd rejoinder.

 

 

 

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

Jefferson Morley

St. Martin’s Press. 336 pp. $27.99.

 

By David Robarge

 

    Readers who pick up The Ghost, hoping finally to have a comprehensive and objective treatment of James Angleton, the Agency’s long-time, shadowy, and controversial chief of counterintelligence, will be sorely disappointed.

    What they will find is an erratically organized account of most of the key events in Angleton’s life, along with an agglomeration of often badly sourced suppositions, inferences, allegations, and innuendoes frequently cast in hyperbolic or categorical language.

    The Ghost displays the most prominent shortcomings of journalistic history: reportage substitutes for cohesive narrative, with vignettes and atmospherics stitched together with insufficient discernment among sources. One of Morley’s more dubious ones—an anonymous blog post with no citations, from which he pulls an outlandish quote—inadvertently provides an insight into what his ulterior motive in writing The Ghost appears to be: “This is not about who James Angleton was so much as what James Angleton had to be” (emphasis in the original).[1]

    In pursuit of a story he seems to have already written in his mind, Morley manipulates historical facts, engages in long leaps of logic, and avoids inconvenient contradictory evidence and interpretations to produce yet another superficial caricature of a deeply complicated personality.

 

Questionable Logic

    The most problematic feature of The Ghost is Morley’s penchant for reaching grandiose conclusions based on sketchy or no evidence, contorted reasoning, or unfamiliarity with intelligence processes and the history of the events in which he places Angleton. To cite just three from among numerous instances:

• Morley overstates Angleton’s part in the Italian election operation—he hardly was its “miracle worker.”
• No persuasive evidence shows that Angleton had a “supporting role” in the MK/ULTRA project, that he “help[ed] give birth” to it, or that he “pursued the use of psychoactive drugs for intelligence work,” other than a brief relationship Angleton had with a colleague who worked on the program.
• An Israeli diplomat is alleged to have been “Angleton’s man in Havana.” But they met only a few times, and the diplomat declined Angleton’s request to contact CIA agents in Cuba.[2]

    Morley’s highly dubious rendering of the Kennedy administration’s policy toward Cuba, and Angleton’s involvement with it, is more troublesome. For starters, the United States did not have “two divergent Cuba policies” represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “engineered provocation” plan called NORTHWOODS and the White House’s “autonomous operations” using Cuban exiles, possibly in conjunction with the assassination of Castro.[3]

    The administration’s policy was what it did, not what was said in meetings or written about in plans and memoranda. NORTHWOODS was never carried out, and the CIA’s integrated covert action program codenamed AM/WORLD became the focus for the rest of Kennedy’s presidency. Morley later asserts that Angleton stressed Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban ties so the White House would activate NORTHWOODS, but he presents no evidence besides Castro’s suspicions, which corroborate nothing.

 

Jim Garrison: Trump Before Trump

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By Donald H. Carpenter

 

    This March marks the 50th anniversary of one of the great miscarriages of justice in US history: the persecution of Clay Shaw by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

    It is an unprecedented and Byzantine saga by any standard. Today it may seem slightly less bizarre because the occupant of the Oval Office—like Garrison—is a conspiracy theorist and pathological liar, one who finds the likes of Roger Stone, Michael Levin, and Alex Jones significant and credible.

    But the story ought to be recounted on this anniversary, if only as a reminder that what Richard Hofstadter memorably called the “paranoid style of politics” is not exclusive to the right. It has had—and continues to have—more than its share of purveyors, practitioners, and cheerleaders on the left.

 

Origins

    Legend traces the genesis of Garrison’s probe back to a chance conversation in November 1966 between the DA and US Senator Russell Long (D-Louisiana), when they found themselves sitting next to each other on a commercial airline flight. Russell’s father, Louisiana Governor Huey Long, Jr. (D), had been assassinated in 1935, and the senator was skeptical of the Warren Report.

Russell Long (played by Walter Matthau) expresses his doubts about the Warren Report to Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) in the film “JFK.”

    Since the report’s release in September 1964, dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission’s findings had been steadily mounting, with numerous books and articles questioning the accuracy of the panel’s conclusions appearing early in the fall. Although the precise date is unknown, it is accurate to say Garrison secretly began his investigation around the time of his encounter with Long. Their conversation either encouraged or precipitated the DA’s interest in the assassination.

    The question of origin sometimes overlaps with the question of legitimacy. Some critics later maintained that Garrison only launched his probe to divert attention from an investigation by Life magazine (and other media) into organized crime’s influence in Louisiana. Others insist that Garrison had a genuine interest in the Kennedy assassination all along, and that it was the increasing number of publications critical of the Warren Report that incited the district attorney to exercise his almost unlimited power to launch an investigation.

    Garrison began by picking up three already spent leads. One had to do with an oddball individual named David Ferrie who was a pilot, formerly employed by Eastern Airlines. Ferrie habitually made extreme political statements, and had been arrested a few years earlier for allegations of sexual activity with an underage male. Shortly after the assassination, a Ferrie acquaintance named Jack Martin alleged that Ferrie, who had gone to Texas just before the assassination, might have been the getaway pilot for accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The FBI had interrogated both Martin and Ferrie in 1963, eventually dismissing the allegations as nothing more than the drunken rants of a man (Martin) who had an axe to grind with Ferrie. Three years later, Garrison decided to take another look at the story.

Looking for Faust in Texas

 

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Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas

Joan Mellen

Bloomsbury. 359 pp. $37.

By John McAdams

    The “Faustian bargains” in the title of Mellen’s latest book are the pacts she believes three Texans implicitly made with Lyndon Johnson, to serve Johnson’s corrupt purposes in return for his sponsorship and patronage. But unlike Goethe’s Faust, there was no redemption at the end for any of them.

    The Texan named in the subtitle, Mac Wallace, was a student leader at the University of Texas during World War II, and some JFK assassination conspiracists believe Wallace shot John Kennedy. The two unnamed Texans, somewhat oddly, were far more notorious in the 1960s: Billie Sol Estes, a corrupt wheeler-dealer whose schemes ultimately ended in imprisonment, and Bobby Baker, a Senate staffer who parlayed his connections with powerful people into huge influence and wealth, but whose dealings also landed him in Federal prison.

    Mellen is the author of a mind-numbing book in praise of Jim Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans (A Farewell to Justice), so one approaches this volume with considerable skepticism. Faustian Bargains is more of a mixed bag, but it does repeat deficits of that earlier work. Mellen, again, relies heavily on—to put it mildly—highly questionable sources, constantly relying, for example, on the statements of Billie Sol Estes. Yet in a latter chapter of the book Mellen herself trashes Estes’s credibility, accurately characterizing him as “an admitted liar, con man and convicted felon.”[1]

    Other dubious sources include J. Evetts Haley’s rather unhinged polemic A Texan Looks at Lyndon, and an unpublished manuscript by Stephan Pegues titled “Texas Mafia.” That’s right: a secondary source that never got published, written by an obscure author. Mellen admits that this source is “characterized by exaggeration” and that Pegues has passed away leaving “no source notes, nothing substantiated.”[2]

    Much better, in principle, is her use of the notes and private papers of Holland McCombs, a long-time Time Inc. journalist. In 1963, McCombs assiduously interviewed what appears to be dozens of people with stories to tell about LBJ and his allegedly shady dealings in Texas. Unfortunately, most of what McCombs uncovered was merely gossip. It is fairly well-established or accepted that the political culture of Texas in the 1950s and 1960s condoned a lot of questionable practices, but for the historian unfounded gossip, however tantalizing, still has to be proven. Often Mellen cites assertions from memoranda McCombs wrote to Life magazine editors with no indication who or what the primary source was. Even worse, Estes was an important source for McCombs.

    Mellen’s reliance on McCombs makes one omission all the more interesting. It was none other than McCombs who, in 1967, first put the brakes on what had been Life magazine’s support for Jim Garrison’s “investigation” of the Kennedy assassination. McCombs happened to know Clay Shaw, and when he was arrested by the New Orleans DA, McCombs instantly realized the investigation had to be a miscarriage of justice if not worse: a clown show directed by a demagogue. Mellen conveniently sidesteps the contradiction between her hagiography of Garrison and dependence on McCombs in this book.[3]

 

 

 

Lucien Haag’s Flawed Analysis of the First Shot Fired in the JFK Assassination

 

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Editor’s Note: In the spring of 2015, the official publication of the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners (AFTE) featured an article by Lucien C. Haag entitled “The Missing Bullet in the JFK Assassination.” The article was the last in a series of three discrete analyses in which Haag, a criminalist and long-time AFTE contributor, examined ballistic evidence from each of the three shots fired by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dealey Plaza.[1]

In the two previous articles, Haag, with admirable clarity, and by drawing from the work of others (notably Dr. John K. Lattimer and Larry M. Sturdivan), confirmed yet again the rational consensus: the second shot fired hit President Kennedy in the upper back before seriously wounding Governor Connally, and the third shot pierced the rear of the president’s head.

In sharp contrast, Haag’s article on the missing bullet (aka the first shot fired) had serious deficiencies. Technical, evidentiary, and logical flaws in Haag’s shooting reconstruction analysis invalidate his conclusion as to how the first shot fired by Oswald missed its intended target.

The following critique is adapted from a letter sent to the editor of the AFTE Journal, which is online but behind a paywall. The letter appears in the journal’s Fall 2016 issue, along with a response from Haag.

By Frank S. DeRonja & Max Holland

 

    To determine why or how Oswald’s first shot missed, Lucien C. Haag empirically tested all four reasoned possibilities that have been put forward since the 1963 assassination. The bullet might have been deflected by 1) the branches of an oak tree; 2) a traffic signal light; 3) the mast arm of the signal light; or finally, 4) the bullet simply missed and struck the asphalt pavement of Elm Street.[2]

    The idea was to establish the most logical explanation following a process of elimination. Or as Haag observed in 2013 (borrowing from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), “The essence of good forensic science is to look at what are the competing explanations of an event. And if you can rule out that which is impossible, that which remains, however seemingly improbable, is the truth.”[3]

 

Deflection by the Oak Tree

    During the investigation following the assassination, Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents thoroughly inspected the oak tree that partially obscured Oswald’s line of sight down Elm Street. They found no evidence that branches had been struck by a bullet fired from Oswald’s rifle. The Warren Report, nonetheless, still claimed complete deflection by the tree branches was a possibility.[4]

    Haag designed and conducted his own tests to determine, once and for all, if the tree branches in question had the capability to deflect a pristine 6.5mm-FMJ bullet fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. This study was sensible because notwithstanding the lack of evidence, lore about an oak tree branch deflecting the first shot had become a widely-accepted explanation in the decades since the Warren Report.[5]

Tree branches destabilized, but did not redirect, a full metal- jacketed bullet fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano.

    Haag’s testing approach here was well planned, and first reported during a PBS-NOVA documentary, “Cold Case JFK,” which aired in November 2013. The results revealed that bullet deflections by oak tree branches, such as those that were in Oswald’s line of sight, are minimal, although the impact is sufficient to destabilize a jacketed bullet. This was not a surprise finding given the high kinetic energy of a projectile fired from a Mannlicher-Carcano and the low impact resistance of a tree branch. A bullet fired through the branches of the oak tree on 22 November 1963 would have either struck passengers in the presidential limousine, and/or the limousine itself, or terminated in the Elm Street asphalt.[6]

 

In Search of the Third Man

 

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By Tim Brennan

 

 

 

    Perhaps the only thing more fantastical and bizarre than the 2016 Republican race itself is how the Kennedy assassination became part of the campaign news cycle in May, albeit fleetingly.

 

     A false allegation, given prominence by the National Enquirer, was recycled by Donald Trump, the presumed GOP nominee, during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” Per the article, Trump accused Rafael Cruz, father of candidate Ted, of consorting with the accused assassin of President Kennedy before November 1963: “You know, [Cruz’s] father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being, you know,  shot . . . . I mean, what was  he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

 

    Putting aside the incoherence of Trump’s mind, as well as the frightening prospect of a US president who parrots the National Enquirer and listens to the likes of Roger Stone, a conspicuous conspiracy theorist, the kerfuffle did focus attention on a long-forgotten minor mystery: who was the “unidentified man” who distributed Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) handbills with Lee Harvey Oswald on the streets of New Orleans scarcely three months before John F. Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963?

The Final DeRonja-Holland Report

 

To read entire article online,  click here.

To download pdf of article, click here.

 

Nut Country: From A(lger) to (Cru)Z

Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy
Edward H. Miller
The University of Chicago Press, 230 pp., $25

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By Darwin Payne

 

    As Air Force One carried John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline on that short hop from Fort Worth to Dallas on November 22, 1963, the president turned to her and made a never-forgotten comment on this last morning of his life. “We’re heading into nut country today,” he said. In his hands the frowning young president held the infamous full-page, black-bordered advertisement in that day’s Dallas Morning News, an ad that effectively labeled him a communist. In Nut Country, author Edward H. Miller portrays those Dallas “nuts” and, as his subtitle elaborates, poses a provocative connection: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy.

    Who knew that those nuts, in all their conspiratorial notions, foreshadowed the so-called “Southern strategy” that Richard M. Nixon followed to achieve his razor-thin victory in 1968 (Barry Goldwater having laid the groundwork four years earlier). Miller, beginning with those 1963 nuts and their antics, carries the story to the next level—how these conservatives (well, ultra-conservatives) transformed the beliefs of so many Dallasites into ballot box victories, and set a pattern for GOP successes throughout the once-Democratic Solid South that persists to this day, it’s latest permutation being the Tea Party.

    First, let’s remind ourselves of a few of those best-known nuts who were making national headlines from Dallas in the early ‘60s. Army Major General Edwin A. Walker moved to the more hospitable clime of Dallas after resigning under pressure from his military commission because he introduced an ultra-conservative program to his troops and urged them to read John Birch Society literature. Fundamentalist preacher W. A. Criswell, pastor of Dallas’s huge First Baptist Church (the Rev. Billy Graham was a proud member), said, among other things, that the election of a Catholic president would bring an end to religious freedom in America. The famous and wealthy oilman H. L. Hunt’s crude novel Alpaca advocated giving extra votes to those who paid the most taxes, and he sponsored numerous ultra-conservative broadcast programs and publications. Bruce Alger became in 1954 the first Republican congressman from Texas in many years, and was the only representative to vote against the school lunch program for children, calling it “socialized milk” (the measure passed by a 348 to 1 vote). Dallas Morning News publisher Edward M. “Ted” Dealey, at a White House reception, told President Kennedy to get off Caroline’s tricycle and act like a real man on horseback. Frank McGehee, founder of the rabidly anti-communist National Indignation Committee, packed the auditorium with zealots when UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson spoke on UN Day in 1963, attempted to keep him from speaking, and assaulted him afterwards in the parking lot. Less than a month later the president was assassinated a few blocks away.

    These ’60s extremists shared a fundamentalist belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible as a guide for contemporary politics, and they didn’t hesitate to say so. Racist convictions were sometimes blatant but often semi-disguised in coded language. Inevitably, there was an unquestioned acceptance of the inherent wisdom of unfettered private enterprise, and a universal belief that states’ rights were being usurped by a power-hungry federal government. A widely-held conviction was that Earl Warren and his Supreme Court were usurping traditional American values (remember the “Impeach Earl Warren” signs along the highways?). If that sounds like an earlier version of Ted Cruz’s political platform, ‘tis no accident. Cruz is a lineal descendant of Walker and Alger, Dealey and McGehee.

    Several factors made “Big D” especially receptive to ultra-conservative politics. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson took the side of the federal government in contending that oil-rich tidelands off the coast of Texas belonged to the nation instead of the state. The Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, favored state ownership. This issue was the proverbial last straw that prompted Texas Governor Allan Shivers to bolt from the party of Jefferson and Jackson; he was joined by a majority of Texans in both the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, thus bringing an end to Texas’s role as a certain Democratic vote in the electoral college. Another milestone occurred when new President Lyndon B. Johnson revealed that he was no conservative when it came to civil rights, greatly hastening the exit of conservatives from the Democratic Party and to an embrace of the newly revived and increasingly right-wing GOP. Still, it took decades for the Texas’s transformation to filter down to state and local races.

    Still, the headline-makers of the late ‘50s and ‘60s generally lacked the organizational abilities or aptitudes to create a political strategy capable of producing votes at the ballot box. When the aforementioned Walker ran for the governorship in 1962, he finished a dismal sixth in the Democratic primary won by John Connally. How was political ascension precisely achieved in Dallas? The more difficult but less visible business of translating an ideology into electoral victories would be left to others. Their names do not ring bells for today’s readers, but they are aptly described by Miller.

Who Needs Soviet Propaganda?

 

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government
David Talbot
Harpers. 686 pp. $29.99

 

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 By David M. Barrett

 

    A key indicator of where David Talbot is going in his portrait of CIA Director Allen W. Dulles comes from his treatment of C. Wright Mills and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

    Mills was a Columbia University sociologist whose 1956 book, The Power Elite, caused a minor sensation in the seemingly placid ‘50s. Liberal and conservative scholars alike depicted the American political process as a balancing act among competing interests, which included big business, organized labor, farmers, and professional groups. But Mills, as Talbot notes approvingly, did not believe such a perspective was “adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works.” Instead, Mills posited a Marxist-lite critique that presented governance in the United States as an elaborate conspiracy theory of unaccountable elites. He argued that corporate, military, and governmental leaders worked hand-in-glove solely to enrich and empower themselves and the institutions they headed, and cast doubt on the belief that the United States was some version of a democracy.

    How did presidents—America’s nominal leaders—fit into this system of elite control? According to the Millisian analysis, Eisenhower’s prime directive was to preserve an elite that benefited from a “permanent war economy.” That would seem to be at odds with Ike’s famous parting shot, in which he warned Americans that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist . . . . Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Perhaps that portion of Eisenhower’s nationally-televised farewell address from January 1961 was a gaffe, which Michael Kinsley famously defined as a politician accidentally telling the truth.

    Much more often, according to Talbot, President Eisenhower acted the role of an amiable dunce who followed the diktats of the power elite. Ike had been “a peace-loving warrior” during the great global conflict of the previous decade, but by the time he sought the presidency in 1952 he was an “aging general,” well-meaning perhaps but subject to manipulation and oftentimes just plain clueless. He obligingly took orders from the “Dulles-Dewey group” (a combination brain trust and bank consisting of future CIA Director Allen, his brother and future Secretary of State John Foster, and former GOP presidential nominee Thomas Dewey). These were the men, for example, who “tapped [Richard] Nixon for vice president.”[1]

    Unfortunately, as in so many episodes related in the book, the true story is at odds with Talbot’s invented version. After the GOP convention nominated Eisenhower, Herbert Brownell, Ike’s campaign manager (who would become attorney general), told Eisenhower the time had come to select a running mate. After ruminating for awhile, the nominee handed his short list to Brownell, who then consulted leading Republican pols, including Dewey, but not the Dulleses. How Nixon got picked is recounted in an exhaustively researched new book about Eisenhower and Nixon, The President and His Apprentice, by Irwin F. Gellman.[2]

    Talbot goes on to assert that during the eight-year Eisenhower presidency, no one in the administration—not even Ike himself—matched the Dulles brothers in power. In particular, the president is depicted as knowing shockingly little about what Allen Dulles and the CIA were up to, while lacking the intelligence and energy to insist on knowing. These portraits of Ike and the Dulleses are a graphic novel (comic book) rendering of the national and international politics of the 1950s, and not in a good way. The charge that Eisenhower was an amiable dunce is an old and political one, dating back to the time he was still in office. Eisenhower was so popular and scandal-free that Democrats had little choice but to claim he was more interested in playing golf than running the country. While researching The CIA and Congress, the majority of which dealt with the Eisenhower era, I saw some episodes of an out-of-touch Ike, especially during the last few years of his White House tenure, which were illness-plagued. But there was more frequent evidence of a shrewd political figure. It may be going a tad too far to claim that Eisenhower’s was a “hidden-hand” presidency, a revisionist  argument political scientist Fred Greenstein first put forward in 1982. But the five-star general surely was not a cipher.[3]

    Talbot’s book, of course, really purports to be an expose about Allen Dulles’s directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency. Here there are serious problems, rooted in a number of bad choices by the author. Among them:

Nixon’s Overreach—and an Author’s

 

Nixon’s Gamble: How a President’s Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration
Ray Locker
Lyons Press. 339 pp. $29.95

 

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By James Robenalt

 

    Ray Locker’s book is a disappointment. He obviously invested a great deal of time reading primary documents and listening to presidential recordings, the kind of basic research that is critical to any insightful account of the Nixon presidency. Unfortunately, Locker then mixed primary source material with highly dubious secondary sources, thereby casting doubt on the integrity of the entire work.

    Nixon’s Gamble begins promisingly. Locker accurately describes Richard Nixon’s proclivity for secrecy and his divide-and-conquer strategy to marginalize institutions that he did not trust: the State Department, in particular, but also the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. Nixon’s mishandling of these stakeholders caused an unprecedented reaction, particularly in the Pentagon. For more than a year, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s liaison office at the National Security Council purloined documents containing information that was not being shared by the president and his equally secretive national security adviser.

    Little about this story of secret back-channels and severe institutional jockeying is particularly new, though Locker does a commendable job of pulling together the strands and putting it all in context. Nixon had good reason, of course, to worry about leaks and their impact on his bold but surreptitious initiatives with respect to China and the Vietnam war. The clandestine negotiations that led to the China breakthrough, and the back-channel meetings in Paris with the North Vietnamese, could have been endangered by an unregulated flow of information to the press. And, of course, there is nothing really unique about presidents keeping secrets, especially in the realm of national security. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt famously said that he never let his right hand know what his left hand was doing. Given that Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor, were trying to end U.S. involvement in a war and simultaneously triangulate relations with the Soviet Union and China, they cannot be blamed for obsessing, to a degree, over the secrecy of their initiatives.

Nixon Reiterated

 

One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Tim Weiner
Henry Holt and Co. 384 pp. $30

 

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By Melvin Small

 

    Tim Weiner, winner of a National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes (2007), a history of the CIA, and a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, has turned his attention to Richard Nixon in the scathing One Man Against the World. Because of the continuing release of tape recordings, telcons, and other primary sources—a gift to historians that keeps on giving—Nixon books remain a flourishing cottage industry. Just this publishing season, Weiner has been joined by Evan Thomas (Being Nixon) and Irwin Gellman (The President and the Apprentice) who also promise new interpretations in part because of recently declassified or underused sources.

    Whereas Thomas’s biography is balanced and Gellman’s history of Nixon’s vice presidency tilts toward a favorable conclusion, Weiner’s view of Nixon’s presidency is a Shakespearean horror story of mendacity, criminality, and paranoia. It is well-written and often thrilling, but for many it will be overkill. Allowing the main characters to speak for themselves, thanks in good measure to the tapes, the author appears to have mined his sources, many of which have been released over the past decade, for the most inflammatory and shocking conversations. Indeed, virtually all of his endnotes refer to the rich collections of primary sources—he rarely cites secondary sources and there is no bibliography. (Disclaimer—I am one of those who enjoys seeing his books cited).

    Despite Weiner’s ostensible reliance on primary sources, and notwithstanding the publisher’s extravagant claims for the book, there is little or nothing that is new here. Most of his seemingly original findings have appeared elsewhere, though uncredited.

“Grassy Knoll” Sid:

Hillary’s Personal Conspiracy Theorist

 

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By Max Holland
 

 

    The controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s extant and missing emails briefly put long-time Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal back in the news, with more surely to come after June 16. That is the day when Blumenthal is scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating the deaths of US ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on 11 September 2012. It turns out that Blumenthal, Hillary’s “Svengali-like confidant since the 1990s,” advised the secretary on Libya.

    Decades have passed since Andrew Sullivan rightly termed Blumenthal “the most pro-Clinton writer on the planet,” capable of making Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s Kennedy-worship look downright tame by comparison. And it has been many years since Blumenthal’s less savory turn as a White House aide, speechwriter, in-house intellectual, press corps whisperer, and compiler of dossiers on aggressive reporters during the Bill Clinton’s second term. Consequently, news organizations felt compelled to remind their audiences of Blumenthal’s résumé: as NPR’s Ron Elving put it, “Who Is Clinton Confidant Sidney Blumenthal?”

    Oddly, one salient fact was invariably missing from these profiles. While they often noted (as did the National Review and Bloomberg) that Blumenthal’s penchant for conspiracy theories had once earned him the nickname “Grassy Knoll” inside the White House, the fact is Blumenthal’s moniker is not figurative, but literal. Four decades ago, Blumenthal was not only in league with JFK assassination buffs who claimed shots were fired from the proverbial grassy knoll—he also argued earnestly that “the reason the hopes of the ‘60s were not realized was because a group of people at the top made certain they were dashed.”[1]

    The previous sentence comes from Government By Gunplay, a 1976 paperback book edited by Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian—Yazijian being one of the founding members of what was called the Assassination Investigation Bureau (AIB), then headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

How the 1 Percent Got That Way

 

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Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street
Eileen Appelbaum & Rosemary Batt
Russell Sage Foundation. 381 pp. $35
 

 

By Alan Tonelson

 

     If Private Equity at Work gets the large audience it deserves, great times should be in store for America’s public relations industry. Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt’s exhaustive study of the private equity sector and its impact on the US economy gives these often high-flying investors the kind of black eyes that typically produce a stampede to image-makers like Kekst and Company.

    Bad enough are many of the relatively familiar concerns the authors meticulously document about this part of the nation’s virtually unregulated shadow banking system. Has anyone who follows the economy or finance, even as a layperson, not heard of the hits often absorbed by workers and communities when companies are bought and sold solely for short-term gains through leveraged buyouts, the dominant manifestation of private equity? And the casino-like nature of these (and many other types of) transactions often have been portrayed as a central flaw of American-style capitalism, especially with the economy still struggling to emerge from a financial crisis and recession triggered by fast-buck finance.

    Much more striking, and less well known, is all the evidence presented by the authors exposing private equity as a failure even by the Darwinian standards its companies favor and indeed claim to embody. As Appelbaum and Batt make abundantly clear, the sector flunks numerous major tests of free market virtue. Private equity’s overall returns for investors are sub-par. Its activities often have nothing to do with turning around floundering companies. Its operations tend to be as transparent as a burka. And a major source of returns and earnings for its own general partners and staff stem directly from favors arguably bought with Washington lobbying—most prominently, the tax code’s favorable treatment of debt financing for takeover activity, and lucrative earnings from so-called “carried interest” as lightly-taxed dividend income. The carried interest discount allows financial engineers to avoid paying millions in income taxes.

    The combination of humdrum performance (for sky-high fees) and opacity helps produce one of the most stunning revelations of Private Equity at Work: The sector’s victims include not only displaced (and often blindsided) workers and ravaged local tax bases, but many of those who invest in private equity firms themselves. And inside this irony is another that the authors face squarely and admirably, given their unmistakably progressive political orientation: Public employee union pension plans are among the biggest of these private equity investors.

Sabato’s Folly

 

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The Kennedy Half-Century:
The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy
Larry J. Sabato
Bloomsbury. 603 pp. $30

 

By David Reitzes

 

    Evaluating a president’s place in history, even with the benefit of hindsight, is seldom easy. Applying the proper perspective to as iconic a figure as John F. Kennedy has proven well-nigh impossible. From the instant his presidency was cut short by a burst of gunfire fifty years ago, mythology has overwhelmed reality.

    Any historian who tackles this subject is therefore, by definition, audacious. But Larry J. Sabato is doubly so. To his ever-lasting credit, Sabato believes Kennedy’s term in office, the assassination, and the aftermath are an indivisible historical whole and must be written about as such.

. . . [I]t is impossible to understand the Kennedy legacy without understanding the assassination—the sequence of events, as well as what most Americans think happened and why. Millions have never been, and will never be, satisfied with the official findings of two separate government inquiries—not least because the inquiries came to opposite conclusions on the critical question of conspiracy. The assassination dictated that JFK would not have the time create a full record and make his whole claim on history. For fifty years the unfinished record of the man and his presidency has stirred Americans as they mourned an unconscionable loss and wondered what might have been. This “ghost legacy” is as powerful as the real one.[1]

    This is a bracing change from the approach of most historians who have written about Kennedy, whose tendency has been to treat the assassination as an unwanted complication. Of course, it is not easy to write about an event that remains a controversial mystery to so many, with a majority of Americans consistently believing that the truth about it has never been told  Consequently, it’s not unusual to see historians handle the subject rather dismissively, as Robert Dallek did in An Unfinished Life:

    Despite an authoritative 1993 book, Case Closed, by attorney Gerald Posner refuting numerous conspiracy theories, the public, inflamed by a popular 1991 Oliver Stone film, JFK, believed otherwise . . . . The fact that none of the conspiracy theorists have been able to offer convincing evidence of their suspicions does not seem to trouble many people. The plausibility of a conspiracy is less important to them than the implausibility of someone as inconsequential as Oswald having the wherewithal to kill someone as consequential . . . as Kennedy.[2]

    Despite Sabato’s willingness to undertake the necessary task of making history whole again, The Kennedy Half-Century is a great disappointment. Sabato’s in-depth treatment of the assassination is precisely where the book falters. The author often ends up sounding more like a fevered assassination buff, pandering to popular, uninformed opinion about the assassination, rather than someone who was a Rhodes Scholar, founder of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, and is the University Professor of Politics at UVA.

 

Naftali Reconsidered

 

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    His turn as director of the Nixon Library has given him

    credibility, but is it warranted?

By Max Holland

 

    Since late April, Reuters, the Orange County Register, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker have published articles lamenting the lack of a director at the Richard M. Nixon Library (RMNL) in Yorba Linda, California.[1]

    All the articles (excepting Jeffrey Frank’s slightly more nuanced New Yorker piece) have the same narrative, almost as if they were part of an orchestrated campaign. The uncommon delay in finding a new permanent director (going on three years) is the fault of Nixon partisans, so the story goes, who are holding out for a congenial person to rehabilitate the only president to resign in disgrace. And the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is being stymied in its admirable effort to present Nixon in an objective, unvarnished light.

    As proof, the articles reprise the conventional, heroic narrative about the tenure of Tim Naftali, who headed the library from 2007 to 2011. Naftali “presided over the installation of a new, historically accurate Watergate exhibit,” The Nation article said, which Nixon loyalists “vehemently objected to,” according to Reuters. That left Naftali “fiercely at odds with the . . . [Nixon] family and close supporters of the 37th president,” the Orange County Register reported. The Register also quoted Naftali to level the allegation that Nixon loyalists are consciously stalling so they can allegedly “write the text” for a pending $15 million renovation of the museum, which is the public face of the library, since most visitors to Yorba Linda do not use the archives. The Los Angeles Times article dispensed with a reporter and made these points in an article written by Naftali himself.

    As the late Alexander Cockburn liked to observe, “The First Law of Journalism is to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.”[2]

    There are serious issues up for debate here, not the least of which is whether presidential libraries should be shrines, places that debunk their namesakes, or something in-between. There is also the question of whether Nixon deserves special handling. Before considering such issues though, it might be well to reconsider Naftali’s tenure. As the cliché goes, there are two sides to every story—even one involving Richard Milhous Nixon.[3]

    In a widely-noted remark at Richard Nixon’s funeral service in April 1994, then-President Bill Clinton said, “may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” Naftali was supposed to hasten and facilitate that day as the first NARA-appointed director. Yet the portrait of Naftali that emerges after taking a closer look at his directorship is not as flattering as the above clippings. The former RMNL director is skilled at public relations, knows how to use the press to advance a case, and has a talent for self-promotion. But through acts of commission and omission, he failed to enrich and preserve the historical record. In one particularly egregious instance, he even helped falsify that record.

Truth in a Lie: Forty Years After the 18½ Minute Gap

 

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By James D. Robenalt

    On the afternoon of October 1, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon and his chief of staff, Alexander M.  Haig, Jr., slipped away from the White House and went for a rambling, nearly two-hour car ride through the Washington countryside.

    Nixon and Haig left the White House because they did not want to risk anyone overhearing them talk about a sensitive matter. Or perhaps they feared that someone might use remnants of the White House recording system, though it was supposedly disconnected, to capture their words. Given all the leaks to the press, and the exposure of just about every administration secret up to and including the existence of the White House tapes, paranoia wasn’t entirely unjustified.

    Just prior to this unscheduled outing, Nixon’s long-time personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, had come to the president in a panic. She breathlessly told him she had accidentally caused a four to five minute buzz on a subpoenaed tape she had been transcribing. And the recording appeared to be a crucial one: it encompassed meetings on June 20, 1972 between the president and his top aides, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, on what was Nixon’s first day back in the White House since the Watergate break-in, which had occurred three days earlier.

    Nixon told Woods not to worry, as he didn’t think the specific portion of the tape she accidentally altered had been subpoenaed. Still, he immediately called Haig, according to Nixon’s memoir RN, and told him what happened. The two men then left the White House for their impromptu car ride.[1]

    Two months after Woods’s private admission, the discovery of an 18½ minute gap on that tape caused a national furor, second only to the public’s reaction to the Saturday Night massacre. Public disclosure of a two-toned buzz or hum that caused the gap in conversation supercharged calls for impeachment and finally unraveled the landslide electoral victory Nixon had achieved just two years earlier. It left the political landscape scarred, even four decades later, and plagued by culture wars that persist to this day. Nixon’s term could not have ended in a more devastating way for the office of the presidency or the nation.

    Yet more than 40 years later, the infamous gap remains one of Watergate’s most enduring and tantalizing mysteries. Technological efforts to recover what was erased (or obscured by the humming noise) have all failed, although on fleeting portions of the tapes faint, almost ghostly, human voices can be detected. In 2009, it was thought that a forensic examination of Haldeman’s handwritten notes might reveal the substance of the conversation. That experiment by the National Archives failed too.

    Recently released testimony from Nixon himself just might hold the key to unscrambling what happened forty years ago. And it turns out that answering two of the three main questions about the gap—who caused it and why—not only solves most of a historical mystery, but is also critical to understanding Nixon’s downfall.

The Girl in the Red Skirt: A Micro-Study of the Zapruder Film

 

 

By Kenneth Scearce

 

 

 

    In the Zapruder film, the earliest obvious reaction we can see to the commencement of the assassination is that of Rosemary Willis. Rosemary Willis was 10 years old when she witnessed President Kennedy’s murder. She can be seen in the Zapruder film after it resumes at frame 133, running along the south side of Elm Street, in a red skirt and a white, hooded jacket. During the first 5 seconds of the restarted film, Ms. Willis turns her gaze away from Kennedy towards the Book Depository, slows from a run, and stops abruptly. Her body language clearly strikes a pose of thunderstruck bewilderment while almost everyone else visible in the Zapruder film appears nonplussed.

    The two animations below were created by Gerda Dunckel from the Zapruder film (the copyright of which is owned by The Sixth Floor Museum). The animations run from the Zapruder film’s first frame, Z133 to Z221, ending just before the second shot was fired at Z222.

The first animation is a close-up focused on Ms. Willis:

The second animation is an extreme close-up of Ms. Willis:

    Initially, during frames 133—160 of the Zapruder film, Ms. Willis keeps time with the president’s Lincoln Continental. Soon, however, certainly by no later than Z161, Ms. Willis begins to slow down noticeably (her swinging arms have dropped by Z161 as she slows, compared to the height of her arms in previous frames). By Z197 (and probably earlier), Ms. Willis has come to a complete stop.  During this sequence, Ms. Willis is facing in the direction not of President Kennedy to her right front, but of the Book Depository to her right rear. This is very odd—unless something more significant than watching President Kennedy had caught her attention.

The Assassin as Political Pilgrim

 

 

The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union

Peter Savodnik

Basic Books. 267 pp. $27.99

 

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By Priscilla Johnson McMillan

 

 

Editor’s Note: In the half-century since President Kennedy’s death, one arm is capable of holding all the reliable works that attempt to understand the assassination by understanding the assassin. Two of the most outstanding in this niche are Jean Davison’s Oswald’s Game (1983) and Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995), the latter notable for the author’s negotiated access to the Minsk KGB’s file on and surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Yet the book against which all such efforts must be measured is Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Marina and Lee, which is being reissued this fall by the Steerforth Press. As Thomas Powers observed in his 1977 New York Times review, Marina and Lee was a “miraculous book . . . miraculous because McMillan had the wit, courage, and perseverance to go back to the heart of the story and the art to give it life.” McMillan restored agency to Oswald, and by so doing left no room for the tapestry of conspiracy theories that had been woven around him, possible only so long as he remained a cipher. So rich was the book’s texture that when Mailer sat down to write his Oswald biography, he quoted long passages from Marina and Lee verbatim, and in his acknowledgments wrote that a “special statement is necessary to cover the contribution of Priscilla Johnson McMillan.”[1]

The 50th anniversary is ripe for another look at Oswald, if only because the end of the cold war opened a window for reportage that had not been possible earlier. What is not explicable or defensible is Peter Savodnik’s calculated neglect of Marina and Lee in The Interloper. Savodnik, regrettably, did not think he could pull off his book without pretending that McMillan’s book did not exist.

Despite this shabby behavior, The Interloper is one of the few books deserving of attention on this anniversary. Washington Decoded asked Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a member of its editorial board, for her considered opinion.

 

    The Interloper may be the one book appearing this year that attempts to understand the Kennedy assassination by taking a microscopic look at the assassin. The result is a nuanced and sympathetic view of Lee Harvey Oswald, a view so human that it crowds out and leaves no room for mechanistic theories of a conspiracy.

    The author, Peter Savodnik, is a Russian-speaking writer who spent many months in Minsk, the city in which Oswald lived during most of his 2½ years in the Soviet Union. There, Savodnik interviewed Erich Titovets, a man who knew Oswald fairly well, and the very few others who remember the interloper who arrived in 1960 hoping to remain forever. Savodnik even traveled to Israel to interview Ella German, the attractive Jewish woman whose rejection of Oswald’s marriage proposal in January 1961 had much to do with the American’s rejection of Soviet life and eventual decision to return to the United States.

   Savodnik sees Oswald as a seeker after something affirmative who, in reaction against a childhood of moving from place to unhappy place with a selfish, unstable mother, longed for a home and steady sense of purpose. But Oswald wanted something more. He was a Marxist who idealized the Soviet Union as a country that treated all of its citizens equally and provided baseline amenities to everyone. What he found instead was a bureaucracy such as he had encountered in the Marine Corps and ‘round the clock surveillance by the KGB. He recorded his hopes and disappointments in his “Historic Diary” and in “The Collective,” several essays he wrote while in Minsk.

    Naturally, Savodnik uses Oswald’s writing to trace his feelings about his life in the USSR and concludes that he felt isolated and alone, having failed to connect and find a place for himself within the society he had idealized from afar. It was in Minsk, Savodnik says, that Oswald realized that he would always be a outsider, an interloper, and where the “desperation and fury coursing through his whole life were most fully on display.” Savodnik goes so far as to say that if the reader understands Oswald’s life in Minsk, he or she will understand much about how the Kennedy assassination came about.

    This claim is a stretch: the anger and violence that were to characterize Oswald’s behavior after his return to the United States were barely visible during his time in Minsk.

The JFK Medical Evidence:

 

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New Light on a Lingering Forensic Controversy

 

By John Canal

 

The exact entry site of President Kennedy’s head wound is the most perplexing medico-legal controversy stemming from the assassination. It has confounded assassination researchers and credentialed experts for decades.

Conflicting conclusions over the entry wound’s location—and the tightly-associated debate over the damage to the cranium—have lingered for so long they seem irresolvable.

Factoring in a simple technique familiar to every skilled mortician, however, makes it possible to resolve the contradictions between the findings of the original pathologists and the official inquiries that revisited the medical evidence in 1968, 1975, 1978, and 1998. It is finally possible to square this particular circle and put the issue to a well-deserved rest.

 

The Controversy in a Nutshell

    All five of the official forensic investigations have been unanimous on one point: a single, high-velocity missile entered the rear of the president’s head, with the instant, gruesome results captured in the Zapruder film beginning at frame 313. Expert opinion is in disagreement about almost everything aside from that.

    The three military officers/physicians who performed the postmortem on the night of November 22 placed the entry wound near Kennedy’s external occipital protuberance (EOP), a little knob typically about two inches above the hairline. The autopsy report stated, “Situated in the posterior scalp approximately 2.5 cm. laterally to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance is a lacerated wound measuring 15 x 6 mm. In the underlying bone is a corresponding wound . . . .”[1]

    These prosectors also noted the grievous damage to JFK’s head. They described a large irregular defect of the scalp and skull on the right involving chiefly the parietal bone but extending somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions. (The parietal bone extends from the occipital bone, which is essentially the back of the head, to the frontal bone, essentially the forehead.) This finding was consistent with the recollections of more than 25 eyewitnesses, most of them medically-trained, who reported seeing an exit-like wound about the size of a small orange in the rear of the president’s head.[2]

    Figure 1 is one unofficial attempt from 1967 to depict the damage to the back of the head (BOH) as described in Dr. Robert N. McClelland’s testimony before the Warren Commission. McClelland’s description was one of the more precise eyewitness accounts. But accounts of the damage to this area understandably varied, as the majority of medical personnel had been preoccupied with trying to resuscitate JFK at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital.[3]

    The BOH opening, in all likelihood, was created after the bullet’s explosive impact exposed the president’s brain through a tear in the rear scalp and an opening between two or more dislodged (but not blown-out or missing) pieces of loose rear skull. This observation is supported by the fact that the lateral X-ray shows no missing rear bone whatsoever. Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, one of the prosectors, did say in 1996 that he repositioned some bone pieces before the X-rays and photos were taken; it seems logical that he pushed some loose pieces of skull (dislodged but still adhering to the scalp) roughly back into place.[4]

    The initial postmortem finding regarding the location of the entry wound in the head was accepted until 1968. In that year Attorney General Ramsey Clark commissioned four experts to revisit the postmortem because of a public controversy that had arisen over the findings. While the so-called Clark Panel did not have the decided advantage of examining the body directly, it was composed entirely of forensic experts, whereas only one of the prosectors had training in that specialty. Citing one X-ray in particular, these experts declared that the prosectors had incorrectly located the rear entry wound in the head. The Clark Panel Report claimed the X-ray in question revealed the entry to be as high as the area of the president’s cowlick, or almost four inches (or ten centimeters) higher than the location established back in November 1963.[5]

    A single photographic view was also cited to underpin the Clark Panel’s correction; number 42 representing that view is reproduced here as Figure 2. This photograph was presumed to have been taken just after JFK’s corpse arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital, site of the autopsy, and it presumably showed the entry wound well above the EOP—in the vicinity of the president’s cowlick rather than near the EOP. The Clark Panel made no mention of the dubious practice it had engaged in of using a movable body part, such as the scalp, to locate the entrance wound. Normally, as one wound-ballistics expert put it, the “location of a penetrating wound to the cranium is usually pinpointed by the cratered hole in the skull.”[6]

    The other manifest difference between the Clark Panel and the findings of the original prosectors concerned the visible damage to the rear of the president’s head. The Clark Panel reported what seemed self-evident from Figure 2: aside from the cowlick entrance wound, the BOH was relatively unscathed; indeed, the scalp was apparently intact.[7]

    The bottom line was that the Clark Panel findings did not fundamentally change the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired the one bullet that penetrated the president’s skull, in addition to the separate shot that pierced JFK’s upper back. Nonetheless, the amended conclusions were stunning: assertion of a four-inch error in the entry wound, and refutation of visible BOH damage. The notion that the postmortem contained such gross errors in the first place left doubt where there should have been absolute certainty.