Washington Decoded

Before Hiroshima & Nagasaki

 

The First Atomic Bomb: The Trinity Site in New Mexico
Janet Farrell Brodie
University of Nebraska Press. 318 pp. $60

By Kay Matthews

 

    The First Atomic Bomb is a deeply researched history of the weapon developed by the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and tested at the Trinity site in the Tularosa Basin on 16 July 1945. Dubbed “the gadget” by the scientists and workers who manufactured it during the last years of World War II, it was identical to the second bomb dropped on Japan—aka “Fat Man,” a plutonium implosion bomb detonated over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Three days earlier, “Little Boy,” a Uranium-235 fission bomb, had exploded over Hiroshima.

    The book begins with an overview of the policies, people, and places that contributed to the Trinity explosion and its complicated aftermath, which is helpful for readers unfamiliar with the history of the bomb. The Manhattan Project, a thirty-five month endeavor that cost of enormous cost (estimated at $21.6 billion in 1996 dollars), brought together the scientists, most famously Robert Oppenheimer, and the military, General Leslie Groves, but also an “industrial and engineering construction effort” of thousands of workers—civilian and military—all over the country that somehow managed to maintain a curtain of secrecy until the bombs were dropped over Japan.

    Brodie’s focus on the workers—not scientists—who helped make “the gadget,” and her knowledge of previous scholarship familiar to many New Mexicans, are impressive. In Chapter Two, “Dispossessions,” she details the stories of Tularosa Basin residents who were forced to relocate after the Trinity site was chosen for the bomb test, mostly Anglo and Hispano ranchers. They were inadequately compensated and never allowed to return post-Trinity for complex of reasons, including the expansion of the nearby Alamogordo Army Base (which became Holloman Air Force Base), and the White Sands Proving Ground (which became White Sands Missile Range).

    To put this in context, Brodie devotes a subsection of the chapter to the history of land conflict in New Mexico and references the work of writers who have documented the displacement of both Native American and Hispano populations in the long history of the territory’s journey towards statehood. Historian Malcolm Ebright’s book, Advocates for the Oppressed, documents the confrontations between wealthy Hispano families and Natives over control of valuable irrigable land. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, Roots of Resistance, provides an analysis of how a succession of conflicting land tenure patterns and practices dispossessed and disenfranchised the indigenous people of New Mexico. Historian David Caffey documents the inability of the United States legal system to justly adjudicate Hispano and Native land grants.

    While Brodie provides a detailed description of the day of the Trinity test in this first section, the bulk of the book is divided into two main sections: 1) building of the site; and 2) post-test events regarding disposition of the site, the afterlife of Trinity radiation, and historical preservation.

Choosing the Site

    Then Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes instructed General Groves that no Native American tribes or reservations should be displaced in choosing the site. Yet many Hispano and Anglo farmers and ranchers would be forced to leave, as noted above. In choosing the uppermost portion of the infamous Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man’s Journey) basin, part of the Camino Real trail from Las Cruces to Socorro, they figured they had secured as much isolation and secrecy as possible. The workers who came to build the site from Los Alamos and the army—military police, construction workers, engineers (SEDs), technicians, and the scientists in charge—worked under brutal wind and heat conditions. Brodie notes that despite an integrated work force at LANL—Native Americans and Hispanos—there are no records that reveal how many people of color worked at the Trinity site (ditto for women).

    After the successful explosion, technicians and workers stayed at the site to clean up and conduct additional experimentation while the military provided security. They all wore radiation-detecting dosimeter badges, but as Brodie jumps back and forth in time over the post-explosion years, the haphazard nature of the cleanup and status of the site becomes obvious.

    A telling example is that of the handling of the trinitite, or the “semi-glossy agglomerations” from sand thrown into the air by the blast that fell to the ground around the site (and that people took home as souvenirs). There was little agreement about its radioactivity, whether it should be removed, or be preserved as part of White Sands National Monument, until finally the Atomic Energy Commission, which took civilian control of the Trinity site, hired a contractor to scoop it up and bury it. No records of that removal were kept, however, and confusion remained as to where and how it was buried. Brodie attributes the general lack of records on post-Trinity activities to the pressures to ready the bombs for use in Japan.

    Post-bomb control over the Trinity site was complicated by its location within the Alamogordo Army Base and the rapidly expanding White Sands Proving Ground. In the build up to World War II and especially post war, New Mexico became the outdoor laboratory for more than nuclear weapons. Public lands were withdrawn for bombing ranges, fighter pilot practice, and missile testing. Competing requests from the US army, air force, and navy expanded the military presence in New Mexico, which now hosts four massive military bases ranging from 50,000 acres to 3,200 square miles.

    Brodie devotes a chapter to the radioactive fallout from Trinity, something New Mexicans are all too familiar with as a “nuclear sacrifice zone”: Los Alamos National Laboratory; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP); uranium mining and milling (impacting Native pueblos); and a proposed temporary nuclear reactor waste storage facility. LANL workers and miners were finally compensated under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program and Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 1990. But compensation for nuclear test “downwinders” was limited to those residents of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona—not New Mexico Trinity site downwinders. In research at the National Archives Brodie found that two items from a folder labeled “Secret: Classified Information. National Security Information” had been pulled from the file but their labels remained, addressing “Disposition of Alamogordo Test Area” and “Disposition of Holloman.” Both documents were pulled in the 1990s, just as the RECA act was promulgated. Brodie questions whether this information was censored to prevent the likelihood that the Trinity downwinders would be included in RECA.

    Amendments to RECA law over the past few years have added eligibility to additional geographical areas but despite the intense lobbying of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, the act continues to exclude them (the act includes only those government employees who were present at and after the explosion). Brodie ends this chapter with another reference to a work of New Mexico scholarship, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico by Jake Kosek. He found that many New Mexicans suspect, rightly or wrongly, that scientists who collected data about Trinity radiation were also responsible for hundreds of cattle mutilations in the 1970s and 1980s, using the soft tissue to test radiation levels!

    Just as complicated as military control over the site was the National Park Service’s (NPS) attempt to preserve the Trinity site as a national monument. The fact that the White Sands National Monument, a magnificent desert field of gypsum dunes was already wedged between the Alamogordo Air Base and White Sands Proving Ground may have contributed to the enthusiasm. The monument superintendent, Johnwill Faris was disabused of his hope that it could coexist with the military when the air base took over the monument’s water supply and condemned surroundings lands (Johnwill Faris’s son lives in Santa Fe and corrected Brodie’s spelling of his father’s name: Johnwill, not Johnwell). But the monument survived and is now a National Park. No such luck for a Trinity National Monument.

    Brodie quotes a NPS bureaucrat: “I believe that this country should not establish a national monument to commemorate a bomb—any more than we would want to commemorate the use of poison gas.” After much squabbling and the advent of new federal rules that affected NPS designations, the Trinity site was listed as a National Historic Landmark in the Federal Resister of Historic Places on 15 March 1972.

    Kudos to a writer who, despite a few minor mistakes on place and people names, wrote a book that is meticulously researched and sensitive to the people of New Mexico, whose lives have been forever impacted by the nuclear weapons industry since that fateful day in 1945.

Kay Matthews lives on a farm in El Valle, New Mexico and works as a freelance journalist and publisher of La Jicarita, an online journal of environmental politics. An earlier version of this review appeared in La Jicarita in July.

©2023 by Kay Matthews

Christopher Nolan’s Forthcoming “Oppenheimer” Movie: A Historian's Questions, Worries, and Challenges

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By Barton J. Bernstein

 

I think we should not attempt a plan [to develop the weapon for radiological warfare] unless we can poison [enough] food to kill a half a million men.
                   J. Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, 25 May 1943[1]

I can hardly believe my eyes when I saw a news release said to be quoting Oppenheimer, and giving the impression that there is no radiological hazard [in the A-bombed Japanese cities]. Apparently all things are relative.
                   Radiologist Dr. Robert S. Stone to Lieutenant Colonel Hymer L. Friedel[l], 9 August 1945[2]

[C]redible evidence exists which tends to show that Dr. Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party [in 1941] . . . This evidence [because of the source employed] is not available for use in court.
                    Assistant Attorney General Charles B. Murray to Attorney General James P. McGranery, 12 November 1952[3]

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer said [in his speech] that he has ‘no doubts’ [that the US‘s] development of the H-bomb was the right course.[4]
                    Palo Alto Times, April 1960

The people who know nothing [about Oppenheimer] are going to get the wildest ride [in the “Oppenheimer” film]. . . they need to know, because, you know, he’s the most important man who ever lived.
                    Christopher Nolan[5]

 

    The forthcoming “Oppenheimer” film, on the once- famous J. Robert Oppenheimer, reportedly received a large budget for the 2023 movie—about $100 million for the making, and about $100 million for the marketing. Directed by Christopher Nolan, whose earlier films have reportedly grossed more than $5 billion, the movie is likely to be a blockbuster.

    Rather ironically, it is likely to rival the “Barbie” film at the box office. Some critics, undoubtedly, will discuss American culture in the framework suggested by the two very different movies. “Barbie” has multiple, and profitable, product tie-ins with various items and firms. Such could not reasonably be the case for the “Oppenheimer” film, dealing heavily, as it does, with nuclear weapons.

    A widely admired director, Christopher Nolan has won laurels for his work, and his movies are often used as models in film-making classes. His “Oppenheimer” film was voted by a Hollywood critics group as among the most awaited summer movies. It is scheduled for release on July 21. It has already been discussed in various publications, and the publicity blitz may be near. The “Oppenheimer” film is apparently in many ways a joint project by Nolan with his wife, Emma Thomas, who served as the producer. “She’s the best producer in Hollywood, without question,” according to Nolan.[6]

    Nolan’s new movie is starring the gifted Irish actor, Cillian Murphy, as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was often described, and greatly celebrated, as “the father of the atomic bomb.” The cast includes, among others, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, head of the A-bomb project, Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chief and Oppenheimer foe, and Emily Blunt, as Kitty (Katherine) Oppenheimer, Robert’s wife. It is a distinguished cast.

    It’s revealing to read in some newspapers, as part of the Hollywood-generated publicity, of the committed preparation by the hard-working Cillian Murphy for his central role in “Oppenheimer.” Murphy stated, as the New York Times reported in Murphy’s words, “We are going into this guy’s [Oppenheimer’s] head, you have to be immersed in the essence so strongly that you carry the audience with you.”[7]

    The movie reportedly leans heavily on a major and justifiably well-respected, but sometimes also dismayingly flawed, book on the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the wartime and early postwar Los Alamos laboratory, later headed the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), and became in 1947 the longtime director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[8]

    After Oppenheimer’s impressive wartime work directing the secret Los Alamos laboratory in developing the two kinds of atomic bombs, he became, in the postwar period for a near-decade, an influential adviser on the US’s nuclear-weapons and related defense policy. Aside from the iconic Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer was probably the best known, and generally the most respected, US-based scientist.

The Riddle of Lee Harvey Oswald

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The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee
Paul R. Gregory
Diversion. 280 pp. $21.80

 

By Richard A. Reiman

 

 

    There are mysteries about the assassination of President Kennedy, but among those likely to bedevil historians a hundred years after the assassination, the endurance of just one is certain. It has nothing to do with grainy images from the Zapruder film, trajectories from the sixth- floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, or bullet shots, be they “magic” or prosaic. It is the motivation, in full, of Lee Harvey Oswald for assassinating JFK. The question suffers from an overabundance, not a paucity, of possible answers, conjoined with the portrait of a man who planned for greatness while sharing almost nothing with anyone what he was about. If, while Oswald lived, someone might have both desired and attempted to spend time with this hostile, hyper-suspicious fantasist, and possessed the wit to probe his politics or personality, the chances were overwhelming that the door, metaphorically speaking, would have been slammed in his face.

Lee & Marina Oswald

    Equally improbable would be that someone possessing these credentials would step forward for the first time after nearly sixty years, extensively and shrewdly summarizing all that he had learned.

    Enter Paul R. Gregory and The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee. Gregory’s brush with Marina and Lee occurred on the precipice of an academic career of international scope and distinction. Between earning a doctorate in economics at Harvard in 1969 and authoring this model of a restricted “life and times,” he wrote or co-wrote more than twelve books and one hundred articles on the fields of Russia’s economy and energy sector. His fluency in some of the psychodramas of Soviet history (his books include such titles as Lenin’s Brain, and Politics, Murder and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin) suggests the interesting possibility that either his later work was informed by his early acquaintance with psychosis personified, or that the subject of this book and its mysteries were retroactively illuminated by his subsequent education in the enigmatic riddles of Russia.

    Gregory was 21 years old when he met Lee Oswald in June 1962, two weeks after Oswald, recently returned from the Soviet Union, had sought the help of Paul’s father, Peter, in finding a job. The elder Gregory, that rarest of things in Cold War Fort Worth—a Russian translator—had positively evaluated Oswald’s Russian language proficiency at Oswald’s request. Interested in meeting Marina, Peter had brought Paul along to visit the couple at Robert Oswald’s home. Soon, Paul was arranging for language tutoring from Marina over the last two months of his summer hiatus from the University of Oklahoma. The Gregorys (father, mother and Paul) also hosted a dinner for the Oswalds on August 25, attended by two Russian émigrés from Dallas, George Bouhe and Anna Meller. Aside from these contacts, Paul met the Oswalds only one more time: on November 22, 1962, when he drove them to a bus stop back to Dallas from their Thanksgiving family reunion with Lee’s brother and half-brother, one year to the day before the assassination.

Reality Check

 

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Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories
Michel Jacques Gagné
Routledge. 508 pp. $29.95

 

By Martin J. Kelly Jr.

 

    In a world of sensible analysis there is an inverse relationship between analytic knowledge and unwarranted suspicion. The more we understand how the real world actually materializes in our daily lives, the less likely are we to imagine nefarious puppeteers behind the scenes. But now we are in a paranoia-laden culture that finds it easy to assert that the murder of twenty children was faked by the government, or that the Israeli Defense Force trains NYC police officers to deliver violence to innocent US citizens. These days political passion intensifies conspiracy claims and inoculates believers against embarrassment and refutation.

    Fringe ideas have always been noisy in America. In the ‘30s, a rash of outré notions marched into the Depression spotlight to capture the imagination of the disaffected. Utopian criticism from the thrusts of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin and William Dudley Pelley, for example, created deep mistrust of traditional thinking and government. Some of the movements were basted in anti-Semitism and proto-Nazism at the same time as Adolf Hitler became living myth to German volk. America was able to shrug off these radical forces because in the throes of the Depression mainstream politics and media gave them very little breathing room. In the long run, their effect on the electorate was puny.

    After the tumultuous ‘60s, America’s courting of half-baked ideas was quickened by an emerging and powerful popular culture teeming with salient facts unleavened by deliberative analysis. In its “now for something completely new” insistence on breadth against depth, the ubiquity of electronic media is part of the genome of the surge in unexamined thinking. All ideas were (are) of equal force. As a generalization, the conspiracy theory (CT) “take” on the assassination of JFK in 1963 is a hard-core historical element in the unwitting pursuit of “at-large” mythic ideas in the country—the death of a president is mainstream by definition. That the murder was investigated by two different government initiatives in 1964 and 1977-78, solidifies its genetic importance for American suspicion along with several zany notions that come with it in the pop culture.

    Michel Jacques Gagné’s Thinking Critically is a richly-detailed antidote to JFK conspiracy thought. He submits JFK CT thinking to direct tests against reality. It is impossible to praise this book too much or to capture its power in a few words. The result of decades of research and five yearsof writing, Thinking Critically is a textured and thoughtful treatment of many of the major conspiracy themes surrounding JFK’s murder. While he asserts the analysis is not an exercise in formal logic, Gagné does pick out some hackneyed fallacies in the JFK CT literature like sic hoc ergo propter hoc and “lack of evidence indicates a successful cover-up.” And he includes types of fallacies and formal argument in two very useful appendices.

    The entire book is somewhat discursive, i.e., moves coherently from topic to topic without attempting to glue together the JFK CT movement into a univocal conceptual package. The soul of the book is in its conceptually savvy treatment of crucial features in the JFK CT tradition through a sound hearing of full evidence in each analysis. Just about all of the CT cognitive artifices that have distorted the murder for decades collapse under the weight of their own jerry-rigged density and the force of the evidence Gagné examines. The analysis demonstrates most CT facts to be “factoids” and conspiracy scenarios to be filled with fundamental contradictions. Not one conspiracy claim survives the established facts.

    Thinking Critically intimates that the JFK Camelot myth had ignited energetically from Jacqueline Kennedy’s PR fantasies about her dead husband into a full-fisted Arthurian political and moral depiction of JFK by CT writers. JFK became a peace-loving universal ultra-liberal whose loving kindness and superior moral stance made him the target of hateful intolerance from his own colleagues in government. In such a Romantic milieu, every citizen with an inclination toward reading conspiracy into his murder was possessed by unstoppable passion.

False and mendacious allegations of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy persist nearly 59 years later despite multiple investigations.

    Gagné suggests that JFK’s death was felt as an end to liberal hope so that a wellspring of  desperation kept the conspiracy alive in a segment of the population. As time went on, then,  the original Warren Commission and its defenders become historical villains in the vision of  the CT community.

    We learn that Oswald was not the mild-mannered cipher lionized in CT writings. Oswald’s  story is checkered and problematic. While there is a psychiatric history of him in 1953 when he  was in the New York city public school system, Gagné’s analysis relies mostly on more  accessible facts rather than on technical psychological observations. Anyone can support these  quotidian facts with the professional psychiatric examination on the record. Oswald was filled  with fantasies of omnipotence and violence as part of his personality disorder.

    Crucial physical evidence such as ballistics, forensics, X-rays and photos, and the Zapruder  film are ratified again and again by straightforward exposition. All claims of these elements  having been forged or altered by Dallas Police, FBI, military doctors, secret X-ray or film labs  are shown not only to be groundless but also to be impossible in 1963. The backyard photos,  the autopsy report with X-rays and photos, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and the single bullet,  the fragments from JFK’s skull and Governor Connally’s body, etc., are indelibly certified by a  cold look at the brute facts of the case.

    All of the standard CT claims, baroque and mundane, are shredded in Thinking Critically by  a sane study of basic facts and evidence. Grassy Knoll and man-hole snipers, as well as Oswald  impersonators and KGB operations explode under rational scrutiny. Icons of the conspiracy  movement evaporate as well under the epistemic ridicule brilliantly wielded by Professor  Gagné. We learn not only that Nixon, LBJ, CIA, the mafia and the Pentagon, etc. had no hand  in JFK’s murder but also that major CT public figures were less than competent with the  primary empirical findings in the case. Mark Lane, David Lifton, Gary Aguilar, David Mantik and even Roger Stone, to name a few, are stripped of their New Clothes.

    Lifton believes JFK’s body was switched and altered at autopsy. Gagné shows the clear impossibility of such a maneuver. Mantik, who has a PhD in physics and an MD, insists the x-rays were altered to make JFK’s front skull entry wound look like an exit wound. While Gagné demonstrates how Mantik, a radiologist, has rotated an X-ray improperly to make his claim, he doesn’t indict the doctor for other technically unsound CT research on JFK’s skull X-ray that catapulted Mantik stage-front in the CT movement a few decades back. A bit bumbling and a little paranoid are some of these CT thinkers despite their PhD’s and MD’s. To see these notions and their proposers unmasked as Gagné punches up the validity of foundational facts is an epiphany for the reader.

    Thinking Critically is a beautiful and indispensable contribution to public sanity in an age of tabloid concepts. It shows unequivocally that, in the decades since 1963, only an evidence-free paranoid suspicion has characterized the conspiracy community’s long Sumo-grapple with the reality of the JFK case. Everyone should read the book and be deeply grateful.

Martin J. Kelly Jr., a  Professor Emeritus of Psychology who also taught History of Science, is a frequent contributor to Washington Decoded.

©2022 by Martin J. Kelly Jr.

A Single Photograph Disproves Oliver Stone’s Conspiracy Claim

 

The Unfounded Attack on CE 399’s Chain of Custody

 

 

By Steve Roe

 

 

    Some people, when they are responsible for creating a disaster, apologize and slink away. Others attempt to make amends. A few double down.

    Oliver Stone’s new pseudo-documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, proves the nothing-if-not indefatigable director belongs firmly to the double-down school. He first unveiled his conspiratorial take on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in JFK, a 1991 feature film. At that time he proclaimed the film ought to be accorded as much weight as the Warren Report. Now Stone declares that his “conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts.”[1]

    One of the outlandish claims in JFK: Destiny Betrayed concerns a most important piece of ballistic evidence. This artifact is Warren Commission Exhibit (CE) 399, the spent bullet fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons. This bullet, after penetrating the president’s upper back and exiting his throat, traversed Texas Governor John Connally’s torso and wrist before lodging itself superficially in his left thigh. During the chaos at Parkland Hospital, the bullet fell out onto the stretcher cart being used to transport Connally to the operating room. Within an hour or so a Parkland employee noticed the bullet on the stretcher, and it was eventually handed over to a Secret Service agent before finally reaching the FBI Lab on the evening of November 22nd.

Above: A frame from the Zapruder film shows President Kennedy and Governor Connally an instant after they were struck by the second bullet fired.                                         

Below: CE 399, the second bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.                                                                                                                .                                                                                              

    Stone and James DiEugenio, who wrote the screenplay, would have everyone believe, however, that CE 399’s provenance can be impeached, and that unnamed conspirators planted a key piece of evidence that was the focus of every federal investigation. As Stone asserted during a March interview with an all-too-credulous Boston Herald reporter, “Nothing matches. There’s no chain of custody—of a bullet [CE 399] or a rifle or fingerprints. Nothing was done right. It was a completely botched investigation . . . .[2]

    In point of fact, there is no chain of custody issue. The Warren Commission worked hard in 1964 to establish how CE 399 got from Parkland to the FBI Lab on the night of November 22nd. The House Select Committee on Assassinations corroborated the accuracy of the commission’s findings in the late 1970s. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) reaffirmed these findings in 1996. And most recently, the National Archives (NARA), which preserves all assassination artifacts, acted in concert with the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to employ state-of-art imaging that enables researchers to examine CE 399 as never before.

    The issue comes down to whom do you believe: Oliver Stone? Or your own eyes?

When Is the News Media Going to Catch On?

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The National Archives keeps releasing assassination-related records, and the press keeps getting the story wrong.

 

 

By Robert Reynolds

 

    Now that we are roughly mid-way between the last release of JFK assassination records from the National Archives, and the next round, scheduled for December 2022, it seems a good time to take stock of the news coverage we have gotten so far.

    The good news: the fiasco that marred coverage of releases in 2017-2018 was not repeated. The bad news: coverage was still an embarrassing failure.[1]

    Virtually none of the stories this time around accurately conveyed the small amount of new information that was released in December 2021. Instead, story after story about the release of records from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK ARC) featured long summaries of documents previously described in newspapers and government reports from the 1990s, the 1970s, even the 1960s. These summaries were presented as if they were news. This spectacle occurred in publications ranging from the New York Post to The Washington Post, from the Daily Mail to the Daily Beast. Even the venerable AP and that supposed newspaper of record, The New York Times, were not immune.

    Not every outlet faltered, to be sure. Author Gus Russo, writing for the website SpyTalk, observed that “there doesn’t seem to be a truly new document in the batch, just cleaner, transparent versions of previous releases.” Substitute “open in full” for “transparent” and Russo was correct. Meanwhile, Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, told CNN the same thing during an interview, provoking host Michael Smerconish into calling him a “buzzkill.” CNN seems to have listened to Posner, broadcasting fewer decades-old news stories than other outlets.

    After eight rounds of releases from the ARC since July 2017, however, the question remains: why did so many news outlets still get the story so wrong, publishing “olds” instead of “news”? The fundamental reason is that they didn’t understand what was new in the releases. Instead, they thought these “secret” documents were all new information.

    An old saw in journalism, however, is that a story is no better than its sources. Without excusing the reporters who wrote and the editors who published, a major part of the responsibility for the latest misleading news quotient must rest with the sources reporters depended upon—the authors and researchers who actually delve through the assassination-related and cold war documents that constitute the collection. They are one of the primary reasons why so many news organizations do such a poor job of explaining what the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is actually doing.

Assassination: As American as Apple Pie?

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In every campaign [it has been determined] that there have been people—for lack of a better word—stalking candidates with ill intent.

                                                                                                        Eljay B. Bowron
                                                                                                        Director, Secret Service, 1993-1997

 

 

By Mel Ayton

 

    There have been notorious, as well as unknown, assassination attempts, plots, and threats against incumbent US presidents throughout American history, from George Washington to Barack Obama.

    Much less well known is that there have been numerous assassination attempts, threats and plots against men and women running for the presidency, as well as holders of and candidates for the office of vice president. Many of these plotters, fortunately, changed their mind at the last second when confronted by tight security. But some would-be assassins nearly succeeded.

    The Secret Service investigates literally hundreds of assassination threats against candidates during presidential election cycles, and also threats to assassinate vice presidential candidates. Since the agency steadfastly refuses to discuss protective intelligence and methods, no one will ever know for sure though how many plots have been thwarted. One presidential candidate, John Schmitz, once likened the Secret Service to a lighthouse: “you don’t count the ships they save.” Former agent Joseph Petro has opined about the “many times” an attacker was waiting to strike but then aborted his or her mission because of the heavy bodyguard protection around a candidate.[1]

    Many potential assassins have possessed the “means, motive and opportunity” to carry out their act but their plans have been foiled before they could gain any proximity to the candidate. Other armed threateners have gained proximity to their targets and have been in a position to attack. An “attempted assassination,” therefore, can be defined as an armed individual who has approached a presidential candidate with ill intent or waited for an opportunity to kill a candidate even if they have been foiled at the last minute by stringent security or other circumstances. Many would-be assassins who fall under this category are well-known and include the men who shot presidential candidates Robert Kennedy and George Wallace. However, little-known to the general public are the attempts to kill vice presidents, and presidential candidates such as Barry Goldwater, Ted Kennedy, John Lindsay, Eugene McCarthy, George H.W. Bush and Gary Hart.

Vice Presidents

    A general assumption exists that no one has ever attempted to assassinate a sitting vice president, on the grounds that the holder of this office has no real political power and a low profile. An assassin would preferably go after the person with the real power: the president.

    Yet at least two attempts to assassinate a vice president have been documented. One involved Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson (in concert with a simultaneous attack on the president). The other was on Woodrow Wilson’s running mate, Thomas Marshall.

The Making of Richard Nixon

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Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960
Irwin F. Gellman
Yale University Press. 473 pp. $35

 

By Donald A. Ritchie

 

    Unlike the last presidential election, the loser in 1960 did not insist the election was rigged and stolen from him, did not press state officials to overturn the results, and did not whip his supporters into taking mob action, even though he had more legitimate claim to protest. Irwin F. Gellman argues that vote fraud in Illinois and Texas corrupted 1960's “campaign of the century.” His account depicts John F. Kennedy as less of a hero and Richard M. Nixon as less of a villain than they are typically portrayed.

    Gellman takes issue with nearly everyone who has written about that election, and counters with his own prodigious research in a wide range of manuscripts and oral histories. He believes that scholars have favored East Coast sources, particularly the accommodating Kennedy Library, to the detriment of the West Coast-based Nixon Library, whose records he describes as less helpfully organized and more difficult to find.

    Most of all, Gellman rejects the romantic notions of the campaign perpetuated by Theodore H. White’s immensely popular and influential book, The Making of the President 1960. He accuses White of having been seduced by Kennedy, who gave him ready access during the campaign, while Nixon, suspicious of White’s politics, repeatedly declined to be interviewed. Gellman dismisses White for distorting the candidates and the issues and offers his own account as a corrective.

    The election of 1960, whose popular vote was one of the closest presidential contests in history (although the electoral margin was wider), reflected voter uncertainty about both candidates. After eight years of the grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon represented a younger generation, more risky and less reassuring. Both were political centrists and Cold War anticommunists. Both straddled parties that were internally divided between liberal and conservative wings. And both tried to appeal to black voters in the North without alienating white segregationists in the South. Kennedy faced suspicion due to his Catholicism, Nixon for perceptions of past cutthroat politics. Doubts about both candidates persisted and the polls remained evenly divided throughout the race, with the lead tipping back and forth as Americans tried to make up their minds.

    The question was how accurately voters perceived the choice. Gellman faults the media for not presenting a more honest picture of Kennedy’s dicey health and philandering, and of the immense amount of money his wealthy family poured into the campaign for legitimate and illegitimate expenses. Although most newspapers endorsed Nixon—who was favored by their conservative publishers--the leading national news reporters liked Kennedy and distrusted Nixon, shaping their coverage. At the time, reporters followed a code that the private conduct of a politician was off limits unless it affected public behavior. Like alcoholism, adultery was a bipartisan failing, which kept the parties from exploiting it as an issue. Libel suits also posed potential peril in the days before the Supreme Court’s Sullivan decision in 1964. Even if reporters had tried to file such stories, editors would have kept them from print.

Once More ‘Round the Plaza

 

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By Robert Reynolds

 

    Once again the National Archives is preparing to release previously redacted documents from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK ARC). And once again the idea is becoming rampant that significant and newsworthy information on the assassination of President Kennedy 58 years ago will soon be revealed.

    News coverage of the coming releases started out muted this time around compared to the last big releases, which occurred from July 2017 to April 2018. It picked up markedly, however, when President Biden released a memo on October 22 that spelled out short- to long-range plans for the collection.

    The memo called for a first release of redacted documents that agencies no longer wish to withhold in mid-December, then another, larger, release by December next year. The memo also mandated a boat-load of paperwork for agencies to fill out if they want to postpone anything past that date. A longer-range element of the plan calls for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the federal agency that houses assassination-related materials, to scan the entire collection and put it on-line. How long that will take is not spelled out in the memo.

    Reaction to Biden’s memo ranged from yawns to apoplectic complaints that Biden has sold out to pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and is suppressing incriminating documents.

    That a collection of mostly paper documents can stimulate such passions is a tribute to the depth of the national trauma inflicted by the assassination. Given the confusing result of the last releases, it is also understandable that people might think there are still important documents left unreleased. A closer look at NARA’s latest data on the ARC, however, reveals just how unlikely this is.

 

The JFK Database

    The 2017-2018 releases from NARA were confusing, first, because it was unclear how much material was from documents previously withheld in full, and second, because it was equally unclear how much was from documents that had been previously released in part. This should not have been the case.[1]

    The primary reason for the uncertainty was outdated information in the JFK database, the computer listing of metadata for most records in the collection. The creation of the database had been mandated by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the 1992 public law that established the JFK archival collection in the first place. The purpose of the database was to provide a detailed index to the contents of the collection, including basic information for every record, such as the title and date of the document, the agency that generated the record, number of pages, and so on.

    The main problem that led to the confusion was a failure to update the release status of each record. Why was this data field not better maintained? During the five years the database was being assembled, 1993 to 1998, there were frequent changes in the status of records. Agencies argued with the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), the limited-term panel created to oversee the assembly and release of the JFK records, about which documents counted as assassination-related records, and what standards should apply for withholding documents in full or redacting portions of their text. These status changes were not always recorded in the database. With more than three hundred thousand records in the database, that should not be surprising.

The Homophobic Backdrop to Garrison’s Persecution of Clay Shaw

 

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Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime
Alecia P. Long
University of North Carolina Press. 247 pp. $28

 

 

By Martin J. Kelly, Jr.

 

 

    Conspiracy accounts of the JFK assassination in 1963 have flourished for almost six decades since the Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. A range of conspiratorial scenarios, vivified by books, movies and TV docudramas, orbit public awareness as cultural truisms. While Jack Ruby’s murder of the assassin in Dallas on live TV, two days after JFK was gunned down, provided the initial thrust for the conspiracy movement, it is Jim Garrison’s New Orleans 1967-69 prosecution of Clay Shaw for JFK’s murder that seems to thrive as an iconic modulus against Oswald’s status as the sole perpetrator.

    Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, used the Garrison prosecution as the Rosetta stone to construct a three-hour narrative of conspiracy. Garrison was not only an advisor but made a cameo in the film as Chief Justice Earl Warren, a cruel casting if there ever was one. JFK spun a vivid tapestry of plots and sub-plots populated by flamboyant characters and exerted a strong influence on the public sensibility about the case. The film was a catalyst behind The John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that an independent panel review all the government’s assassination-related records, particularly documents still protected for reasons of national security.

    When the independent panel (aka the Assassination Records Review Board) finished in 1998, the promise to completely release all government records by 2017 became another pacemaker for the incessant drumbeat of conspiracy in the assassination research community. After a large volume of records was made public in 2017, nothing new to the case seemed to capture the imagination of the research community. But, as if a coda, in July 2021 Oliver Stone appeared at the Cannes Film Festival with his new documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. To the press he said, “. . . an important bookend to my 1991 film. It ties up many loose threads, and hopefully repudiates much of the ignorance around the case and the movie.” James DiEugenio, whose book, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case is a long and detailed defense of Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw, is listed as a writer of the documentary.

    Now Alecia Long’s monograph emerges as an interesting amplification of the Garrison case. Cruising for Conspirators is not a typical screed of conspiracy-or-not arguments that characterize the JFK assassination literature. Professor Long has produced, instead, a solidly researched and expertly written academic history book. Thirty years ago, before Post-Modernism opened up academic disciplines to include marginalized social groups, such an enterprise might not have seen the light of day. In our present historical moment, though, Professor Long excavates clearly the role played by homosexuality for cultural ideation in ‘60s New Orleans when Garrison launched his crusade against Clay Shaw, a gay defendant.

    Cruising uses primary sources such as official investigators’ notes, personal papers, newspaper and magazine articles by journalists in contact with Garrison’s prosecution, and diaries, court records, and trial transcripts. Material from well-researched secondary sources is also utilized to render a clear picture of the rational frailty of Garrison’s persecution of Shaw. Two books she cites, Patricia Lambert’s False Witness and Fred Litwin’s On the Trail of Delusion, are filled with primary evidence the Garrison investigation was “hoax-like” from its inception.

    Professor Long navigates through the capricious human contingencies that launched and supported the action against Clay Shaw. She intensifies the previous revelations of Garrison’s rash crusade as a kind of “Emperor’s New Clothes” by meticulous documentation and a fresh look at homosexuality as a factor in Clay Shaw’s prosecution. Her historical analysis of homosexuality in the Garrison context creates an indelible impression of the complexity of a case that turned out to have no evidentiary foundation. While she makes no psycho-historical leaps about Garrison, or his personal psychology, a salient attitude about sadistic gay men as perpetrators of baroque violence is unmistakably present in identifying Clay Shaw as a suspect and persists until his acquittal by a jury in 1969. And, in the course of her exposition, Professor Long sketches out the perilous atmosphere enclosing gays in New Orleans in the ‘60s: because homosexuality was illegal, all sorts of options for defense against charges were more difficult to muster.

The Nixon Precedent

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Nixon’s FBI: Hoover, Watergate, and a Bureau in Crisis
Melissa Graves
Lynne Rienner Publishers. 246 pp. $85

 

 

By James Robenalt

 

    Exactly one thousand twenty-five words comprise Article II of the Constitution, and most of them are devoted to how to select a president of the United States.

    The two hundred or so left over describe a president’s substantive powers. That the key phrase—“executive power shall be vested in the president of the United States”—has been interpreted generously is an understatement. It has become the basis for vast power since it confers unenumerated powers. By contrast, Article I, which governs the Congress, only vests all legislative powers “granted herein”—a limiting qualifier.

    Add sweeping clauses like “commander in chief,” and “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and you arrive at the dilemma posed in Melissa Graves’s new book, Nixon’s FBI, Hoover, Watergate, and a Bureau in Crisis. What are the limits of a president’s control over federal law enforcement, especially when the crimes at issue may involve the president in either his/her private or elected capacity? This issue, in turn, raises the question of the government’s power to surveil its citizens, including citizens who may be considered political dissidents and not seditious criminals. That question is at the heart of the present danger posed by domestic extremists or terrorists who have grown exponentially during the Trump administration.

    This makes Nixon’s FBI an important read.

    An assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel, Melissa Graves started out to write about the fundamental conflict between the FBI’s duties, as the premier federal investigative agency, and the fact that it answers to the president while also investigating said president from time to time. Her focus was the Nixon administration, when this conflict was in sharper relief, owing to the Watergate scandal, than at any other time save for the past four years. Eventually her research encompassed the courageous FBI agents who pursued the Watergate investigation despite all the headwinds from higher-ups to constrict the search for the truth—including, as it turned out, a higher-up named Richard M. Nixon. Special agents like Angelo Lano, John Mindermann, Daniel Mahan, Paul Magallanes, and John Clynick are profiled in an important chapter about the investigation of the break-in by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. These agents are depicted, correctly,  as being many steps ahead of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. While Woodward and Bernstein are celebrated in history as the “intrepid” reporters who cracked the Watergate case, in reality it was the hard work of these FBI agents who simply would not be waylaid.