Jump to content
The Education Forum

A Certain Arrogance


Recommended Posts

Introduction to A Certain Arrogance

[NOTE: I have corrected typesetting errors present in the earliest printings and otherwise modestly refined prose in dire need of same.]

To Withdraw From the Tumult of Cemeteries

By Charles R. Drago

human kind

Cannot bear very much reality

-- T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

Let me be clear from the outset: A Certain Arrogance is no more or less “about” the assassination of John F. Kennedy than cancer surgery is “about” the tumor.

George Michael Evica, one of the preeminent prosectors of the malignant growth that disfigured the American body politic on November 22, 1963, for decades has focused his intellect and intuition on the search for a cure for the underlying disease. In the course of forty years of research, analysis, writing, broadcasting, and teaching, he has followed its devastating metastasis through the vital organs of politics (deep and otherwise) to the extremities of business, culture, and religion. All the while he has cut away necrotic tissue and struggled valiantly, in the company of a surgical team as distinguished as it is obscure, to keep the patient alive.

Professor Evica, author of And We Are All Mortal: New Evidence and Analysis in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1975; University of Hartford), can be numbered among the most honored of the so-called second generation of Kennedy assassination researchers. Their labors to refine, reinforce, expand upon, and draw attention to the discoveries of their predecessors validate this direct statement of fact:

Anyone with reasonable access to the evidence in the homicide of JFK who does not conclude that the act was the consequence of a criminal conspiracy is cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.

Conspiracy in the Kennedy killing is as well-established an historical truth as is the Holocaust. Further, those in a position to know this truth who nonetheless choose to deny it in service to the darkest political and cultural agendas are morally akin to Holocaust deniers.

A Certain Arrogance stands as Professor Evica’s response to the unavoidable question: How do we define and effect justice in the wake of the world-historic tragedy in Dallas?

Clearly he understands that, at this late date, being content merely to identify and, if possible, prosecute the conspiracy’s sponsors, facilitators, and mechanics would amount to hollow acts of vengeance. Cleaning and closing the wound while leaving the disease to spread is simply not a survivable option.

With the nobility of knowledge comes obligation: How can we utilize all that has been learned through our post-Dallas experiences to heal and immunize the long-suffering victims of the malady of which the assassination of John F. Kennedy is but the most widely appreciated and putrescent manifestation?

The method by which Professor Evica honors his noblesse oblige is, at first blush, hardly novel. Like many other researchers, he has chosen to begin his exploration by focusing on an aspect of the complex life of the lead character in the assassination drama, Lee Harvey Oswald. To carry the cancer metaphor forward: Think of the falsely accused killer as a tumor cell whose sojourn through the host organism in theory can be traced back to its source.

Oswald’s movements, however, are not easily discerned. False trails and feints abound. Promising clues have been obscured by a host of ham-handed interlopers and sinister obfuscators.

Rather than traverse well-worn pathways, Professor Evica sets out by following one of the few remaining under-examined passages of an otherwise over-mapped life. His uniquely painstaking investigation of Oswald’s involvement with Albert Schweitzer College (hereinafter ASC), including the processes and implications of his application, acceptance, and nonattendance, has led both to major discoveries and to significant refinements of previously developed hypotheses.

In the former category our attention is drawn to what Professor Evica terms “one of U.S. intelligence’s last important secrets,” the involvement by the Central Intelligence Agency and psychological operations (psyops) in student and youth organizations – especially those with religious affiliations.

The U.S. government’s faith-based initiatives, it seems, did not originate with George W. Bush’s alleged administration.

As he meticulously follows Oswald’s ASC paper trail, the author is led not toward the Swiss campus, but rather into brick walls and empty rooms. A prime example: Oswald applied to the college on March 19, 1959. Less than two months later, when the chairman of ASC’s American Admissions Committee (and, at the time, the pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, Rhode Island) submitted to Switzerland the applications and related materials of prospective American students, Oswald’s folder was included.

Today those documents – critically important evidence in the investigation of the crime of the 20th century – do not exist in any official repository. This in spite of the fact that copies, or perhaps even originals, were in the Providence ASC file seized by the FBI after the assassination. This troubling absence, within a broader context fully substantiated in A Certain Arrogance, inevitably leads the author to conclude that Oswald’s application to ASC is “a still-protected American intelligence operation.”

I do not wish to spoil the bittersweet joy of discovery to be experienced as readers accompany Professor Evica on his journey through unknown territory. Yet the methodology and ultimate value of A Certain Arrogance as a “whodunit” (as opposed to the “howdunit” nature of the overwhelming majority of JFK assassination-related volumes) must be fully appreciated. To discover the identities of Oswald’s early manipulators is to be drawn into the necrotic nucleus of the disease. And so, thanks to the Evica investigation of the ASC charade, we are left with a preliminary, shattering conclusion regarding the “who” we seek.

“Whoever directed the Oswald [assassination] Game was thoroughly knowledgeable about both the OSS’s and CIA’s counterintelligence manipulations of Quakers, Unitarians, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed clerics and World Council of Churches officials as intelligence and espionage contacts, assets, and informants.”

From the mountains and snowfields and quaint villages of Switzerland, Professor Evica escorts us through a darker, more mysterious inner landscape. Examinations of what he neatly summarizes as “U.S. covert intelligence operating under humanitarian cover” leads us to a confrontation with psychological operations – psyops and its propaganda, disinformation, and morale operations alter egos.

Professor Evica was the first to understand the Kennedy assassination and other intelligence operations as by-design theatrical productions, replete with all the essential elements of drama – including shameless manipulations of audiences’ minds and emotions. Within these pages he further supports and refines this hypothesis.

“Psychological manipulations of individuals and groups, whatever the procedure may have been called in the 18th and 19th centuries, drew upon discoveries in anatomy, mesmerism, hypnotism, counseling, studies in hysteria, rhetorical theory, psychoanalysis, advertising, behavior modification, and psychiatry. In the same periods, the literary forms of irony, satire, and comedy and the less reputable verbal arts of slander, libel, and manufactured lies were applied.”

Before we are tempted to argue that the realities of war often require an honorable combatant to mimic, for a limited period and with noble intent, the darker designs of an evil foe, Professor Evica reminds us that, “Most of these genres and strategies were enlisted in the service of social, class, and political power.” He then identifies the likely director of the aforementioned Oswald Game.

C. D. Jackson was “the psyops expert who organized and ran General Dwight David Eisenhower’s Psychological Warfare Division at SHAEF … an official of the Office of War Information … [and] a veteran of the North African campaign.”

Jackson’s career and its impact upon American history, heretofore marginally understood at best (he is widely identified as the Time-Life editor who purchased the Zapruder film) are major focuses of A Certain Arrogance. Nowhere is both the validity of Albert Einstein’s observation that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” and the contemporary relevance of Professor Evica’s discoveries more clearly evident than in the author’s exposition of the Jackson oeuvre. In particular we are drawn to the discussion of how mass media early on was identified as a key weapon in the mind control arsenal.

In a 1946 letter to Jackson, General Robert McClure, at one time Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence for the European theater, boasted to his psyops counterpart of the scope of their manipulation.

“We now control 137 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theaters, 642 movies, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers, and conduct about 15 public opinion surveys a month, as well as publish one newspaper with 1,500,000 circulation … run the AP of Germany, and operate 20 library centers.”

Fairness and balance, it seems, did not originate with the Fox Network’s alleged news division.

Haunting the pages of A Certain Arrogance in the company of the shades of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald is a revelation so menacing in its assault on convention as to provoke a reflexive shielding of our eyes from its searing light. Yet the author cannot spare us the psychic pain that is the unavoidable side effect of his scholarship, insofar as such suffering remains the sine qua non for the eradication of our common malady and the return to robust good health.

Within the nucleus of the disease, Professor Evica has discovered “a treasonous cabal of hard-line American and Soviet intelligence agents whose masters were above Cold War differences.”

In light of this revelation, we are left with no choice but to embrace a new paradigm of world power.

Professor Evica reveals the universally accepted vertical, East v. West Cold War confrontation to have been a sophistic construct, illusory in terms of its advertised raison d’etre, all too real in its bloody consequences, created by the powerful yet outnumbered manipulators of perception to protect what they recognized to be an all too fragile reality. The true division of power, he teaches us, then as now is drawn on a horizontal axis.

Envision the earth so bifurcated, with the line drawn not at the equator, but rather at the Arctic Circle. Above the line are the powerful few – the “haves.” Below the line, in vastly superior numbers, are the powerless many – the “have-nots.”

Can we bear so much reality?

While contemplating the implications of Professor Evica’s research, I was reminded of how Francis Ford Coppola struggled to find the best thematic hook on which to hang the plot of The Godfather, Part III. It is said that he considered and ultimately rejected a treatment of the Kennedy assassination as the most cinematically viable expression of systemic evil in full flower. Instead – perhaps wisely, perhaps not – he opted to dramatize the Vatican Bank scandal.

Upon initial examination, the conjoined stories of the looting of the Banco Ambrosiano, the perfidy of Roberto Calvi and P2, the assassination of John Paul I, and the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church at its highest levels present as the cellular components of yet another tumor, arguably the most horrific manifestation imaginable of the disease being probed by Professor Evica.

We are incredulous. We are outraged.

Then reason returns.

The manipulations of religious institutions by elements of the deep political structure for unholy purposes should provoke neither surprise nor anger. For is not organized religion merely politics by other means?

The assault on Albert Schweitzer, however, is another matter.

“The ethical spirit … must be awakened anew,” Dr. Schweitzer instructed at the height of the Cold War. The defiling of the name and the perversion of the mission of that saintly man no doubt provoked sweet satisfaction within the breasts of those for whom a worldview informed by ethics is simply not a survivable option.

What then of justice? Have we any reason to expect the guilty to be punished, the disease to be eradicated. The novelist Jim Harrison:

“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth … We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle … the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not; immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt; note Jesus’ howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity.”

It is for us to deliver justice and heal ourselves, to muster the courage to ask questions and the strength to endure answers.

Within the pages of A Certain Arrogance, George Michael Evica leads by example.

Edited by Charles Drago
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Introduction to A Certain Arrogance

[NOTE: I have corrected typesetting errors present in the earliest printings and otherwise modestly refined prose in dire need of same.]

To Withdraw From the Tumult of Cemeteries

By Charles R. Drago

human kind

Cannot bear very much reality

-- T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

Let me be clear from the outset: A Certain Arrogance is no more or less “about” the assassination of John F. Kennedy than cancer surgery is “about” the tumor.

George Michael Evica, one of the preeminent prosectors of the malignant growth that disfigured the American body politic on November 22, 1963, for decades has focused his intellect and intuition on the search for a cure for the underlying disease. In the course of forty years of research, analysis, writing, broadcasting, and teaching, he has followed its devastating metastasis through the vital organs of politics (deep and otherwise) to the extremities of business, culture, and religion. All the while he has cut away necrotic tissue and struggled valiantly, in the company of a surgical team as distinguished as it is obscure, to keep the patient alive.

Professor Evica, author of And We Are All Mortal: New Evidence and Analysis in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1975; University of Hartford), can be numbered among the most honored of the so-called second generation of Kennedy assassination researchers. Their labors to refine, reinforce, expand upon, and draw attention to the discoveries of their predecessors validate this direct statement of fact:

Anyone with reasonable access to the evidence in the homicide of JFK who does not conclude that the act was the consequence of a criminal conspiracy is cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.

Conspiracy in the Kennedy killing is as well-established an historical truth as is the Holocaust. Further, those in a position to know this truth who nonetheless choose to deny it in service to the darkest political and cultural agendas are morally akin to Holocaust deniers.

A Certain Arrogance stands as Professor Evica’s response to the unavoidable question: How do we define and effect justice in the wake of the world-historic tragedy in Dallas?

Clearly he understands that, at this late date, being content merely to identify and, if possible, prosecute the conspiracy’s sponsors, facilitators, and mechanics would amount to hollow acts of vengeance. Cleaning and closing the wound while leaving the disease to spread is simply not a survivable option.

With the nobility of knowledge comes obligation: How can we utilize all that has been learned through our post-Dallas experiences to heal and immunize the long-suffering victims of the malady of which the assassination of John F. Kennedy is but the most widely appreciated and putrescent manifestation?

The method by which Professor Evica honors his noblesse oblige is, at first blush, hardly novel. Like many other researchers, he has chosen to begin his exploration by focusing on an aspect of the complex life of the lead character in the assassination drama, Lee Harvey Oswald. To carry the cancer metaphor forward: Think of the falsely accused killer as a tumor cell whose sojourn through the host organism in theory can be traced back to its source.

Oswald’s movements, however, are not easily discerned. False trails and feints abound. Promising clues have been obscured by a host of ham-handed interlopers and sinister obfuscators.

Rather than traverse well-worn pathways, Professor Evica sets out by following one of the few remaining under-examined passages of an otherwise over-mapped life. His uniquely painstaking investigation of Oswald’s involvement with Albert Schweitzer College (hereinafter ASC), including the processes and implications of his application, acceptance, and nonattendance, has led both to major discoveries and to significant refinements of previously developed hypotheses.

In the former category our attention is drawn to what Professor Evica terms “one of U.S. intelligence’s last important secrets,” the involvement by the Central Intelligence Agency and psychological operations (psyops) in student and youth organizations – especially those with religious affiliations.

The U.S. government’s faith-based initiatives, it seems, did not originate with George W. Bush’s alleged administration.

As he meticulously follows Oswald’s ASC paper trail, the author is led not toward the Swiss campus, but rather into brick walls and empty rooms. A prime example: Oswald applied to the college on March 19, 1959. Less than two months later, when the chairman of ASC’s American Admissions Committee (and, at the time, the pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, Rhode Island) submitted to Switzerland the applications and related materials of prospective American students, Oswald’s folder was included.

Today those documents – critically important evidence in the investigation of the crime of the 20th century – do not exist in any official repository. This in spite of the fact that copies, or perhaps even originals, were in the Providence ASC file seized by the FBI after the assassination. This troubling absence, within a broader context fully substantiated in A Certain Arrogance, inevitably leads the author to conclude that Oswald’s application to ASC is “a still-protected American intelligence operation.”

I do not wish to spoil the bittersweet joy of discovery to be experienced as readers accompany Professor Evica on his journey through unknown territory. Yet the methodology and ultimate value of A Certain Arrogance as a “whodunit” (as opposed to the “howdunit” nature of the overwhelming majority of JFK assassination-related volumes) must be fully appreciated. To discover the identities of Oswald’s early manipulators is to be drawn into the necrotic nucleus of the disease. And so, thanks to the Evica investigation of the ASC charade, we are left with a preliminary, shattering conclusion regarding the “who” we seek.

“Whoever directed the Oswald [assassination] Game was thoroughly knowledgeable about both the OSS’s and CIA’s counterintelligence manipulations of Quakers, Unitarians, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed clerics and World Council of Churches officials as intelligence and espionage contacts, assets, and informants.”

From the mountains and snowfields and quaint villages of Switzerland, Professor Evica escorts us through a darker, more mysterious inner landscape. Examinations of what he neatly summarizes as “U.S. covert intelligence operating under humanitarian cover” leads us to a confrontation with psychological operations – psyops and its propaganda, disinformation, and morale operations alter egos.

Professor Evica was the first to understand the Kennedy assassination and other intelligence operations as by-design theatrical productions, replete with all the essential elements of drama – including shameless manipulations of audiences’ minds and emotions. Within these pages he further supports and refines this hypothesis.

“Psychological manipulations of individuals and groups, whatever the procedure may have been called in the 18th and 19th centuries, drew upon discoveries in anatomy, mesmerism, hypnotism, counseling, studies in hysteria, rhetorical theory, psychoanalysis, advertising, behavior modification, and psychiatry. In the same periods, the literary forms of irony, satire, and comedy and the less reputable verbal arts of slander, libel, and manufactured lies were applied.”

Before we are tempted to argue that the realities of war often require an honorable combatant to mimic, for a limited period and with noble intent, the darker designs of an evil foe, Professor Evica reminds us that, “Most of these genres and strategies were enlisted in the service of social, class, and political power.” He then identifies the likely director of the aforementioned Oswald Game.

C. D. Jackson was “the psyops expert who organized and ran General Dwight David Eisenhower’s Psychological Warfare Division at SHAEF … an official of the Office of War Information … [and] a veteran of the North African campaign.”

Jackson’s career and its impact upon American history, heretofore marginally understood at best (he is widely identified as the Time-Life editor who purchased the Zapruder film) are major focuses of A Certain Arrogance. Nowhere is both the validity of Albert Einstein’s observation that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” and the contemporary relevance of Professor Evica’s discoveries more clearly evident than in the author’s exposition of the Jackson oeuvre. In particular we are drawn to the discussion of how mass media early on was identified as a key weapon in the mind control arsenal.

In a 1946 letter to Jackson, General Robert McClure, at one time Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence for the European theater, boasted to his psyops counterpart of the scope of their manipulation.

“We now control 137 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theaters, 642 movies, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers, and conduct about 15 public opinion surveys a month, as well as publish one newspaper with 1,500,000 circulation … run the AP of Germany, and operate 20 library centers.”

Fairness and balance, it seems, did not originate with the Fox Network’s alleged news division.

Haunting the pages of A Certain Arrogance in the company of the shades of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald is a revelation so menacing in its assault on convention as to provoke a reflexive shielding of our eyes from its searing light. Yet the author cannot spare us the psychic pain that is the unavoidable side effect of his scholarship, insofar as such suffering remains the sine qua non for the eradication of our common malady and the return to robust good health.

Within the nucleus of the disease, Professor Evica has discovered “a treasonous cabal of hard-line American and Soviet intelligence agents whose masters were above Cold War differences.”

In light of this revelation, we are left with no choice but to embrace a new paradigm of world power.

Professor Evica reveals the universally accepted vertical, East v. West Cold War confrontation to have been a sophistic construct, illusory in terms of its advertised raison d’etre, all too real in its bloody consequences, created by the powerful yet outnumbered manipulators of perception to protect what they recognized to be an all too fragile reality. The true division of power, he teaches us, then as now is drawn on a horizontal axis.

Envision the earth so bifurcated, with the line drawn not at the equator, but rather at the Arctic Circle. Above the line are the powerful few – the “haves.” Below the line, in vastly superior numbers, are the powerless many – the “have-nots.”

Can we bear so much reality?

While contemplating the implications of Professor Evica’s research, I was reminded of how Francis Ford Coppola struggled to find the best thematic hook on which to hang the plot of The Godfather, Part III. It is said that he considered and ultimately rejected a treatment of the Kennedy assassination as the most cinematically viable expression of systemic evil in full flower. Instead – perhaps wisely, perhaps not – he opted to dramatize the Vatican Bank scandal.

Upon initial examination, the conjoined stories of the looting of the Banco Ambrosiano, the perfidy of Roberto Calvi and P2, the assassination of John Paul I, and the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church at its highest levels present as the cellular components of yet another tumor, arguably the most horrific manifestation imaginable of the disease being probed by Professor Evica.

We are incredulous. We are outraged.

Then reason returns.

The manipulations of religious institutions by elements of the deep political structure for unholy purposes should provoke neither surprise nor anger. For is not organized religion merely politics by other means?

The assault on Albert Schweitzer, however, is another matter.

“The ethical spirit … must be awakened anew,” Dr. Schweitzer instructed at the height of the Cold War. The defiling of the name and the perversion of the mission of that saintly man no doubt provoked sweet satisfaction within the breasts of those for whom a worldview informed by ethics is simply not a survivable option.

What then of justice? Have we any reason to expect the guilty to be punished, the disease to be eradicated. The novelist Jim Harrison:

“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth … We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle … the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not; immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt; note Jesus’ howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity.”

It is for us to deliver justice and heal ourselves, to muster the courage to ask questions and the strength to endure answers.

Within the pages of A Certain Arrogance, George Michael Evica leads by example.

Brilliant Charles, beautifully written. Another "must have" book.

LHO's life is one of never- ending facination. Research like this is deeply rewarding.

And thanks to John B. for starting the Evica thread to begin with.

Others have reached the same conclusions regarding the true purpose of the "Cold War". And certainly

LHO's "defection" to Russia. It's all "smoke and mirrors".

The deceptions astound the mind.

And yes, the all- too- real blood.

Dawn

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not to steal George Michael's thunder but C. D. Jackson, Charles Douglas Douglas, was in Wickliffe Draper's

sister's wedding party in 1924 because they were apparently childhood buddies and lifetime friends. Douglas

also worked with Clare Booth Luce whose husband, Henry Luce was Editor in Chief there when the Zapruder

Film was purchased and possibly concealed by him as a favor to Draper. This was one of the first evidence

that I found tying Draper to the JFK conundrum and it only whetted my appetite.

Now Draper's complicity in the JFK conundrum has been solidified and triangulated thoroughly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...