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Lee Israel

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  1. That doesn't answer the question of why his name is David B. Henschel in the e-mail, since the e-mail appears to have been archived by the IETF exactly as received, i.e. from "David B. Henschel." You mean Virginia Commonwealth University identified him as such in that era when university - assigned e-mail accounts were a new phenomenon. I can tell you they got his name wrong. It's Herschel, and the middle initial is wrong. If you mean that VCU identified him as "David B. Henschel" by getting his name wrong and assigning him an e-mail account under that name, I guess that would explain the wrong name in the e-mail. In such a case, one might expect him to point out this mistake and give his real name in the text of the message, but perhaps he didn't feel that was important or he did not wish to do so. In any case that seems like a plausible explanation of the mistaken name. Thanks. I had trouble at Hunter College in 1997 when I took evening classes. My tuition included an e-mail account on the campus network. I had no computer at home, nor did yahoo e-mail exist in 1997. Hunter gave me the address of lee_anne_israel @ ... etcetera. My middle name doesn't even begin with "A." This happened in mid - town Manhattan, less than a mile from the United Nations and Rockefeller Center. And it happened four years after Virginia Commonwealth University struggled to get the students' names right when they created e-mail accounts. David told me the campus had no fiberoptic links for the computers until spring 1994. He sent the e-mail in November of 1993. Why didn't the students organize themselves and do something about it ? You have to know the VCU campus. It's in a high - crime neighborhood. David told me the journalism school sucks, very few students work in journalism ten years later and the only stable career path is health sciences. It doesn't have a law school. Of course, it has a few computer science people, but they don't socialize with the journalism people or the pre - med people. Yet another clique is the one of students who just stepped off a plane from South Korea or Ethiopia. Try assigning an e-mail account to Quong Ping Xian in 1993 when your local area network doesn't reach the registration office where Xian registered yesterday minutes after giving all her cash to an airport cab driver who told her Woodrow Wilson is on the one dollar bill.
  2. I have corrected it to David Herschel. Did you ever find out anything about Herschel? Was he a student journalist as he claimed? Yes, he sent me Xeroxes from his campus newspaper with his byline. He had an aunt who was a stenographer at the CIA in the early to mid 1950s. But he felt he did NOT have an opening with the aunt to ask her about it. In the early 1950s the aunt was under strict instructions NOT to discuss anything with her family. In later years she and her sister -- David's mother -- never even said the letters CIA to each other. They did discuss the National Institutes of Health where the aunt worked in the 1970s and early 1980s, again as a stenographer. David learned of the CIA connection from a personnel file of a grandfather who proofread the Congressional Record in the early 1950s. The grandfather had to state in writing if he had any children who worked for the U.S. government. If so, where ? Grandfather died before David could know him. The grandchildren, aunts and uncles are scattered across the United States now. They never see each other anymore. Many extended families in the United States fragment as people get graduate degrees and better job offers 3,000 miles away. They barely have enough free time to update parents and siblings on what's new.
  3. The name may be wrong, but I have to question this for a couple of reasons. The email from “David B. Henschel” is archived at the following URL, which would indicate that the sender himself got his own name wrong, and not the folks at Cool List Digest: http://web.archive.org/web/20041106221932/.../1993/1296.html Right. That e-mail has been on the Internet since its early days in 1993 when it had no graphics and was dominated by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Mr. Herschel evidently e-mailed something to the IETF, which had a way of preserving it for posterity. Secondly, “David B. Henschel” identifies himself in the email as a journalism student in Virginia in 1993. You mean Virginia Commonwealth University identified him as such in that era when university - assigned e-mail accounts were a new phenomenon. I can tell you they got his name wrong. It's Herschel, and the middle initial is wrong. I am Lee Israel, the best authority on Dorothy Kilgallen. I talked by phone and corresponded with Mr. Herschel about the Kilgallen Mystery several times in the mid 1990s. The "Internet" meant nothing to me then, so he didn't bother to describe his adventures with the IETF. According to the following Google page, “David Henschel” was a founding editor of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs in 1997. The same David Henschel who was studying journalism in 1993? No. One is Henschel, other is Herschel. The only time my conversations with David delved into international affairs was when we discussed Dr. Ibne Hassan, an academically recognized expert on the International Court of Justice (based in the Netherlands) who boarded at Dorothy Kilgallen's townhouse toward the end of her life. He is the "exchange student' in the "epilogue" of my book. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=david...G=Google+Search The URL listed for the journal cannot be accessed without a password. However, David Henschel is also listed as a “friend” of the journal at this site: See above. If John Simkin is reading this, will you please correct David's name on your "spartacus / schoolnet" essays on Kilgallen and Ron Pataky ? Errors there make me look bad, too. http://journal.georgetown.edu/donations.cfm
  4. Yes. He says his mother lay dying of leukemia for months so she couldn't have been Kilgallen's source on anything but side effects of medication that was scarcely available then. It was totally irrelevant. I didn't drop the name Judith Campbell Exner, either. Yes, I did know that. I also knew that when Kilgallen visited New Orleans and Dallas, the poor ambassador was preoccupied with his dying wife. Yes. No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts. He had something to do with it. Thank you for this very important information about Ron Pataky. Have you spoken to him lately? Not since 1976. He does not answer my emails. He has also taken down his website on his artwork. This is worth looking at: http://www.scumpa.com/pipermail/cool/1993-...ber/001612.html The people at "cool literary digest" got the guy's name wrong. It's David Herschel, not Henschel. Can you fix it on your web link about Pataky? In it you describe Herschel as an "investigative journalist" who interviewed Pataky in 1993. Herschel told me about their encounter a little later in the 1990s. Did you know he was a great fan of Gordon MacRae? Yes. He also talked a lot about romancing Gordon's daughter Meredith, best known for the 1960s TV sitcom "Petticoat Junction." http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-review...6915034-7891368
  5. Yes. He says his mother lay dying of leukemia for months so she couldn't have been Kilgallen's source on anything but side effects of medication that was scarcely available then. It was totally irrelevant. I didn't drop the name Judith Campbell Exner, either. Yes, I did know that. I also knew that when Kilgallen visited New Orleans and Dallas, the poor ambassador was preoccupied with his dying wife. Yes. No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts. He had something to do with it.
  6. You don't know Florence Pritchett was Kilgallen's source on anything related to the JFK assassination. People have debunked the Pritchett connection in this group before. Search it. Florence died after lying in bed for months with leukemia. She was not a serious journalist. She wrote a column of kitchen recipes in the Sunday Journal American. She wrote nothing more than that during the last ten years of her life. Her son, today a 52 - year - old Massachusetts resident, would like JFK researchers to leave his mother alone. Kilgallen's family, by contrast, doesn't care what you do with her. Have you thought of watching the DVD about Kilgallen in Dallas? You won't find it for sale, but several What's My Line fans have talked about it in their yahoo group. Their group shares an annoying problem with this forum: Everyone refuses to give out a postal address so you can't mail anyone a DVD. You can share a link with a web site. But suppose some good stuff is on a DVD and not a web site?
  7. Sherman Skolnick's chronic paralysis is a non-issue, but two portions of his 1973 testimony before the National Transportation Safety Board lower his credibility. You neglected to mention them. They come from this web site. Dubious Testimony Of Sherman Skolnick First, Mr. Skolnick asserted that Michelle Clark, the pioneering Black television anchorwoman, sat next to Dorothy Hunt on the United Airlines plane. He provided no source. How could Mr. Skolnick or anyone else know the identity of Ms. Hunt's seatmate? We do know Michelle Clark was on the plane, and Mr. Skolnick evidently knows too little about American racism to investigate her as a potential target of a sinister conspiracy. Second, Sherman Skolnick told the following not-very-funny joke at that 1973 hearing of the National Transportation Safety Board. "I am here to admit that I have absolutely no proof whatever that Richard Nixon himself or Edward Carlson, the chairman of United Airlines, was on the plane with a 38 [caliber revolver] and shot Mrs. Hunt." He said this to U.S. government officials who were trying to wrest a positive legacy out of a horrible tragedy that had occurred just a few months earlier. The loved ones of 45 people shattered by said tragedy lived near the NTSB hearing. Some could have been present. The joke suggests Mr. Skolnick had a sinister ulterior motive in the attention he drew to himself many decades before the Internet made such behavior so easy. Conveniently for him, the Internet was available when John Kennedy Jr. died in 1999. Mr. Skolnick used it to milk that aviation disaster, too, for all it was worth.
  8. Nobody said he suffered from it in the 1960s. In the 1960s he was simply resourceless and unfocused. It was in the 1980s that his wife Elaine had to care for him due to Alzheimers. The Dallas Morning News reported this, and the articles are in the Lexis Nexis Universe data base.
  9. As to Pritchett: I spent years on the Dorothy Kilgallen book, spoke with what I assumed were her closest friends, and never once did the name FP come up. They doubtless ran in the same circles and could have appeared together in the Stone Age when radio and TV featured bright New Yorky women giving their arch opinions on everything. That's the only connection I am aware of. And why would DK entrust her secrets - probably Cuba related - to the wife of the ambassador? I read somewhere that FP was in a coma before her death - just about the time that DK was digging up her hottest gems. I don't know what Penn thinks he knows. But absent his knowedge, dying on the same day and being related to Cuba do not make a cogent theory of common involvement.
  10. Lee Israel is the author of three biographies, all chosen by either Book-of-the-Month or Literary Guild: Miss Tallulah Bankhead, Kilgallen (a New York Times best-seller), and Estee Lauder: Beyond the Magic (not her finest moment). She has contributed to sundry national magazines, specializing in personality profiles and satire. Lee lives in New York City with two cats, Tennessee and Tallulah; the latter hides under the bed when any of her fabulous friends visit. When the friends are not so fabulous, Lee joins Tallulah under the bed. Her interest in the Kennedy assassination began when she started investigating the murder of Dorothy Kilgallen.
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