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Dorothy Kilgallen


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If Kilgallen was murdered, it may not be because of what she knew, but rather because of what she was determined to find out. Kilgallen was by far the most high-profile person to raise doubts about the Warren Commission, and that alone could have made her a target.

And her murder could have been a warning to any other high-profile media persons who got too curious about the assassination. That's why high-profile media persons (e.g. Peter Jennings leaps to mind) have been toeing the official line for all these years. I call this the Kilgallen Syndrome.

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[Dominick Dunne wrote:] " I forgot to tell the woman who called in that no notes or tapes from the Ruby interview [that Kilgallen had with Jack Ruby] have ever been found. Kilgallen told people that she was going to break the case, so Ruby must have told her something that someone important didn’t want her to print. At least that’s my interpretation.

I'm not so sure that Kilgallen's determination to "break the case" means that Ruby had given her any real information. It may only mean that, like many researchers, she was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. With her background in crime reporting, no doubt she felt qualified for the task.

[DD wrote:] "She once wrote in her column that if Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow ever told the whole story of her life with Oswald it would “split open the front pages of the newspapers all over the world,” according to Lee Israel in her biography of Kilgallen."

To my mind this passage suggests that, at least at the time she wrote this, Kilgallen was not really clued in to the forces behind the assassination. After more than 40 years of research, I doubt if anyone (besides Norman Mailer) believes that Lee Oswald's relationship with Marina can tell us anything about who killed JFK.

If I have followed this thread correctly, it is not established that Kilgallen gave her notes to Florence Pritchett Smith. It seems implausible that she would impose in this manner on a friend who was literally on her death-bed.

If Kilgallen was murdered, it may not be because of what she knew, but rather because of what she was determined to find out. Kilgallen was by far the most high-profile person to raise doubts about the Warren Commission, and that alone could have made her a target.

Ron is probably right about the murder being a “warning”. If not, it was a very careless operation (I do not go along with the idea that the CIA is an incompetent organization).

Dorothy Kilgallen may or may not have got important information from Jack Ruby. What we do know about her is that she had very good sources from within the CIA. For example, she was the first person to publish an article about the CIA and the Mafia working together to assassinate Castro. She also published a story that attempted to link JFK and RFK with the death of Marilyn Monroe. Kilgallen, like Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, allowed herself to be used by the CIA and FBI. However, she was in financial difficulties in the 1960s and had a good reason to publish a book exposing the truth behind the assassination. The important point is that Kilgallen’s manuscript was never found. Why was it destroyed?

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However, she was in financial difficulties in the 1960s and had a good reason to publish a book exposing the truth behind the assassination. The important point is that Kilgallen’s manuscript was never found. Why was it destroyed?

I have misplaced my copy of Lee Israel's bio of Kilgallen. Do we know for a fact that Kilgallen was working on a manuscript on the JFK assassination? Is there any evidence that she had completed any significant amount of writing on the project? Did anyone ever see this manuscript, or did she tell anyone about its existence?

I find it hard to believe that any of her CIA/FBI contacts would or could give her any inside information on the plot, and therefore she would have to rely primarily on analyzing the evidence in the 26 volumes. Do we know if she had spent any significant time with the 26 volumes? This is a long and difficult process and was much more difficult in 1964-5, before publication of Sylvia Meagher's Subject Index. I gather she had some conversations with Mark Lane. Did she contact other early researchers like Sylvia Meagher or Leo Sauvage?

Question for Lee Israel: Did you ever try to get anyone in the police department or the DA's office to reopen the Kilgallen case in light of what you discovered about the Out-of-Towner?

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  • 3 weeks later...

CNN LARRY KING LIVE

Larry King Interviews Dominick Dunne

Aired February 4, 2006 - 21:00 ET

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0602/04/lkl.01.html

CALLER: Hello, Mr. Dunne, have you ever thought about investigating the mysterious death of Dorothy Kilgallen, and did you know Dorothy?

DUNNE: Well, you know, I actually only met her. I can't say I know her, but you know, you're absolutely right. That is a mysterious death.

KING: Sure is.

DUNNE: Absolutely, and you know, they said...

KING: By the way for the audience, she was a major reporter. She was on "What's My Line?"

DUNNE: Oh, yes and "The New York Journal America."

KING: She was a guest on my radio show here. And she wrote for "The New York Journal." She was a gossip columnist.

DUNNE: Gossip columnist, but she was also the daughter of a crime writer. And she was herself a brilliant crime writer. She covered trials.

KING: And she cohosted a radio show called, "Dorothy and Dick."

DUNNE: "Dorothy and Dick," and she was on "What's My Line?" with Arlene Francis. Do you remember all of that?

KING: And her death was mysterious.

DUNNE: Yes, and they said it was a suicide of pills, but you know, the pills had not dissolved as they found during the autopsy. And she had just, you know--as a lot of people connected with the Kennedy assassination, who had mysterious deaths over the years.

And she had just had the first, and I believe only interview with Jack Ruby, the guy who shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Do you remember that day, Larry, and the thing?

KING: Yes.

DUNNE: And it was right after that, that she died. I mean, I think she had some material, something, something that they didn't want, somebody didn't want to come out. That's a great question whoever called that in. And, you know, I don't think we'd ever find anything this many years later. But it's a mysterious death.

KING: No. We'll take a break and be back with more of Dominick Dunne right after this.

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I'm not sure whether this ground has been covered but, I came accross a small bit of information while looking at Ron Pataky's profile on Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3N6S...1157309-1677722

In it he describes one of his books "HELP! I'M BEING HELD A PRISONER IN A RANSOM NOTE FACTORY!" as having received a great review from William F Buckley junior. Is it possible that Pataky was friendly with Buckley, who trained with the CIA in 1951 and was sent to mexico city under howard hunt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley,_Jr.

An interesting if somewhat tenuous link here.

There are some interesting quotes from Buckley on the wikipedia page, which include a debate with gore Vidal

"At one point Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”, to which Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered.”

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbuckleyW.htm

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5078

John

Edited by John Geraghty
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  • 1 year later...
Here is a conversation that took place between Lee Israel and myself on the Forum on 20th December, 2005.

John Simkin: In your book you make a lot of Kilgallen’s relationship with the man you call the "Out-of-Towner". In fact, you imply that he was in some way involved in her death. Is it correct that the man’s name is really Ron Pataky?

Lee Israel: Yes.

John Simkin: Did you find any evidence that Ron Pataky was working for the CIA?

Lee Israel: No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts.

John Simkin: Do you believe that Ron Pataky murdered Dorothy Kilgallen?

Lee Israel: He had something to do with it.

Here is a photograph of Ron Pataky with Dorothy Kilgallen:

post-7-1193074775_thumb.jpg

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  • 1 year later...

I have just discovered that J. Edgar Hoover used Dorothy Kilgallen via Richard Berlin, to spread the rumour that JFK was involved in the Profumo case. On 23rd June, 1963, Dorothy Kilgallen published an article in the New York Journal-American: "One of the biggest names in American politics - a man who holds a very high elective office - has been injected into Britain's vice-security scandal." This was a reference to the John Profumo and Christine Keeler affair. Kilgallen went on to describe one of the girls as "a beautiful Chinese-American girl now in London." She added that the "highest authorities" had "identified her as Suzy Chang."

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My page on Dorothy Kilgallen has been since 2000 either number one or number two in search-engines. The only real rival was Wikipedia. The other one that consistently appeared near the top was the page created by John McAdams. Over the years I have continued to add information to the page which has reinforced its place at the top. I think everybody would agree that it is the most detailed account on Kilgallen on the web. Yesterday I discovered that it no longer even on the first page of search results at Google. The same is true of the other search-engines that use the Google database. However, it remains first or second on other search-engines. The question is, what information have I added that have given the powers that be such concern?

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKkilgallen.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Kilgallen

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death4.htm

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I have just discovered that J. Edgar Hoover used Dorothy Kilgallen via Richard Berlin, to spread the rumour that JFK was involved in the Profumo case. On 23rd June, 1963, Dorothy Kilgallen published an article in the New York Journal-American: "One of the biggest names in American politics - a man who holds a very high elective office - has been injected into Britain's vice-security scandal." This was a reference to the John Profumo and Christine Keeler affair. Kilgallen went on to describe one of the girls as "a beautiful Chinese-American girl now in London." She added that the "highest authorities" had "identified her as Suzy Chang."

John,

1. You said, "J. Edgar Hoover used Dorothy Kilgallen via Richard Berlin. . ." Are you implying that she was knowingly or unknowingly used by Hoover. That is, did Berlin tell her that Hoover was behind the story?

2. You quote Kilgallen's article which says, "One of the biggest names in American politics. . ." and connect that to JFK. How did you make that connection? "One of the biggest names" could be any number of highly elected officials.

3. You also refer to the JFK involvement as a rumor. How did you come to this conclusion?

Thanks.

Ken

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I have just discovered that J. Edgar Hoover used Dorothy Kilgallen via Richard Berlin, to spread the rumour that JFK was involved in the Profumo case. On 23rd June, 1963, Dorothy Kilgallen published an article in the New York Journal-American: "One of the biggest names in American politics - a man who holds a very high elective office - has been injected into Britain's vice-security scandal." This was a reference to the John Profumo and Christine Keeler affair. Kilgallen went on to describe one of the girls as "a beautiful Chinese-American girl now in London." She added that the "highest authorities" had "identified her as Suzy Chang."

John,

1. You said, "J. Edgar Hoover used Dorothy Kilgallen via Richard Berlin. . ." Are you implying that she was knowingly or unknowingly used by Hoover. That is, did Berlin tell her that Hoover was behind the story?

2. You quote Kilgallen's article which says, "One of the biggest names in American politics. . ." and connect that to JFK. How did you make that connection? "One of the biggest names" could be any number of highly elected officials.

3. You also refer to the JFK involvement as a rumor. How did you come to this conclusion?

Thanks.

Ken

The FBI and the CIA were both aware of the activities of Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, Mariella Novotny, Suzy Chang, and other prostitutes associated with Stephen Ward from as early as 1960. Novotny had worked as a prostitute in New York City between December 1960 and March 1961 when she was arrested. After being released on bail she fled back to London. They still had her pimp, Harry Alan Towers, in custody but decided to drop all charges.

We know from declassified documents that Hoover believed that there was an international call-girl operation at work that was attempting to gain information for the Soviet Union. Hoover, who pointed to Novotny’s connections to communist Czechoslovakia, as evidence for this Soviet conspiracy. At the time he was also investigating two other prostitutes with links to Bobby Baker with communist backgrounds: Ellen Rometsch and Suzy Chang.

It is assumed that MI5, who were now know was using Stephen Ward to entrap Eugene Ivanov, an naval attaché at the Soviet embassy, was keeping the FBI and the CIA fully informed of this operation. The US intelligence agencies were also receiving information about Ward’s activities from two Americans living in London: Thomas Corbally and Earl Fenton. Both men were close friends of Ward.

A FBI document reveals that on 29th January, 1963, Thomas Corbally, told Alfred Wells, the secretary to David Bruce, the ambassador, that Christine Keeler was having a sexual relationship with John Profumo and Eugene Ivanov. The document also stated that Harold Macmillan had been informed about this scandal.

The original source of this information came from an unpublished interview that Keeler had given to Peter Earle, a journalist working for the News of the World. Keeler was negotiating a deal with the newspaper but because of threats coming from Profumo’s lawyers, they were unable to publish this information. During this interview, Keeler claimed that she slept with JFK when she visited New York between 11th and 18th July, 1962. Hoover checked out these claims and discovered that Keeler was indeed in New York on these dates.

It was not until July 1963 that Keeler’s confessions were published in the British press. However, the story about sleeping with JFK was not included in the article. Nor were Mariella Novotny’s claims that she had slept with JFK. Suzy Chang was also rumoured to have slept with JFK. She denied this but did admit that she had spent time with him after meeting him at the 21 Club.

Hoover saw these rumours as a way of applying pressure on JFK and RFK in his power struggle with the brothers. He therefore gave the story to Richard Berlin who passed in onto Kilgallen. It was Kilgallen who first suggested in the New York Journal-American (3rd August, 1962) that JFK was sleeping with Marilyn Monroe. It is assumed that this information also came from Hoover.

Hoover had already told RFK about Christine Keeler before the story broke in the UK. A FBI declassified memo dated 20th June, 1963, from Alan Belmont to Clyde Tolson referred to the concerns of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara about the John Profumo case. It stated "Mr. McNamara referred to a memorandum from the FBI dated June 14, 1963, advising that Air Force personnel may have had relationships with Christine Keeler." The next section is blacked out but it goes onto say: "McNamara said he felt like he was sitting on a bomb in this matter as he could not tell what would come out of it and he wanted to be sure that every effort was being made to get information from the British particularly as it affected U.S. personnel."

Another memo survives dated 2nd July (still before the Keeler confessions were published in the newspapers) which reveals that RFK asked Hoover to tell him “exactly what Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies did when they visited New York the previous year”.

In her recent autobiography, The Truth at Last, Keeler admits that she lied about having an affair with JFK. However, a fellow prostitute connected to Stephen Ward, Mariella Novotny, did claim in 1974 that she had taken part in sex parties with JFK.

In his book, An Affair of State, Phillip Knightley argues that “John F. Kennedy’s sexual appetite was so prodigious and so indiscriminate that he would not have been able to remember (who he had slept with).” Therefore, he had asked RFK to find out what the FBI had on him. He could have asked the CIA about this matter as their man, Earl Fenton, was also a close friend of Ward and had interviewed Keeler about her involvement with UK and US politicians.

What we do know is that JFK had a fear of being pulled into the Keeler scandal. According to Ben Bradlee, JFK asked David Bruce, the US ambassador in London, to provide him with daily reports on the scandal. Bruce got his information from Thomas Corbally, who was a close friend of Stephen Ward and had also been attending these sex parties. The great irony of this was that Corbally was also Hoover’s main informant on the scandal.

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John,

With all of my rotarian evangelical perkiness that I find so annoying, I am thinking of posting your story about Google Censorship and Dorothy K. as Case Study of this censorship. This will be posted around to about 20 Big newspaper websites which will take a total of 14 minutes. Also this is good way of introducing more people to this exceptional forum.

Seen from a vulgar marketing perspective, this is a way of interesting new people in the assassination, from ANOTHER ANGLE. Also it performs the usefull democratic duty to inform more citizens about how censorship works aka the shallowness of the our internet ocean of democracy. (Note, that when I say shallowness of the internet, I did not mean to inply that there were not deep parts, but rather, how distinct yet invisible forces steer many people away from them.)

First, though I wanted to ask you if you have any exact numbers of hits of your D.K. page vs. McAdams? This would be usefull. Also you originally stated that your D.K. page didn't even make the front page. I googled it and it was on the front page but listed around #7, which is still very significant difference in terms of the new hits that will or will not be generated from this undemocratic decision on the part of a gigantic corporation. I just want to get it technically correct.

Edited by Nathaniel Heidenheimer
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John,

With all of my rotarian evangelical perkiness that I find so annoying, I am thinking of posting your story about Google Censorship and Dorothy K. as Case Study of this censorship. This will be posted around to about 20 Big newspaper websites which will take a total of 14 minutes. Also this is good way of introducing more people to this exceptional forum.

Seen from a vulgar marketing perspective, this is a way of interesting new people in the assassination, from ANOTHER ANGLE. Also it performs the usefull democratic duty to inform more citizens about how censorship works aka the shallowness of the our internet ocean of democracy. (Note, that when I say shallowness of the internet, I did not mean to inply that there were not deep parts, but rather, how distinct yet invisible forces steer many people away from them.)

First, though I wanted to ask you if you have any exact numbers of hits of your D.K. page vs. McAdams? This would be usefull. Also you originally stated that your D.K. page didn't even make the front page. I googled it and it was on the front page but listed around #7, which is still very significant difference in terms of the new hits that will or will not be generated from this undemocratic decision on the part of a gigantic corporation. I just want to get it technically correct.

I Googled it just now and it is currently in 12th place but still on the second-page. It is number one if you do it via Google.uk. Nearly all my pages are. The reason for this is that Google as an inbuilt bias against non-USA websites. I have never seen it written about but the internet is an example of information imperialism.

The reason my page has moved up over the last few days is that I added the DK URL to this thread (this page is in 7th place and on the first page). I have also placed a link near the top of my home page. Any link you place on the newspaper websites will also help.

What is needed is to take a close look at how Google and other search-engines work in relation to controversial subjects such as Dorothy Kilgallen. Why is McAdams' pages always so high in any search? For example, his DK page has only

1,302 words and one photograph. My page has 10,583 words and 8 photgraphs. We are also told that external and internal links are always important. McAdams has no external and 4 internal links. My page has 133 external and 66 internal links.

However, it is not generally true that Google is not normally biased too much against me. For example, do a search for Lee Harvey Oswald. I am at number 3 whereas Wikipedia is 1st and McAdams is 2nd. Again, it is difficult to discover why McAdams is so high.

If your page is in the top 5 it does not really matter as anybody interested in the subject will come to your web page. The real problem is when you have been relegated from the first page of searches, as in the case of Kilgallen. There must be something on this page that has caused it to be relegated in this way.

If you type in the "assassination of John F. Kennedy" you get the same result with Wikipedia first and McAdams 2nd with my site in 5th place. Once again, anyone interested in the subject will get to my site and then this forum. All my pages are linked to the forum and the JFK pages are linked to the relevant threads.

Interestingly, if you type in "John F. Kennedy" I am in 5th place and John McAdams does not feature at all. People are much more likely to do this than searches for the assassination of JFK. For example my JFK page gets an average of 16,400 page impressions a month, whereas the JFK assassination index page gets 11,700.

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  • 2 months later...
Here is the FBI document that mentions Tom Corbally's role in the Profumo scandal.

Consider the fact that Ambassador David K.E. Bruce was the son of William Cabell Bruce and that he had been part of every administration from Truman until

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m131...v29/ai_19398211

...In 1926, he married the nation's richest woman, Ailsa Mellon, daughter of Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon. This love marriage gave him access to one of the largest family fortunes in the world. The marriage quickly soured; Ailsa didn't like sex and turned out to be a slightly batty hypochondriac. Over the next 18 years, Bruce took to discreet philandering and--ever the dilettante--spent a little time in the Foreign Service, and then occupied himself with his investments and advising Andrew Mellon about his art acquisitions. He came to love his father-in-law more than his wife, and when a tax scandal enveloped Mellon in the 1930s, Bruce blamed Franklin Roosevelt, that traitor to his class. Mellon had taken enormous tax deductions on paintings he had donated to a Mellon charitable trust--except the paintings remained hanging on Mellon's (and Bruce's) walls. "Long afterward," Lankford writes, "he could hardly speak FDR's name without anger."

Only World War II rescued him from boredom; he became an aide to `Wild' Bill Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Stationed in London, he fell in love with the ravishing Evangeline Bell and finally asked his wife for a divorce. After the war, by now in his late forties, he held a succession of diplomatic posts which kept him in Europe for nearly two decades....

As ambassador to West Germany in the late 1950s, Bruce displayed gross insensitivity on the issue of Nazi war crimes. After visiting Alfried Krupp, he remarked that his host was "about the last man one would casually think of as a war criminal" Convinced that Albert Speer was wrongly tried and convicted, Bruce went to Spandau prison, vigorously shook Speer's hand and said, "You aren't forgotten." Lankford writes of this incident with studied understatement that Bruce's "emphasis on style had its limitations."

...Finally, Bruce was also wrong on Vietnam. In 1949, he urged Washington to extend military aid to the French in their colonial war against Ho Chi Minh. In an early articulation of the `domino theory,' he cabled Washington that if France did not stop communism in Indochina, "Burma and Siam will fall like over-ripe apples." Later in the '60s, he had doubts about whether Vietnam was worth a U.S. commitment. But like many Establishment figures, he decided that once a commitment had been made, Washington had to stick it out. Ever the loyal apparatchik, Bruce agreed to work for the Nixon-Kissinger team as its Paris negotiator in 1970-71....

COPYRIGHT 1997 Washington Monthly Company

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

I can't help wondering if the "William Hitchcock" mentioned in the file could have been Bruce's nephew, the infamous LSD money-launderer, Billy Mellon Hitchcock.

Not to jump off-topic, but I believe that part of the mystery of Dorothy Kilgallen has to do with the exact circumstances of what actually transpired in her one-on-one interview with Jack Ruby. Meaning that there were, if I am not mistaken, words to the effect that the Dallas Police had tapped the room where Kilgallen interviewed Ruby. But an even more important aspect of that has to do with what was Jack's motivation in doing some of the things he did....

And, since I am not psychic, all I can do is offer an illuminating quote by someone who supposedly knew Jack Ruby, and that would be H. Scott Shurian, who was interviewed in Los Angeles in 1964.

He told the FBI that "he knew of no political convictions of Ruby, but advised that he read that Ruby could be convinced to assist either the right or the left if this would make him a 'big man.'"

See

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...p;relPageId=117

The assassination of JFK, resulted indirectly, in Dorothy Kilgallen becoming an afterthought in the minds of many American's.

And to buttress my point, one of the extreme deficiencies of the HSCA was making a mockery of the idea that there even were "mystery deaths in the JFK assassination," although even the most impartial observer could arguably attest that there were many people that died in the aftermath of the assassination, particularly in the years 1964, 1967, 1977, who fit that description.

All the HSCA did in reference to the mystery deaths was cite the erroneous math in the one-hundred thousand trillion to one figure cited in the newspaper in England, and then selectively chose which deaths it decided were "worth investigating."

That eliminated the ability to see what the connection was....in that whoever was killing the knowledgeable persons with info regarding the assassination, may have been the same people involved in the assassination itself, but I suppose that would be akin on my part to preaching to the choir.

Edited by Robert Howard
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