I’ve acquired a used copy of The Rabin Memoirs, by Yitzhak Rabin. He was wrapping up a U.S. tour in November 1963, and was in Dallas not more than a day before the assassination. He learned of the shooting, according to his wife’s book, immediately upon their arrival back in Israel. I was interested in seeing what Rabin wrote about it, including hopefully which high-ranking U.S. military officers he had spoken to, and where and when, while in the U.S.

As posted earlier, I had already bought Curtis LeMay’s autobiography, only to learn that LeMay didn’t have a single word to say in it about the JFK assassination. Surely, I thought, I would have better luck with Rabin. Well, guess what.

Rabin was scheduled to become Israeli chief of staff at the beginning of 1964, which I understood from previous reading somewhere to be the reason for his visiting U.S. military facilities, as he was about to become the top military man in Israel. So I eagerly searched and found the appropriate section of his memoirs. On p. 61, he relates how Ben Gurion resigned as prime minister in June, 1963, to everyone’s surprise. But his successor intended to keep Ben Gurion’s promise to Rabin to make him chief of staff. “My term would begin,” Rabin says, “on January 1, 1964.”

Then, instead of telling us anything about the half year between Ben Gurion’s resignation and his becoming chief of staff, Rabin begins the very next paragraph with, “I began my tenure as chief of staff . . . ”

Rabin not only makes no mention of his U.S. tour and the JFK assassination, he doesn’t even mention John F. Kennedy in his book. (Even LeMay couldn’t avoid mentioning the name.) And his somehow losing the whole second half of 1963 in his memoirs reminds me of E. Howard Hunt's loss of the whole damn year in his autobiography Undercover.

Perhaps I’m overracting, because with these two books I’m now out about 40 bucks. But it seems illogical to me that men like LeMay and Rabin would avoid any reference in their memoirs to such an historic event as Dallas, given its relevance to their professional lives if not their personal ones, and simply as a matter, for God’s sake, of human interest. Did they simply forget to include any thoughts on it? Sure. They forgot on purpose, and the question is why. What was it they wished to avoid by ignoring the subject?

Ron

I bought 'iron eagle' a book about Lemay, he leaves out the assassination also.
I noticed that in Undercover also. Hunt obviously doesn't want to give anybody any clues as to who he was associating with at that time.
As reagrds Rabin, who knows, he probably didn't want to make any fuss by mentioning the assassination at all. By leaving out his US visit I assume he did not want people knocking at his door asking him if he had any knowledge of the assassination. He wouldn't want to give any anti israeli the chance of accusing him of setting it up.
John

The Irish Catholic was assassinated

The Communist/s got framed

The Jew can't quite see this one but he did complain of being set up, also there was an apparent attempt to blame the Jew by associating with JBS

Elementary my dear Holmes?? Who stood to gain by people looking everywhere but at themselves? The at the time resurgence of right wing bigotry in the form of the KKK for one. JBS? DCC? hmmm...i wonder who was a member/lackey/gopher in "63. And where were they at 12.30?

Ron,

The fact that both LeMay and Rabin fail to mention the assassination is terribly incriminating, IMO. Such an earth shattering event and they don't even mention it? And Rabin never gives JFK a mention in his entire book? Who is he trying to kid?

At the risk of stirring up a hornet's nest, I believe the Israeli Government was involved in the assassination with Rabin a major player. A joint US/Israeli military intelligence project, allowing the US Military to have Vietnam and the Israeli Government to continue developingn nuclear weapons at Dimona unencumbered. JFK's determination to prevent Israel from acquiring a nuclear capability was seen in Israel as a threat to its very survival. Ben-Gurion said so himself. Perhaps Rabin's elevation to chief of staff was contingent on him successfully participating in an important project.

As an explanation for the media's slavish adherence to the Government's lone nut line, I submit this;
1. Operation Mockingbird.
2. The leadership of much of the US media was (and is) sympathetic to the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish homeland.

In June 1967, NBC broadcast "The Case of Jim Garrison", a hatchet job designed to discredit the investigator. Interestingly, NBC was a subsidiary of Radio Corporation of America (RCA). As Garrison points out in his book, by 1963 RCA had become a part of the national defence structure, providing advanced radio and other sophisticated technology for the armed services. It's prime contract awards had increased by over one billion dollars from 1960 to 1967, according to Garrison. It had become part of the warfare machine and its' chairman, General David Sarnoff, was known as a cold war warrior. General Sarnoff was also a strong supporter of the state of Israel.

I haven't had time to fully research it, but I believe other media leaders such as William S Paley (CBS) and Arthur Krim (United Artists) shared Sarnoff's views. Krim and his wife Mathilde were close friends of LBJ and often stayed at LBJ's ranch with the President and Ladybird.

The other thing which leads me to suspect Israeli Govt. involvement is the so called Jewish connection regarding Jack Ruby which, IMO, has never been fully explained. Was Ruby visited in jail by "representatives of the Jewish community" and, if so, who were they?

More later.

Mark, Richard Nixon would love your post! He attributed his problems to the Jewish media.

Not entirely. That's the book that says LeMay was in Michigan on leave when he heard about the assassination and hurried back to Washington in time for the funeral. LeMay fortunately didn't write Iron Eagle, so we at least have that much info (though LeMay is likely the source, so who knows where he may have really been).

Ron

Mark,

Rabin's silence is even more striking in light of a passage found early in his book. When Moshe Dayan was chief of staff, he made Rabin a head of training. On page 51, Rabin writes, "When the chief of staff (Dayan) set out for a tour of U.S. army military schools and installations, I accompanied him - my first opportunity to visit North America and make the acquaintance of the mighty American army. That was a truly instructive visit." Yet a few years later, when Rabin, on the eve of becoming chief of staff himself, was able to make his own tour of U.S. military installations, it is somehow not worth mentioning, even though his U.S. tour concluded within hours of the JFK assassination, one of the most momentous events in modern history. Wouldn't that in itself make his tour worth mentioning? Of course it would.

Thanks to his wife Leah with her own book, we at least know that the tour took place, and when it took place. But that knowledge raises more questions than it answers.

Ron

The plot thickens, as they say. According to the book Israel and the Bomb by Avner Cohen (Columbia University Press, 1999), Rabin came to the U.S. in November 1963 for a secret American-Israeli security dialogue, code name Mifgash, in Washington. Rabin, deputy chief of staff, and Colonel Aharon Yariv, deputy chief of military intelligence, met on November 13-14 with Robert Komer of the National Security Council and (apparently, the text isn't clear on this) Myer Feldman of the White House. On the agenda was the Israeli desire for missiles, to counter an Egyptian missile program, and tanks to modernize Israel's Sherman tank force. Neither side was authorized to mention the Dimona nuclear issue. The U.S. nixed the missiles, as the Egyptian program was only in a research and development stage, but an understanding was reached on tanks, though months of negotiation would lie ahead.

It is understandable that Rabin might wish not to mention a secret security dialogue in his memoirs, but he was writing 16 years after the fact. Leah Rabin says nothing about it in her book (published in 1997 after Rabin's death), which describes their U.S. visit as a high-level orientation trip to America. "We went to New York and Washington, and Yitzhak traveled to several other cities, mainly military centers and installations." She says that the trip lasted three weeks, which means they arrived a week before the security meetings on November 13-14, and stayed two weeks after, with Rabin, in Leah's words, "in Dallas just hours before (the assassination) - albeit as mere coincidence; Fort Bliss was a stop on his military briefing tour."

Ron

Ron,

There's something ironic about the possibility of one of the major players being given up inadvertently by his wife......a few years after he himself is assassinated.

Thanks for the info. I must congratulate you on your book collection, Ron. You seem to have books on every concievable topic. I've read some of Cohen's excerpts and it's a compelling argument. Interesting that it supports Vanunu. Is Vanunu still around?

Your post is full of gems. The standouts are:
1. Why was this November 63 security dialogue a secret?
2. Who's Robert Komer?
3. Who's Meyer Feldman of the White House? Maybe he's known among researchers but I haven't heard of him.
4. Why do Rabin (and LeMay) display such stunning amnesia concerning the assassination?

The biggest question for me is why aren't Forum members jumping all over this? It's like an echo chamber in here.

Look at Nixon's memoirs, LBJ's memoirs, RFK's oral history interviews... There were a lot of books and interviews written and conducted which leave the assassination out. Look how many books on Kennedy's life completely ignore the relevant issues raised by his death, beyond that he was killed by some wacky guy who may have been a commie.
I don't think you can draw anything out of LeMay and Rabin leaving the assassination out of their memoirs. Perhaps they doubted the WC and felt no compunction to say so, hoping to avoid jumping into the middle of a firestorm. Look at O'Neil's, Caliifano's and Haig's memoirs--all that we can remember about them is what they said about JFK's death. As for LeMay, it seems pretty clear he disrespected Kennedy; he may have thought that sharing his thoughts on the assassination would be in bad taste.

In Hillary Clinton's memoirs she writes about the effect Kennedy's assassination had on her and her family--yet she doesn't say who she believes pulled the trigger! You could make yourself mad trying to decipher what was not said.

Pat,

I think it depends on circumstances whether you would expect someone to say something about the assassination in his memoirs. Everyone who is old enough remembers where he or she was when they heard the news. That doesn't mean you would expect them to write something about it in their life stories if they had no connection or dealings with JFK or his administration. But Rabin was a foreign dignitary who had been in negotiations with the JFK administration just two weeks before in Washington, and then far from DC had just left the very city where JFK was shot down. And he says nothing about it, like it was some everyday occurrence?

I guess we'll always have to wonder if Rabin met with Nixon or dropped by the bottlers convention to meet Joan Crawford, or, more interestingly, if he met with Maxwell Taylor in Dallas as the latter was returning from Hawaii. I'm frankly more interested in Taylor's possible presence in Dallas than Rabin's (with Taylor using Rabin's presence at Fort Bliss as an excuse to visit), though conceivably Rabin's presence could also be damning.

LeMay was supposedly on leave and therefore missed a JCS meeting in the Pentagon in the wake of the assassination, a meeting in which all the services including his were put on alert. Regardless of what he thought of JFK or the Warren Commission, I would expect him to say something about his duties, thoughts, and reaction in such a time of national crisis. How often do such things happen? But then LeMay as a leading sabre rattler of the MIC is a suspect in the crime in my opinion (and remember it was the military who took charge of JFK's body as soon as it could be stolen out of Dallas), but I understand that he or the military isn't a suspect in the opinions of many others.

Ron

I don't really have that many books. I got the info from Cohen's book by searching in it electronically at Amazon.com. And I plan to do that more regularly rather than buying books unseen, having gotten burned on the works of LeMay and Rabin.



I had to look them up.

Robert “Blowtorch Bob” Komer came to JFK’s NSC from the CIA:

http://www.mishalov.com/Komer.html

Myer Feldman was a Deputy Special Council to the President whom JFK had used before in dealings with the Israelis:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsourc...RUS8_15_62.html

Ron