The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up

[Paul Brancato]

Another Henry Crown connection is to Army Colonel Frank M. Brandstetter. I wonder if Crown, referred to in one of Brandy’s biographies as Colonel Henry Crown, was Army also. Crown visited Brandy in Acapulco and convinced him to manage the Acapulco Hilton in 1959. Brandy had come to his attention after managing the Havana Hilton during the Revolution. Why might this be relevant? Brandy reported to Army Intelligence (ACSI) for two decades, and was assigned by his ‘big brother’ at ACSI to join Jack Crichton’s 488th Military Intelligence Attachment in Dallas a few years prior.

 

[Ron Bulman]

The biggest thing about Cover-Up to me was how he focused in the end especially on the East Coast Establishment as the ultimate source of who ordered it and covered it up.  How they pushed the Warren commission into existence.  When the Dean of Yale Law School suggests it hours after Oswald is killed...  in essence to prevent Congressional or Senate investigations.  Naming names Rockefeller, Mc Cloy, Dulles, Acheson, the Bundy brothers, Rostow, more.  

Also how Russell and others were deflecting attention from them to Cuba or the "Government":  DPD, FBI, the military in general, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Military Industrial Complex, rouge CIA agents, or radical right Texas oil men.  Ironic given many of them were heavily invested in Texas oil. 

Edited March 14, 2020 by Ron Bulman

[James DiEugenio]

Ron,

When you say Russell, do you mean Richard Russell?

[Ron Bulman]

45 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Ron,

When you say Russell, do you mean Richard Russell?

No, I was referring to Lord Bertrand Russell.  Chapter 9, Establishment Radicals and Kennedy.  On Corliss Lamont, him and Chomsky.  How Russell formed the British Who Killed Kennedy Committee, he suspected "American Authorities" were responsible for the cover-up.  The way I interpreted it was being the aristocrat he was, he knew better who was ultimately responsible for it and was covering for them, blowing smoke so to speak.

I never realized Chomsky had done a specific hit piece on JFK, Rethinking Camelot:  JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture, 1993.

[James DiEugenio]

Oh OK.  Gibson went after Russell and Chomsky and for good reason.

 

[Ron Bulman]

1 hour ago, Robert Wheeler said:

wrong thread- removed

 

You are prolific.

[James DiEugenio]

Don Gibson is one of the finest scholars of the Power Elite there is or was.

He is one of the few people who has actually read Carroll Quigley. Quigley wrote two books that are milestones in understanding the mess that became the modern world: Tragedy and Hope and The Anglo American Establishment.

The latter was written first but published after.  Its kind of a rehearsal for his monumental Tragedy and Hope.  

Gibson understood that the group Quigley was allowed to study memoranda about--namely the CFR--was modeled on Chatham House. (Some people think they were actually planned at the same time, but the Rhodes Group, which Quigley follows closely, preceded the actual founding of Chatham House.) The latter was instrumental in running the British Empire, and the American  Power Elite had sent emissaries over to examine how it worked and to use it as a model for the CFR.

That is one reason why Quigley is important and why the British influence should not be ignored.  It is important not to forget that two of the most influential people to run the CFR were Allen Dulles and John McCloy.  

 

Edited March 15, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Ron Ecker]

It's a shame that someone doesn't (can't?) make a movie about the Power Elite. Names changed to protect the guilty. Not about the JFK assassination per se (the movie definitely wouldn't get made), but about how the PE operates. The story could center on the killing or bringing down of a fictional president or such. Has such a movie been made? I thought of Seven Days in May, but as I recall that centers on a military demagogue.

 

[Jeff Carter]

4 hours ago, Ron Ecker said:

It's a shame that someone doesn't (can't?) make a movie about the Power Elite. Names changed to protect the guilty. Not about the JFK assassination per se (the movie definitely wouldn't get made), but about how the PE operates. The story could center on the killing or bringing down of a fictional president or such. Has such a movie been made? I thought of Seven Days in May, but as I recall that centers on a military demagogue.

 

Paddy Chayevsky - Sidney Lumet's "Network" heads into that territory. 

The actual grinding momentum and application of power is not inherently dramatic. A movie set in, say, Davos would not necessarily be interesting.

[James DiEugenio]

The best scene in Network is where the Finch character gets read the riot act by Ned Beaty about hw the world works.  Comes close to the real worl'd's Power Elite.  What just happened to Trish Regan.

Edited March 15, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Jeff Carter]

Gibson’s “Battling Wall Street” helped me perceive the differing worldviews that could be generally described as a Kennedy/development model versus a Dulles/ resource extraction model. The power elite preference for the latter in the U.S. was emphatically expressed in the 1960s.

As has become more obvious since the Cold War’s end removed the ideological rationale, the western capitalist democracies generally continue to pursue a resource extraction model foreign policy, based on coddling local elites and repressing restive populations. This has been most clear these past two decades in Latin America, with the expressed hostility to Venezuela’s Bolivarian movement’s development model policies, and the continuing rollback of such which started in Haiti followed by Honduras. The recent bipartisan Congressional standing ovation for Venezuela’s ridiculous “interim president” Guaido was an expression of the primacy of the resource extraction viewpoint, also made clear by the open talk of exploiting Bolivia’s minerals now that the development model government was removed.

It seems Kennedy and his advisors had the wisdom to question whether an “I win/you lose” foreign policy was the best choice against an  “I win/you win” development model - for business as well as moral/ethical reasons. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is based on a development model, and our elites are determined to stop it by all means.

[James DiEugenio]

Nice one Jeff, I did not even know what that was.

Which shows how little we spend on the Big Picture here.

It reminds me a little of the JFK/Hammarskjold secret agreement, but this is on a much larger scale.

 

[Calvin Ye]

On 3/9/2020 at 2:52 PM, James DiEugenio said:

To get back to Don Gibson, who I would wager, few people on this forum have heard of and even less have read.

Don Gibson, if you can believe it,  was the first person in the field who truly defined what the Power Elite was at the time of Kennedy's assassination.  But further, along with that, he also took pains to show Kennedy's differences with them.  In this, he was unique.  The problem up until that time was that if one went with people outside the field, like Domhoff, you learned little about Kennedy.  If you went with people inside the field, like Scott and Evica, you would have thought that a nebulous web of the CIA, the Mafia and drug dealers ruled the world.

What Gibson did is he showed that there was a level above the CIA that no one had really examined. And it was this Ruling Class that had awesome power not just in America, but throughout the world. This figured in disputes with Kennedy in places like Congo and Indonesia.  Where there were not millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions--- but billions on the table.  If Kennedy prevailed, that huge amount would be channeled to the people who lived there; if Kennedy was disposed of, the Power Elite  and their imperial dealings would prevail i.e. they would put in a strong man and rake in the cash from the extravagant wealth to be mined through the abused natives.

No one before Don Gibson had ever come close to showing this the way he did. Because in Battling Wall Street, he was the first writer who ever really examined Kennedy's economic policies in detail.  The chapter in that book on the Steel Crisis is probably the best examination of that key event in the literature.  Gibson did for Kennedy's economic policies what authors like Mahoney, Muelhenbeck and Rakove did for his foreign policy.  He discovered and described aspects that had been ignored by others and needed to be reassessed in order to really understand what Kennedy was about.  Battling Wall Street is, I think, one of the single most important books about the Kennedy administration. I would recommend to anyone both of his books, which I think were both reissued a few years ago in trade paperback versions.  I  miss his contributions to the case.  A very valuable scholar who really exemplified what that word should mean.

 

 

This is from George Bush: An Unauthorized Biography

"MacArthur’s warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community."

This passage identified the Wall Street oligarchy as the main players and its ties to the intelligence community

 

 

 

[Calvin Ye]

On 3/9/2020 at 2:52 PM, James DiEugenio said:

To get back to Don Gibson, who I would wager, few people on this forum have heard of and even less have read.

Don Gibson, if you can believe it,  was the first person in the field who truly defined what the Power Elite was at the time of Kennedy's assassination.  But further, along with that, he also took pains to show Kennedy's differences with them.  In this, he was unique.  The problem up until that time was that if one went with people outside the field, like Domhoff, you learned little about Kennedy.  If you went with people inside the field, like Scott and Evica, you would have thought that a nebulous web of the CIA, the Mafia and drug dealers ruled the world.

What Gibson did is he showed that there was a level above the CIA that no one had really examined. And it was this Ruling Class that had awesome power not just in America, but throughout the world. This figured in disputes with Kennedy in places like Congo and Indonesia.  Where there were not millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions--- but billions on the table.  If Kennedy prevailed, that huge amount would be channeled to the people who lived there; if Kennedy was disposed of, the Power Elite  and their imperial dealings would prevail i.e. they would put in a strong man and rake in the cash from the extravagant wealth to be mined through the abused natives.

No one before Don Gibson had ever come close to showing this the way he did. Because in Battling Wall Street, he was the first writer who ever really examined Kennedy's economic policies in detail.  The chapter in that book on the Steel Crisis is probably the best examination of that key event in the literature.  Gibson did for Kennedy's economic policies what authors like Mahoney, Muelhenbeck and Rakove did for his foreign policy.  He discovered and described aspects that had been ignored by others and needed to be reassessed in order to really understand what Kennedy was about.  Battling Wall Street is, I think, one of the single most important books about the Kennedy administration. I would recommend to anyone both of his books, which I think were both reissued a few years ago in trade paperback versions.  I  miss his contributions to the case.  A very valuable scholar who really exemplified what that word should mean.

 

 

This is from George Bush: An Unauthorized Biography

"MacArthur’s warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community."

This passage identified the Wall Street oligarchy as the main players and its ties to the intelligence community

 

 

 

[Calvin Ye]

On 3/9/2020 at 2:52 PM, James DiEugenio said:

To get back to Don Gibson, who I would wager, few people on this forum have heard of and even less have read.

Don Gibson, if you can believe it,  was the first person in the field who truly defined what the Power Elite was at the time of Kennedy's assassination.  But further, along with that, he also took pains to show Kennedy's differences with them.  In this, he was unique.  The problem up until that time was that if one went with people outside the field, like Domhoff, you learned little about Kennedy.  If you went with people inside the field, like Scott and Evica, you would have thought that a nebulous web of the CIA, the Mafia and drug dealers ruled the world.

What Gibson did is he showed that there was a level above the CIA that no one had really examined. And it was this Ruling Class that had awesome power not just in America, but throughout the world. This figured in disputes with Kennedy in places like Congo and Indonesia.  Where there were not millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions--- but billions on the table.  If Kennedy prevailed, that huge amount would be channeled to the people who lived there; if Kennedy was disposed of, the Power Elite  and their imperial dealings would prevail i.e. they would put in a strong man and rake in the cash from the extravagant wealth to be mined through the abused natives.

No one before Don Gibson had ever come close to showing this the way he did. Because in Battling Wall Street, he was the first writer who ever really examined Kennedy's economic policies in detail.  The chapter in that book on the Steel Crisis is probably the best examination of that key event in the literature.  Gibson did for Kennedy's economic policies what authors like Mahoney, Muelhenbeck and Rakove did for his foreign policy.  He discovered and described aspects that had been ignored by others and needed to be reassessed in order to really understand what Kennedy was about.  Battling Wall Street is, I think, one of the single most important books about the Kennedy administration. I would recommend to anyone both of his books, which I think were both reissued a few years ago in trade paperback versions.  I  miss his contributions to the case.  A very valuable scholar who really exemplified what that word should mean.

 

 

 

Edited April 4, 2021 by Calvin Ye