Questions for Peter Janney on his book Mary’s Mosaic

[John Simkin]

(1) Given the resurgent medical and research interest in such psychedelics as LSD and Psilocybin, and the fact that it was mostly the CIA that brought psychedelics into the culture in the 1950s and 1960s, did this phenomenon make an impact on President Kennedy?

(2) Was the death of Washington Post editor Philip L. Graham a suicide, or just made to look that way?

(3) Was Allen Dulles the true “project manager” for the assassination of JFK?

[William Kelly]

I think that Peter Janney is in a unique position, as the son of a respected CIA officer, to be able to get other CIA officials to talk on the record, and that he has probably developed new and important information about those in the CIA knowledgeable about the death of Mary M., Dino B. of the NPIC, and other aspects of the assassination. While we all have different thresholds of belief, and can accept or reject what he has to offer, he has the opportunity to get information that ordinary researchers can't access, so we should at least pay attention to what he has to say.

Bill Kelly

JFKcountercoup

[Michael Hogan]

I have a question for John and Janney:

Why on earth would anyone believe a xxxx like Tim Leary in the first place?

I mean why would Leary wait for nearly two decades to tell us about Mary M? Clearly his most famous client ever?

Especially when he had about 25 opportunities to tell us about her before he wrote Flashbacks?

I think that Janney treated the Leary/Meyer topic rather thoroughly and fairly. He spent more than half a chapter writing about it. The first four pages

tell the story from Leary's point of view (Flashbacks and and Leary's interview with Leo Damore). Janney makes these sources clear.

Then he writes:

"In addition, some of Leary's critics (and there are many) even doubt that he actually had any contact with Mary Meyer at all. The majority of these critics believe he shamelessly exploited the story of Mary Pinchot Meyer, and engineered it for publicity for Flashbacks. In particular, the thrust of this criticism has been that if Leary had a relationship with Mary that began in 1962, why did he wait until 1983, some twenty years after the fact, to write about it? After all, Timothy Leary was a prolific author. Two of his major books from mainstream publishers, High Priest and The Politics of Ecstasy, both published in 1968 -- four years after Mary Meyer had been murdered -- contain no mention of her."

There are many other passages where Janney expresses either a fair amount of skepticism or tells both sides of a story.

In my opinion Janney does a good job in both the text and the footonotes of making sources clear to the reader. I think it's a good book, better than most of its genre.

[Michael Hogan]

Michael:

Does he answer the question?

That is why did Leary never even come close to mentioning her if she appeared to him in 1962 and had this unforgettable conversation with him?

Its not enough to say, well here is this side and here is this side. Where is the critical analysis that informs us how to answer the question? For if that is not there, then what you describe is just CYA. And it is CYA chosen to get dubious Leary's story from his book Flashbacks into the text.

Janney doesn't answer that question. He asks it. Janney gives the reader all of the available information over the years, sources it, and allows the readers

to do their own critical analysis. At least that's the way I see it.

You see it as CYA. I see it as at least some objectivity. Here is another example of Janney's skepticism:

"In any case, Timothy Leary portrayed Mary as a woman in possession of considerable feminine power, someone who had undergone her own personal transformation who now wanted to become an acolyte for world peace, intent on laying the groundwork for such a mission. Yet no one else has ever gone public to substantiate Leary's claims about Mary's mission, nor publicly verified the existence of any 'LSD cell group" that she was supposedly working with....."

I think it is enough to say well here is this side and here is this side. Or better yet, here are all sides. Let readers decide for themselves.

I mean does anyone really think that Leary would not mention this incident for 21 years? Especially when he had every opportunity he had to do so many, many times previous.

If there was a witness in the TSBD who had been interviewed say 12 times by the FBI, SS, DPD and the WC, and each time he never mentioned seeing Oswald with a rifle on the sixth floor, but then suddenly, when he was interviewed by, say, the House Select Committee, he now vividly recalled seeing Oswald and his sniper's nest and him with a rifle running from it, would you believe him?

I don't think so.

Yet, that is what we are supposed to do here. And Janney thinks that by presenting Leary's version with those who think its ridiculous, that somehow no one will notice just how nutty it is to buy into Leary. Sort of like the old commercials with Betty Crocker baking a cake magically in front of you, Janney thus tries to say see, this side is equal to this side. When they are not even close.

It was five years after Kennedy's murder that Ken O'Donnell told Tip O'Neil that he heard two shots from behind the fence. It took another twenty years ( O'Donnell died in 1977) before this information became public. Do you believe O'Donnell (and Powers)?

Jim, for what it's worth, I've read your Silver Bullet essay several times. You compare Janney's then upcoming book to Slatzer's book. In my opinion, that wasn't fair, nor has it turned out to be accurate.

You didn't mention that, beginning in 1966, Leary had extensive legal problems stemming from government drug charges. After a successful appeal based on a failure to inform him of his Miranda rights he was convicted on another charge in 1969. Leary fled the country and was later captured and extradited from Afghanistan. He served three years in a California prison. This all happened at a time when the government's war on drugs began in earnest. Perhaps these problems had something to do with Leary's failure to mention Mary Meyer. Perhaps not.

I've never read Flashbacks -- to me it had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination. I take it that Leary didn't explain why he waited so long to write about Mary Meyer Pinchot.

As an aside, Janney is extremely critical of David Heymann. In the footnotes he references Lisa Pease's review of Bobby and Jackie and the Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination's website. He includes The Assassinations (Probe) in the selected bibliography.

Edited May 2, 2012 by Michael Hogan

[David Andrews]

Is there any source (eyewitness) independent of Timothy Leary who can support that Meyer even knew Leary at all?

Is Leary the only source for the connection of JFK, Meyer, and drug use? Specifically the LSD legend?

Edited May 4, 2012 by David Andrews

[David Lifton]

Michael:

Does he answer the question?

That is why did Leary never even come close to mentioning her if she appeared to him in 1962 and had this unforgettable conversation with him?

Its not enough to say, well here is this side and here is this side. Where is the critical analysis that informs us how to answer the question? For if that is not there, then what you describe is just CYA. And it is CYA chosen to get dubious Leary's story from his book Flashbacks into the text.

I mean does anyone really think that Leary would not mention this incident for 21 years? Especiaily when he had every opportunity he had to do so many, many times previous.

If there was a witness in the TSBD who had been interviewed say 12 times by the FBI, SS, DPD and the WC, and each time he never mentioned seeing Oswald with a rifle on the sixth floor, but then suddenly, when he was interviewed by, say, the House Select Committee, he now vividly recalled seeing Oswald and his sniper's nest and him with a rifle running from it, would you believe him?

I don't think so.

Yet, that is what we are supposed to do here. And Janney thinks that by presenting Leary's version with those who think its ridiculous, that somehow no one will notice just how nutty it is to buy into Leary. Sort of like the old commercials with Betty Crocker baking a cake magically in front of you, Janney thus tries to say see, this side is equal to this side. When they are not even close.

My experience with Timothy Leary- - Circa 1965, when he appeared as the speaker at a meeting of a group that subscribed to “General Semantics”.

(For more info on that, see:

http://en.wikipedia....neral_semantics)

At the time, I was attending a lecture sponsored by an Ayn Rand group, and Alan Greenspan (the future Fed chairman) was appearing (via a taped lecture, as I recall).

The Ayn Rand group met regularly in a room at the AIAA auditorium on Beverly Boulevard, where CBS Television City is now located.

The General Semantics people (who believed that reality was rather malleable) rented a room in that building, and in fact on the same floor.

After the lecture, I was in the parking lot, and who should be there but Timothy Leary, that night’s speaker.

I was then about 25, believed in an objective reality, and didn’t understand how a Harvard professor could possibly subscribe to such balderdash (the "malleable reality" idea--my phrase). So we “got into it.” Really, it became a rather heated discussion.

The man really did not subscribe to the notion of an objective reality, and he was adamant about it.

At the time, I drove a 1961 Volkswagon, and it was parked right there, where we were talking. And I’ll never forget what he said:

“If you want to believe that that Volkswagon is a volkswagon, and not possibly an elephant, that is your problem!”

Really, he said that. (And he meant it! I'm not kidding.)

So keep that in mind—I always do—whenever I read anything about Leary.

I got in my car, and probably went up the street for a stop at Canter’s Deli. And then drove home (I was then living in West L.A.)

Of course, I drove my VW everywhere. . . and had a couple of engine changes. But I never thought it was an elephant.

DSL

Edited May 4, 2012 by David Lifton

[Guest Tom Scully]

David,

Leary's colleague Richard Alpert, later aka Ram Dass seemed more adept at describing what had changed from their mutual experience with "mind altering" substances.:

Be Here Now, Remember

By Ram Dass

http://hinduism.about.com/od/books/fr/Be-Here-Now-By-Ram-Dass.htm

.....Great Ideas from the Book

To share a few ideas from the heart of the book, Dass reminds us (on numberless pages) that our thoughts are bound in time and space-so to experience true reality, or eternal soul awareness, or divine love-we need to go beyond our thoughts. So for everyone who says, 'this happened because of this reason'-that's only a story; it does not allow you to jump out of the 'gravitational wake of time and space'.

Dass says, thoughts are like a caterpillar and beyond thoughts is like the butterfly. What is beyond thoughts? Us. Soul. Eternal, unbounded love. Bliss. Self-creating joy-that which cannot be affected by time-space thoughts and events. What does this mean in practical terms? Worldly events do not have to enslave us; we can live freely, in peace and joy despite what goes on in the world.

He discusses spiritual paradoxes, like, 'the moment you give it all up, you have it all.'

'As long as you don't want power you can have it....

[Michael Hogan]

Clear and simple, Janney had an agenda. Way before he began the book.

Jim, I think that many authors have an agenda when it comes to books like this. And certainly that may have an effect on the material they present and the way they present it.

But ultimately the book should be judged on its content and its sources.

I do believe that authors sometimes have a responsibility to selectively present things that are speculative, or even spurious, as long as they make it clear with their sourcing.

I concede that Janney may have oversold the Leary story, but he issues disclaimers and makes his sources clear. The Leary/Meyer stuff is really just a small part of the book.

Ed Haslam also had an agenda when he wrote Dr Mary's Monkey, one that you left unstated in your review. Haslam, by his own admission, needed a witness. He chose to use

Judyth Baker and he spent two full chapters weaving her story into the fabric of his. The sum total of your criticism was this:

"On the negative side, I believe Haslam puts too much stock in Judyth Baker. And his epilogue about Oswald entitled "The Perfect Patsy", is both superfluous and shallow."

Other than that, your review was glowing and overlooked a lot of the weaknesses in Haslam's narrative. But that's another topic for another time. The point is that Haslam,

like Janney, was writing about the murder of a prominent woman, a murder that affected his family and made an impression on him as a young boy.

You gave Haslam a pass on his agenda.

Jim, I have a lot of respect for the considerable time and effort you have put into exposing so much of the sensational, unproven and erroneous claims of authors, researchers

and even EF members. Sometimes that seems like what the study of this case has evolved into -- debunking myths.

By no means am I an advocate for Leary's stories about Mary Meyer. Nor am I necessarily an advocate of all of Janney's conclusions about Meyer's murder.

But I give him more credit than you do for the objective disclaimers he gives when presenting his material.

You formed your opinions about Janney a few years ago and I don't see Mary's Mosaic having much effect on them. Because of positions you have staked out

in the past and comments you have made on this thread I don't see anything in his book that you are apt to praise. I'm prepared to be wrong about that.

But Janney, right or wrong, has written a worthwhile book and his habit of identifying sources in the text is one I wish authors would use more often. In all cases

the footnotes are there for the reader that wants to learn more about where Janney got his information.

I look forward to Lisa Pease's review.

Edited May 4, 2012 by Michael Hogan

[Michael Hogan]

From www.boston.com

One man’s suspicion, obsession, and an unsolved murder

By Joseph P Kahn

May 26, 2012

http://www.boston.co...t_meyer/?page=1

I hope you didn't get taken in by Janney.

Jim, I have intended to reply to your last post. I'm going to wait until all the Lovelady stuff dies down.

Don't make the assumption that because I posted this link I have been "taken in."

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

As someone who has read the book, I agree with Michael's comments.

The Leary aspect of the narrative is appropriately qualified by the author. Also, it is very far from the keystone to the story. The Bradlee-Angleton link carries most of the weight, and the drug stuff is much more lightly frosted onto the cake than one might think from some of Jim's earlier comments which seem to overemphasize the role of Leary in Janney's version of events.

There are one or two WTF moments in the book, where you are really left wondering why Janney inserts a paragraph of loony tangent based on a single very tenuous source.

Also there is no doubt that Janney overplays the role of Mary Meyer in the so-called evolution of JFK into a knight against the MICC. Clearly Janney is still struck by the unclothed Cold War Hottie he saw around the time of Diem Bien Phu, when he stumbled upon her sunbathing in his friends back yard. I guess I will have to forgive him that one. But it is certainly a valid criticism to say that Janney's Mary-myopia has the effect of minimizing the extent to which JFK was already a Cold War iconoclast in important respects.

That said, I would be very hesitant about judging this book too swiftly. The Bradlee-Angleton relationship is the baby in this bathwater, and given the history of the Washington Post in post WWII politics, that is too much baby to sacrifice without careful sifting.

[Michael Hogan]

And before you say he discounts Heymann in the book, that is because of mine and Lisa's work on Heymann which exposed him as a pathological xxxx. Janney did not such disowning act in the outline.

Too late, I already said it in a previous post. Maybe I should go back and edit it out.

Jim, I think Janney owes you some of his royalties.

It's clear you have antipathy for him and his research, but you should not let that spill over to members posting here.

Remember, Nathaniel and I are at a tremendous disadvantage here. We've only read his book; you've had the advantage of reading his outline.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Jim if you think I am so stupid as to believe Ben Bradlee on even a Boxscore.... I hope I'm not.

I don't think that the book takes either Angleton or Bradlee at their word. It seeks to interrogate what each said. Given the significance of both, and their cooperation in creating their respective stories about the diary, I don't see how it is not a story whether they are lying or not. I mean say they are lying. Then you have the editor of Watergate making up a story to obfuscate the death of an important figure, and the CIA at the heart of a media-murder of a person and of history. How is that not a story? Either way, to ignore the whole thing seems to be helping Bradlee not hurting his worthless credibility.

Edited May 27, 2012 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[Peter Janney]

The Autodafé of Lisa Pease and James DiEugenio:

Tomas de Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition return in a new era of suppression

of freedom of thought and adherence to a rigid dogma – namely their own prejudices!

Lisa Pease’s six-page diatribe against me and my recent book Mary’s Mosaic is, at the very least, a marvel of subjective distortion and shoddy criticism, fueled by her own personal vendetta that someone dared not follow her as she, and her partner James DiEugenio, have attempted over the years to appoint themselves as the ultimate “guardians of truth” in all things Kennedy (see the following: http://www.ctka.net/reviews/Pease_Janney_Mary's_Mosaic.html ).

And as usual, Lisa Pease’s only fallback source in her vain attempts to substantiate anything she writes is James DiEugenio, whom she seems to always regard as unassailable. Together, nothing that these two write can ever be challenged or debated – without one of them launching some kind of personal diatribe against anyone who challenges it, establishing a different opinion. Indeed, during his last appearance on Len Osanic’s Black Ops Radio program (June 28, 2012), DiEugenio gushes over “Lisa Pease’s wonderful – and I really think it’s a really wonderful piece of work . . . because it’s done in her usual very intelligent, very elegant, very incisive kind of a style. And I’m going to be doing Part II to which I am actually working on right now . . .” We wait with bated breadth.

What’s particularly revealing in Pease’s latest piece of writing is that she first announces to her readers that she “check every fact, . . . dare[ing] the author to prove his case to me,” and then goes on to continue (along with her partner DiEugenio) to make the absurd claim that JFK was not a womanizer, or sexually promiscuous, but always “adorable and sweet,” (quoting Angela Greene). We are now, after years of revelation by such authors as Ralph Martin, Seymour Hersh, Nigel Hamilton, and Presidential historians Michael Beschloss and Robert Dallek – to say nothing of the women who have come forward (the most recent is Mimi Beardsley Alford in 2012) – supposed to go on believing “The Doctrine of Pease and DiEugenio” that this was all just a “Republican Party” or “CIA” plot to discredit President Kennedy. Following “the two McCarthyites of the JFK assassination research community,” as one researcher recently put it, is like walking into a never-ending fantasy world of ignorance, hopefully having been convinced that the real truth has just been dispensed, when all that has taken place in this case is Pease’s fabricating evidence in order to gin up “facts” to support her delusions.

I am not going to try your patience as a reader by writing six pages of rebuttal, though I easily could take issue with every aspect of Pease’s tangled web of claims where she can’t even correctly restate what I wrote. Indeed, it becomes clear that Pease’s greatest talent is attempting to bestow upon her readers her own vitriolic projections that have no basis or understanding of fact. In doing so, she identifies herself as an intolerant critic who must torture (and therefore misconstrue) the facts in an effort to win an argument, so typical of a fanatical mindset that can’t consider any real alternative other than its own projections.

And so, despite the fact that there was absolutely no forensic evidence whatsoever (as documented in the FBI Crime Report, which was withheld from the defense until the beginning of the trial nine months after the murder) linking Ray Crump, Jr. to the bloody crime scene or to the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Lisa Pease wants her readers to believe, as she does, that Ray Crump was actually guilty, because some of the clothes he was wearing that day matched what eyewitness Henry Wiggins, Jr. saw when he viewed the man standing over Meyer’s body within 30 seconds after the two gunshots had ended her life. Wiggins was 126.5 feet away from the murder scene. This was all documented in 1200 pages of trial transcript, something that Pease fails to mention to her readers, because she never read or studied it.

Still, Pease omnisciently claims that in viewing just one picture of Ray Crump in my book, she (and she alone) has decided to proclaim that Crump does, in fact, have a “medium build,” and that Wiggins’ description is completely accurate. Wiggins obviously saw somebody who wore similar clothes to Crump that day, but I maintain it wasn’t Ray Crump. Then, ignoring everyone else’s disposition toward Crump, including his attorney Dovey Roundtree, public defenders George Peter Lamb and Ted O’Neill, and anyone else who actually had contact with Crump at the time of the murder, Pease becomes convinced he was only acquitted because he had “a very astute lawyer.” Never mind the lack of any real evidence, or the fact she was shot execution-style with a gun that was never recovered, or that no one in Ray Crump’s family or community had ever seen Crump with any firearm. To further make her case, Pease invokes the authority of author Nina Burleigh, who like Pease is sure of Ray Crump’s guilt, but who can’t even correctly document the jury’s composition, in addition to a number of other important neglected facts.

Then, hanging her hat on the fact that because Crump lied (he was concealing a tryst with a married woman) about why he was in the vicinity of the towpath that morning, this is further proof to Pease of Crump’s guilt. Our Dick Cheneyesque “cherry-picker” of facts then takes her distorted proclamations even further. Creating her own testimony, Pease suppresses that Crump had an organic brain impairment before the murder took place and that he was actively alcoholic, which in the perception of his attorney Dovey Roundtree made him “incapable of clear communication, incapable of complex thought, incapable of grasping the full weight of his predicament, incapable most of all, of a murder executed with the stealth and precision and forethought of Mary Meyer’s [murder].” (Mary’s Mosaic, p. 318).

Further accusing me of concealing the fact that Crump had a criminal record before the Meyer murder (which consisted of the unspeakable, heinous crime of having been twice arrested for disorderly conduct, along with having served a 60-day jail sentence for shoplifting – all of which I mention on page 53), Ms. Pease wants her followers to believe that because of Crump’s subsequent career in crime, this is the ultimate sine qua non proof of Ray Crump’s having murdered Mary Meyer. The only thing that becomes clear here is that any psychological understanding and sophistication of the human condition completely eludes Lisa Pease; she’s unable to comprehend how an already psychologically impaired individual subjected to continued abuse over a nine-month period in jail (which according to his attorney Dovey Roundtree likely included sexual assaults) could damage someone to the point of becoming a hardened criminal. And so in Pease’s fantasy world, nothing matters (or is able to be grasped) except her distorted perception of her own opinions that have no real basis in factual evidence.

But not yet content, Pease wants her supporters to believe that all of this “illustrates Janney’s shortcomings as a researcher.” She goes on to attempt to prove that I next have “distorted the math” and time intervals in showing that there was a second “Negro male” eluding capture by police immediately following Meyer’s murder. Either Pease didn’t read carefully what I wrote, or she is intellectually challenged by the English language. In either case, she proves only one thing: she hasn’t read the trial transcript. Indeed, her own shortcomings as a researcher won’t even allow her to be factually accurate when quoting what I wrote. “Detective Warner arrested Crump at 1:15pm,” writes Pease, which is not only incorrect (and not what I wrote), but reveals how little Pease actually understood what she read.

Very simply (Mary’s Mosaic, pp. 122-128), I demonstrate through an extensive study of the trial transcript, and in an interview with police officer Roderick Sylvis for this book, how he and his partner Frank Bignotti arrived at Fletcher’s Boat House at approximately 12:30pm in order to block the exits of anyone trying to leave the towpath area. That’s what they were supposed to do: wait in their patrol car and guard the exits, a concept that Lisa Pease again is unable to grasp. They waited for about “four or five minutes” and then began hatching a plan whereby Sylvis would begin walking eastward toward the murder scene via the towpath and Bignotti would do the same along the adjacent railroad bed and woods that separated the two. This planning and positioning of themselves, according to Sylvis, took another five minutes or so. We are now at approximately 12:40pm. As soon as they started out, the two officers spotted a young while couple walking westward on the railroad tracks, who they then approached and began talking to. In an interview with Sylvis in 2008, I asked him specifically how long this interrogation had taken. “At least five minutes, probably more,” said Sylvis. It is now conservatively past 12:45pm, and very possibly later, approaching 1:00pm, before the two officers start their journey eastward toward the murder scene.

Sylvis told the court that he walked “approximately a mile east on the towpath, at which point he saw “a head jut out of the woods momentarily, just for a second . . .” (Mary’s Mosaic, p.123). When I queried Sylvis about how long it took to walk the mile, he was very clear that he had walked “very slowly” and vigilantly, intermittently stopping to peer into the woods, and periodically calling out to his partner Frank Bignotti. During the interview, Sylvis told me he had to be have been walking for “about twenty minutes.” In my book, I gave him the benefit of doubt and stated that “it has to have been at least fifteen minutes or more” (p. 123), before he spotted the head of a second “Negro male.” That meant that the time was likely to be at the very least 1:15pm (the time Ray Crump was arrested, seven tenths of mile away) and likely significantly later.

Yet in Lisa Pease’s reverie, this too becomes incomprehensible for her to grasp. Furthermore, Ray Crump – according to the trial transcript – was already in the company of Detective John Warner sometime before 1:15pm at a location of one tenth of a mile east of the murder scene. I maintain that it could have been as much as ten to fifteen minutes before 1:15pm that Warner first spotted Crump (who Warner said “wasn’t running” when he first spotted the about-to-be defendant), before he started interrogating him – first asking him to produce his driver’s license, which Warner studied, then asking him a series of seven questions, before deciding that he would walk with Crump to his alleged fishing spot in order to help him retrieve his fishing gear that Crump said had fallen into the Potomac River. The trial transcript repeatedly documents that Crump was officially arrested at approximately 1:15pm by Detective Bernie Crooke, but he was in the company of Detective Warner before that time. Therefore, the “Negro male” spotted by officer Sylvis, who successfully eluded capture by police, couldn’t have been the defendant Ray Crump. This isn’t rocket science, but for the challenged Lisa Pease, it’s too much to tolerate, given her desperation to find some way to discredit me, whereby she finally resorts to attacking my educational credentials.

In addition, Ms. Pease can’t even seem to fathom or consider how “Lt. William L. Mitchell,” a man who told police he was jogging on the towpath when he passed Mary Meyer – allegedly just before the murder took place – told police that a “Negro male” matching Wiggins’ description was following her in an effort to frame Ray Crump. “Mitchell” would then testify against Crump at the murder trial nine months later in July 1965 as part of the CIA’s assassination operation. It doesn’t seem to matter to Pease that “Mitchell” has never been able to be located since the trial, or that his known address during that time was documented as a “CIA safe house” by three separate former CIA employees. At the time of trial in July 1965, Mitchell told a reporter that he had since retired from the military and was now a mathematics instructor at Georgetown University – yet no record of his employment there could ever be located, nor was there ever any bona-fide military service record located for “Mitchell,” either in the Pentagon where he was listed in the directory at the time of the murder, or in the main military data base in St. Louis. This was thoroughly researched by the Peabody Award-winning journalist Roger Charles, as discussed in my book, a fact that Pease fails to mention in one of her many deliberate omissions, which also included Damore’s consultation with L. Fletcher Prouty (as documented by Damore’s attorney James H. Smith) to finally understand who “Mitchell” was, before Damore confronted him. Of course, Lisa Pease is entitled to whatever flawed point of view she wants to embrace, but she’s not entitled to her own set of facts.

The rest of Pease’s long-winded misstatements criticizing author Leo Damore, Timothy Leary, Robert Morrow, Gregory Douglas and other sources who I attempted to unravel – explicitly noting their deficiencies and limitations – completely obfuscates the clarity of the emerging picture: Placed in a larger context, and juxtaposed with firm documentation, the aggregate unfolding scenario clearly indicates that Mary Meyer’s life was ended by a CIA assassination. But in the Pease-DiEugenio fantasy world, people are either all white or all black, complete truth-tellers or liars, completely reliable or unreliable. There are no shades of grey; there is no ambiguity; and there is no room for the analysis of intricacy and complexity.

And this is why the Pease-DiEugenio brand of journalistic sophistication (or lack thereof) can’t seem to fathom how JFK advisor Kenneth P. O’Donnell could somehow go on the official record after the 1976 National Enquirer exposé about the Meyer-Kennedy affair and defend the shining Camelot myth in his attempt to negate that there had been a romantic affair between Mary Pinchot Meyer and President Kennedy; yet only a year later, shortly before his death, confide to author Leo Damore some of the intimate details of their relationship. In the same way that O’Donnell never talked publically about how the FBI had discounted his testimony that the Presidential motorcade in Dallas was driving into an ambush where at least two shots had come “from behind the fence [on the grassy knoll],” in front of the motorcade, O’Donnell only mentioned this reality to insiders, which was confirmed twenty-five years later by Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill in his 1987 memoir Man of The House. Both Leo Damore and his attorney James H. Smith worked on one of O’Donnell’s Massachusetts gubernatorial campaigns where the three had become good friends. Yet Lisa Pease can’t fathom that there were many things O’Donnell didn’t want to share publically, and would only confide privately to the people he trusted.

Fabricating evidence is a fatal error for any kind of investigative reporter or critic. What kind of a mindset (or person) would do this? Only a callow, dogmatic “true believer” in the childish Camelot myth, who cannot tolerate being challenged, resorts to a riddled analysis that is filled with factual errors and deliberate omissions and misstatements. This episode in their increasingly virulent and intolerant criticism is both tragic and unfortunate, because some (but not all) of the work of Pease and DiEugenio has made a significant contribution to JFK assassination historical research.

For example, James DiEugenio’s deconstruction of Chris Matthew’s recent book on JFK was an insightful analysis of a flawed work. In addition, DiEugenio and Pease together edited a useful anthology of articles on the assassinations of the 1960s. However, what they have done to Mary’s Mosaic is all too similar to what they do to other first-time authors writing about the JFK assassination: they delight in subjecting those who dare to write about the Kennedy assassination (in a way that conflicts with their own historical interpretations) to the “CTKA buzz-saw.”

So, readers and followers beware (those of you who have the patience to read many of their long and pompous reviews): these two Los Angelinos have an extremely inflated opinion of their own importance in the JFK assassination debate. Fortunately, books last; and reviews are forgotten weeks after they are written (if not sooner). Moreover, we are living in the 21^st century. In spite of the fact that Pease and DiEugenio would surely resurrect book burnings for those works of which they disapprove – establishing a modern-day JFK assassination Index Librorum Prohibitorum if they could do so –modern-day JFK researchers and the American public do not hunger for another Torquemada or Cardinal Bellarmine. I dare say that if Pease and DiEugenio had been in charge of Galileo’s heresy trial in Rome, he would have been sentenced to burn at the stake, instead of to the life imprisonment (house arrest) levied on him by the Holy Office.

(This article is also posted on Lew Rockwell.com: http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/janney3.1.1.html )

[Guest Tom Scully]

Why use Mimi Alford to support your point that tarring JFK as a womanizer could not possibly be driven by republican and CIA propagandists? Mimi writes in her book that the first person she told of her affair with JFK was her dear friend and former roommate, Marion Stuart Pillsbury. Pillsbury is the daughter of Gerry Ford pal, Robert Douglas Stuart, Jr. Around the time Mimi wrote she confided her Kennedy dirt to Pillsbury, Stuart Pillsbury began her 21 years stint as executive director of the David Rockefeller foundation. We apologize for our skepticism about the unceasing character assassination of JFK. Citing sources like Hersch and Alford says much about your ability to discern what is reliable. You're writing about politically contaminated history without being alert to the partisan sabotage.

Edited July 6, 2012 by Tom Scully

[Peter McGuire]

The book is waiting for me at the library - just made the waiting list. Will read and get back here. This is another - very fascinating part of the whole story that I have read about before.

Kennedy was killed by his own government for some reason - it was bigger than Vietnam, although that was a small part of it , and a good cover story.

Some kind of secret research going on? Opposition to Israel's nuclear ambitions? Simply no to three terms for the Kennedys....

I know it was an inside job - you can see the Secret Service inactions - but why? Even screwing around in broad daylight in the White House and making a mockery of the institution of the office of the President would have not caused an operation to take out the POTUS , with extreme prejudice. It had to be about something we do not know about which WAS a threat to national security.

Edited July 8, 2012 by Peter McGuire