Tim Carroll

Poppa Joe supported the nomination after the fact. Kennedy went to the convention planning on Symington. T.C.

Rather than blackmail, I believe Johnson managed to obtain the V.P. nomination through trickery and betrayal. Bobby's oral history makes it clear that Kennedy was informed that Johnson wanted the offer and that he would decline to accept. But Johnson didn't decline. Bobby described the scene when JFK returned to the hotel suite after making what was supposed to be a pro forma offer with prearranged refusal: And he said, "You just won't believe it." I said, "What?" And he said, "He wants it." And I said, "Oh, my God!" He said, "Now what do we do?" Bobby made his famous visit to convince Johnson to withdraw: So I went, and I said, "you can run the party." And in my judgment - seeing him since then - he is one of the greatest sad-looking people in the world. You know, he can turn it on. I thought he'd burst into tears. I don't know whether it was just an act or anything. But he just shook, and tears came into his eyes, and he said, "I want to be Vice President, and if the President will have me, I'll join with him in making a fight for it." It was that kind of conversation. Johnson sprung a trap that JFK couldn't escape. T.C.

The Berlin Wall certainly made for good Cold War theater, serving as a moving symbol of communist oppression for a quarter century. The circumstances that led to the building of the Wall are seldom discussed. It's good to remember how the NATO countries were prepared to launch all-out nuclear war to defend West Berlin, a half city located over one hundred miles inside of East Germany. Khrushchev was in a bind over the flood of skilled professionals escaping to the West through that city. It had to be stopped, but if he stopped it, as he claimed at the Vienna Summit to be his intention, there was no form of conventional warfare to contest it. Kennedy deftly sent the subtle signal that there would be no violation of Western interests if the East Germans constructed a Wall on their own territory. The Wall calmed the Berlin Crisis, backfired profoundly as a propaganda symbol, and ultimately bought the time needed to avoid a nuclear war. It's also good to remember how many asserted that Kennedy's refusal to knock the Wall down was a sign of weakness. Berlin demonstrated the efficacy of Kennedy's kind of leadership, in contrast to the solutions preferred by militarists. The euphoria in the streets of Berlin that day of the Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech showed how much people all over the world recognized how Kennedy had brought everyone through the moment of maximum peril. T.C.

I'm a racist because I oppose school vouchers? For the record, my post made no mention of race. But since twisting the race issue is clearly Mr. Lamson's agenda, here's the NAACP's position on vouchers: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) said today the Supreme Court decision upholding the use of taxpayer-paid school vouchers to send children to private schools will eventually leave public schools systems in dire straits. Kweisi Mfume, NAACP President & CEO, said: "The congress and state legislatures should act immediately to counteract the court's decision. The NAACP opposes the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for school vouchers because it will mean fewer dollars for public schools where most Americans are educated. School voucher programs siphon scarce tax money away from struggling public schools. Education must be a fundamental guarantee for each child. This decision does nothing but further undercut the concept of universal quality public education, which has provided a means of upward economic and social mobility to generations of working-class families. Siphoning off funds meant for public education will, dollar-for-dollar, make it that much more difficult for public school systems--already falling behind the curve--to keep pace in their desperate efforts to modernize and become more efficient. Vouchers are a bandage not a cure. They don't solve the problems or the needs of public schools or the students who attend them. It's a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. This 5-4 Supreme Court decision legitimizes a concept of Robin Hood in reverse and says, 'it's ok to take more money from poor school systems.' In the end, it treats the symptoms, but offers no cure." In a resolution approved two years ago, the NAACP Board of Directors voted its unqualified support of public education and denounced the use of public funds to support non-public school "choices." T.C.

Liberals in America, especially at more local levels, have taken to using the less loaded word: "progressive." A general model of liberalism would involve social tolerance and economic progress for the disenfranchised, while conservativism relates to maintenance of the status quo. In the case of this extemist breed of conservatives known as Neo Cons (neo Conservatives), I think of them as Neo Confederates. They don't just seek to maintain the status quo, they actually seek to roll back the clock to antebellum days by undoing Social Security and Public Education. They oppose a liveable minimum wage, socialized medicine and generally opportunity for all. Their policies widen the gap between haves and have-nots. They claim to be against big government yet always seek to expand governmental authority. They claim to be against taxes while enabling predatory corporate policies that raise the cost of life's essentials. Refusing to recognize education as a social necessity, as fundamental as infrastructure and law enforcement, they hypocritically promote school vouchers in the name of freedom of choice. This is analogous to disaster relief workers handing out vouchers for Evian to people who choose or don't need the regular water. T.C.

The example betrays the point. Conservatives favor school vouchers because they view education itself as a social program which should be either limited, cut back or done away with. Vouchers are a slippery slope toward that end. The labels liberal and conservative generally hold up. A better example of a situational conservatism would be when the belief in balanced budgets is thrown out the window like so much trash when the pretense of war can promote massive military industrial expenditures. John Simkin is correct in his statement that while not all conservatives are racists, all racists are conservatives. T.C.

Aren't there any international laws against the tactics employed by the CIA and the United Fruit Company?Certainly there are Terry, and rulings. Probably why anti UN is on the gov agenda. John is exactly correct that the government's anti-U.N. agenda is driven by a fundamental international lawlessness for which the U.S. disclaims any accountability. Anyone who feels smug about dragging Saddam Hussein into court should be mindful that the U.S. has previously been found by the World Court to be criminally violating international law. There was a resolution passed during the Contra Crusade in Central America condemning the U.S.' role there. The U.N. is substantially restrained from such findings because of the U.S. veto power. But just imagine if Ronald Reagan had been dragged into an international court to be held accountable for the atrocities in Central America. That the U.S. continues to evade responsibility for its hegemonic actions is a disservice to civilization generally. T.C.

Tosh Plumlee has described an association with a house behind 1026 N. Beckley which involved an Alpha 66 group. He has gone back to the house and shown researchers where his initials were scratched into a drainboard. T.C.

The sequence of events leading to Johnson's V.P. nomination implies that Kennedy was not expected to live to complete his term in office. Johnson had been conducting a whispering campaign about Kennedy's long-denied Addison's Disease. Additionally, Johnson's close friendship with J. Edgar Hoover probably made him aware of Kennedy's drug use and chronic venereal disease. Kennedy himself didn't expect to live long, so it's fair to consider that LBJ didn't either. The thinking in 1960 may well have been that Kennedy wouldn't need to be killed. It must have frustrated Johnson to see Kennedy's health actually improve during his last year of life. T.C.

http://www.toonedin.com/cheney.html

From my reading of the subject, very few people outside of Texas were aware of the oil depletion allowance. However, some politicians did make a fuss about it. In 1933, Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt's treasury secretary, made attempts to get it removed. His attempts were blocked by powerful figures in Congress.... President Harry Truman attacked it by saying "I know of no loophole... so inequitable." However, he was unable to do anything about it because of the activities of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Dwight Eisenhower made no attempt to bring it to an end.... It was only when Kennedy became president that attempts were made to deal with this tax loophole. The oil depletion allowance saved a small group of men millions of dollars every year. If anybody had a motive to kill JFK it was the Texas oil millionaires. I've also noticed the mention of the Oil Depletion Allowance in the movie, Giant. There was an earlier mention of the O.D.P. in the 1954 Humphrey Bogart-Ava Gardner movie, The Barefoot Contessa. In the pertinent scene, a wealthy South American businessman launches into a tirade about what hypocrites American businessmen are - how they don't pay their fair share of taxes and benefit from subsidies which amount to corporate welfare, most particularly the Oil Depletion Allowance. Speaking of the movie Giant, it was in the news this week with regard to the Cheney shooting. It seems that the Armstrong Ranch would be analogous to the James Dean ranch in Giant, in contrast to Rock Hudson's character's ranch being the "model" for the King Ranch. Sydney Blumenthal wrote the following excerpt in his article, Shoot First, Avoid Questions Later: Katharine Armstrong is linked to two family fortunes -- those of Armstrong and King -- that include extensive corporate holdings in land, cattle, banking and oil. No one in Texas, except perhaps Baker, but certainly not latecomer George W. Bush, has a longer lineage in its political and economic elite. In 1983, Debrett's Peerage Ltd., publisher of "Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage," printed "Debrett's Texas Peerage," featuring "the aristocrats of Texas," with the King family noted as the "Royal Family of Ranching." The King Ranch, founded by Richard King in 1857, is the largest in Texas, and its wealth was vastly augmented by the discovery of oil on its tracts, making the family a major shareholder of Exxon. The King Ranch is the model for Edna Ferber's novel of Texas aristocracy, "Giant." John B. Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and enforcer for the King Ranch, founded his own neighboring ranch in 1882, buying it with the bounty of $4,000 he got for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. In 1944, almost inevitably, the two fortunes became intertwined through marriage. Tobin Armstrong's brother John married the King Ranch heiress, who was also a Vassar classmate of Tobin's wife, Anne, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family.... While the incident continues to unfold, the Bush administration is pressing a new budget in which oil companies would receive what is called "royalty relief," allowing them to pump about $65 billion of oil and natural gas from federal land over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government, costing the U.S. Treasury about $7 billion. For Texas royalty like the Armstrongs, it would amount to a windfall profit. The curiosities surrounding the vice president's accident have created a contemporary version of "The Rules of the Game" with a Texas twist. In Jean Renoir's 1939 film, politicians and aristocrats mingle at a country house in France over a long weekend, during which a merciless hunt ends with a tragic shooting. Appearing on the eve of World War II, "The Rules of the Game" depicted a hypocritical, ruthless and decadent ruling class that made its own rules and led a society to the edge of catastrophe. http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/20...eney/print.html T.C.

Talk about pathetic, here's Robert bringing back a thread from last summer to continue to prosecute the Shanet Clark brouhaha, caring ever so much about Mr. Clark while at the same time demonstrating overtly that he hasn't just missed that "Shanet had posted to the Forum lately," but has missed Shanet's numerous posts generally. It's a shame that Robert further needed to turn this so-called "real event" of his own making into an opportunity to add even more insult to injury, this time targeted at Terry Mauro. T.C.

Shanet Clark has made 75 posts since acknowledging that it was "wrong" to state that Tim Gratz was a part of the manipulation of Arthur Bremer. Shanet is not a weak sister who needs his cause championed; he's an honorable gentleman who took responsibility for himself and moved on. Resurrecting his apology/departure in order to advance a vendetta against Tim Gratz demeans Shanet as well as Tim. T.C.

The film evoked images of the twisted gunrunning operations involving the theft of National Guard Armory weapons, such as the one in Texas the month of the assassination. It's hard to imagine how such robberies could have occurred so frequently without some governmental complicity. T.C.

I loved the film and have recommended it to others. It started off as a comedy and ended very darkly. In this post I started to get into a certain plot twist and then realized I would really be spoiling it for others. So I'll just say that there came a point when it reminded me of the subterranean role of gunrunning in the events of Dallas. I recommended the film to Tosh Plumlee, as it reflected much of what he has tried to impart with regard to the activities of M-26-7. T.C.

This thread's not out of line, you're wrong there. And Tim's no martyr.Ditto to that, Rush. I think Tim should be prepared to take some of what he dishes out. The initiation of an entire thread devoted to Tim Gratz's political views isn't questionable because it's undeserved; it's questionable because it's inappropriate and crass. T.C.

Cheney's behavior was typical of an avoidance of scrutiny to conceal alcohol consumption. He evaded any contact with authorities for fourteen hours. He knows all about this, given his multiple drunk driving convictions. This long time hunter supposedly didn't know that he needed a certain hunting license. Bush and Cheney began this administration by circumventing the constitutional prohibition against both coming from the same state. These guys have at their core a root disregard for the law and the normal rules of civilized society. They personify the kind of psychopathology that was LBJ's hallmark. Texas, man! T.C.

Records show that years after Dealey Plaza, Roselli continued in his practice of losing his FBI surveillance by walking to the rear area of the Desert Inn, where Maheu had his air-curtained home on the golf course. T.C.

And of course, there's Maheu's best friend, Johnny Roselli. Maheu was/is some some kind of player! Which person in Dealey Plaza resembled a Hughes bodyguard? Is this the same person? T.C.

The Walker attempt didn't just shield the right-wing general from allegations of complicity in the JFK matter; it provided the same kind of misdirectional cover for right-wingers generally. The supposed attempt on Walker, in which a stationary target was missed, was a key element in the establishment of Oswald as a crazed commie. Similarly, the claim that Nixon had been Bremer's target didn't just absolve Nixon as his sponsor; it presented Bremer as a left-wing extremist rather than a right-wing one. By Hunt's own admission, part of the plan was to have Democratic Party literature strewn around Bremer's apartment, to be found later by investigators. The Walker attempt clearly established Oswald's historical credential as a leftist sniper. To speculate for a moment, the attempt operationally established his credential as a near-miss artist who would have been capable of shooting Connally, just as Zangara missed FDR and killed Cermak. T.C.

Is there some conclusive evidence that supports such unequivocal declarations about the motive(s) for Tower's and Heinz's deaths? T.C.

After closely studying the Moorman Photo in the course of an exchange about Classic Gunman, I began to feel that I was seeing more images behind the wall. I sought Jack's help with getting "the best quality Moorman photo obtainable." I was surprised to realize that I couldn't intelligently answer his questions: "Which version? There are several. The early Zippo print without the thumbprint? Early wire service prints with pedestal cropped out? Later wire service prints? My copies made from the original? Gordon Smith copy from original, etc. etc. etc.? All are different." So I'm seizing this opportunity for clarification and/or an assist from Bill Miller regarding which version is the purest (perhaps "rawest" would be better, knowing Jack's position about tampering). I also question the thumbprint: how can there be versions without it? As for the coke bottle, I'm a bit confused about that issue. Admittedly, I can't see it in the foregoing posts. But if it was at the retaining wall corner in Willis and Betzer, then it must also be within view in Moorman. Correct? T.C.

The concept of a fake attempt may only apply to what Oswald thought himself a part of. The actual firing of a rifle from the window would be classic misdirection, drawing attention to Oswald (Alek Hidell) as owner of the rifle and missing employee. T.C.

The link works fine for me. The assertion of KGB funding for Mark Lane is skeletal at best. The idea that the KGB was "secretly underwriting his 'research' and travel in the amount of $12,500 (in 2005 dollars)" is fairly obscure. Would "secretly" mean it was even secret from Lane? How much would $12,500 in "2005 dollars" be in 1966? It seems the amount would have been so insignificant that any evidence of such token funding would have been generated to deliberately discredit Lane (classic counterintelligence). The thrust of the Holland article seems to be that lawyers have ill-served the research effort: During forty-two years of controversy over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the legal profession has played an instrumental role. All seven members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the 1963 assassination, were lawyers. There were twenty-seven people on the commission's staff (including Norman Redlich, a Nation contributor since 1951), twenty-two of whom were aspiring or practicing attorneys. The combined efforts of these lawyers produced an imperfect report in September 1964, although its fundamental findings have never been seriously impeached. But what the legal profession giveth, less scrupulous members of the bar taketh away. Since 1964 four other lawyers have been chiefly responsible for putting the Warren Report into undeserved disrepute. During a conference in November sponsored primarily by the Washington-based Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC)--headed, not coincidentally, by a lawyer--three of these four lawyers made rare public appearances or were otherwise represented in spirit. The paterfamilias of disingenuousness, Mark Lane, was noticeably absent. An obscure New York attorney at the time of the assassination, Lane single-handedly set the standard for dishonest criticism. In 1964 he spread innuendo about an ostensibly sinister delay in the Warren Commission's investigation as he went barnstorming around the country giving what was then known as The Speech. Two years later Lane published a book titled Rush to Judgment, having conveniently forgotten his earlier accusation. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation during those years, steadfastly refused, to his everlasting credit, to propagate Lane's basic allegation that the government was indifferent to the truth. Little did McWilliams (or anyone else) know then that the KGB was finding Lane's work so useful that it was secretly underwriting his "research" and travel in the amount of $12,500 (in 2005 dollars). The Soviet intelligence service was engaged in a scheme to implicate the CIA, the FBI and the far right in the assassination and the subsequent murder of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, but had little to show for its efforts until New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison inserted himself into the case in 1967. Owing to a clever piece of disinformation implanted in a left-wing Roman newspaper, Paese Sera, in March 1967, Garrison became consumed by the notion that Clay Shaw, a prominent businessman he had charged with participating in an alleged conspiracy that killed JFK, was actually "an employee of the CIA...an agency man in Rome trying to bring Fascism back to Italy," as he put it in his 1988 memoir. Within a matter of months Garrison had succeeded in making the KGB's wildest fantasy come true: An elected public official in America was propagating Moscow's line. Not even Lane had dared suggest that official Washington was complicit in the assassination itself. Garrison, having died in 1992, did not attend the AARC conference, but he was represented in spirit by Joan Mellen, a Temple University English professor who has just published a hagiography of the DA, whom Oliver Stone tried to rehabilitate in his 1991 film JFK. Mellen's reception was decidedly tepid, for Garrison, like Joe McCarthy, has always represented a fault line. Just as McCarthy was disavowed by many anticommunists because of his beyond-the-pale tactics, conspiracy "buffs," as Calvin Trillin memorably labeled them in a 1967 New Yorker article, have always been hopelessly divided over Garrison. Even buffs inclined to believe the DA's grand theory of a military-industrial-intelligence complex find it hard to square that with his persecution of Clay Shaw. The most vociferous critics among the buffs have never forgiven Garrison for setting back the movement almost irreparably. A jury declared Shaw not guilty in 1969 after a mere fifty-four minutes of deliberation, and if Shaw hadn't died prematurely in 1974 at the age of 62, Garrison would likely have found himself at the wrong end of an impressive civil judgment for misuse and abuse of his prosecutorial powers. The fallow years following the collapse of Garrison's legal farce ended once Watergate proved that conspiracies and cover-ups could exist in high places. During Washington's season of inquiry in the mid-1970s, unresolved questions about the 1963 assassination resurfaced. Some of them richly deserved to be asked, and answered--such as the nature of the cooperation (or lack thereof) between the Warren Commission and the two agencies critical to its inquiry, namely, the FBI and the CIA. Led by Senator Frank Church, Democrats on the Select Committee on Intelligence dived into this issue with a vengeance--until the answers they started coming up with contradicted the still- prevalent view that once there had been a Camelot. Then-Senator Gary Hart was more responsible than most of his committee colleagues for twisting unpalatable truths into the logical equivalent of pretzels and milking the tragedy for political gain. The only genuine conspiracy Hart and his colleagues established was the Kennedy Administration's attempts to kill Fidel Castro, and the subsequent efforts to keep that secret from one and all, including the Warren Commission. These days Hart--a lawyer before he entered politics--seldom talks about the Church Committee. Nonetheless, he made a rare appearance at the AARC conference to speak about the "still unanswered questions" raised by his three-and-a-half-month inquiry. Listening to Hart was an exercise in time travel. The perspective gained after thirty years, not to mention information available from tens of thousands of recently declassified documents, was airbrushed out of existence. Hart forthrightly admitted that he has "not followed the research" but acted as if his conclusions were as fresh and relevant as when first issued in 1976. He remains a "total agnostic" on who killed Kennedy, and overly proud of his role in revealing that two groups were ostensibly motivated to kill the President: anti-Castro exiles and the Mafia. Those who testified before Hart have a somewhat different recollection of the former senator's probity. He was "only interested in [testimony] proving what he wanted proven," James Hosty, a retired FBI agent who testified before Hart in 1975, recently recalled. When one young man in the audience had the temerity to ask why the Church Committee had not endeavored to answer questions instead of just raising them, Hart became testy, if not bitter. Had he been elected President in the 1980s, Hart averred, he would have reopened the federal investigation into the assassination (for the third time). The clear implication was that the American people will never know because Hart's bid for the presidency was unfortunately aborted. Notwithstanding Hart's rare discussion--which included his hilarious impression of William Harvey, the CIA officer who negotiated the Mafia's participation in the plots to kill Castro--the centerpiece of the AARC conference was a banquet address by G. Robert Blakey, who was a professor at Cornell Law School when he became chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1977. It is due to Blakey that the federal government speaks (at least superficially) with a forked tongue about the assassination. In 1964 the Warren Commission unanimously found that "on the basis of the evidence before [it]...Oswald acted alone." In 1979 the HSCA infamously concluded that JFK "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," but the committee was "unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy." The pregnant construction of the HSCA's hedged conclusion hinged entirely on so-called acoustic evidence rammed through the committee at the eleventh hour by Blakey. Now a law professor at Notre Dame and a nationally recognized expert on the RICO statute, Blakey invariably fails to mention that three HSCA members dissented in 1979 because they found the uncorroborated acoustic evidence unbelievable. And their reservations soon proved correct: A National Research Council panel (aided by an Ohio rock drummer named Steve Barber) established in 1982 that the "shots" allegedly recorded on a police Dictabelt began approximately one minute after the President was mortally wounded and en route to Parkland Hospital (a finding that is reaffirmed in the current issue of Science & Justice, a British forensic journal). In point of fact, 99.99 percent of HSCA's report improved upon or underscored the accuracy of the Warren Report's key findings. But one would be hard-pressed to know that after listening to Blakey. The exploitation of the assassination by the likes of Mark Lane, Jim Garrison and Gary Hart, for whatever reasons, was bad enough. But someday a historian looking back will likely declare Blakey the most irresponsible of them all. Blakey was given a position of great responsibility in the mistaken belief that he would seek the truth. Regarding Holland's mention of Science & Justice's findings that "A National Research Council panel (aided by an Ohio rock drummer named Steve Barber) established in 1982 that the "shots" allegedly recorded on a police Dictabelt began approximately one minute after the President was mortally wounded and en route to Parkland Hospital (a finding that is reaffirmed in the current issue of Science & Justice, a British forensic journal)," Wikipedia reports that the british journal's reportage is the opposite of what Holland claims" An analysis published in the March 2001 issue of Science & Justice by Dr. Donald Thomas uses a different Dallas policeman radio transmission synchronization to put forth the claim that the National Academy of Sciences panel was in error. Thomas's conclusion, very similar to the HSCA conclusion, is that the gunshots impulses are real to a 96.3% certainty. Thomas presented additional details and support in the November 2001 [1] and September [2] and November [3] 2002 issues. T.C.