Nathaniel Heidenheimer

Greg, interesting. Have you read Secret Agenda by Jim Hougan and Silent Coup by Colodny? Was wondering if this one builds on their research , differs or what.

Precisely how interesting is Jesse H. Jones? We know he was important to LBJ. The writer Charles Higham claims that Jones was a big influence on FDR's decision to advance 6$ million a year to Ibn Saud, even though the latter was a Nazi collaborator, so the Germans would not get enough oil. "Saudi Arabia was emphatically not a lend-lease country. If it were known that Ibn Saud as Hitler's close ally in Nazi pay was being bribed by the President to protect an oil company [Jones was part owner of the Davis Oil Company] there would have been a major public outcry. Roosevelt ordered Harry L. Hopkins, who was in charge of Lend-Lease, to arrange with Britain for the money to be paid to the king under the table. Lend-Lease to England was to be surreptitiously increased." p.81 Trading With The Enemy? Any other sources on this?

"He was a charter member of what came to be known as "the goon squad," a group of young New Dealers who, in the days before Pearl Harbor, met o Monday evenings in the apartment of economist Robert Nathan ,who by day was in charge of developing military requirements to help the nation mobilize for war. In addition to Phil, Rauh and Prich, the group included Isaiah Berlin, diplomat, Oxford don, philosopher, and great friend of Felix Frankfurter, and Lauchlin Currie, the first professional economist to work in the White House. The company was all male; wives were not welcome. Phil placed a starring role. To some he seemed a brash upstart, but others recognized that he was the son-in-law of the publisher of The Washington Post, and the Post was leading the was in pushing for American involvement in the war. In August 1940, Meyer fired his editor, the Quaker isolationist Felix Morley, and replaced him with the interventionist Herbert Elliston. Financial editor and columnist for The Christian Science Monitor, and earlier its correspondent in China, he had refused to become a Christian Scientist, thereby, in effect, refusing the editorship of the Monitor. Within a week of arriving at the Post, Elliston called for "speed, and more speed" in entering the war;"every minute," he said, "the heat of the European blaze is hotter and closer!" The goon squad was known for leaking and feeding information to selected reporters and columnists, and Phil had an inside line to journalists who were squarely in the interventionist camp. Te preferred newsmen included Alfred Friendly, a favorite of Eugene Meyer's who had moved to the Post in 1939 from the Washington Daily News; and Drew Pearson and his partner, RObert Allen, who since 1932 had been writing the syndicated column "Washington Merry-Go-Round," and offshoot of their shocking and best-selling books that exposed the political, social, business, and sexual secrets of Washington's most powerful; the column, then in Cissy Patterson's Times-Herald, would soon move to the Post" pp. 102-103, Power, Privilege, And The Post by Carol Felsenthal --------------------------------------------------- Does anyone know much about this Elliston's background in China? Did he represent a compromise between Europe v. Asia focus in an attempt to divide the latter away from the isolationist camp [i.e. win over those isolationists who thought that the interventionists were more Eurocentric, and perhaps not strongly enough commited to US unilateralism in Latin American and China?] Also I am pretty certain that Felix Morley is the Grandfather of Jefferson Morley. Can anyone confirm that? Also was Thomas Corcoran also a member of this social group that the author refers to as "the goon squad"? Also, elsewhere the author tells us that Phil Graham's little brother Bob was not the only future Senator in Phil's life. Phil's boyhood close friend was George Smathers. First i had heard of that, and perhaps interesting, given the Capitol whispering in late summer and Fall of 1963.

By left-gatekeeping I mean attempts to control the left by intelligence agencies or their surrogates (foundations, academics, or publishing companies) who are 1) trying to maintain credibility with left audiences but only in order to 2) neutralize this audience so that the net effect of their writing/ pontificating is to A) split the left up even more make them get even localer than local so the connection between social movements and electoral politics is broken even more C) cover up key events in recent history [e.g. the RFK 1968 campaign where something was in danger of actually working, and turning it into a litmus test of what it means to be a good leftist [i.e. how much can you bash RFK ] D) disconnecting key policies from key events so that the youthful leftist is left thinking "why bother with the assassinations since there were no policy consequences and one dead Kennedy is no better than one dead Cuban] hence taking all consciousness away from such things as the legitimation (or not) of a completely corrupt political system, the legitimation (or not ) of a completely corrupt media system... etc. In short it is Using "left" to prevent left., and it easy because of money and because of the collapse of the teaching of history under Wall Street's testing and Charter school barrage, which does not leave enough time to let history explain how power works. Also, Paul, Obama and Clinton are rightists at different stages of the same, 45 year long, rightward movement, that includes the RFK and MLK assassinations, and the Democratic big wigs desertion of George McGovern, who, it is too often forgotten was a backer of RFK in 1968.

----------------------- Tom, would you consider typing up a summary of these links that would be more clear for the General Reader? I think you could keep most of this and just arrange an intro with a few sharper topic sentences thrown in here or there. Something stand-alone that I could post everywhere including places where readers of Mimis book might see it?

The Operations Coordinating Board was created upon recommendation of Eisenhower's Jackson Committee, in September, 1953. It was to replace the Psychological Strategy Board. JFK abolished the OCB on Feb 19th, 1961. The Jackson Committee said that the Older PSB didn't work because it "was founded upon the misconception that 'psychological activities somehow exist apart from official policies an actions" OCB members "initially included the undersecretary of state as chair, the psychological warfare advisor, the undersecretary of defense, and the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and Foreign Operations administration." (Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War, p.86) Osgood suggests that the main reason the OCB was created to replace the PSB was that the latter was too much under the sway of the State Department and a new org. was needed to refine the general guidelines of the NSC into more detailed instructions to be given out to a wide variety of departments within the Federal Government. To what extent was the OCB a significant expansion of the unelected military and intelligence bureaucracy? To what extent might JFK have felt that the OCB was a potential challenge to the presidency? Do we know anything about the CIA and the State Department's reaction to JFK's decision and or attempts to prevent this change if there were any?

I happened to see Mr. All Mafia No CIA on CNN a couple of weeks ago about this book. No way they would ever invite a James W. Douglass on CNN. It is noteworthy that Mr Wrong Turn is brought out just after about a nine month flurry of Watergate Revisionist articles which might serve to sow very reasonable questions about the Official Version of Watergate in enough minds to matter.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Don, You raise a number of key points an examples. First, let me isolate one of them because I am not sure whether it is one of the key points of my argument (which could be wrong anyway). Re specific points about 263 273 etc. re Vietnam, how much of the details about the very real, significant differences-- and also differences between the draft of 273 and its final version-- were available to the US public during the 1960's? Some yes, but very important documents revealing these differences were not released until much later. Now, one could go too far here, because certainly the 1,000 troop withdrawal had been discussed, but ambiguities about whether the US was winning or losing the war-- which were not real conditions for JFK's plans for getting out of Vietnam, but rather were only conditions for how he would market his plan during the upcoming election year until he could go full airwave in 1965 -- could definitely have been seized upon to manipulate public opinion into supporting The Official Continuity myth that was so pivotal in diverting the public, and especially the left [ notice that when I type diverting the left I do not use quotation marks around left, but I do when it comes to how "the left" is mediated, i.e. becomes aware of itself through its 3 and half magazines.] And this gets me to my badly explained point, ifn I got one: just how difficult would it be --given the media topography of the 1960s, 70,80, 90s, and after 9/11 , and.... there are some very very different phases here... i.e. 70's limited hangout phase is very different-- but perhaps chronologically logical?-- phase from the 1992- right now phase of just mix jfk with flying saucers, Bill O' Reilly [just don't mention channel 6 in 1977, or maybe do because our readers won't know the difference because they are so.. sophisticated yeah thats it.. SOPHISTICATES!!...just how difficult would it be to splice and control the left, given these limited number of faucets for thirsty leftists to drink from? Not very. So if there is an uninsured point here, it is that the quotation marks around "leftists" are far more significant than the word inside. This is because of Cold War history and the CIA's awareness of just where the greatest threat to the MIC would logically come from, and their subsequent planning to control this left dissent and turn it into "left" McDissent. So when we complain of "the left" and their blatant pig headed idiocy regarding the assassinations, it is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL TO keep in mind that 1) it is this group that has had the highest percentage of disinfo added to their media diet about the assassination 2) it is this group that has had the most sophisticatedly targeted and specialized bs added to their media diet about the assassination 3) the disinfo added to the very inorganic media diet of the US "left" is not in the least left but is rightist, mostly -CIA lies with the expressed purpose of neutralizing the left on the area of JFK and RFK and their policies SO THAT THE NET EFFECT of this Officially Mediated """""leftism"""" is right when it really matters, i.e. dissuading those who would most naturally be interested in how the Vietnam war got so big, how genocide in Indonesia happened, how the economy was changed from industrial to finance capitalism etc from ever connecting these developments with the assassinations. Then , devoid of policy implications, it is a short step to Guru's shoulder shrugging "Who Cares?" and more funding from the Ford Foundation for Pacifier Radio Network. Now at this point the logical question becomes "who the xxxx cares what those organic asswholistics think?" So often I share this sense of frustration. But then I remember: that cog dis I feel as The Last True Leftist [did you hear that Ford Foundation?] who dares brave the Slings and Arrows of the Licensed Crunchy is exactly the cog dis that is the true aim all CIA left gatekeeping of which Encounter Magazine is the prime example. After botched Yoga and abscessed meditation, I shall return to enlighten you with why it matters lots and lots what "the left" reads and communicates about the assassination EVEN IF ONE IS NOT A "LEFTIST", A LEFTIST, A PINKO OR EVEN IF YOU ARE A FIFTY SHADED GRAYO. Ohmmmmalready.

If you are posting about the history of JFK v CIA in Vietnam, Laos, Washington DC, Brazil, Congo, Indonesia, China or USSR you are 15 times more likely to be censored by Democratic Underground or Huffington Post than if you post on a neutral, libertarian or other right wing site. This is not an accident. The fumbled football is only made available to those who will run with it.. in the wrong direction. Censorship that scrambles is a far more effective censorship than is blanket censorship. The NET EFFECT of this sort of scrambleship is to have 75% of left liberals not even bothering to read more than one book if that on this period of history. It is a misdirectional forplay designed to prevent any interest among that particular audience for whom the assassination and JFK's policies would have the most significance.

Hey can we believe that Caro cites ONLY LBJ's diary for claiming that Dulles was suggested for the Warren Commission to LBJ by RFK? Has anyone ever heard any other sources for this idea that RFK told LBJ to put Dulles on WC? And this diary or journal entry is, according to Caro, In July or August of 1969. Now why do I have a problem with this source on that allegation???? ---- To me most of the negative reviews of this book that are currently on Amazon are counterproductive. Most make their focus the question of whether or not LBJ was directly involved in the assassination. They leave out the role of the permanent military intel bureaucracies and the contrast of how JFK and LBJ got along with this new National Security State, that had continued to evolve well after 1950, thank you Mr. Chomsky. Many of them also leave out the biggest problem with Caro's horrible book, its complete omission of policy contrasts between the two presidents which he avoids by making the book only cover up through immediate post assassination period and by making zero contrasts between LBJ and JFK during his description of the latter's admin. Caro thus preserves the myth of continuity in policy.. by avoiding almost all policy! And too many of the critics have let him off the hook. I urge everyone to read this horrible book and send your reviews to amazon now. You will hit more eyeballs with this review than you will posting anywhere else. Specialists CAN write for generalists and newbies. You don't have to start from scratch. The authority well informed commentary is convincing enough to draw new readers in, snag their attention, and get them to read more. Please snag now.

Hey can we believe that Caro cites ONLY LBJ's diary for claiming that Dulles was suggested for the Warren Commission to LBJ by RFK? Has anyone ever heard any other sources for this idea that RFK told LBJ to put Dulles on WC? And this diary or journal entry is, according to Caro, In July or August of 1969. Now why do I have a problem with this source on that allegation????

Thanks for getting this back on track. As a McCarthy for President coordinator of volunteers in 1968, at 17 I was not old enough to vote, yet was very active in the campaign and was in Chicago, on the national staff as part of the Special Projects Committee, as I think I explained earlier. While surprised at the CIA support for McCarthy, which probably stems from their realization that the Vietnam war was a sham, I understood McCarthy's antimosity towards RFK, who only entered the race After McCarthy convinced him that LBJ could be defeated by his strong showing in New Hampshire. I also resented RFK entering the race and taking the steam out of McCarthy's cause. McCarthy, and his staff, also didn't appreciate the Kennedy's putting up a straw man candidate in George McGovern, who like Humphrey, was a politician and not a crusader. I also thought McCarthy had the ability to be president, and was pretty shocked to learn, while in Chicago, that McCarthy knew he had no chance to actually win the presidency. He did it on principal. America just wasn't ready for a poet president. BK McCarthy was a middle to upper middle class candidate. Only. The parallels to Howard Dean are pretty clear. Both, IMO, may very well have been fold-back operations, designed to contain and control anti-war elements of the party without ever really intending to win. RFK was a much much stronger candidate against Nixon, because his entire 1968 campaign was, in effect, the workable counterpunch to The Southern Strategy. Take for example, his challenging the middle and upper middle class college students opposition to the draft. Brilliant move. Long term that is exactly what was necessary to keep the anti-war movement moving forward, and to keep a neo New Deal alliance together that could also work on social issues. It blunted the white working class anger that the Southern Strategy was designed to exploit. The 1968 RFK campaign is so censored because it is the solution to everything that Republicans have done since. RFK's counterpunching the Southern Strategy WAS WORKING and we cannot be permitted to see this. Otherwise the reification of the Media's Blue Dog BS would never work. The 1968 California primary had the biggest income gap between Democratic candidates ever recorded in the 20th Century. The big wigs in the Dem hierarchy did not want to register THOSE PEOPLE!! If you do not understand the 1968 RFK campaign you cannot understand today's Bendovercrats, and are in danger of voting.

Paul: What do you mean by the phrase "his own team" re Mongoose? How do we know that RFK was literally in charge of all actions undertaken by Mongoose, as opposed to just nominally? After all we know that the CIA was later doing unauthorized Cuba actions in 1963. Do you think that had RFK not been part of Mongoose that the CIA would have stopped CIA operations against Castro? Who are the sources who claim that RFK was the most aggressive component of Mongoose? What does RFK's actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis re CIA hit team proposals tell us about RFK's real role with Mongoose?

http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/presidentialrecordings/johnson/1963/11_1963 Easlakeism, unrepentant. Lots of interesting intonations on these tapes!

What does this suggest about the degree to which conflicts between the Air Force and the Navy, present in the military reorganization of 1947, were still present in 1963? Did these conflicts play a direct or indirect role in the assassination? To what extent did McNamara feel capable of trying to tackle inter-service rivalry? Did his involvement in the TFX affair and his apparent conflicts with the Navy play a role in his decision to continue on under LBJ ?

Great news Jim. I hope it will not take you too long. There is so much that is terrible in this book, that one could really spend too long on it. I hope you will also post this review on the Amazon site [if necessary, in slightly altered form] because this is where the newbie youthful citizens go, and they really really need to see criticisms that are not LBJ obsessed, and that put both JFK and LBJ perspective using their vastly different relations with the permanent military intel bureaucracies. Because the Caro book has gotten so much exposure, all of us should use it as a fulcrum. I am amazed at how little the amazon reviews are used by the informed. Everyone take a look. Hundreds of thousands of eyeballs are being hit by five star reviews of a book that is Seymour Hersh disguised with pancake syrup. What an American Tragedy if we allow this to be the unanswered One And Done book for a whole new generation of zombies.

I find it interesting that, while the later Kaiser, Jones, and Logevall books add quite a lot of great different material, they do not really pick up on his Burris material. Perhaps that was simply out of bounds by 2000 for academics. I think it definitely was after 9/11

Daniel, Very important points made on a very important thread. I just want to add my myopia: Who would be most "outraged" by this standard account of RFK ALLEGEDLY (thank you Sam Halperin) "riding shotgun" over the poor MONGOOSE campers? Why not ask Dizzy's daughter on The Nation's editorial board. It is no accident that the image of RFK as more zealous than the CIA to Kill Castro, an image which comes from CIA mouths, is most frequently mimeographed in Foundation Funded """Left""" publications [read 'for rightist ends'] Isolated fabrications like these might whittle down the audience for strange doings at TIME-LIFE re the LAPD in July of 1968, and even stranger doings at KTLA re the LAPD in January of 1969! Bleeding audience by a thousand cuts. So when Someone Talks, who is there to hear it? Only the one's who will pick up the football and run.. in the wrong direction > Alex Jones.

LBJ 'S BACKCHANNEL INTEL REPORTS FROM VIETNAM, 1961: NO ONE KNEW WOODWORK AS GOOD. WAS THE CIA CONFUSED ABOUT WHO WAS PRESIDENT? "Why, then, was the Vice President's information so different? Consider, for example, the Burris memo to Johnson in March 30. In it he delivered to LBJ an even more lurid account of the failing war effort than he had on the 16th. Intensification of Viet Cong activity "on an increasingly broader spectrum" was under way, Burris said, and had now crossed the threshold of direct attacks against units of South Vietnam's regular forces. What is particularly arresting about his March 30 Memo is the raw data that was explicitly and forcefully contradicted at the March [sECDEF, on which McNamara and JFK had based their understanding of how the war was going] conference. ... WHERE WAS THE VICE PRESIDENT'S INFORMATION COMING FROM [my emph] Burris [ Air Force Colonel Howard Burris, LBJ's personal military advisor] says he "got a lot of raw information." (7) When pressed for his exact sources he replied, "We got if from everywhere." In a more revealing explanation on another occasion he said: They'd hand you a copy of a memo. You'd get stuff from the boys in the woodwork. Later McCone [who JFK put in as nominal head of the CIA after he fired Allen Dulles, which is bad for your health] put a stop to what I was getting." -- p. 226-227 JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and The Struggle for Power by John Newman, History Dept., University of Maryland. NOT A HINT OF THIS IN CARO

You got me backwards on that one Nate. I don't say or believe that the CIA sparked or predicated or had anything to do with Arab Spring, and therefore those who say that they are supporting the dictators because they are against NATO are wrong - the Arab Spring is for real and not a CIA sparked invention, and if the Arab Spring is now supported by the CIA, that is no reason to support the dictators. I don't check to see who the CIA is for or against before I make up my mind. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syira were ruled for decades by ruthless dictators who no one predicted could or would be overthrown by a popular democratic region wide revolutionary insurection - and your opinion of the CIA doesn't impact those facts in any way. Up the rebels, death to tryants! BK Ruthless dictators usually supported by the CIA. In Egypt, you know that that was not minor support. And Obama sends Frank Wisner's son over there to restore "order"? I really don't get you Bill. You're willingness to condone vast imperial overreach by a completely unchecked CIA and your willingness to accept this absolute power absolutely unchecked IMO diminishes the significance of the JFK assassination and turns it into trivial pursuit. I have listened to your arguments in defense of the CIA for years and they simply fail to convince because compartmentalization is how that org works, so how can it constitute a defense? The CIA has been largely unchecked since around 1953, and completely unchecked after November 22, 1963. No democracy can live through that. To pretend otherwise trivializes the assassination, even though I am certain that is not your intent. We do not have anything like real democracy here. It is processed conformity. That said, I continue to enjoy reading your research and also to do my best to make it reach wider audiences.

Count me out on that one Bill. The CIA is the opposite of Democracy. No way they can spread it. When it comes to foreign intervention, track record, and motives matter. The CIA gets a 0 out of 100 on that scale.

Tom, Why do you think that extremely labor-intensive efforts to gain a moveable beach-head are better than the alternative strategy of a coordinated effort to delegitimate Wikepedia as a source on the JFK assassination and related CIA media ops? You raise a provocative question pointedly, but the answer does not seem as obvious to me. There are some pretty pyrrhic beach-heads out there. I might be convinced otherwise in this case, but, more generally, it seems to me that anyone who wants to change media has got to switch strategies. The time for merely offering "alternative media" is over, because it has been proven a clearly ineffective strategy. All it does is take pressure off the only media big enough to matter, and they get away with even worse lies. These lies--alone-- shape elections and their corresponding wars. The time has come for a new strategy of creating a political cost for the corporate liars by doing stuff which calls into question their legitimacy before the eyeballs still watching them.

For now, let me just say that I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the way that early 1960s liberalism is taught today i.e. I think cynical and subsidized fake ""leftists''' have misrepresented this unique period, and its inchoate political volatility. I think that this liberalism is of a type completely different from the liberalism of later periods, and moreover, I think that the misunderstanding of this early sixties liberalism is absolutely vital to the perpetuation of official lies about the major political assassinations.

" The LHO wikipedia article has been rated at most, by 118 registered wikipedia users. The LHO article has had more than 104,000 page views in the last 30 days. Wikipedia is what it is, a source where links leading to other sources of information can be quickly obtained. Each wikipedia article is a result at any given moment, of the status of the "input" of dueling POV's of editors, (mostly ordinary members of the public, enabled by their support from agenda driven, wikipedia administrators and hyper editors, and hidden monied, political, and ideological influences). Almost 3500 page views per day of the rather narrow subject matter of Lee Harvey Oswald, nearly 5000 views per day of the article on the Assassination of President Kennedy, but you seldom go to wikipedia, Nathaniel? You urge us all to get the word out, the truth out, but when it comes to one of the most prominent places on the internet, with top search engine placement, you elected to take your ball and go home? It seems most of the members here have similarly reacted to wikipedia. Do you react the same way to the challenges of google search results manipulation? Why aren't we all working in coordination to attempt to get what we can to "stick" in wikipedia articles? Why are we not making the changes in those articles that we are able to effect, and accepting patiently, only for the time being, the changes we attempt which do not "stick"? Your post hints of hand wringing, and it is almost all I see in reaction to wikipedia posted by members of this forum. You posted that maybe wikipedia is changing. The new article ratings seem irrelevant window dressing, IMO. Wikipedia is probably not going to change, but it will continue to be a bully pulpit." ---- I object to this post as it has caused me cognitive dissonance or whatever that stuff is that causes thinking. Mods pleased be advised of this grievous Breach of Trust.

I almost never go to Wikipeidia, but on my notion of lark, I decided to see if they could find a way to warp the batting statistics of the St. Louis Cardinal currently known as Allen Craig, and compare their objectivity re his bullets to one or a baker's dozen in Dallas. What I discovered was that there now seems to be A RATING PAGE for each subject. You need to have an account in order to rate the pages. It might be interesting to see how much gravity weighs on them scales.