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.

Wow, this new Caro book is REALLY bad. Yes there are one or two redeeming qualities. But, this new Caro book is REALLY bad. There are some reviews making some good points, but generally a lot of the LBJ did it centric-ness of these reviews is playing right into the hands of the disinformationists. I hope that people who can point out the wider political implications of the coup can post stuff on there soon. This book is getting lots and lots of views, and it is a shame that readers are sometimes only being given a caricature of the research community. We need to get more media-smart and realize that this is a wider angle opportunity to escape the horrible prison that the internet has become. Please post reviews with links to good books NOW!! . I will asap but unfortunately this is my most hellish time of year and I have zero time.

Shared. Will re-share in a number of different places. These days, injections are needed in many strategic points of the media circulation system. They are thinking sneakier. So must we. It is as if Huffingtons never divorced, but rather bipartisan mytoasted.

This is an opportunity. The Story has gotten nearly 900 shares . Tons of comments on the story. This is a once every ten years opportunity to spread links , books etc. I would do it, but I have been spreading links all day, and I have a job. Can someone else who cares about history take over?

You can even pair Caro with another book in a kind of challenge. Here is how I did it. ---------- I love reading Caro on LBJ. But there is no National Security State there. Even great historians like Allen Brinkley fail to ride both broncos-- the traditional three branches, electoral model and the newer one, the post 1947 National Security State. Official McLeftists like Chomsky are peddled to the extent that they confirm the statist mantra that this new military, intel AND MEDIA bureaucracy was always under the thumb of the President. No thumb was that wide, and especially after January 1953 [ notice how we hear the least about the CIA between 1953-1960 from our official "leftists"] Do you take your own curiosity seriously or manicured? If the former, try this challenge: read the most important book on the US presidency written since 1945. It is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. This book rides both broncos. Check out what Ray MGovern, John Perkins, Daniel Ellsberg, Marcus Raskin and Richard Falk have said about JFK and the Unspeakable. The Footnotes alone are the Alexandria of the US National Security State. Compare it to Caro's new book. Read both at once. The twain is not marketed to meet. That's your job as a citizen living at a time when the largest Military Industrial Media Complex in world history is 64 years old and grown beyond lenses. Or you can keep reading The New Yorker, and conflate Daniel Ellsberg with moon landing wackos. Nobody will make fun of you.http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Unspeakable-Why-Died-Matters/dp/1439193886/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

This book will be number 1 for a while. It is an incredible opportunity. We should try to get a new Amazon review up every single day if not hour. These reviews should be full of product links to great books like Breach of Trust and Unspeakable. The corporate media censorship should not go uncontested. Amazon reviews on a book that will get this amount of views is a real opportunity. Also mention Black Op Radio and quote from other good sites. We need to do this. There will never be the publicity of another JFK movie. We do it or the implications of the coup will be forever niched and trivialized.

What a piece of abject garbage is Hersh. No wonder the CIA's lips move so fast for him.

Brief Dudman note. Recently I was kicked off the STL today website by a moderator named "Mandy" I like to post JFK and Cold War connections material on BIG NEWSPAPER SITES SO That I can convince myself that I am a Hegelian world-changing individual even though I never understood a single word he said. Well anyway, the article I posted that SEEMS to have gotten me kicked off was the December 1 1963 article by Dudman mentioning the windshield. Dudman is still alive. Well within two days I was removed from the stl today forums, a place where I liked to be, because it was 1) full spectrum 2) got reposts from all over North America because there are many emigrees from Stl Louis area by oceans and 3) to thousands of views. I had been posting on this site for 10 years. Then suddenly I post the Dudman article in the site of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and I am removed. By a moderator named Mandy. Now I sent an e-mail to a certain journalist employed at Stl Today who I know is pro-conspiracy although he mostly writes about movies. He wrote back to the effect that there was little he could do but said I should know how certain agents operate and shouldn't be too surprised. In view of Weldon's comments on BOR that Dudman was frightened into silence, I thought this censorship --when contrasted with my ten years of posting on the STL today site-- might be interesting. I had posted lots on JFK and CIA history before. But this was posting an old article from the St. Louis Post Dispatch itself. FWIW

“Butch” Griswold was a popular deputy commander, possessing far more people skills than “Tommy” Power " HUMANELY IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!! "Their wives marveled at the mutually taciturn airmen whose friendship seemed based more upon mental telepathy tha conversation." Who said there was no checks and balances in Omaha! No seriously folks, this is very interesting in terms of Richard Rhodes comments that SAC possessed some degree of autonomy within the air force on the ability to launch a nuclear first strike and also independence from presidentS.

Lets compare three areas of extreme controversy within Mary's Mosaic. 1) the alleged meeting with Leary 2) the breakdown of Phillip Graham at the Jan 1963 Publishers Convention and 3) the night of her death summary btw. RFK and Marilyn Monroe In the first two the author clearly acknowledges the controversy and, to his credit, attempts to present different points of view and illuminate their sources. Now it could be that this overview of the different views is loaded with a straw dog presentation of "the critics" of Janney's view. I will need to reread the sections and compare them more closely to other accounts to answer that question. However, what really stands out #3. The allegations about RFK and Marilyn are so flimsy, short and based on only one source. Given that they very strongly suggest a direct role of RFK in her death, it is kind of like a drive by shooting of RFK. More and more I have wondered about the incredible lack of interest in the RFK assassination. This is especially true given the incredible number of people interested in the JFK assassination. The combined effect of both assassinations has been to turn the Democrats into The Other Republicans. Given this common result of both assassinations in tandem, how does one explain the tens of thousands who are interested in JFK and spend so much time there, yet have no time at all in the RFK hit. Even among JFK researchers who seem so keenly aware of media distortion and Mockingbird Droppings re JFK seem completely uncritical when doing drive by allegations about RFK. Don't get me wrong. I am not objecting to Janney's right to make these allegations re RFK. What I am objecting to is overwhelming chasm between the seriousness of the charges and the amount of evidence and perspective offered in evaluating these charges. The RFK assassination is so often shorn of its political context when it is mentioned at all. I recommend the book In His Own Right by Palermo. This book is tied with JFK and the Unspeakable for the most important cure for the US' current woes. It shows more clearly than any other just how huge a difference there was between RFK's multi-faceted California campaign WHICH INCLUDED CLEAR CLASS ISSUES AND THREATENED TO BRING IN WHAT THE UPPER CLASS WITHIN THE PARTY DEEMED "THE GREAT UNWASHED"--and , on the other hand, Gene McCarthy's upper middle class college campaign. Such purity is Lagley's scrubbing bubbles, a temporary finger in the damn until Dow resumed napalming Vietnamese kids. Of course the left is diverted from this connection, with the most flagrant lies about RFK. I am beginning to wonder if there is not even deliberate disinformation about RFK even among those who are Pro-conspiracy re JFK. That is just how important the RFK assassination is seeming to me right now, and until I find an answer about why it is so ignored all I can do is ponder strange discrepancies such as between 1and 2 v 3. "for a bore is a straight line that finds a wealth in division" The strategy of disinformation used by the CIA in media about the assassinations is not one huge lie but onion-skin style lying, with shared truths diminishing until there are a million sub-groups screaming at each other. Intenet and cable replacing the older three network scenario is good for that approach. http://www.amazon.com/His-Own-Right-Joseph-Palermo/dp/0231120699

I have just recently passed up the RFK-Marylyn M. Part of the book It was only two paragraphs and was almost entirely based on one book. It was very poorly done IMO because it was only based on one source, and did not address any of the critics of this view. It was really terrible, given just how suggestive it was that RFK was involved in the murder-- while never actually saying he was-- but while being so fast and flimsy in sourcing. That said, there are other parts of the book that are very good.

This book is really starting to move. It is now around 2,000 in kindle sales, 1,000 in hardcover after being out for one day with zero media and zero adds. That is momentum. The material on Ben Bradlee could really shake trees, IMO.

How in the name of GOD is posting ONLY on this HIGHLY SPECIALIST SITE a means of bringing JFK truth "to the mainstream" ? This is just where we are supposed to talk only to those who already know lots about the assassination. Posting here is useful but it does absolutely NOTHING to bring more new readers to the truths of the assassinations. But alas, it seems like actually trying to SPREAD truth to new, younger readers is beneath the dignity of our sophisticates here on Education Forum! A tree will continue to fall in the forest while the NYT manufacture of lying consent and McDissent continues to go unchallenged.

" A very young Bill Clinton, incredibly enough, was the one who drove Hale Boggs to the airport when his plane took off and vanished into oblivion" Don, first I've heard that Bill Clinton drove Boggs to the airport. Would have thought that would have made it into the excellent Roger Morris book on the Clintons. What is your source on that?

Very very interesting Robert. Especially when combined with your earlier post on the LeMay thread. We are told again and again about inter-service rivalries that came to a head around the time of the 1947 military restructuring. And lingered. But one of the lingering issues that evolved as a result of that struggle was the relatively weak position of the Sec of Defense as a whole in his relation to the separate civilian service secretaries, who, it was thought would be more reflective of the top military dogs in each service. Indeed this ambiguity between centralization and loyalty to the Navy was a major reason for Truman's appointment of Forrestal and the later's calling Harry's bluff by accepting. And, IMO this ambiguity was a major variable in Forrestal's bugging out in 1949. James Carroll describes JFK's creation of the DIA as an attempt to strengthen the president's hand and reign in the autonomy of the separate services. While we are often led to believe that the Air Force was feeling very special after 1947, your post on the LeMay thread-- in conjunction with this one-- suggests that maybe the issue of inter-service rivalry, though real enough, might sometimes serve as a foil for the other conflict, that between central and decentralized control over the services. And it should be emphasized that this conflict was at the center of the 1947 restructuring debate itself. So it should not surprise us too much if this issue --never fully resolved-- should crop up again when National Security State was SACarine 16.

------ It ist too often forgotten that Butler loaded up the truck and moved to Orange County in 1968. According to Turner and Christian he was on hand the day after the RFK assassination to blame Cuba for the assassination of RFK too. A small newspaper from the National Socialist Duchy of Long Beach California covered this particular INCA dialectic.

Robert: Where all of this gets very compelling in my estimation, are some of the lesser known details of this period in time. Especially regarding the issue of timing. For example, the following passage page 105; Harnessing the Genie: Science and Technology Forecasting for the Air Force 1944-1986 - Michael H. Zorn General Schriever carried these and other conclusions of the Forecast panels with him to an AFSC Commanders’ Conference held at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama,on November 13, and 14, 1963. Attended by General LeMay and all AFSC commanders, it featured two days of briefings by the project’s committee chairs. Schriever told his listeners at the end of the sessions that the Pentagon had so far supported the Forecast interpretation of national policy goals, based upon the principle of “limited and balanced deterrence through flexible and controlled response.” provided “plenty of license to build the kind of Air Force which will implement [the policy goals].” He stressed that neither Zuckert nor LeMay wanted the panel reports to serve as “action” or implementation documents, but only as “blueprints” for the future. Hence, Schriever, said firmly, “there will be no [organizational] end runs; everything is going to go through the system, through established channels; no surprises; the actions will be ground into the [existing] machinery [of AFSC].” The general [schreiver] could afford to speak firmly. He had already presented Forecast briefings to Zuckert and LeMay on September 3; to Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatrick and the Defense Director for Research [DDR&E], Harold Brown, on Sept 23; and to Secretary McNamara on October 24. Every listener liked what he heard. In fact, based upon the preliminary Forecast results, McNamara invited Schriever to submit appropriate adjustments in the fiscal year [FY] 1965 RDT&E budget. To allow the opportunity, the Secretary printing the proposed DOD budget until late November by which time the President would have to see it. Schriever’s amendments reached McNamara’s desk on November 22, 1963, the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. Government activity ground to a standstill, and the Project Forecast recommendations failed to enter the 1965 budget, an unfortunate setback for its implementation. --------- Robert could you expand and or simplify this a bit? Are you here suggesting that LeMay and or SAC may have been losing a degree of autonomy or flexibility if this new plan went through? If so how?

Tonight Larry Hancock is scheduled to talk about his new Book Nexus on Black Op Radio. We should post the BOR link everywhere, especially where young people are and also where those who are not already knowledgeable about this period. Recently I was censored off a big newspaper site for posting the Ray McGovern article Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA. I am convinced that the gov is most concerned about when we spread truth to THOSE WHO ARE NOT ALREADY INTERESTED IN THE ASSASSINATIONS. They are less threatened by Facebook et al because it keeps the knowledge niched, and collectively sladerable using psy op techniques such as those found in the bs, baby and bathwater books on ""Conspiracy Theory"" which have been spreading faster than Schirmer in Shinnola of late. Spread curiosity wide. Spread it full spectrum. If you don't nobody else will. This is not the 1970s when stuff could reach lots of eyeballs. Only you can prevent truth-moating.

Agreed. The assassinations are about the legitimation of our current political circus. Or not. Agreed. Last nights Black Op Radio beyond even my stretched capacity for hyperbole. Everyone must listen to it now. I only listened to the first half and look forward to the second. Also people should really spread it around and post it where lots will see it. Because the flight recordings made Corporate Media news recently you have a hook to hang this incredible BOR show on.

Its the Soviet Union. Psychobabble is used on anyone opposing the State. The difference is they had a one party state and we have the CIA , some screaming psychopaths and mutes who New York magazine tells us really frighten Wall Street. Gee is that guy shiny.

Counterpunch lies about RFK and Unions. They imply he was anti-union. In reality, the unions who wanted a break with the Vietnam war were going with RFK and LEAVING THEIR NATIONAL COLD WAR CONSENSUS PRO WAR NATIONAL LEADERSHIP who still supported Humphrey. When National union leaders lose control of their locals, North Virginia notices. Alexander Cockburn should stop pretending he doesn't know this.

I could not find this article, can you post it? -------------- Here is the offensive blather http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noam-chomsky/american-decline-_b_1276193.html And notice, here, he is published in the Huffington post. Funny how in recent years he seems to be getting wider distribution. This first time I really noticed he had gone from South End Press to a division of Holt? 2002. I could not believe that his book was in a Penn Station news stand. Hmm

Thanks for that, Robert. Yet that is not the way it is presented in the Counterpunch article. Leaving aside the standard lie about JFK escalating Vietnam, the author seems to have twisted this conjectural projection of his hatred of his antagonist, RFK into something that never happened: "It’s also been documented that Bobby Kennedy bullied Lyndon Johnson into continuing the Vietnam war. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin (in “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream”), Bobby insisted to LBJ that President Kennedy would have done everything in his power to keep Southeast Asia from falling to the Communists, and that it was therefore incumbent upon Johnson to honor his dead brother’s legacy by not abandoning the war. He pressured LBJ to remain in Vietnam, arguing that pulling out would be the act of a coward and traitor." Standard fare for the Encounter Magazine set at Counterpunch Kennedy Corpses. This is pushed on the very folk who could become most dangerous if the truth about the assassinations ever crested their damns of disinformation.

Here is an e-mail exchange I had with the author of the lying Counterpunch hit piece. He now has an in at Huffington Post as well. (shockwave) He can't seem to find the origins of his allegations about RFK hawking on LBJ. Why am I not surprised? We cannot keep allowing these leftward aimed lies to continue. You might not think it matters because you might not consider yourself a leftist. That is incorrect, and if necessary I will explain why. -------------------------------------- I am absolutely positive I read it in "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream." I am positive. Are we talking about the same book? dm ----- Original Message ----- To: dmacaray@earthlink.net Sent: 2/25/2012 5:13:23 PM Subject: Doris Goodwin's comment about RFK and LBJ on Vietnam inCounterpunch article?????????????????????????? Hello. I have a question about your article on RFK in last Junes Counterpunch. You cite Dorris Kearns Goodwin's book on LBJ for the comment that RFK was pressuring LBJ towards intervening more strongly in Vietnam. I have searched the book and could not find the passage you were alluding to. Can you please point out the passage. Thank you!

Bill today I typed up two of Douglass' footnotes dealing with Collins Radio and sent them around. Please feel free to add onto my note which is all Jim D. I hope to really sent this one into the right sites so that more of the audiences most targeted for disinformation will see it. If you add on, it could send your Collins Radio threads too. ----- Why Did Markus Raskin [once McGeorge Bundy's Top Advisor, later founder, IPS] call JFK and the Unspeakable "a soucrebook for many years to come"? Well let's just take one of the more than 2,OOO detailed and scholarly footnotes, #909 for Chapter 6 ------ 909. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square, Publications, 1983), p.57. One sentence cited from article by Ralph W. McGehee, "Foreign Policy by Forgery: The CIA and the White Paper on El Salvador," The Nation (April 11, 1981), pp.423-34 (with deletions by the CIA). McGehee also noted in his Nation Article, as then cided in his book on pp.57-58: "Initially the Indonesian Army left the P.K.I. [Communist Party of Indonesia] alone, since it had not been involved in the coup attempt. {Eight sentences deleted here by the CIA.} Subsequently, however, INdonesian military leaders [seven rods deleted by the CIA] began a bloody extermination campaign. In mid-November 1965, General Suharto formally authorized the 'cleaning out' of the Indonesian Communist Party and established special teams to supervise the mass killing. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the P.K.I. Photographs of the bodies of the dead in generals [who had been killed in a failed coup]-- badly decomposed-- were featured in all the newspapers and on television. Stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the Communists and set the stage for a massacre... To conceal its role in the massacre of those innocent people the C.I.A., in 1968, concocted a false account of what happened (later published by the Agency as a book, Indonesia--1965: The Coup that Backfired) ...At the same time that the Agency wrote the book, it also composed a secret study of what really happened. [One sentence deleted by the CIA.] The Agency was extremely proud of its successful [one word deleted by the CIA] and recommended it as a model for future operations [one half sentence deleted by the CIA]." FOR MORE ON THE CIA AND ITS COLLINS RADIO TIES IN THE JFK ASSASSINATION ITSELF AS WELL AS THE OPERATIONS OF THE 1965-66 INDONESIAN GENOCIDE LET US NOW TURN TO FOOTNOTE 912 OF CHAPTER 6, JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE; WHY HE DIED AND WHY IT MATTERS BY JAMES W. DOUGLASS. FOOTNOTE 912 OF CHAPTER 6, JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE: ON THE CIA'S COLLINS RADIO AND ITS TIES TO THE JFK ASSASSINATION AND THE INDONESIAN GENOCIDE OF 1.25 MILLION THAT WAS JUST ONE DIRECT RESULT OF THIS ASSASSINATION. 912 William Blum, Killing Hope: Us Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 19950, p.194. The CIA's support of the massacre in Indonesia [btw. 750,000 and 1.25 Million following CIA coup in 1965, N.H.] also included supplying communications systems from Collins Radio, its major contractor (whose employee Carl Mather, as we have seen, was linked through his automobile's license to a sighting of the second Oswald the afternoon of the assassination): "The supply of radios is perhaps the most telling detail {of U.S. logistical support to the bloodbath]. They served not only as field communications but also became an element of a broad, US intelligence-gathering operation constructed as the manhunt went forward. According to a former embassy official, the Central Intelligence Agency hastily provided the radios--state of the art Collins KWM-2s, high-frequency single-sideband transceivers, the highest-powered mobile unit available at that time to the civilian and commercial market." Kadane, "Letter to the Editor, New York Review Of Books (April 10, 1997)