James DiEugenio

Let me explain how I got interested in this. It was when I first read about Sy Hersh and the so called Kennedy/Monroe trust agreement. I was wondering, why would a liberal MSM journalist take part in something that was so clearly a fraud? Why do I say that? Because one of the so called signees to the trust, Janet Des Rossiers, told Hersh that was not her signature on the documents, it was forged. When I interviewed Greg Schreiner, a MM authority in LA he told me it was not MM's signature either, it was a forgery. Hersh marched on anyway. Why? As is the usual case in these matters, it was for money. He had gotten a million dollar advance for the book. He then sold the TV rights to ABC. But ABC did something that Hersh did not do: they hired three experts to forensically test the documents. It turned out that Des Rossiers and Schreiner were correct. The documents were forged on a typewriter that did not exist in the early sixties. And the signatures showed signs of tracing, that is stopping and starting in mid stroke. (There is an excellent article by David Samuels in The New Yorker on this subject.) Now if you got a million bucks, would you not pay a few quid to do the testing before you fell on your face? But not only did ABC get taken, since they bought the rights before testing, the originator of the documents, Lex Cusack, had made tons of money by suckering rich collectors. As anyone can see, there is money in sensationalistic fraud. Again though, why would Hersh take part in something like this? I later learned that Hersh was on a mission. His career was jump started by Bob Loomis, the big time editor who ended up at Random House. And I guess it was just a coincidence that Loomis is the one who originated Posner's book Case Closed? And he gave Posner a PR tour that was unprecedented, and only rivaled by the one Hersh got for his POS book. When I tried to call Loomis, his secretary said he was not in his New York office. He spent three days a week in Washington. Hm, I wonder where? So as any can see, the two are related. The aim was dual: 1.) Snuff out any kind of conspiracy ideas through Posner, and 2.) VIa Hersh: JFK was not worth worrying about anyway. Doing that work on Hersh flashed a huge light bulb off in my head. I realized then that there was really a big industry in this "trash JFK and MM" field and publishers and TV impressarios would pay money for it. And its the way people like David Heymann, a total fraud if there ever was one, made money. If you read up on how Robert Slatzer's crappy book originated, you will see more of the same. Slatzer was a walking phony; with his 48 hour marriage to MM in Mexico. Well, Summers gave him a lot of space also. So no I have no double standard. As an historian, I use the same methods I was taught by my professors Koistenon and Davis at CSUN. Look for the original, primary source, seek corroboration, and then see if this pattern was followed or diverted. That will tell you something. With Monroe, witnesses like Carmen, Slatzer, and Smathers are not original, consistent sources, and their stories do not stand up under scrutiny. So that is my consistent methodology and anyone can see it at work. Its my job to unearth events the public does not have the time to excavate or understand. The Hersh/MM fiasco was an event which provided a portal into what causes these mega events. And it should be noted, Hersh went onward and downward after. To the point that The New Yorker would not publish him anymore.

I don't have two standards. I try and evaluate the credibility of people who say they are witnesses and find evidence to corroborate their stories. Joe just mentioned the utterly preposterous Jeanne Carmen. Carmen actually said that Johnny Rosselli murdered Giancana over Monroe!!!! I am not kidding you can look it up. But this is the kind of thing that Summers began by giving an utter screwball like Carmen space in his book. As for this Bday party, I mean how often do I have to prove it? She came with her former father in law. She rented a limo and drove him home to Brooklyn. She actually wanted him to return to LA with her, but he refused. She then went back to her apartment where a fan of hers was waiting on her front step. She talked to him. She then went upstairs, got a massage by her personal masseuse and retired. This is all proven. Therefore the stories made up by the likes of Mark Shaw, and I think Blaine etc are all counter factual. As you can see, this is the same method I use for JFK. Credibility and corroboration.

BTW, if you do not have her book, America's Last President, you are not well armed for the 6oth. But it now.

I usually do not like Hedges, but in this he let the subject of the interview talk. And Jeff Sachs did a really nice job. I think this if for the 60th and if so its a good start. He even says the CIA killed JFK over peace. I especially like the way he contrasted what JFK was doing vs what the current Democratic Party is about. Its become the war party.

The best recent book about Kennedy. And this is a very good podcast that actually has a sponsor. Listen and learn.

Joe: There was nothing like what you allude to at the beginning of your post between MM and JFK. There was perhaps a one off encounter and that was it. And as I have shown at length, there was no such thing as a diary of secrets, it was invented by Slatzer 11 years later. MM was a really liberal person who was all for civil rights. That is what she would talk to RFK about and that is why she would call him at the DOJ. According to people who knew Bobby, he would dutifully take her calls, like he would take Judy Garland's also. RFK understood that you could use celebrities in PR terms--like filling MSG-- and also as sources of inspiration for the underprivileged. I wrote about how he did this with Dave Hackett in New York City.

He was also paying attention to Jack Benny. Probably, detente with Russia.

Nice work you guys are doing Peter. Congrats.

Cory: Clint Hill was Jackie's personal SS agent. And he is one of the best witnesses we have about the hole in the back of the head. To compare him to Blaine, I mean really. Among other things, Blaine made up two MM encounters that did not happen. And ignored the one that probably did. Is this like your reference to Peter Lawford that turned out not to be Lawford? If you are going to use Blaine Cory, you might as well use Slatzer and Carmen. Leslie, awhile ago I decided not to make it my area to analyze photos for deeper meaning. Its a very tricky area without proper context. I leave it to others.

I got it half right. Here it is from the true authority, Don McGovern. Consider the damning allegation, leveled by all the conspiracists, that Jacqueline Kennedy did not attend her husband's birthday celebration because of Marilyn's presence. According to David Heymann, Jackie was not interested in watching Marilyn, the woman who connived to supplant her as First Lady, serenade her husband; therefore, Jackie occupied herself at her Atoka retreat. However, the house built by the Kennedys in Atoka, Virginia, dubbed Wexford by the First Lady, was not complete in May of 1962 and would not be completed until early 1963. Not to miss his opportunity to spread the facts and the truth, in The Marilyn Files, Robert Slatzer asserted that Jacqueline refused to attend her husband's birthday gala due to the appearance of Marilyn, who, according to Slatzer, Jacqueline dubbed “that slut”. The First Lady decided to hunt foxes instead. However, Clint Hill, the First Lady's Secret Service Agent and her ubiquitous body guard, depicted a completely different picture. In his memoir, Agent Hill clarified that he and the First Lady traveled constantly between the White House and Middleburg, Virginia; and the weekend of the early birthday celebration for her husband, and the Democrat Party's fund raiser, would be no different: on Friday, May the 18th, the First Family, minus the president, returned to Glen Ora, an elegant estate owned by Mrs. Gladys Raymond Tartiere located in Middleburg approximately five miles east of Atoka. The Kennedys merely leased the property. The First Lady had recently entered the local Loudon Horse Show and she planned to ride that weekend, primarily because, during the First Lady's recent trip to Pakistan, the Pakistani President, Ayub Khan, presented her with the perfect gift, a beautiful horse named Sardar. Considering the beautiful weather, Agent Hill explained, the First Lady longed to avail herself of every opportunity to ride her equine gift; and the horse show provided her with the perfect opportunity to participate in several equestrian events, not to mention also show off her new horse and gift. Although President Kennedy wanted Jacqueline to attend the birthday gala and fund raiser in New York City, since his wife's absence could be a political liability, she was adamant about keeping her weekend plans; so he eventually acquiesced to his wife's wishes. Apparently the press was not informed of the First Lady's plans and Agent Hill noted that she was particularly and especially happy. She despised political functions; and her absence there from was commonplace, not at all surprising. She would be much happier at Glen Ora with her country friends than she could ever be engaging political donors with insipid small talk, an activity she despised. Certainly Jacqueline's absence that Saturday night in Manhattan had absolutely nothing to do with Marilyn's presence or her sexy performance. Still, many persons accept what the conspiracists have invariably asserted.

Leslie, one can read as much as you want into a cropped photo. The other photo shows Steve Smith with his arm around MM's waist escorting her around. Go ahead read into that one. Geez where is his hand going to? Jackie was not there since it was not her brithday party for him. It was really a fundraiser with about 15 entertainers on the bill and I think 15,000 people in MSG. You can see at the Bday before and the one after, which Jackie did arrange, she was there.

Its not infamous. Because that is a cropped version. See the beginning of this article for uncropped and other photos. https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/collateral-damage-mark-shaw-s-public-atrocity-part-2 The occasion was her singing at Kennedy's fund raiser/birthday gala; this is the reception after. And there was nothing to it either before or after. She attended with her former father in law, dropped him off after and went back to her apartment and greeted some of her NY fan club.

Michael has a tendency to resort to smears and also to unrelated subject matters when he starts to lose an argument. It really gets kind of tedious to listen to. I replied to Rothmiller's claims about a diary in more ways than one. I also replied to the claim that RFK was in LA that day. As per my references to "authority", April VeVea authored a book that reconstructed what MM's day to day life consisted of. It was the kind of book that although it does not make a lot of waves, is a valuable piece of work. Because you can match it up with the calendars of both RFK and JFK. (There is a second book like this by Rollyson.) This is how one can prove things. As per RFK and Gilroy, how much evidence do you want? Pictures, testimony, newspaper stories. As per Summers and Shaw, what I said was this: their books, for me, are like one step below people like Slatzer. Just take a look at how much Summers relies on Slatzer, Carmen and Smathers. And I should also add Gary Wean. I actually sent away for Wean's book. I had to do an ILL and it cost me about 20 bucks. But it was worth it. Because what Summers left out about this guy is, I think, the real story. And you will hear it soon. As per Mark Shaw, I mean sheesh. What are we to make of a person who presents photographic evidence to suggest that somehow Bobby Kennedy's car was in Brentwood, when a.) it was not, and b.) it was not his car. That is, unless Bobby drove to San Francisco. Or that the two men from the mortuary were actually bringing a stretcher back into Monroe's home, when in fact, the building was not her home! Or do you even want to talk about Gianni Russo, who Donna Morel exposed as another witness out of Aesop's fables. Or Shaw's so called Fox "security log" which neither he nor anyone else around has seen. If this were the JFK case, these guys would be torn limb from limb. But the MM field, for years, was different since there was no cross checking, quality control apparatus. Therefore people like Slatzer and Wolfe were allowed to basically run amok with these fables. Today there is something like this with people like Morel, McGovern, Gary VItacco Robles and Nina Boski. Thanks for them. Because MM, JFK and RFK deserved much better.

DiMaggio and MM were reconciling at the time of her death. He rescued her from an asylum that her previous psychiatrist had mistakenly placed her in. That is the main reason she fired her and replaced her with Greenson.. If I recall correctly, there were only 24 people at the funeral ceremony as Joe D controlled the list. There is no evidence that there was anything at all between RFK and MM. There is evidence that there was a one shot encounter between JFK and MM, back in 1961 IIRC. There was not any continuing affair. And MM was not at the White House during the JFK years. The work that has been done on this by skilled and professional writers uses the calendars that are demanded of the AG and POTUS, with the MM day books by Rollyson and Vevea. April Vevea has become a really good and valuable writer and blogger on the subject. And she has been one of the most proficient sources to effectively counter all the crapola that came from people like Slatzer and Mailer and Carmen. The difference being she does some careful and logical and fact based work. Her expose of Carmen was bracing. Just recall, Summers used both Slatzer and Carmen in his book. Whew. PS And thanks Sandy.

No Pamela, Jim has done a lot of reading on this subject in books that no one else here has apparently read. And I also understand just what Sy Hersh was up to and why. And how when that blew up in his face, ABC and Jennings still supported him and protected him. That will be a major part of my upcoming essay.

WIlliam: To even try and reply to your question as to what I would ask the students to do is pretty difficult. But if I had to do so, I would probably begin at the beginning and have them read Vincent Salandria's early work destroying the SBT. That would be enough to get them interested. Now that I had their attention: I would go a bit deeper: Presumed Guilty by Howard Roffman. Among other things, that book I think was the first to postulate that the x rays demonstrated a hunting round instead of a FMJ bullet. I would then shift the focus to who was Kennedy? JFK and the Unspeakable I would address the medical evidence with the book Trauma Room One-- here you get an eyewitness, plus Gary Aguilar's fine long essay. Then Edwin Black's The Plot to Kill Kennedy in Chicago. I would show excerpts from two films, Chip Selby's on the Single Bullet Theory and Oliver's JFK: Destiny Betrayed. (They would be too time consuming to show in their entirety.) I would probably end with something on Oswald, taken from a combination of Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, Chapter 7 "On Instructions from his Government" and Greg Parker's Lee Harvey Oswald's Cold War. I think that would be a pretty decent introductory grounding.

Thanks for that Robin. Nice primary source contribution.

There is none. No one book can adequately sum up this whole case since it had just gotten too big, especially with the work of the ARRB. The first edition of Crossfire is like a desk encyclopedia. But that was published before the ARRB. Meagher's book is a classic but fundamentally it is a demolition of the Warren Report. Which almost no one takes seriously today anyway.

Joe: If you had been the doctors who allowed MM to take so many pills, something like 746 in 50 days--just do the arithmetic as to how many per day-- do you think you would have been in any hurry to let the authorities know about what your negligence led to? As Don McGovern has written, if MM's death would have taken place in the modern era with more medical oversight, her doctors would have likely been severely disciplined by their medical boards, probably suspended, or even placed on trial. Especially because of the empty bottle of nembutals--a very powerful drug. MM was a pill addict, there is no way around that. There is even evidence that she went to the black market for more. It is not my opinion that RFK had nothing to do with MM's death. It is an established fact that he was in Gilroy about 350 miles away at the time. And there is a plethora of evidence, including a series of photographs in time sequence, that demonstrate this beyond doubt. For many years on end, actually decades, cheapjack writers like Robert Slatzer and David Heymann simply manufactured a mythology that had no basis in fact in order to sell their pulpy books to an all too willing populace. Then that ridiculous novel Double Cross came out and the tabloid cable media jumped on board. In the former case, the clown Slatzer actually said that RFK had promised to marry MM? And he also spilled out the secrets of MONGOOSE to her! And he had been part of Murder Inc?? I mean please with this BS. Heymann actually wrote that RFK was in Brentwood at her house not once but twice that day. Which we now know, through Susan Bernard, and other evidence, was not possible. And by the way, I would put the work of Summers and Shaw about one notch below those two clowns. One of the worst things you can do as a non fiction author is to have your thesis in sight before you start your research and writing. Summers, for example, actually bought into that con man Slatzer, who made a career out of this BS. But further, he was actually played by Slatzer who promised to pay a friend of his to lie for him and Summers bought that also. And as more than one author has shown, MM's contract was never controlled by The Outfit. A writer without confirmation bias could have seen through a con artist like Slatzer. For example, Don McGovern utterly destroyed Slatzer. What Don did was to carefully analyze the information in these books, compare them to each other, and compare them to the adduced record. The pills MM took were ingested, they were not injected or supplied by enema. And Don proves this scientifically. The mixture she took of Nembutal and Chloral Hydrate should have never been allowed by her doctors. Especially since she had tried to take her life four times previously. There have been many critiques of what Greenson was doing with MM, since as anyone can see, his treatment was not successful. And he was the third psychiatrist MM employed in something like 6 years. it is almost impossible to overestimate the influence of Slatzer and Heymann on both the public and in the literature. Slatzer wrote two books and had two films made. He made many appearances on TV talk shows masquerading as MM's 48 hour husband. Which is one of the most ridiculous BS stories ever postulated. But yet, Summers references his name literally scores of times in his book Goddess, and Donald Wolfe does the same. This tsunami of utter hooey ended up with MM being consulted by Bob Maheu and attending meetings of MONGOOSE, and being employed as a honey pot in the Castro plots. I wish I was kidding but I am not. This stuff actually got published. It should make the people on this board cringe. This is what the subject of my multi part essay will be. How this nuttiness ended up damaging literary and cultural standards. Ending up with that debacle by Seymour Hersh about a signed trust agreement between MM and the Kennedys, in which Hersh was also played by a con artist who made lots of money off his fraud. And that is what, due to Slatzer, this became: a business dealing in fraud. A fraud which distorts and defiles the people being used in the money making process. And it also distracts from the factual record. Which Mike is trying to do with the heading of this thread. The people in the JFK field--who have dealt with many such instances-- should be sensitive to it

BTW, Tanenbaum has a new book out about the Yablonski case. Which is what made Sprague a national figure. We will try and have Bob on BOR, Sprague has passed on unfortunately. In that case, through five trials, Sprague unlocked a multi leveled conspiracy that led to the top of the UMW. He then convicted the man behind it all, Tony Boyle. This is what the HSCA could have been.

Two heroes of this case, and man do they ask good questions. IMO, Sprague would have cracked it.

Yes Marcus, Bart puts through that scenario in his book. He is one of the many from ROKC that do not think the second floor soda (or no soda) incident happened. When I review the book I will list what I think are the four major theorems he puts forth.

Robin, thanks for that. The HSCA actually did have the Hunt memo? I did not know that. In reading the docs about this, they never let on that they did. I think it was Surrell Brady who did the inquiry on this. In fact, I think its proper to say that they buried this. What a deep six operation. Carlos Marcello but no Hunt memo?

One of the things that Bart gets across is how weak the case was at the end of the day on Friday. I mean what did the DPD have on the JFK case? This is why Leavelle said to Calloway he had to come though for them on Tippit.

If you do not know who Jeff Meek is, you should. He is the only journalist in the country who writes a regular column on the Kennedy case for an MSM newspaper, and he has been doing it now over three years. He has gotten some pretty interesting people and some higher ups like Tunheim. To my knowledge this is the only interview that Leslie Wizelman of the HSCA has done. And its an interesting one. Anyway, for the most part--exceptions noted--hats off to Jeff. https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-jfk-files-pieces-of-the-assassination-puzzle