James DiEugenio

What a good article, thanks Tom. Here is a most important passage I think. Revisionist authors Moyar and Boot, for example, are well-known hawks who believe that the United States can intervene successfully in distant, alien societies if only Washington uses its power deftly and puts the right people in charge. To use an epic tragedy like Vietnam for political purposes, is I think, just shameful.

Roger: I think the discussion of Kennedy's Vietnam policy does have something to do with Jeff Sachs. I mean was not the sub title of his book The Quest for Peace? Kennedy's withdrawal from Vietnam was provably reversed by LBJ. Johnson was on a quest for war.

No, Mamet never brought this up with me and Oliver. He did bring his script for his own project about the Z film. And he told us how surprised he was when the money was pulled even though he had Blanchett signed. I think Celozzi sent him his script after that meeting. From my information, Mamet dropped out of that one. George Gallo was then brought in and now he has been dropped and Barry Levinson has been brought in. But in this new story, there is no mention of Travolta or VIggo M. This instability indicates there might be problems with this project.

This is confusing. Mamet did not write the original script. Celozzi did. Mamet was supposed to have done a rewrite. But then he and Celozzi had a falling out. George Gallo then came in as director. Now he is gone, and Levinson is coming in? Problems I think. What happened to Travolta?

Ben: Mike is relying for his Vietnam stuff on an agenda driven book which Tom Gram exposed on this site as being full of holes. And yes Mike, i am calling Nixon a fruitcake, you know why? Even Ambrose, Mr. Establishment, thought that Nixon was around the bend on Vietnam. I proved Nixon knew he could not win the war and he proceeded with it for political and personal reasons for over four years. Ted Draper proved that the terms he agreed to in 1973 were just about the same that he was offered in 1969. To kill as many people as he did in three countries, and to bomb them to the point that Indochina looked like the surface of the moon, that is just beyond the pale. What Nixon did in Cambodia was simply nutty. That you either cannot see this, or deem it excusable, that is your problem Mike. Not mine.

That looks interesting. I think its the first film to deal with all four.

Thanks Larry. While in NYC, rebelling against Zanuck, she really fell in love with the Actor's Studio, especially Lee Strasberg. His wife became her coach. That family was the prime beneficiary of her will.

Because Robert, as Len Osanic has said, Prouty had a policy of not outing a CIA agent. So he came as close as he was willing to go. Whether or not Bush was really a CIA agent, or an asset, is something we can debate all day and night.

Thanks Sandy.

I am not ignoring Blaine Cory. You are distorting what he said. And anyone can see that. When someone is in the same building as someone else, does that mean they are copulating? No, especially when its in public with other people around. This whole cheapjack industry that has grown up around MM has been really pernicious for all involved. But in one way it really cheapened MM herself. As John GIlmore once wrote, the object seems to be "anything to trash Marilyn for a buck." Monroe was not a Mafia moll. She was not an undercover agent for the CIA or the KGB. She was not a UFOlogist, and she sure as heck was not involved in the CIA plots to kill Castro. But yet that was the end result of the tall tales of Slatzer and Carmen. Encouraged by writers like Wolfe and Summers who referenced them. MM worked hard at her craft. She really wanted to be an accomplished actress. She also did not like the Hollywood system. That is why she broke away from it and became the first actress since Pickford to form her own company. She actually faced down Zanuck, a very powerful figure at the time, over this. She returned a script to the studio once after writing the word TRASH over the first page. At the Actor's Studio she performed in Anna Christie, a play by O'Neill. Ellen Burstyn saw it and said she was good. The pressures of her career got to her since she was not a really confident person due to her unfortunate--in the extreme-- childhood. Both her mother and her grandmother were committed to asylums. Its an open question if she ever knew or met her father. She did not meet her sister until she was 15. And she never did find the right psychiatric/ medical doctor team. She went through three psychiatrists in something like 6-7 years. And Greenson's treatment of her was very controversial. But she had to switch to him since her prior shrink, Kris, actually placed her in an asylum. But the worst part is that her medical doctor and Greenson were not in unison as to what pills she was getting or how many. And there is evidence she bought off the black market. But its clear she never found the right team. Both those guys, Engelberg and Greenson, should have been professionally disciplined--at the least. Probably placed on trial.

Sandy, Why? This is now about what Sachs had written about. Kennedy's quest for peace, and comparing that with what Nixon did after. Which is a perfect topic for this forum.

Mike: You know between your comments on the Prouty thread and now this, I really do not know what to make of you on this forum. You started this dumb thread in the first place with its ridiculous heading. You then abandon it and then you come back and you apparently do not read what was written in between. There is evidence for one encounter between JFK and MM. Period. There is no evidence at all between RFK and MM. That is simply balderdash. Nothing at all happened at the night in question at MSG, and I have proved this with first hand evidence. FInally, RFK had no romantic entanglement with MM and had nothing to do with her demise. Over and out. And this is also provable with all kinds of evidence. And any rumors about that did not occur in print until 1964, after JFK was killed. So you should just stop this innuendo with that Mark Shaw type of overtone you have as a heading on this thread. It is truly nutty. As it smears three people. MM died of barbiturate poisoning which had been ingested, not injected. And not taken by enema or suppository. And that is also proven. The question then becomes: was it deliberate or was it accidental? One can make an argument for both sides on that one. But if someone takes well over seven hundred pills in 50 days, and a bottle of Nembutals in 36 hours, I mean that is pretty much asking for trouble. Try and buy Nembutals on the open market today.

Michael Griffith is passing gas to disguise just how bad Nixon was and how hopeless the war was. Here is the exact quote in context. So there is no denying it, its just what I said it was. Nixon had heard about the Wise Men meeting and understood what it meant. In March of 1968, before the presidential campaign began, he told three of his speechwriters: “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.” (Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, p. 52) There is no better source on this than Jeff Kimball. He was the foremost scholar on this subject, Nixon and Vietnam. From the start, Nixon knew he could not win. The best he could do was a Korea type stalemate. And he could not even attain that. Even though he needlessly invaded two other countries with utterly disastrous results.

BTW, when i say that Nixon knew the war was lost, let me explain why. After LBJ broke with Kennedy and reversed his withdrawal plan, whatever that was supposed to accomplish was evaporated by Tet. Westmoreland still wanted to fight on. With 210,000 more men. There is evidence that Bobby Kennedy leaked this to the press, and that made it a dead duck. But at the same time, LBJ called a meeting of the Wise Men, Lovett, Acheson, etc. And tried to make that argument. Acheson walked out. LBJ called him up and asked him why. He said he was tired to being bamboozled by the Pentagon. This more or less caused LBJ to do two things 1.) Withdraw from the race, 2.) Realizing the war was lost, to push for a peace plan. Well, Nixon heard about this meeting. And he told his advisors at the time that he thought the war was lost also. And this was before the inauguration. But he also said they could not admit that. And he did not want LBJ to get a peace so he secretly torpedoed that. So he stayed in, while withdrawing American troops, but supplemented it with even more intense bombing than Johnson. All the time knowing it was futile. To me it does not get much worse than that. Under Kennedy, there were no combat troops in theater. Under Nixon it hit the highest number of about 550,000. It was only then that he began to lower the numbers.

BTW, is it not coming out pretty soon, like in a couple of weeks I think?

And let me add one other thing about this alleged comparison of that fruitcake Nixon with JFK. Kennedy would have never ever even thought of using nukes in Indochina or bombing the dikes. Nixon proposed both and we have it on tape. The latter would have been even more lethal than the former; John Newman said it would have killed about a half million people. To top it off, Nixon lied abut this after.

This is simply wrong about Nixon. Even though Nixon knew the war was lost, he still tried to get a Korea type of peace plan through. How? By doing something that JFK would have never done and would have strongly protested. The invasions of Cambodia and Laos. These ended up being twin disasters. The former resulted in one of the great post war genocides by the Khymer Rouge. The bombing of Laos was utterly ridiculous since there was just about nothing to bomb there. But the problem really was this: as many commentators have proven, like Theodore Draper, the agreement Nixon got in 1973 was hardly any different than the one he could have had in 1969. In other words the destruction of Cambodia and Laos was simply useless in a purely practical sense. Which is what Nixon always advertised himself as being.

I saw the preview at last year's CAPA conference. Its a Libby Handros production, and she is an accomplished documentarian. It looked pretty good to me, Oliver, Karl Evanzz and RFK Jr. are in it, among many others. From my understanding, she is now doing it in two parts. This one will be what was lost, and the next one will be the how.

Tim Wray should have never have been on the ARRB. But when one reads the 15 pages Horne wrote about the culture of the ARRB one understands why he was. Its pretty clear that not one of the Board was going to go against the official story in public, and this included the first director, Marwell. It is also clear that they were going to try and discredit Stone. You can see that in their report, and the fact that its pretty transparent that --by trying to smear Prouty--they could get to Stone's film. Which was really the reason for their being. In retrospect, its really kind of shocking to me that Gunn went along with this charade. Jeremy Gunn has a very mixed legacy today.

No, the term hatchet job, by Wray, is all of 17 words later. Wray is the guy who perused JFK and Vietnam and gave it back to Horne. Wray is the guy who was going to use Secret Service sources to say there was not military intel in support of security. When , in fact, there were actual plentiful pictures of such for which he could have called Palamara for. Wray is the guy who missed the source about the military intel support in Dallas even though it was online. Prouty was the source for two major aspects of Stone's film: the Vietnam withdrawal, and the attempt to support the Secret Service in Dallas that was not accepted. He was correct on both issues. Tim Wray did not like either. Horne took his job, and instead of trying to discredit Stone, he worked on uncovering vital evidence that showed a plot to kill Kennedy; he succeeded in doing so.

I object also since I posted it. But I also do not like the CT label today. Stone's JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed proved conspiracy is not a theory.

Thanks Ron. I agree, MM's technique in this is first rate. BTW, I think its the only TV performance she did. Jack Benny was so thankful, he bought her a Cadillac. Billy Wilder said about her that she was far and away the best comic actress he ever worked with. No one else was even close.

1. Signing her death warrant? Oh please. Gimme me a break. Joe, the Benny show was not a film performance, it was simply a staged skit. And she even brought in Daryl Zanuck. 2. Cory, who was in the bedroom then? And where was it? Blaine specifies two meetings. One at Krim's. We know what happened there I described it three times. He says the other one was at Peter Lawford's. That was in public also. So where is your cross examination headed? BTW here is the Benny show. She was just excellent in this.

1. Cory, if he never saw any evidence of an affair then that is it. Period. He is not, as you tried to suggest, in opposition to Hill, he is in unison with him. 2. Joe, are you serious? You never saw MM act in any of her films, like Gentleman Prefer Blondes etc? Even Burt Reynolds, who knew her from her New York days said that one day they were walking down Broadway, and no one noticed her. And Burt commented on that. She then said: OK, now watch this. She took her hair down and changed her walk and suddenly people did start noticing them. Burt said it was one of the most immediate, sharp, yet subtle changes he ever saw an actress do. MM really worked hard to master certain techniques to give an effective performance. If you want to see how skilled she was, watch the skit she did with Jack Benny on his TV show. Its on You Tube. And then watch the same skit with Mansfield. Night and day. 3. And this is what I mean. She was really good at putting on that persona. Because, as I said, she was with her father in law (he is in those photos in Don's article) that night both before and after, who she really liked. She actually wanted him to return to LA with her. But for whatever reason he did not want to go. So she dropped him off in her rented limo in Brooklyn I think, and she returned to her apartment where one or two of her fans were waiting for her. Even though it was late, she stopped and talked. It was just them. And then she went upstairs to her apartment. And that was it. Except I think her masseuse was there and that is how she fell asleep. Pamela: In the uncropped version was Schlesinger in on it also? Even though, as I prove above in number three, nothing happened?

This is what you wrote Cory: So I see your Clint Hill and raise you Agent Gerald Blaine who said MM and JFK had two encounters to his knowledge and apparently one was behind closed doors. You left out the part where Blaine said he never saw any evidence of an affair.