David Kaiser

As far as I know there is no "manuscript." There is a brief summary, just a few pages, which is what I quoted from. Jeff Morley provided it to me. I believe it was a proposal for a book which for some reason did not go any further.

I appreciate that various people here are reading my book--in one case very carefully--yet I am astonished at how difficult it seems to be for people to distinguish what it does and does not say, even to the point of ascribing accusations to me that I did not make. While I found William Pawley a most interesting figure and unearthed a great deal of new data about him and his activities, at no time did I state that he was definitely involved in the conspiracy to kill the President. I identified John Martino, Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and of course Ruby and Oswald as participants. For the record, I did not so identify Loran Hall either, although I did say that he is the link (because of the Odio incident) between Oswald on the one hand and Martino and Trafficante on the other. I have no way of knowing what Hall might or might not have known about the events of NOvember 22 before they took place. Because Martino had so many connections to so many people (including Pawley), his involvement opens the way to speculation about a lot of other folks, too, and Pawley is one of them. Pawley's suicide (there is not a shred of evidence that it was anything else) is somewhat suspicious because the HSCA was trying to interview him at that time, but his family said he was very ill and in great pain. I took great care in The Road to Dallas not to go beyond the evidence I had, and to make definite statements only when clear facts supported them. There is no such evidence linking Pawley to the assassination, and thus, I did not say anything to implicate him. Perhaps my practice of distinguishing between what might be true and what pretty clearly is true is so unusual among JFK authors that seasoned veterans of the case have trouble recognizing it for what it is. David Kaiser

This was the second book that I have written about a famous crime--the first dealt with the case of Sacco and Vanzetti (it had been begun by a friend of mine, William Young, but he passed it on to me when he died in 1980.) I learned a great deal about this kind of enterprise doing that book and I learned a lot more this time. I am also seeing some things more clearly as a result of the reaction to The Road to Dallas. I must say, John, that your question, in my opinion, exemplifies what has been wrong with the vast majority of JFK assassination research, on all sides of the question. Everyone is looking for one smoking gun or one fact about Oswald's character or one piece of physical evidence that will prove, or disprove, a conspiracy. But that is not what history is about. "The historian's task," wrote Henry Adams, one of the greatest, "is to state facts in their sequence." The King of Hearts told the White Rabbit the same thing (see frontispiece, The Road to Dallas.) That is what I have tried to do. No single piece of evidence is critical in itself. The problem is to place them within a coherent story, and that is what so many fail to do. My book has delineated in great (and totally unprecedented) detail the network of mobsters, American mercenaries, Cuban exiles, American right-wingers and (at times) CIA operatives that was operating around the country in the early 1960s. It shows the motives of the mobsters, in particular, for wanting to kill JFK. It shows they discussed it. It shows how one of them had prior knowledge. It shows that Oswald had become connected to that network. It shows that Ruby was connected to it as well. It shows that that network mounted a disinformation campaign on the afternoon of November 22 to link Oswald to Fidel. It shows how leading mobsters reacted in 1975 when key elements of the story began to leak out. It shows that certain people admitted involvement. And so on. All this is cumulative and mutually re-enforcing. After I wrote Postmorem about Sacco and Vanzetti, a statistician I know became interested in the subject. He uses something called Bayesian analysis, which is technique for estimating a combined probability of a certain event, based upon the probabilities of certain related events. I did not try to use this technique formally writing The Road to Dallas but I constantly use it informally. Thus, for instance, if some one claims to have seen Oswald or Ruby at a particular time and place, the critical issue is often not so much the reliability of that particular individual as it is whether other evidence (especially evidence they could not possibly have known about) supports the idea that Oswald or Ruby was there. The more popular way to deal with the case, sadly, is to postulate either that there was a massive conspiracy--in which case every piece of evidence tending to show a conspiracy must be true--or to postulate that Oswald and Ruby must have been a lone assassin, in which case every suspicious piece of evidence must be dismissed. That may be emotionally simpler but it won't lead to the truth. I hope this post, and the book, will help some people to think about the case in a new way. best, David Kaiser

Yes, E. Howard Hunt had been asked - I'm not sure by whom, probably Chuck Colson - to fabricate cables directly linking JFK to Diem's assassination, and he did so. L Patrick Gray testified about reading, and then destroying, one of them after John Dean gave him the documents in Hunt's safe. That is the main episode I remember.

Yes, E. Howard Hunt had been asked - I'm not sure by whom, probably Chuck Colson - to fabricate cables directly linking JFK to Diem's assassination, and he did so. L Patrick Gray testified about reading, and then destroying, one of them after John Dean gave him the documents in Hunt's safe. That is the main episode I remember.

There is certainly some truth in what you say. I do not think internal CIA documents say A when not A is the truth very often, but it is obvious that many things are never documented, and any response to any other agency is based upon what is in the documentation, nothing more. (When some one asks, inside the CIA, "what is our conneciton to x?", the answer is, in actual fact, "what is in the files about X?" ) The FBI is a different matter altogether. Data inside the FBI becomes scared as soon as it is written down (or it did.) And they are in the business of collecting data. I have just discovered (actually Newman discovered it) a case in which a senior FBI official created an alternative vision of history but that is VERY rare. The problem for a responsible historian dealing with the CIA is this: just because various things MIGHT be true must not be taken as a license to believe ANYTHING might be true. I will discuss this point a good deal in the book.

I was fascinated by the past! Yes - a lot. The investigative journalist relies mainly on interviews. The historian relies mainly on documents. There is overlap, but that's the main difference. I like answering big questions. My last two books (including the one in progress) deal with events in my own lifetime. Political history in general is very unfashionable, and before me, only one professional historian, John Newman, has written about the JFK case. It frightens people because so many crazy folk are involved with it, I think. It also requies a huge time commitment. The basic rule is that before-the-fact (in this case, pre-November 1963) documents are more important than after-the-fact ones. There's a hierarchy of evidence. People who come forward years later with stories are suspect, and if they said something different at the time, one has to discount them heavily. Meanwhile, one has to read as many documents as possible to understand the context of a particular event. Almost everything Oswald did looks, actually, like part of something bigger that was happening at the time.

There is certainly some truth in what you say. I do not think internal CIA documents say A when not A is the truth very often, but it is obvious that many things are never documented, and any response to any other agency is based upon what is in the documentation, nothing more. (When some one asks, inside the CIA, "what is our conneciton to x?", the answer is, in actual fact, "what is in the files about X?" ) The FBI is a different matter altogether. Data inside the FBI becomes scared as soon as it is written down (or it did.) And they are in the business of collecting data. I have just discovered (actually Newman discovered it) a case in which a senior FBI official created an alternative vision of history but that is VERY rare. The problem for a responsible historian dealing with the CIA is this: just because various things MIGHT be true must not be taken as a license to believe ANYTHING might be true. I will discuss this point a good deal in the book.

There is certainly some truth in what you say. I do not think internal CIA documents say A when not A is the truth very often, but it is obvious that many things are never documented, and any response to any other agency is based upon what is in the documentation, nothing more. (When some one asks, inside the CIA, "what is our conneciton to x?", the answer is, in actual fact, "what is in the files about X?" ) The FBI is a different matter altogether. Data inside the FBI becomes scared as soon as it is written down (or it did.) And they are in the business of collecting data. I have just discovered (actually Newman discovered it) a case in which a senior FBI official created an alternative vision of history but that is VERY rare. The problem for a responsible historian dealing with the CIA is this: just because various things MIGHT be true must not be taken as a license to believe ANYTHING might be true. I will discuss this point a good deal in the book.

The investigative journalist relies mainly on interviews. The historian relies mainly on documents. There is overlap, but that's the main difference. The basic rule is that before-the-fact (in this case, pre-November 1963) documents are more important than after-the-fact ones. There's a hierarchy of evidence. People who come forward years later with stories are suspect, and if they said something different at the time, one has to discount them heavily. Meanwhile, one has to read as many documents as possible to understand the context of a particular event. Almost everything Oswald did looks, actually, like part of something bigger that was happening at the time. Political history in general is very unfashionable, and before me, only one professional historian, John Newman, has written about the JFK case. It frightens people because so many crazy folk are involved with it, I think. It also requies a huge time commitment.

I was fascinated by the past! Yes - a lot. The investigative journalist relies mainly on interviews. The historian relies mainly on documents. There is overlap, but that's the main difference. I like answering big questions. My last two books (including the one in progress) deal with events in my own lifetime. Political history in general is very unfashionable, and before me, only one professional historian, John Newman, has written about the JFK case. It frightens people because so many crazy folk are involved with it, I think. It also requies a huge time commitment. The basic rule is that before-the-fact (in this case, pre-November 1963) documents are more important than after-the-fact ones. There's a hierarchy of evidence. People who come forward years later with stories are suspect, and if they said something different at the time, one has to discount them heavily. Meanwhile, one has to read as many documents as possible to understand the context of a particular event. Almost everything Oswald did looks, actually, like part of something bigger that was happening at the time.

David Kaiser is Professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College. He is the author of Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (1990) and American Tragedy Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000)