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Douglas Caddy

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    Tell us when you heard the report that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated

    in JFK Assassination Debate

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    Douglas Caddy tells when he heard:

         Upon completing my six months of active duty in the Army at the end of 1961 under a program that required me to serve an additional five and a half years in the reserves after which I received my Honorable Discharge, I enrolled in the New York University School of Law in 1962 in the evening division. During the day I worked in the Manhattan office of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller on the staff of Lieutenant-Governor Malcolm Wilson who was a conservative Republican while Rockefeller was a liberal one. The office was located at 22 West 55th Street and was a five-story townhouse privately owned by the governor. Only about forty people worked in the building as it was considered to be the inner sanctum of the Rockefeller political machine. The most interesting event of my employment there occurred on November 22, 1963, when I received a phone call shortly after noon from a close friend, John Holmes, who worked on Wall Street. He breathlessly told me that President Kennedy had just been assassinated in Dallas and then hung up. I walked to Lt.-Gov. Wilson’s office that was nearby and informed him of the call. He ordered me to go to the press office on the first floor and check it out.

     

         I rode the small elevator down to the first floor and entered the press office. Only the receptionist was there. Carl Spad, the governor’s press secretary, was at lunch. I said to the receptionist, “President Kennedy has just been assassinated.” She looked at me as if I were crazy, saying, “what, what are you talking about?” and then pointed to a small closet. I opened its door and inside was a Telex machine with its alarm bells endlessly ringing as it printed out news of the assassination. At that point the receptionist telephoned Spad to return pronto. I left the press office and walked throughout the townhouse spreading the news. On one floor I walked into a large conference room where about twenty-five men were seated around a long conference table deep in discussion about something important. Everything stopped as I entered, and all looked quizzically at me. Ashen faced I announced, “President Kennedy has just been assassinated in Dallas.” No one said a word or even moved. They just sat frozen and transfixed as each absorbed the shocking news. Getting no response, I turned and left the room. The next day Hugh Morrow, the governor’s speech writer, came to see me on the fifth floor. He asked, “How did you learn of the news of the assassination before anyone else did?”  I gave him a vague reply, not wanting to disclose that a fellow evening law school student had beaten the vaunted Rockefeller Intelligence operation with news of the assassination.

     

         The next evening, I attended a long-scheduled Republican Party dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. I was seated next to a man who would soon be elevated to the New York Supreme Court. We talked about the assassination, and he ominously told me, “I fear that fellow Oswald will be killed by those who assassinated the President. He knows too much.” My mind tried to process his shocking prediction. When the dinner was over, I returned to where I lived while in law school. It was in a co-op (akin to today’s condominium) at 520 E. 72 St. It had a spectacular view of the New York skyline. Its owner was Alice Widener, a syndicated newspaper columnist. She was the widow of Nicholas Berezowsky, a talented musician who fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution by working his way to the border playing the piano in whore houses.  Once in America he became a famous orchestra conductor. Alice, posing as the widow of Nicholas, at the urging of the FBI joined the Communists Party, USA where she made regular donations of money. By doing this over a period of time she was eventually admitted to the innermost meetings of the party’s leaders and afterwards she filed reports with the FBI. She visited J. Edgar Hoover in Washington when she thought she had some especially important to report. When I got home from the dinner, I told her what the judge-to-be had told me about Oswald likely being killed. She responded, “That would never happen in Dallas but certainly would in New York City.” Both she and I were shocked the next day when we witnessed on television Oswald being shot and killed while being escorted by the Dallas Police. [end]

    New book by Donald Jeffries and William Matson Law, "Pipe the Bimbo in Red"

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    Pipe the Bimbo in Red"
     
    New Orleans and the JFK assassination
     
    By Donald Jeffries
     
    As most of you know, I have been researching the JFK assassination now for close to fifty years. I started out working as a teenage volunteer for Mark Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry in the mid-1970s. It remains my wheelhouse issue, and was my gateway into climbing down so many other rabbit holes.
     
    It was inevitable that I’d write a JFK assassination book. Pipe the Bimbo in Red: Dean Andrews, Jim Garrison, and the Conspiracy to Kill JFK, has just been released. Co-written with William Matson Law, the foremost expert on the medical evidence in the case, the book emphasizes the ground level plot in New Orleans. Oliver Stone focused on two of these ground level conspirators, David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, in his 1991 film JFK. We go well beyond that, and examine their connections to powerful forces. In my view, all of the primary players in New Orleans were manipulated like Lee Harvey Oswald, who was overtly groomed to be the patsy.
     
    The book was inspired by my decades long friendship with Dean Andrews III, son of the colorful Beatnik lawyer portrayed so memorably by John Candy in JFK. The title, in fact, comes from a comment by Candy (as Andrews) while eating lunch with Jim Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner). In one of those unlikely but true coincidences, Dean III met my brother Ricky circa 2000 and they eventually became best friends. Dean was embraced by my entire family, and was invited to all the birthday parties and holiday gatherings at my house, back when we entertained frequently. I was in awe of Dean’s connection to the central historical event of the twentieth century, and he was astonished at my knowledge of the case.
     
    The book features the first interview with Dean III, in which he explains how the Garrison investigation impacted their lives, and in fact destroyed the Andrews family in many ways. Dean, Jr. was a high profile lawyer, and headed up the prestigious New Orleans Jazz Festival. I prevailed upon Dean III to bring his mother to my home for dinner some twenty years ago, and it was the first time she’d agreed to talk about her husband and the Kennedy assassination. I think I opened up her mind to the possibility that he hadn’t just been “crazy,” and had valid reasons to be as paranoid as he became. At any rate, I couldn’t blame her; life had been very good before Garrison discovered her husband’s gripping Warren Commission testimony.
     
    Dean Andrews, Jr. was perhaps the key figure in Garrison’s investigation. Andrews was hospitalized at the time of the assassination, and received a bizarre phone call from a Clay Bertrand later on November 22, 1963, asking him to come to Dallas and represent Lee Harvey Oswald, who had yet to be silenced by Jack Ruby. Thanks to Dean III, we reveal new and troubling details about his father’s hospital stay. There are good reasons to believe that Bertrand was the oft used alias for Clay Shaw, well respected head of the New Orleans Trade Mart. Shaw’s intriguing connections go back to World War II, as is documented in Pipe the Bimbo in Red.
     
    Garrison relied on Harold Weisberg’s groundbreaking research, which produced the rare and too often overlooked book Oswald in New Orleans. For unclear reasons, Weisberg turned against Garrison, and in later years became a bitter critic. Weisberg was a hero of mine, and one of my fondest memories is having dinner at his Frederick, Maryland home in the early 1980s. Weisberg’s resentment towards Garrison exploded with Oliver Stone’s film, to such an extent that the cranky old researcher leaked an advance copy of Stone’s movie script to George Lardner, Jr., Mockingbird media asset who had covered (dishonestly) the JFK assassination for many years. Weisberg appears to have been jealous at Stone casting Garrison as his hero, instead of him.
     
    Like Jim Garrison, I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover agent for some intelligence agency- probably the FBI or CIA, and at the time of the assassination was on assignment to infiltrate what he was told was a brewing plot to kill the president. I suspect that David Ferrie, Jack Martin, Guy Banister, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Carlos Bringuier, and others may have been told the same thing. They all seem to have had intelligence connections. Ruby was an admitted FBI informant, and his mob connections went back to the days of Al Capone in Chicago. Ferrie was connected to both the CIA and organized crime through Carlos Marcello.
     
    Jim Garrison was the victim of the most vicious media campaign in history. NBC News broadcast an attack so biased (which included the fanciful revisionist testimony of Dean Andrews, Jr.) that they were forced to give Garrison thirty minutes on air to respond. Walter Sheridan, a former aide to RFK who led the attacks on Garrison, was caught on tape trying to bribe star witness Perry Raymond Russo. Our book features a rare interview by Russo with co-author William Law. We also share a transcript from a talk given by former Garrison aide Anne Dischler, who recounted investigating the little known Oswald impersonations in New Orleans (researchers are familiar with the fake Oswald sightings in Dallas), among other things. We include the reflections of Hollywood legend John Barbour, my most cherished friend and the only man to interview Garrison after his unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw.
     
    I was able to touch base with the family of Edward “Butch” Voebel, Lee Harvey Oswald’s best friend in high school. They speak out here for the first time. I had long suspected that Voebel’s extremely suspicious death at an early age was part of the extremely lengthy JFK assassination Body Count. Those connected to the Garrison investigation were seemingly dropping like flies. Ferrie’s death was beyond strange, and Eladio del Valle, connected to the key players at the ground level, was found with a hatchet to the head at the same time Ferrie died so conveniently. Others were beaten and/or threatened. Some important witnesses were understandably afraid to testify against Clay Shaw, the lone survivor that Garrison prosecuted.
     
    As the sixtieth anniversary of what I call The Mother of All Conspiracies approaches, I will be very busy. I’ve already been asked to do three interviews on November 22. Those of us with limited platforms have to do the best we can to counter what we would assume is sure to be an avalanche of disinformation from the state controlled media. However, there was a strange report that broke in the mainstream press a few days ago, emanating from establishment mouthpiece Rolling Stone, based on the new Paramount + documentary JFK: What the Doctors Saw. The magazine’s headline says it all: “JFK’s Parkland Doctors Come Forward: Oswald Didn’t Act Alone.”
     
    Much like the UFO reports in the mainstream over the past few years, in which sightings that had been ridiculed for many decades were suddenly treated seriously, the information in the documentary is hardly “new.” Those of us who have researched this know all too well how every doctor and nurse who attended JFK at Parkland Hospital described a massive blowout to the rear of his head, something indicating a frontal shot, and contradicted by supposedly authentic autopsy x-rays and photos, which show an intact back of the head. When the likes of Rolling Stone is promoting the idea that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy, we are forced to conclude that perhaps the assassination is going to get the UFO revisionist slant.
     
    Dean Andrews III was severely impacted by his father becoming embroiled in Jim Garrison’s investigation. He was planning to follow in his father’s footsteps, but eventually dropped out of law school. His jobs included a stint as a cab driver, where he met several celebrities. He loved to tell me how John Goodman was bitter over buying the rights to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which several people have compared to my own novel The Unreals. Goodman was unable to get it filmed, and in fact no film based on the novel has ever been produced. Dean met my brother because they were both getting the same services through the county, for those with little financial means.
     
    I never thought Dean would outlive my brother. He still remains shocked over his best friend’s sudden death. He lives in a section 8 housing apartment, but the neighborhood is very nice, in a great location. He qualifies for food stamps. Now confined to a wheelchair, Dean was overjoyed to finally get out of his unit, when I brought him copies of the book, and took him to lunch earlier this week. Looking at him, I couldn’t help but reflect on how different his life might have been, if his father hadn’t taken that fateful phone call in the hospital sixty years ago. He would almost certainly have become a successful lawyer, and his younger brother who died recently after a long battle with drug addiction, would probably still be alive. Here’s a photo of, left to right, my brother Ricky, Dean III, and yours truly.
     
    Dean’s father was so paranoid that he would routinely lock all the doors during the day, and his younger brother would come home from school and be stuck outside until his mother came home. The old Beatnik thought that everyone was in on the conspiracy, and were out to kill him. Despite what he said publicly in order to save himself and his family from the fate so many others suffered, Dean Andrews, Jr. knew that a conspiracy involving very powerful forces had killed President Kennedy. One of Dean III’s best friends in high school was the son of FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who was in the middle of the ground level conspirators in New Orleans. Beverly Oliver, who claims to be the “Babushka Lady” seen filming the assassination, alleged that it was Regis Kennedy who confiscated her film and never gave it back.
     
    As I’ve pointed out often, Oswald, Ruby, Ferrie, Andrews, and the others were not the real conspirators. Clay Shaw was probably the connection between the New Orleans characters, who were all being manipulated in some way, and representatives for the great powers who ordered the hit. Oswald was being impersonated, in Dallas, New Orleans, and even Mexico City, in an obvious attempt to implicate him beforehand. I’m not sure any of the others at the ground level understood that he was going to play the part of the patsy. But by delineating all the unique connections out of New Orleans, as we do in the book, it’s easy to see how the trail leads back to the Pentagon, the CIA- the “Deep State” if you will- that wanted JFK eliminated.
     
    So many future crimes and cover-ups were born out of the JFK assassination. RFK would never have been assassinated if his brother hadn’t. John F. Kennedy, Jr. wouldn’t have been murdered, either. For those who don’t know, I conducted the first independent investigation into JFK, Jr.’s death in Hidden History. I’ll have even important details about the JFK, Jr. assassination in the upcoming The American Memory Hole. The 1960s would have been entirely different if JFK hadn’t died on November 22, 1963. No riots. No counterculture. Perhaps no exploding drug use. It’s corny but true, to declare that America’s innocence died with John F. Kennedy.
     
    Lots of people who refuse to consider all the other crimes and conspiracies are wide “awake” on the JFK assassination. When one domino falls, a lot of others will follow. The truth about the JFK assassination will start the dominos collapsing. The MLK assassination. The RFK assassination. Chappaquiddick, which I believe was Ted Kennedy’s political assassination (in terms of him attaining the presidency). JFK, Jr.’s assassination, just as he was about to launch his political career. His high school girlfriend and others told me that he had a real “quest” to find out who really killed his father, behind the scenes. He was reading the same books I was.
     
    Please check out Pipe the Bimbo in Red. Suggest it to your library. Trust me, it will be much easier to get it into libraries than it has been for Masking the Truth. William and I are purists on the case. We understand there was an obvious conspiracy, involving powerful people in the government. Period. No “rogue” nonsense. No “benign” cover-up. The most important people in the country wanted JFK dead. He was the only president to ever resist the pressure to go to war, and the last president who thought he was actually in charge. Our book will counter not only the establishment lies, but also the “neocon” influence that dominates the research community, where supposed skeptics of the Warren Report continually try to weaken the case for conspiracy.
     
    The ground level players in New Orleans were all connected to radical anti-Castro Cubans. The Cuban connection continues to divert the attention of researchers. I think this was a clear smokescreen. If JFK was killed because he was going soft on Castro, why wasn’t there another Bay of Pigs after the assassination? In fact, Cuba died as an American political issue along with JFK. LBJ never mentioned it. Nixon never plotted to overthrow the dreaded Castro. This makes absolutely no sense, if our Cuban policy was the impetus for the assassination. Our Vietnam policy obviously did change. JFK was going to withdraw all troops by 1965. The CIA no longer had to be worried about being shattered and thrown to the winds, as JFK had threatened.
     
    JFK’s behind the scenes war of words with Israeli President David Ben-Gurion was forgotten after November 22, 1963. JFK was the last president to stand up to Israel in any meaningful way. We see the results of this enabling behavior in Gaza today. There have been very few high profile American heroes. Many are falsely claimed as heroes, but only a handful legitimately belong in that category. John F. Kennedy is one of them. This book clarifies how young Lee Harvey Oswald was maneuvered into his patsy role, while thinking he was being a patriot. They may bring out a revisionist slant for the sixtieth anniversary. Regardless, they will be lying. That’s what they do. Pipe the Bimbo in Red will educate you, hopefully while being entertaining.
    May be an image of 3 people and text that says 'Pipe the Bimbo Red Dean Andrews, Jim Garrison, and The Conspiracy To Kill JFK Donald Jeffries & William Matson Law'
     
     
     
     
     
     

    David Talbot: "The Truth Will Out" on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    David Talbot released this today:

    Twelve days ago, I was asked by the Opinion section of the New York Times to write an essay on the JFK assassination nearly 60 years later. This was a major breakthrough because the newspaper of record has always embraced the official version of the assassination, even as the Warren Report, based on the "magic bullet" and all that nonsense, has grown increasingly tattered over the years. In 2015, when The Devil's Chessboard -- my book about CIA spymaster Allen Dulles and the national security state's war with President Kennedy -- was published, the Times refused to review it. (Nonetheless, the book was a New York Times bestseller.)
    So it represented something of a milestone when the Times commissioned me to write a JFK article. I turned in a sober, detailed piece that was, if anything, TOO kind to the Times and the corporate media. The Times killed it anyway. (Below, you can read what my editor emailed me.) Sigh.
    So, unfortunately, when it comes to the Big Media and JFK, we're still at square one at 60. The New York Times is STILL part of the cover-up.
    A few days later, I was scheduled by Ben Wecht of the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University to give the closing speech at its annual conference, which is the best gathering of JFK experts in the country. I spoke about the Times and Big Media's role in the Kennedy cover-up.
    Here is my speech:
    We’re Winning – and Losing – the JFK Media War
    Thank you, Ben Wecht and thanks to the staff of the Cyril Wecht Institute. I regret that I can’t be in Pittsburgh in person. I may be virtual, but I’m live from San Francisco.
    I will keep my remarks fairly brief as I close out this very informative conference today. I know you’re all rushing to return home. But I do want to leave you with something provocative. So here goes.
    “History,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the White House aide to President Kennedy and Harvard historian, was fond of saying, “is an ongoing argument.”
    No subject embroils academics and journalists more than the JFK assassination, even 60 years later. But the American people are a different story. There, a substantial majority has long been of one mind.
    Poll after poll ever since the shots rang out in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza has showed that most Americans believe President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. According to a new Gallup survey, the percentage of lone gunman skeptics remains a solid 65% of adult Americans, with the largest numbers of those skeptics pointing at the federal government (20%) and specifically the CIA (16%) as the likely culprits – numbers that are sharply up in recent years.
    Despite this unshakeable public conviction, and a growing body of evidence to the contrary, the U. S. media has remained stubbornly even perversely wedded to the single assassin version of Dallas. The Guardian, one of the more liberal newspapers in the English-language world, just ran a worshipful profile of aging Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who still clings to the tattered Warren Report, despite (among other recent revelations) his former Secret Service colleague Paul Landis’s assertion that there was nothing “magic” about the magic bullet at all.
    Shaking his head sagely, Guardian correspondent David Smith opined, “In an age of division, disinformation and internet-fueled movements such as QAnon, conspiracy theories about who killed Kennedy and why are thriving as never before.”
    I would bet that David Smith has barely cracked the surface of the JFK story. Journalists for the mainstream press routinely offer their judgments on subjects they know little about. Newspaper and TV reporters are captives of relentless deadlines and a pack mentality. Despite their feisty reputations and their insatiable habit of awarding themselves with prizes, they are a timid lot. They are loath to bite the hands that feed them. This story is so epic – involving a brazen assault on American democracy – you would think the Fourth Estate would show a little humility in its ignorance. It never has.
    As I wrote in my book The Devils’ Chessboard, Cold War-era national security officials like Allen Dulles enjoyed a cozy relationship with the corporate media. Dulles, the CIA director linked by me and other historians with the JFK assassination and cover-up, got himself appointed to the Warren Commission, playing so active a role that some observers said it should have been called the Dulles Commission.
    After the Warren Report was released in 1964, Newsweek national affairs editor John Jay Iselin sent Dulles a gushing note, thanking him for helping the magazine direct its coverage of the report’s 26 volumes on a tight deadline. Newsweek’s cover story on the Warren Report, Iselin told Dulles “was made easier through your kindness in giving us some idea of what to be on the watch for.”
    Dulles was on a nickname basis with New York Times executives and journalists throughout his career. When Dulles was named CIA director in 1953, Times general manager Julius Ochs Adler – “Julie,” as Dulles affectionately called him – warmly congratulated his friend “Allie.” Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger was also a reliable advocate during Dulles’s reign as spymaster, with Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame later exposing their close connection in a Rolling Stone investigative article about the CIA’s media assets.
    These days the press is so close to the national security state that the CIA doesn’t need a clandestine program like Operation Mockingbird to infiltrate it. Every night you can see a parade of former CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon officials on liberal news networks like MSNBC or CNN.
    Essentially, from Ukraine to China to the Middle East, the corporate media acts as a mouthpiece for U.S. empire. National security reporters soon learn that there is no access for them in Langley and Washington if they don’t report the official line. It’s clear to them: no access, no career.
    What the press conveniently forgets, in its disdain for the “conspiracy culture,” is that the American people have been lied to by their government (and the obedient media) time after time. From Dallas to the Gulf of Tonkin to Iran-Contra to 9/11 to WMD -- to Trump and Biden’s presidential decisions to allow the CIA to illegally keep secret some 4,000 government documents related to the Kennedy assassination.
    A message to David Smith and the rest of the smug press corps: this refusal to come clean about some of our biggest national traumas is what has led to widespread public skepticism about authorities, about official pronouncements. There is a direct line between these government lies and the growth of QAnon and other crazy subcultures.
    By the way, some conspiracy theories are cracked. And some are true. Do you think power prefers to operate in the open?
    Now for some good news. As I’ve long observed, quoting Leonard Cohen, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. The official version of what happened six decades ago in Dallas is so widely rejected, is so patently absurd, that even the Big Media is catching up to the truth.
    It’s a mixed bag this anniversary season. Yes, we have useful idiots like the Guardian’s David Smith. But we also have documentaries like JFK: What the Doctors Saw on Paramount+, the blunt eyewitness testimony of several members of the surgical team that worked on the mortally-wounded Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital and saw with their own trained eyes that he had been struck by bullets from the front and rear. In other words, clear evidence of a conspiracy.
    On the November 22 anniversary, we can watch on several streaming platforms the opening episode of Four Died Trying, a documentary series on the history-changing assassinations of the 1960s. This month, there is also the multipart podcast Who Killed JFK? produced by Hollywood actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner, who teamed up with longtime Kennedy assassination author Dick Russell.
    You can also detect a slow movement in the right direction by the corporate press. In recent months, Peter Baker, the New York Times’s White House correspondent, has covered two important developments in the Kennedy case, the Landis revelation about the magic bullet and the discovery that the CIA was secretly reading Oswald’s mail before the Kennedy assassination. This was an eye-popping story because the agency had long claimed that Oswald was off its radar before the assassination -- a dubious assertion about a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, threatening to reveal military secrets, and then returned to this country with a Russian wife. Baker is clearly open to new information about the JFK case.
    And New York magazine recently featured a generally positive profile of JFK expert Jefferson Morley, the dogged journalist who sometimes succeeds in making the mainstream press do its job --- though strangely the magazine’s editors chose to delete the positive quotes about Morley from other Kennedy authorities.
    Despite this flirtation with the truth, the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media remain largely wedded to the official version of Dallas. Last week, I was asked by a Times opinion editor to write a JFK assassination op-ed – a landmark event considering my reputation. Unfortunately, the newspaper of record rejected my measured article. “The piece is rich and fascinating,” the editor emailed me, “but I don't think I can move forward with it. The fascinating mobius strip of truth and conspiracy is very tricky for Times Opinion.” Whatever that means.
    So, yes, the mainstream press is, let’s say kindly, a work in progress as we near the 60th milestone of the JFK assassination. The news media is still trailing far behind public opinion, even the Times Opinion section.
    But if the mainstream press’s progress has been slow – some would say glacial -- Hollywood, unfortunately, is even worse. The dream factory is where the truth goes to die. And the entertainment industry has even more power to shape public consciousness than the daily news barrage.
    After Oliver Stone’s explosive movie JFK was released in 1991, the CIA reportedly vowed that another film like that – which blamed Kennedy’s murder on powerful government plotters -- would never be made. The agency was right. The CIA now operates a branch office in Hollywood which has done a very effective job at making sure that U.S. spies are portrayed in a heroic light and in canceling screen projects which take a different view.
    After they were published, my New York Times-bestselling books – Brothers, on Robert Kennedy’s hidden search for the truth about the murder of his brother, and The Devil’s Chessboard, about the rise of Allen Dulles and his central involvement in the JFK assassination – were optioned by major studios and filmmakers. But neither book has come close to reaching the screen. “They’ll never make your books in Hollywood,” Oliver Stone told me several years ago. So far, he’s been right.
    What I’m about to tell you is painful. Darkly comic. Sure, it happens every day in Hollywood – after all, it’s Hollywood, Jake. But there’s a political dimension to my frustration. Yes, Oliver was probably right – they’ll never make movies or TV shows from my books. Or from anyone’s books, if you tell the truth about the Kennedy assassination.
    A few years ago, I was sitting at a studio conference table with big producers and a major left-wing director. They wanted our feature to say the Mafia killed JFK, case closed. Wellll, I said, organized crime did play a role – gangsters are often recruited by the CIA to do the spy agency’s dirty work. But, as my books demonstrate, Dallas was a national security operation. The movie producers just looked at me like I wasn’t getting it. Later, the director said to me on the phone: We both know it’s bullshit. But let’s take the money and run. I didn’t. Now I hear director Barry Levinson and writer David Mamet are making a new movie. It says gangsters killed Kennedy. That one is getting made.
    Hollywood continues to confound me and thwart me. Continues to buy the rights to my books and do nothing with them. I was raised there. My father Lyle Talbot was a cofounder of the Screen Actors Guild. My son Joe Talbot is the widely acclaimed director of The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I’ve learned how to write fiction and screenplays.
    I even collaborated with Oliver Stone on a screenplay. That’s right. It hasn’t gone in front of the cameras yet. Maybe it will someday.
    Yes, we must admit – we’ve been losing the big media war. The corporate news media has been slow, very slow, to let in the light. And Hollywood, the other communications bastion, remains a twilight zone, a largely impregnable fortress. The land of superhero spies and fantastical propaganda.
    So, what should we do at this point? Sixty years later. When the White House still sides with the CIA, in brazen violation of the law, and keeps some 4,000 documents about the Kennedy assassination secret. When our vigilant, watchdog press rouses itself and growls… “Oh, well. So it goes.”
    By the way, while researching my book The Devil’s Chessboard, I filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA and State Department for the travel records and passport history of William Harvey. He was the assassinations chief for the CIA during the Cold War and a Kennedy hater. Before the JFK assassination, Harvey was spotted by his CIA deputy flying from Rome, where he was stationed at the time, to Dallas. A court ruled that the government could keep Harvey’s travel records hidden, though he died many years ago.
    So, given all this official stonewalling, what should we do? Keep doing it ourselves. Keep ignoring the government and the big media gatekeepers. If the New York publishers and Hollywood studios persist in blocking us, we’ll keep going around them with podcasts and blogs and documentaries. That’s what we’ve always done.
    If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own. That’s what Scoop Nisker, the late great San Francisco radio host, used to say.
    I have a saying of my own – The best story wins. We have the truth on our side. And guess what? It’s a much better story.
    Keep saying what the New York Times doesn’t want to hear. Keep digging up information that will never get you on CNN.
    Someday our citizens army will win.
    Let me add one final comment as we depart. With apologies to my good friend Jeff Morley, who has done so much to advance the JFK case. Jeff spoke earlier today. It was a very good speech, but I must disagree with one of his statements. When it comes to understanding this murder most foul, we are more than just “warm.” We are hot, very hot.
    Yes, there are crucial gaps in our understanding of the crime – like the names of the snipers who shot the president and who exactly financed the operation. But we know the larger truth. Top officials in the CIA and military organized the killing of President Kennedy and its cover-up. They killed him because JFK was trying to wind down the Cold War and was threatening the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned the American people about. In other words, Kennedy was confronting a very lucrative racket. We’ve been at war ever since Dallas.
    In 2019, a list of prominent Americans signed a so-called Truth and Reconciliation public statement, which said in part: “A growing body of evidence strongly indicates that the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at high levels of the U.S. power structure, and was implemented by top elements of the U.S. national security apparatus using, among others, figures in the criminal underworld to help carry out the crime and cover-up.”
    This powerful and definitive statement, which I helped organize, was signed among others by G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the House Assassinations Committee; Dr. Robert McClelland of the Parkland Memorial Hospital surgical team; Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg; former Secret Service hero Abraham Bolden; and a who’s-who list of leading JFK researchers including Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Gary Aguilar, James Douglass, Peter Dale Scott; Rex Bradford; James DiEugenio; John Newman – and yes, Jeff Morley.
    Sixty years after Dallas, let’s state loudly and clearly what we know. Even when the mainstream press and Hollywood refuse to listen.
    The truth will out.
    Thank you.
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