Douglas Caddy

Paul: I am not quite certain that “supersedes” is the right word here. I think my prior posting above and those I made in the Watergate Topic of the Education Forum complement the latest reported developments in the Levinson’s case. The $2.5 million payoff to the Levinson family may be to assure that they keep quiet about what they know regarding Levinson’s assignment that led to his disappearance. It may also be an acknowledgement by the government that Levinson is no longer alive. After Shoffler died in 1996, Merritt contacted his family and was told by a family member that the family had signed a confidentiality agreement with the government that prevented them from commenting on any aspect of the intelligence work Shoffler had done for the government. Merritt was not told at that time that there was a monetary payoff attached to the confidentiality agreement but one could assume this might be the case. Doug

Kennedy’s Last Act: Reaching Out to Cuba November 20, 2013 by Peter Kornbluh This Post was originally published in La Jornada. http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/kennedys-last-act-reaching-out-to-cuba/

In the book, “Watergate Exposed”, which is based on what Robert Merritt, a government confidential informant, told me about the scandal, there is a section dealing with Robert Levinson (pp. 60-61.) Merritt’s controller was Washington, D.C. police detective Carl Shoffler. Shoffler was a military intelligence agent who had been assigned to the Washington Metropolitan Police. Shoffler arrested the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972, having been tipped off by Merritt two weeks earlier of the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee. Shoffler is widely thought of as being “Deep Throat” as he telephoned the Washington Post a short time after he arrested the burglars and alerted the newspaper as to the crime. Shoffler also worked for Interpol. The Financial Times of April 13, 2007, carried an article about Robert Levinson titled, “Missing American feared a victim of “dirty war.” The article states, “As the Financial Times revealed this week, Mr. Levinson disappeared on March 8 after a six-hour meeting on the Iranian island of Kish with Dawud Salahuddin, an American who converted to Islam and was recruited by revolutionaries to assassinate an Iranian opposition activist near Washington in 1980…. “Over the years, Mr. Salahuddin – who goes by the name of Hassan Abdulrahman in Iran, where he is married to an Iranian and works as an editor – developed an intense relationship over the telephone with Carl Shoffler, a legendary Washington, D.C. police detective. “Mr. Shoffler, who died in 1996, followed the 1980 murder and tried to persuade Mr. Salahuddin to return to the U.S. Mr. Salahuddin says he nearly did. In the meantime he helped Mr. Shoffler liaise with an Iranian criminal investigator on tracking down drug smugglers bringing heroin from Afghanistan through Iran and on to the west. Mr. Levinson shared those same interests.” ------------------------------ An updated article from TIME: http://world.time.com/2013/12/16/american-born-assassin-in-iran-robert-levinson-never-said-he-was-working-for-the-cia/#ixzz2ngLvc15n

In the book, “Watergate Exposed”, which is based on what Robert Merritt, a government confidential informant, told me about the scandal, there is a section dealing with Robert Levinson (pp. 60-61.) Merritt’s controller was Washington, D.C. police detective Carl Shoffler. Shoffler was a military intelligence agent who had been assigned to the Washington Metropolitan Police. Shoffler arrested the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972, having been tipped off by Merritt two weeks earlier of the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee. Shoffler is widely thought of as being “Deep Throat” as he telephoned the Washington Post a short time after he arrested the burglars and alerted the newspaper as to the crime. Shoffler also worked for Interpol. The Financial Times of April 13, 2007, carried an article about Robert Levinson titled, “Missing American feared a victim of “dirty war.” The article states, “As the Financial Times revealed this week, Mr. Levinson disappeared on March 8 after a six-hour meeting on the Iranian island of Kish with Dawud Salahuddin, an American who converted to Islam and was recruited by revolutionaries to assassinate an Iranian opposition activist near Washington in 1980…. “Over the years, Mr. Salahuddin – who goes by the name of Hassan Abdulrahman in Iran, where he is married to an Iranian and works as an editor – developed an intense relationship over the telephone with Carl Shoffler, a legendary Washington, D.C. police detective. “Mr. Shoffler, who died in 1996, followed the 1980 murder and tried to persuade Mr. Salahuddin to return to the U.S. Mr. Salahuddin says he nearly did. In the meantime he helped Mr. Shoffler liaise with an Iranian criminal investigator on tracking down drug smugglers bringing heroin from Afghanistan through Iran and on to the west. Mr. Levinson shared those same interests.”

CIA Bay of Pigs Secrecy Case Reaches Appeals Court National Security Archive Lawsuit Seeks Last Volume of CIA "Official History" CIA claims release would "confuse the public" National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 450 Posted December 13, 2013 Edited by Tom Blanton http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB450/

Thanks, Pat, for this lucid and fascinating explanation as to how you arrived at the conclusion you did. It serves as a history lesson for any member of the public who decides to investigate this important aspect of the assassination.

Fox News Paid Ousted Exec $8 Million In 'Hush Money': Gawker The Huffington Post | By Jack Mirkinson Posted: 12/09/2013 4:17 pm EST http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/09/fox-news-brian-lewis-payment_n_4414656.html We now know what it reportedly takes to keep a fired Fox News executive from spilling the beans on all the juicy inner workings at the network: about $8 million. That's the figure that Gawker said Brian Lewis, the ousted former consigliere to Roger Ailes, was paid by Fox News in a recently uncovered settlement. Gawker, which reported the figure on Monday, described the payment as "hush money." The site's report is just the latest in a long-running story of intrigue inside one of the most secretive and cutthroat companies in the media industry. Lewis, who was Ailes' right-hand-man for years before falling out with him, was clearly a potential threat to Fox News and News Corp; as his lawyer told the media in a statement in June, "Roger Ailes and Newscorp have a lot more to fear from Brian Lewis telling the truth about them than Brian Lewis has to fear from Roger Ailes and his toadies telling lies about Brian Lewis." News Corp has a history of giving its executives a big payout when they leave under something of a cloud; former British newspaper chief Rebekah Brooks, for instance, was paid a whopping $17.6 million when she resigned from the company

The Issue: The Kennedy assassination -- did the mob do it? By MARCELLA S. KREITER, United Press International | Nov. 17, 2013 at 4:30 AM http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/11/17/The-Issue-The-Kennedy-assassination-did-the-mob-do-it/UPI-41021384680600/ It's been nearly 50 years since bullets were fired at the presidential motorcade as it wended its way through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, killing U.S. President John F. Kennedy and spawning decades of speculation on whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or was part of -- or victim of -- a conspiracy with tentacles in Havana, Washington and perhaps Moscow. Did the CIA do it? Was it the mob? The Kremlin? How about a consortium of businessmen? What if Oswald thought he was a double agent working for the CIA who planned to infiltrate Cuba and work for the overthrow of Fidel Castro? Lamar Waldron makes the case Oswald was tangled up in CIA-Mafia machinations against the Castro regime in "The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination." Waldron said it actually was New Orleans mob godfather Carlos Marcello who masterminded the Kennedy assassination -- something Robert Kennedy believed -- but much of the evidence was either destroyed or is still classified because of the CIA's anti-Castro activities. The first investigation into the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination by the Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded 10 months later in its 889-page report Oswald acted alone, firing three shots at Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 concluded Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy but ruled out the Soviet Union, Cuba, anti-Castro Cubans and organized crime -- but not individual mobsters -- as complicit. Waldron said Marcello, in a fit of rage during a rant about Kennedy and his brother, Robert, blurted out in the prison yard at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, that he had Kennedy killed and wished he could have done it himself. The remark was made in front of two other inmates, one of them Jack Van Laningham, who became his cellmate and eventually wore a wire for the FBI, getting Marcello's alleged confession on tape. Waldron said Marcello, who was incarcerated at Texarkana for his role in the BriLab insurance bribery scheme, hated the Kennedy brothers because of their war on organized crime and their efforts to have him expelled from the United States for good. He was particularly incensed about his deportation to Guatemala -- based on fake documents saying that's where he was born -- and his struggle to slip back into the United States, which took him on a trek through the jungle. Waldron, who reviewed declassified FBI and CIA files and interviewed many of the parties involved, said Marcello's alleged confession is backed by corroborating evidence not available to Laningham or his FBI handlers at the time. Similar confessions came late in life from Marcello's alleged co-conspirators Johnny Rosselli, an underboss for Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante, who controlled the Tampa, Fla., mob and had run casinos in Havana during the heyday of the Batista regime. What makes Waldron so sure Marcello's statements weren't just boasting? "Most mobsters ... haven't ruled unchallenged an empire the size of General Motors for three decades. ... Carlos Marcello ruled Louisiana, Texas and parts of Mississippi. One way Marcello kept that empire so long was by avoiding the limelight, publicity. ... It's a totally different kind of godfather than John Gotti [the New York mobster who headed the Gambino crime family and was known as the 'Dapper Don']," Waldron said, adding because the New Orleans mob was the oldest Mafia organization in the United States, Marcello did not have to go to the national commission to clear hits on government officials. Marcello, he said, actually planned two other attempts on Kennedy in the days preceding Dallas -- one in Chicago and one in Tampa. Like Dallas, two men -- one an ex-Marine and the other a Fair Play for Cuba member -- were positioned to be blamed for the shootings once Kennedy was dead. Waldron said both the Warren Commission and the House select committee investigations were hampered by CIA reluctance to turn over files concerning U.S. efforts to overthrow Castro. Hundreds of thousands of pages related to those plots remain secret despite legislation requiring all files related to the Kennedy assassination be released and Waldron has started a petition on whitehouse.gov (http://wh.gov/lZurV) seeking their declassification. Waldron said it is unlikely Marcello would have left the assassination to Oswald because the former Marine was not an experienced killer. Waldron said Marcello imported two hit men from Europe to handle the shooting. "He [Marcello] liked to use war orphans for hits," Waldron said, "because if you killed them afterward, there was no one to ask questions." As for evidence the fatal bullets came from the Texas School Book Depository, "the angle is in huge dispute. It varies by 20 degrees," Waldron said. The Warren Commission said the bullet that injured Connolly, the so-called magic bullet, went in the back of Kennedy's neck and exited just below his Adam's apple. But Waldron said that's false. The bullet actually went in 6 inches below the top of Kennedy's collar -- something Waldron said the late Sen. Arlen Specter, then an investigator for the Warren Commission, changed to make the trajectory line up. Additionally, an exit wound generally is larger than an entrance wound and the hole beneath Kennedy's Adam's apple was smaller than the back wound. Waldron said Kennedy aides riding in the chase car were convinced at least one shot came from the grassy knoll but were pressured to change their stories for national security reasons. History Professor Randy Roberts of Purdue University, who has written about the assassination's effect on American culture, argues conspiracy theories "always sound good" but they don't hold up. "It sounds really persuasive but then when you read the documents, they don't really say what you think they say," Roberts said. Roberts, who will appear on the History channel's "Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live" Friday, said the ballistics evidence "is pretty convincing" and he doesn't think Oswald's calling himself "a patsy" means much, considering he was seen carrying a package that investigators said was likely the Mannlicher Carcano rifle (Waldron said the package was too small to be the rifle and never made it to the book depository in any event) used to shoot the president and injure Connolly. "If Oswald was a patsy, why did he shoot a policeman and try to shoot more policemen [as he was cornered at a movie theater]?" Roberts asked. "Why did he leave his ring with his wife ... on his way out? ... There's so much logical evidence." Waldron said the evidence implicating Oswald in officer J.D. Tippit's killing is questionable and there are indications Oswald already was inside the movie theater at the time. As for resisting arrest, Waldron said at that point Oswald probably had figured out things weren't going down the way he had been led to believe they would. Best-selling author Robert Tanenbaum, a former New York City prosecutor who served as chief assistant counsel to the House select committee, said he doesn't think the assassination has yet been adequately investigated. He quit the panel when he became convinced members weren't that interested in what really happened. "I don't believe Oswald could have been convicted based on the shoddy evidence they had, particularly with all the other evidence," he said, citing, for example, the statements of Dr. Charles Crenshaw, a young doctor who treated Kennedy when he was brought to Parkland Hospital. Crenshaw said one of the bullets entered Kennedy's throat from the front right while a second bullet entered his head from the side "consistent with [a shot fired from the] grassy knoll," Tanenbaum said. But Crenshaw was never even questioned by the Warren Commission and his testimony was ignored by the House committee. "I believe without question there were shots that came from the side, the grassy knoll," he said. Roberts doesn't buy it though, especially since there are so many conspiracy theories. "If there was a conspiracy, only one of [the theories] can be right. They can't all be," he said. Misconceptions about the assassination still affect U.S. foreign policy. Waldron said the reason the United States never normalized relations with Cuba is because high-ranking officials still are convinced Castro was behind the assassination based on trumped up evidence periodically trotted out by the CIA. "[secretary of State] John Kerry is only the latest government official to say there was a conspiracy, but he pointed a finger at Fidel Castro," he said. "The mob planted a lot of phony evidence pointing to Castro. [Former President Lyndon] Johnson believed Castro killed Kennedy. [Former CIA Director John] McCone believed Castro killed Kennedy. People like [former Secretary of State Alexander] Haig -- they didn't know all of the evidence implicating Fidel was debunked in 1963 and 1964. ... It can all be traced back to the mob http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/11/17/The-Issue-The-Kennedy-assassination-did-the-mob-do-it/UPI-41021384680600/#ixzz2mvDo4Ke9

JFK and Castro The Secret Quest For Accommodation Recently Declassified U.S. government Documents Reveal That, at the Height of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro Were Exploring Ways To Normalize U.S.-Cuba Relations Peter Kornbluh From the Print Edition: Susan Lucci, Sep/Oct 99 Cigar Aficionado Magazine http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/7300/p/1

December 7, 2013 Nelson Mandela, Communist By BILL KELLER The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/keller-nelson-mandela-communist.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print IN 2011, the British historian Stephen Ellis published a paper concluding that Nelson Mandela had been a member of the South African Communist Party — indeed, a member of its governing Central Committee. Although Mandela’s African National Congress and the Communist Party were openly allied against apartheid, Mandela and the A.N.C. have always denied that the hero of South Africa’s liberation was himself a party member. But Ellis, drawing on testimony of former party members and newly available archives, made a convincing case that Mandela joined the party around 1960, several years before he was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to overthrow the government. Does it matter? The news excited some critics and historical revisionists, who claimed it exposed the A.N.C. as a Stalinist front. (“ ‘Saint’ Mandela? Not So Fast!” exulted one right-wing blog.) It probably stirred a sense of vindication among Americans who endorsed their government’s Cold War support of the fiercely anti-Communist apartheid regime. Professor Ellis is no apologist for white rule — he occupies a university chair in Amsterdam named for another hero of the South African resistance, Archbishop Desmond Tutu — but he contends that the affiliation with the Communists shaped the A.N.C.’s ideology in ways that endure, ominously, to this day. “Today, the A.N.C. officially claims still to be at the first stage ... of a two-phase revolution,” Ellis told me in an email exchange. “This is a theory obtained directly from Soviet thinking.” Indeed, the remnants of Communist protocol and jargon — “comrades” and “counterrevolutionaries” — live on in the platform and demeanor of South Africa’s ruling party. My own perspective on this question, shaped by covering the Soviet Union from 1986 to 1991 and South Africa from 1992 to 1995, is respectful of scholarship, but also wary of its limits. Both in Gorbachev’s Russia and in transitional South Africa, I realized that what people profess at party plenums and codify in party records is not always a reliable guide to what they will do, or even what they actually believe. But Mandela’s Communist affiliation is not just a bit of history’s flotsam. It doesn’t justify the gleeful red baiting, and it certainly does not diminish a heroic legacy, but it is significant in a few respects. First, Mandela’s brief membership in the South African Communist Party, and his long-term alliance with more devout Communists, say less about his ideology than about his pragmatism. He was at various times a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and an advocate of violence, a hothead and the calmest man in the room, a consumer of Marxist tracts and an admirer of Western democracy, a close partner of Communists and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists. The early collaboration of the A.N.C. with the Communists was a marriage of convenience for a movement that had few friends. The South African Communist Party and its patrons in Russia and China were a source of money and weapons for the largely feckless armed struggle, and for many, it meant solidarity with a cause larger than South Africa. Communist ideology undoubtedly seeped into the A.N.C., where it became part of a uniquely South African cocktail with African nationalism, Black Consciousness, religious liberalism and other, inchoate angers and resentments and yearnings. But at important junctures — in negotiations to end white rule, then in the writing of a new constitution, and finally in governing — the faction of nationalizers and vengeance seekers lost out to the compromisers. In the talks that set the stage for democracy, Joe Slovo, the longtime leader of the South African Communists and a man fluent in revolutionary rhetoric, was the most ardent advocate of sharing power with the white regime. The prevailing doctrine was whatever worked to advance the cause of a South Africa governed by South Africans. This was true of Mandela and equally true of his successor, Thabo Mbeki. The current president, Jacob Zuma, seems to have no ideology at all except self-enrichment. In one of his several trials, Mandela was asked if he was a Communist. “If by Communist you mean a member of the Communist Party and a person who believes in the theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and who adheres strictly to the discipline of the party, I did not become a Communist,” he replied. The answer was both evasive and perfectly accurate. Perhaps the most important and lasting personal effect of the South African Communist Party on Mandela was that it made him, or helped make him, a committed nonracialist. The A.N.C. in its formative years admitted only blacks. For a long time, the Communist Party was the only partner in the movement that included whites, Indians and mixed-race members. That relationship is one of the main reasons Mandela cited for his rejection of black nationalism and his insistence that multiracialism remain at the heart of the A.N.C. ethic. A third reason the Communist affiliation matters is that it helps explain why South Africa has not made greater progress toward improving the lives of its large underclass, rooting out corruption and unifying a fractious populace. The many failures of the A.N.C. during its 19 years in power can be explained by the fact that it has never fully made the transition from liberation movement to political party, let alone government. The Communist Party is as culpable in that as anyone, but I think what incapacitates the A.N.C. is not Stalinist doctrine, or any doctrine for that matter. It is something in the nature, the culture, of liberation movements. United by what they are against, they tend to be conspiratorial, to discourage dissent, to prize ends over means. In the end, of course, the greatest favor Communism performed for Mandela and the A.N.C. was collapsing. Once the Soviet bloc had disintegrated and China had gone capitalist, the last white rulers of South Africa could no longer pose as necessary allies on the right side of the Cold War. They knew the game was up.

Hey, is this a first for a Playboy article to be cited in the forum? Penthouse always had some good articles, I remember. ----------------- Culture Club: Oliver Stone’s JFK November 30, 2013 Playboy Magazine By Tim Grierson http://m.playboy.com/playground/view/id/3631/title/culture-club-oliver-stones-jfk

NSA Whistle-Blower Tells All NY Times Op-Docs: The Program - See more at: http://www.forbiddenknowledgetv.com/videos/patriot-act/nsa-whistle-blower-tells-all.html#sthash.vMWVmAA3.dpuf Filmmaker, Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans' personal data. Binney says that the secret program has the ability to target a “community” and determine who its members are and build profiles on these members, so that ultimately the NSA knows everything there is to know about the community. Can there be any doubt but that our JFK Assassination topic “community” under the secret program has been targeted by the NSA, and that COPA and Lancer have also?

Blackopradio.com Show #658 Original airdate: December 5, 2013 Guests: Shane O'Sullivan / Greg Burnham Topics: Killing Oswald / COPA Conference To listen, go to: http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2013.html

ARRB/HSCA Audio Files Check out the first round of ARRB/HSCA audio recordings that Steve Kossor created for Doug Horne. Total, there will be about 50 recordings in the collection. http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Remastered-ARRB-Audio-Files-.html?soid=1100889772973&aid=eHtKl28-uhE

Signed copy of JFK book Why England Slept, meant as present for Queen Elizabeth before his assassination, to go under the hammer Why England Slept is being sold online on auction site Picollecta.com JFK wrote book, about events that led to WWII, while studying at Harvard The dedication reads: 'To Elizabeth (II) with affection John F Kennedy' Below signature he adds in brackets: 'We must not fear to negotiate' Expected to fetch hundreds of pounds when auction ends on December 12 By Daily Mail Reporter 6 December 2013 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2519326/Signed-copy-JFK-book-Why-England-Slept-meant-present-Queen-Elizabeth-assassination-hammer.html#ixzz2miHHGPnE

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=20838

National Archives to Open Additional Robert F. Kennedy Records December 4, 2013 http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2014/nr14-10.html

September 25, 2013 Theater Review An Arm-Twister in the Oval Office By CHARLES ISHERWOOD The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/theater/reviews/all-the-way-stars-bryan-cranston-as-lyndon-b-johnson.html?pagewanted=1&pagewanted=print CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The crowds excitedly filing in to the American Repertory Theater here are not, I am willing to bet, panting at the prospect of hearing words like “filibuster” and “cloture” tossed into their laps. Nor are they eager to watch politicians fulminating and pontificating in front of microphones. For such diversions, after all, we have cable news, and with the government slouching toward yet another partisan smackdown, it’s showtime 24/7. No, the reason “All the Way,” a new historical drama by Robert Schenkkan (“The Kentucky Cycle”), has sold out its entire run has everything to do with the man who spends much of the evening in an oval-shaped space at center stage. Bryan Cranston, who racked up three Emmys as the chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin in the obsessively adored cable series “Breaking Bad,” stars as President Lyndon Baines Johnson, fighting to assert himself as a figure of authority, both moral and political, in the tumultuous months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. To immediately address the question of Mr. Cranston’s own authority: yes, onstage he cuts a vigorous, imposing figure as L.B.J., employing a drawl as wide as the Rio Grande as the new president backslaps and backstabs his way through the rough waters of a Washington that, in its deep divisions, bears a depressing resemblance to our own. Mr. Cranston’s Johnson glitters with an almost salacious ruthlessness when he senses a chance to do a little arm-twisting to lock down another vote for a bill he wants passed. And in Mr. Schenkkan’s sharply outlined portrait, Johnson spouts down-home truths, Southern-fried parables and the occasional blue tale like a geyser gushing oil in his native Texas. Mr. Cranston delivers them all with the jovial ease of a man spinning yarns to his buddies on the front porch. (Still, after the umpteenth such serving of corn pone, I began to wonder how Johnson ever found time to do any actual politicking.) This winning star turn can go only so far, however, to give dramatic thrust to Mr. Schenkkan’s play, which is directed by Bill Rauch, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the play had its premiere (without Mr. Cranston) last year. “All the Way” sprawls across three hours of stage time as it covers an imposingly wide swath of territory. Concentrating on two parallel story lines — Johnson’s fight to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his maneuvering to secure a full term as president — the play dangles more subplots than a Congressional bill has earmarks: the sordid attempts by J. Edgar Hoover (Michael McKean) to discredit the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Brandon J. Dirden); the infamous killing of three young men seeking to register black voters in Mississippi; the battle to seat black delegates from Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention that followed; and even comparatively minor incidents like the arrest of Johnson’s longtime aide-de-camp, Walter Jenkins (Christopher Liam Moore), for having sex in a men’s room. “All the Way” works just fine as a PowerPoint lesson in political history, but it ultimately accrues minimal dramatic momentum. (The polished wooden set by Christopher Acebo is designed to suggest a Congressional chamber.) For policy wonks with an avid interest in the backroom deal making that doesn’t turn up on C-Span, the play will offer plenty to chew on. And yet for all its admirable attention to the complex currents of the period it covers, the wide focus drains the play of the narrative drive that makes for engrossing theater. (A countdown clock, noting the number of days to the presidential election, cannot really engender much suspense, since most in the audience will know how that contest ended.) The play begins in the hours immediately after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 as Johnson is winging toward Washington on Air Force One. He knows he has to hit the tarmac running: the next election is less than a year away, and after three years of being virtually powerless as Kennedy’s vice president, Johnson needs to quickly show that he has the leadership qualities necessary to bring the country through a troubled time. Kennedy had already sent the civil rights bill to Congress, where its foes were confidently expecting to gut it, as they had another such bill in 1957, when Johnson was the Senate majority leader, or to let it die. Johnson seizes on the bill as a necessary means both to win popular approval — the country was largely in favor of it — and to win over the Kennedy liberals who never believed in Johnson’s bona fides on the issue. Mr. Schenkkan shows him working the phones relentlessly when he’s not working over a stubborn foe in person, the smiling mask of the good ol’ boy slipping frequently to reveal a bared-tooth snarl. Mr. Rauch has assembled a first-rate supporting cast to fill out the more than 40 roles in the play, with most actors playing two or three parts (sometimes a little confusingly). Among the standouts: Mr. McKean oozing bland, oily menace as Hoover; Reed Birney as a put upon but loyal Hubert H. Humphrey, whom Johnson dispatches to do much of his behind-the-scenes politicking, holding out the promise of a vice-presidential slot; Dakin Matthews as Senator Richard B. Russell Jr., Democrat of Georgia, an ardent segregationist whom Johnson is shown using all his wiles to bring around; and William Jackson Harper as a doggedly determined Stokely Carmichael, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in scenes that depict the internecine warfare among the several black-led groups fighting for civil rights. Fine though the acting is throughout, the abundance of characters means that few have any time to be explored in much depth. Even Johnson does not have the layers of shading that I had hoped for. You come away from Mr. Schenkkan’s play with admiration for Johnson’s peerless political skills, his ability to bend a recalcitrant Congress to his will by means both subtle and blunt, but with little sense of where he truly stood, morally, on the great issues of the day. (In the traffic jam of the play’s dense plot, the Great Society project gets little more than a couple of muted toots on the horn.) Mr. Schenkkan’s portrait leaves the impression that even when Johnson had ascended to the presidency, his primary interest was securing power for his own sake, a portrait at odds with the more complicated, humane one drawn by Robert A. Caro in his majestic, four-volumes-and-counting biography of Johnson. Theater rooted in history always faces a fundamental problem. Hew too closely to the complicated crosscurrents of the story and you risk shapelessness; take too many liberties in streamlining the drama and you’re no longer in the realm of fact. With the exception of his comparatively unshaded portrait of Johnson, Mr. Schenkkan comes down firmly on the side of complexity, which may be the honorable path, but not necessarily the more rewarding one for the audience. All the Way By Robert Schenkkan; directed by Bill Rauch; sets by Christopher Acebo; costumes by Deborah M. Dryden; lighting by Jane Cox; music and sound by Paul James Prendergast; projections by Shawn Sagady; dramaturge, Tom Bryant; dialect coach, Rebecca Clark Carey; associate director, Emily Sophia Knapp; production stage manager, Matthew Farrell. Presented by American Repertory Theater, Diane Paulus, artistic director. At the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass.; (617) 547-8300; americanrepertorytheater.org. Through Oct. 12. Running time: 3 hours. WITH: Bryan Cranston (President Lyndon Baines Johnson), Betsy Aidem (Lady Bird Johnson/Katharine Graham/Rep. Katharine S. George), Christopher Liam Moore (Walter Jenkins/Rep. William Colmer), Susannah Schulman (Secretary/Lurleen Wallace/Muriel Humphrey), Reed Birney (Senator Hubert H. Humphrey/Senator Strom Thurmond), Dakin Matthews (Senator Richard B. Russell Jr./Rep. Emanuel Celler/Jim Martin), Michael McKean (J. Edgar Hoover/Senator Robert C. Byrd), Arnie Burton (Robert McNamara/Senator James O. Eastland/Rep. William Moore/Gov. Paul B. Johnson), Brandon J. Dirden (the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.), J. Bernard Calloway (the Rev. Ralph Abernathy), Ethan Phillips (Stanley Levison/Rep. John McCormack/Seymore Trammell/the Rev. Edwin King), William Jackson Harper (James Harrison/Stokely Carmichael), Richard Poe (Cartha DeLoach/Rep. Howard Smith/ Senator Everett M. Dirksen/Gov. Carl Sanders), Crystal A. Dickinson (Coretta Scott King/Fannie Lou Hamer), Dan Butler (Gov. George Wallace/Rep. James Corman/Senator Mike J. Mansfield/Walter Reuther), Peter Jay Fernandez (Roy Wilkins/Shoeshiner/Aaron Henry) and Eric Lenox Abrams (Bob Moses/David Dennis).

INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY SUMMERS (NOVEMBER 20, 2013) Published December 4, 2013

From the interview: THOM HARTMANN: Yeah. And Jack was the cellmate with Carlos Marcello for a number of years, and he was an informant for the FBI. And they were audio-taping his conversations with Marcello, where Marcello basically laid out they did everything. I mean, this—it’s just—it was fairly straightforward.... AMY GOODMAN: And when is the movie coming out? THOM HARTMANN: We’ll see. Hopefully next year. Thom Hartmann Discusses "Legacy of Secrecy" November 12, 2013-12-04 Democracy Now http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/12/as_john_kerry_questions_official_story

Blair: You may have a point here. If other members believe that I should have posted Joan's speech at Lancer under my prior posting about her earlier speech at the Wecht Conference, even though they were on different topics, please let me know. I certainly do not want to clutter up the "front page" and need to be made aware if this amounts to a nuisance and waste of members' time. I have also posted Joan's speech on my Facebook page. Doug

Speech delivered by Joan Mellen at the annual meeting of “November In Dallas,” for the JFK Lancer group, November 23, 2013 http://joanmellen.com/wordpress/2013/12/03/speech-delivered-by-joan-mellen-at-the-annual-meeting-of-november-in-dallas-for-the-jfk-lancer-group-november-23-2013/#more-562

Two publications that I feel certain are following this film story closely are the Daily Mail (U.K) and Vanity Fair magazine.

George H.W. Bush Given Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation Award December 3, 2013 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/03/george-hw-bush-lbj-foundation-award_n_4380713.html What was a common award denominator between the two? LBJ became president through the assassination of the incumbent president and Bush almost became president though the attempted assassination of the incumbent president by someone with close ties to the Bush family.

It is difficult to figure out what is going on with the alleged film. I have been waiting for comment from one of the major media, such as Fox and CNN, which were supposed to have viewed the film in a private showing last week. If there is an actual film, and it has a startling disclosure, it may be that the media that saw the private showing were required to sign a confidentiality agreement or maybe agree to an embargo date on discussing it. So either it is a hoax, or is a film that has a startling disclosure, or a film that does not add to what is already known. Part of the story was that it was going to be sold at auction. This aspect may also be a factor in what is going on.