Douglas Caddy

DiCaprio, DeNiro, Russell: Taking on JFK Assassination 05/16/13 8:58pm by Roger Friedman www.showbiz411.com http://www.showbiz411.com/2013/05/16/dicaprio-deniro-russell-taking-on-jfk-assassination EXCLUSIVE: The so called conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy is coming to the big screen–and not from director Oliver Stone. About three years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way production company announced intentions to make a film called “Legacy of Secrecy,” which threatened to blow the lid off of what really happened in Dallas in November 1963. Now DiCaprio’s father, George, who put the project together, says the film is coming to fruition. George DiCaprio told me yesterday that “Legacy” follows the saga of FBI informant Jack Laningham. DeNiro would play Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, who confided to Langingham that he ordered the hit on Kennedy. Marcello died in 1993. But back during the days following the assassination, at least a dozen of Marcello’s associates were questioned by the FBI. Neverheless, Marcello’s name never appeared in the Warren Report. van Laningham is alive. His story with Marcello was turned into a book called “Legacy of Secrecy” by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann published in 2009. Leonardo DiCaprio already knew Hartmann: it was his work that inspired Leo’s heartfelt if extremely boring talking head documentary about the enviroment called “The 11th Hour.” George DiCaprio told me he’s been working with van Laningham and “knows everything.” “He’s never spoken to anyone,” George said at a yacht party launch early Thursday evening in Cannes for director Martin Scorsese’s next film. Craig van Laningham, Jack’s son, confirmed all of this for me late tonight. He says he and his dad have met DeNiro, and that David O. Russell is writing the script as well as directing. “George DiCaprio, my dad and I even went to the first screening of The Great Gatsby,” he said, in Santa Monica. “It was sold out.” Back to Scorsese: “Silence” takes place in Japan but will be filmed in Taiwan. The movie is financed, but Scorsese and his team came to Cannes to do something he told me he’s never done: sell a picture to foreign distributors “I’ve never done this!” he exclaimed while we sat on a yacht chartered by Johnny Walker liquors and was packed with movie sales people. Scorsese and co. were seated on a raised platform while the director talked with friends and a few press people, as well as George DiCaprio and his lady friend. Everyone was high with expectation that Leonardo himself would make an appearance. When he arrived DiCaprio Jr. could not bear to remain on the yacht among the party-goers And so, for the third time that I’ve seen in the last two weeks, he was removed to a private area–this time the yacht moored immediately next to the Johnny Walker, so that guests to the Scorsese party could just gawk at Leo and his cooler pals on the neighboring boat while rain down between the two floating motels. I’m starting to wonder if Leo has a velvet rope set up in his own home. As for Scorsese: he’s finishing up “Wolf of Wall Street” and will shoot “Silence” in the summer and fall of 2014. And what about his long awaited Sinatra movie? Will he still use Leo as Frank? “Well, that’s thing,” he said. “Who knows? We’re still working out a lot of details. But I know, I know,” Scorsese said. “Everyone wants to see it!” Roger Friedman Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News. Friedman previously wrote the Intelligencer column at New York Magazine, He writes for Parade magazine and has written for Details, Vogue, the New York Times, Post, and Daily News and many other publications. He is the writer and co-producer of a film about R&B Music called “Only the Strong Survive,” which was released by Miramax in 2003 and was a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365013056

I do not know what to make of this article but because it sheds new light on Watergate, I decided to post it. http://www.eohistory.info/2013/hillaryHistory.htm I was especially intrigued by the following excerpt: Because she was a xxxx,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation. Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro. The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception. http://www.eohistory.info/2013/hillaryHistory.htm

Wall Street Journal May 14, 2013 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324715704578482823301630836.html Excerpts from James Bovard: A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting: President John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, JFK denounced "the discordant voices of extremism" and derided people who distrust their leaders—President Obama didn't invent that particular rhetorical line. Shortly thereafter, JFK signaled at a news conference that he expected the IRS to be vigilant in policing the tax-exempt status of questionable (read: conservative) organizations. Within a few days of Kennedy's remarks, the IRS launched the Ideological Organizations Audit Project. It targeted right-leaning groups, including the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education. Kennedy also used the IRS to strong-arm companies into complying with "voluntary" price controls. Steel executives who defied the administration were singled out for audits. A 1976 report by the Senate Select Committee on Government Intelligence on the Kennedy program noted: "By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting 'dissidents.'" After Richard Nixon took office, his administration quickly created a Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called "all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations." More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973, including Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling (a left-wing critic of the Vietnam War) and the far-right John Birch Society.

MAKING SENSE -- May 15, 2013 at 1:44 PM EDT Would a New 'Bretton-Woods' Save the Global Economy? By: Benn Steil http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/would-a-new-bretton-woods-save-the-global-economy.html Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, center right, at the start of the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors meeting on Friday, May 10 in Aylesbury, England. The role of central banks in shoring up the global economic recovery is set to be a key point of discussion among top financial officials from the world's seven leading economies when they gather in the UK this weekend.Photo by Alastair Grant - WPA Pool / Getty Images. A note Paul Solman: The G7 finance ministers met in England last week and had "intense discussions," said Reuters, about international monetary policy and currency exchange rates, a source of tension in the world economy for, oh, about 100 years now. According to the economic history books, the one great conference that resolved that tension -- for a quarter century -- was "Bretton Woods," a convocation of 44 countries in the White Mountains of New Hampshire less than a month after D-Day and the beginning of the end for the axis powers in World War II. What would the post-war world economy look like? That was the question in July of 1944. The answers were a loosely dollar-based world currency regime, the International Monetary Fund and what was to become the World Bank. So, do we need another Bretton Woods today? Benn Steil, editor of the scholarly journal "International Finance," has written a book that ponders this and other questions: "The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order." Paul Volcker has called it "full of lessons relevant today." Alan Greenspan said it's "a must-read work of economic and diplomatic history" and The New York Times wrote that "it should become the gold standard on its topic." Critics like history professor Eric Rauchway, by contrast, take Steil to taskfor for overemphasizing Bretton Woods' weaknesses and the Soviet connections of its chief American negotiator, Harry Dexter White. Benn Steil: In the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008, world leaders, from French President Nicolas Sarkozy to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, began calling for "a new Bretton Woods" to restore discipline and calm to world financial markets. The very words "Bretton Woods," it seemed, had become shorthand for enlightened globalization. Simply invoking the name of the remote New Hampshire town, where representatives of 44 allied nations came together 65 years earlier, in the midst of the century's second great war, was to put oneself on the side of order, stability, vision, cooperation, and peace. But was the actual 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the most important international gathering since the Paris peace talks a quarter century earlier, really such a kumbaya moment? Could we recreate it? And if we could, would we want to? Consider the conference itself -- the men who drove it and its goals. President Franklin Roosevelt told the assembled that their agenda marked "a vital phase" among "the arrangements which must be made between nations to ensure an orderly, harmonious world." He hoped it would speed the war's conclusion by sending the enemy Axis powers the message that it was America and its allies that had the compelling postwar vision. But FDR had little interest in the actual ins and outs of international economic affairs, and it was his Treasury -- led by Sec. Henry Morgenthau, but powered by his ambitious, temperamental deputy, Harry Dexter White -- which scripted its details. Morgenthau years later told President Harry Truman that his ambition at Bretton Woods had been "to move the financial center of the world from London and Wall Street to the United States Treasury and to create a new concept between the nations of international finance." That concept was given its flesh by Harry White, and its centerpiece was to be a dollar-based international monetary system overseen by a new U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund. With the exception of two delegations, the Soviet and the British, the governments represented at Bretton Woods bowed to this concept with only modest grumbling because they felt they had no choice. The United States controlled nearly 80 percent of the world's monetary gold stock at the time, and U.S. dollars were the only credible surrogate for gold. Without American monetary and financial support, barter was the only way to trade, and therefore to survive. The Soviets, whose trade with the world was entirely state-controlled, had no practical use for the American scheme, and signed on for reasons which were transparent, but to which White was willfully blind: Stalin had hoped to get cheap American loans, that he could repudiate at his convenience, and liked the idea of the world fixing currencies to a gold-backed dollar because it would boost the value of Russia's large gold stocks. (When the loans were not forthcoming, the Soviets refused to ratify the agreements.) The British delegation head, the storied John Maynard Keynes, tussled with White for two years in the run-up to the conference, trying with increasing desperation to sustain some remnant of an international role for the pound sterling, which functioned as the monetary foundation of Britain's fraying global empire. The world's first-ever celebrity economist, Keynes was an unlikely diplomat: he was eloquent and quick-witted, yet also irascible and condescending. But with war-torn Britain on the verge of bankruptcy, its colonies braying for London to start paying its way in dollars, Keynes emerged as London's last-ditch financial ambassador because he had what the Americans respected: star power. For his part, White had a longstanding obsession with Britain and its currency, having as early as 1935, nine years before Bretton Woods, begun working actively to undermine the sterling's status by, for example, forcing China to unpeg its currency from sterling in favor of a peg to the dollar. All this was to pave the way for an international conference at which the dollar would be enthroned as the world's unrivaled monetary standard. Bretton Woods was ultimately part of a Faustian bargain that Britain was obliged to make with FDR's Treasury. In return for American [Lend-Lease] (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=71) aid to survive the war, and a transitional loan to get through the immediate post-war period, Britain was told to: End imperial trade preference, the arrangement by which Britain gave itself privileged access to the markets of its colonies and dominions Make the pound sterling fully convertible into dollars at a fixed rate by July 15, 1947 (a day that lives in infamy for the British, as it triggered a collapse of the country's dollar reserves) Accept the U.S. dollar as the global unit of account. It was a brutal deal, but as British economist and Bretton Woods delegate Lionel Robbins put it at the time, "we need[ed] the cash." The Americans triumphed at Bretton Woods. Yet, looking back nearly 70 years later, it is clear that it was a pyrrhic victory. There had been four pillars to White and Morgenthau's postwar vision: Britain's empire could be peaceably dismantled The Soviet Union could be co-opted into a permanent peacetime alliance Germany could be safely deindustrialized and dismembered (the so-called Morgenthau Plan) Short-term IMF loans would be sufficient to restart international trade. Three years after Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan repudiated all of this. These beliefs, it turned out, had been based on "misconceptions of the state of the world around us." Future secretary of State Dean Acheson later reflected, "both in anticipating postwar conditions and in recognizing what they actually were when we came face to face with them ... Only slowly did it dawn upon us that the whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone and that the struggle to replace it would be directed from two bitterly opposed and ideologically irreconcilable power centers." By early 1947, Britain was no longer seen as a political and economic rival but as a desperate ally that needed to be saved from communism and collapse. The Soviets could not be co-opted, and needed now to be contained (in George Kennan's famous word). West Germany had to be built into a vital bulwark against Soviet expansion -- this through rehabilitation and resurrection as the industrial engine of a new integrated Western Europe ("Western Europe" being an American conception). Finally, the IMF, together with its loan-based salvation mechanism, would be mothballed in favor of massive U.S. grants-in-aid to its allies. (Note to Angela Merkel, Germany's iron chancellor: do you not see parallels with your handling of today's eurozone crisis?) Although the quarter-century period from 1945-1971 is typically referred to as "the Bretton Woods era," the monetary regime called for in the conference agreements could not be said to have become operative until 1961, when the first nine European countries met the requirement that their currencies be convertible into dollars. By this time, however, the system was already coming under strain owing to a deteriorating U.S. balance of payments and corresponding loss of gold reserves. "There is no likelihood," White had insisted when urging congressional ratification of Bretton Woods in 1945. "The United States will, at any time, be faced with the difficulty of buying and selling gold at a fixed price freely." Yet this is precisely what transpired after his system entered into normal operation in the 1960s. On Aug. 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon made a dramatic announcement. Following on the heels of a French battleship arriving in New York to take home its gold from the New York Federal Reserve, Nixon announced the closing of the American "gold window." Facing imminent depletion of the once-vast U.S. gold stock, Nixon would remove the foundation of the Bretton Woods international monetary system - never again would the dollar be convertible into gold. One strange and fascinating legacy of the 1940s that lives on at the IMF today is one which no one present at Bretton Woods could ever have imagined. My archival research uncovered some remarkable new evidence that the Fund's architect, Harry White, despite being a staunch American monetary nationalist, was a passionate believer in the success of Soviet socialist economics, and was bitterly critical of what he saw as western hypocrisy towards Soviet Russia. President Truman was certainly unaware of this when he nominated White to be the first American executive director of the IMF in 1946. He was also on the verge of nominating him to be the first head (managing director) of the Fund when he received a long memorandum from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warning him not to. Hoover charged that White was actually a Soviet spy. Truman did not trust Hoover, but knew he had a political problem on his hands. In order to avoid the questioning that would follow appointing another American above White at the IMF, he had his Treasury secretary, Fred Vinson, tell Keynes that, despite White being a "natural" for the Fund's top post, the administration had decided to back an American for the top World Bank post instead. And it would not be "proper," they had concluded with uncharacteristic fair-mindedness, "to have Americans as the heads of both bodies." In 1997, after exhaustively reviewing a trove of recently declassified Soviet intelligence cables from the 1940s, intercepted and decrypted by wartime U.S. military intelligence, a Senate commission headed by the late Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared that "the complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department." To this day it is a European, and not an American, who runs the IMF. Bretton Woods was truly a fascinating saga, but it was most surely not the triumph of economic thinking and international comity it is often painted to be. An ascendant anti-colonial superpower, the United States, used its economic leverage over an insolvent allied imperial power, Great Britain, to set the terms by which the latter would cede its dwindling dominion over the rules and norms of foreign trade and finance. Britain cooperated because the overriding aim of survival seemed to dictate the course. The monetary architecture that Harry White designed, and powered through an international gathering of dollar-starved allies, ultimately fell of its own contradictions: The United States could not simultaneously keep the world adequately supplied with dollars and sustain the large gold reserves required by its gold-convertibility commitment. The IMF, the institution through which it was launched, though, endures -- however much its objectives have metamorphosed -- and many hope that it can be a catalyst for a new and more enduring "Bretton Woods." Yet history suggests that a new cooperative monetary architecture will not emerge until the United States, the world's largest creditor nation in the 1940s, but now the world's largest debtor, and China, today's dominant creditor nation, each comes to the conclusion that the consequences of muddling on, without the prospect of correcting the endemic imbalances between them, are too great. Even more daunting are the requirements for building an enduring system; monetary nationalism was the downfall of the last great effort in 1944. Benn Steil is Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Flamboyant-Texas-swindler-Billie-Sol-Estes-dies-4515130.php?cmpid=hpfsln http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10060455/Billie-Sol-Estes.html

Rupert Murdoch must step down as News Corporation chair – shareholders Christian Brothers Investment Services demands action to 'dramatically revise corporate By Dominic Rushe in New York guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 May 2013 18.05 EDT A resolution has been filed by News Corp shareholders in the US, UK and Canada calling for Rupert Murdoch to step down. Photograph: ZUMA/Rex Features Dissident shareholders are pressing once more for the media mogul Rupert Murdoch to step down as chairman of News Corporation. Shareholders from the US, UK and Canada filed a resolution on Tuesday, calling for News Corp to appoint an independent chairman. A similar resolution attracted strong support at the media company's annual shareholder meeting last year. The proposal was introduced by Christian Brothers Investment Services (CBIS), which manages $4.6bn for Catholic institutions worldwide. It is backed by the UK's Local Authority Pension Fund Forum, with assets of £115bn ($178.9bn), and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, one of Canada's largest institutional investors. In a separate resolution, Nathan Cummings Foundation, an ethical investment group, has called on News Corp to end the dual-class share structure that allows the Murdoch family to control its media empire despite owning a minority of shares. A CBIS statement said: "A resolution introduced at last year's meeting which called for an independent chairman was approved by two-thirds of the independent shareholders, while another calling for the elimination of the company's dual-class share structure was approved by 62% of the public shareholders. "The shareholders believe that by responding positively to these corporate governance issues, News Corporation can improve oversight of management, reduce business risk and better represent the interests of all shareholders. These two resolutions are the latest salvos in an ongoing campaign by concerned institutional investors to dramatically revise the corporate governance practices at News Corporation." Pressure for change from shareholders has been mounting since the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp's UK newspapers triggered investigations on both sides of the Atlantic. Given the Murdoch family's control of News Corp's shares, the measures are unlikely to succeed. The company announced last year that it is intending to split its publishing assets, including the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Times newspapers, from its faster-growing TV and film assets. Murdoch plans to be chairman of both companies. News Corp released its latest quarterly results in New York later on Wednesday. The company's revenues rose 14% from a year earlier to $9.5bn in the quarter ended 31 March, ahead of analysts' expectations. Net income increased to $2.85bn as a 17% rise in its cable business offset a dip in its publishing earnings. The company announced that the hacking scandal had cost it $42m over the quarter – the company has now incurred more than $380m in costs related to the scandal. Chase Carey, News Corp's chief operating officer, said the new publishing company, News Corp, would update investors about future plans at the end of May. The TV and film business, to be called 21st Century Fox, will hold an investor conference in August. Carey said he was "disappointed" with ratings at Fox, where viewership of the declining hit American Idol has slipped dramatically in the show's 12th season. The decline of Idol has helped CBS take the top slot among key advertising demographics, ending an eight-year run at the top for Fox. Fox will be unveiling new shows to advertisers and the press at the "upfronts" – the major media firms' seasonal showcases – next week.

On May 17, PBS NewsHour presents a special report looking back at the scandal that transformed American politics and journalism and ultimately ended a presidency. In it, MacNeil and Lehrer recount their memories after some of the more gripping moments in the hearings and explain how their partnership and expansive coverage changed not only the face of television journalism, but also their lives. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/how-did-watergate-affect-you.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/covering-watergate/

JFK's heir apparent By JERRY OPPENHEIMER Last Updated: 6:25 PM, February 27, 2013 Posted: 11:04 PM, February 26, 2013 New York Post http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/jfk_heir_apparent_CI5DAX9X8aeqqoAM1yde4M/0 His grandfather, the president, and his great-uncle, the senator, were struck down five years apart by assassins’ bullets. Another uncle, his mother’s brother, was killed in a plane crash. Countless other terrible tragedies have befallen the Kennedy clan — America’s Royal Family. This all begs the question: How does a certain young scion of Camelot emotionally deal with such historically horrific dynastic events? John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg — JFK’s only grandson, the son of Caroline Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg — is now in training to save lives, not as a physician as one might expect of a wealthy Kennedy heir, but rather as a first responder. The Yale University sophomore, who turned 20 last month, is learning to become an emergency medical technician. It’s a noncredit course he’s taking along with his academic studies, fulfilling his desire to help the injured, ill and dying, as best he can. “Jack sees this training as a way to give back to the New Haven community that he’s living in, and where there’s obviously a lot of issues [such as crime and poverty],” says his best friend at Yale — who bonded with Schlossberg when they were summer interns together in Washington for Sen. John Kerry after their junior year of prep school, and asked to remain anonymous. “Jack’s very aware of all the privileges and opportunities that come with his family, so his EMT training has a lot to do with the community-service aspect.” People are already starting to talk about him as the heir to the Kennedy throne: His great-uncle Teddy Kennedy was his political mentor and godfather, and young Schlossberg is JFK’s only surviving male descendant since the fatal 1999 plane crash of his uncle — his mother Caroline’s brother, John F. Kennedy Jr. Jack, as he’s called, is tall and good-looking, with a certain resemblance to the young pre-PT-109 JFK, and has a head of thick Kennedy-esque hair. At just the right angle, he looks strikingly like his Uncle John. From 6:30 to 10 p.m. several nights a week on the Yale campus in New Haven, he attends classroom instruction and hands-on training sessions learning state-of-the-art, life-saving emergency medical techniques. In order to receive his EMT certification, he must pass two semester-end exams based on what he’s been taught — a no-brainer for the bright, articulate, funny Ivy Leaguer who gave a memorably suggestive graduation speech at the exclusive Collegiate School on the Upper West Side. Not surprisingly, politics is in Schlossberg’s DNA. He’s already put in time in Washington, DC, first serving as an intern for Sen. Kerry and then as a page on the Senate floor. As his close college friend observes, “Politics is definitely one of Jack’s passions.” During his freshman year, and into the first semester of this year, he has worked as a policy assistant for the New Haven Board of Aldermen’s public safety committee. And this past fall he co-founded “Yale for Murphy,” to help win election for Chris Murphy, Connecticut’s 39-year-old junior US senator — naturally a Democrat — who beat the big-spending Republican, Linda McMahon. “Jack really got the student body heavily involved,” says his Yale pal, who’s in the university’s Navy ROTC program, and who worked on the Murphy campaign with Schlossberg. “They had fun events going on, and they actually got Chris Murphy to come to campus.” In addition to his political activism at Yale, he sometimes has them rolling in the aisles when he does his stand-up comedy shticks, and more than a few co-eds are said to lust after him. While he’s had a girlfriend or two in the past, he’s not currently seeing anyone special, his close friend at school claims. Schlossberg declined to be interviewed for this story. In an e-mail, he wrote: “While I can’t escape being in the public eye, I feel that attaching myself to a profile, however legitimate and serious, in such a personal way would serve as a type of self-promotion that I’m not comfortable with.” But he noted that he was “flattered” to be the subject of a story. UNLIKE his grandfather, JFK, and his great-uncles, the late senators, Teddy and Bobby, who went to Harvard, where the John F. Kennedy School of Government is located, young Schlossberg chose Yale for a couple of reasons: First was that one of his two sisters, Tatiana, 23, had matriculated there and loved it, and the second was because, as his close friend asserts, “Jack wants to be judged on his own merit and not be viewed as a Kennedy, as might be the case at Harvard. He wants to chart his own path.” Still, at Yale, where he will likely major in history, his Kennedy pedigree is well-known, and he doesn’t attempt to hide it because of his pride in his mother’s family and of their legacy. “He just doesn’t want to be judged for, or judged by it,” says his pal. “He wants to be thought of as his own person. He’s also very proud of his Schlossberg side.” His father, Edwin Arthur Schlossberg, has Russian Jewish roots, and was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. His late paternal grandfather, Alfred Schlossberg, who had been in the garment business, had once served as president of the Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side. Jack, however, was raised a Catholic, like the Kennedys. Ed Schlossberg went on to Columbia, where he earned a couple of Ph.D.s, in science and literature, and it was reported he had a reputation as “a great charmer of old men and young women.” The latter was underscored when he fell for Caroline Kennedy at a dinner party in 1981. Caroline was a quiet, shy, very private 23-year-old, a first-year law student at Columbia University, and Schlossberg was a brash but enigmatic 36-year-old intellectual into lots of brainy projects no one ever really understood. They were married at the Church of Our Lady of Victory, in Centerville, Mass., on Cape Cod, on July 19, 1986 — Schlossberg’s 41st birthday — in what the press called a “Royal Wedding,” planned by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Before long, the groom had been dubbed “Mr. Caroline Kennedy,” and “Camelot’s egghead-in-residence” by Spy magazine. JACK Schlossberg clearly possesses the ambition, drive, personality and looks of his Kennedy forebears — and appears to be headed down the same political and relatively hunky path as those before him. Even in the eighth grade he was an activist, raising more than $100,000 to purchase energy-efficient light bulbs for the poor to save on their electric bills as part of relightNY, which he co-founded. Before heading off to join the freshman class at Yale in September 2011, Schlossberg quietly served during the summer of 2010 as a page in the US Senate, where he won his first election: The other pages voted to make him the floor page, responsible for filing amendments and other key duties. At last year’s Democratic National Convention, Schlossberg got his first major television exposure when he was interviewed by CNN’s chief political correspondent and anchor, Candy Crowley, who told The Post, through her network spokeswoman, that she found Jack “to be impressive.” When Crowley asked him about his support of President Obama, and whether the Ivy Leaguer was considering a political future in the Kennedy tradition, Schlossberg confidently declared: “Politics definitely interests me. I’m most interested in public service. That’s something that I get from being part of my family, which is such an honor.” And his doting mom boasted to Crowley, “Jack’s great. I know whatever he does, he’ll do it with all his heart. So whatever that is, I’m fully behind it.” One thing he did was inspire his mom to support Barack Obama in his first presidential run in 2008, and she went all out for him — making speeches, raising money. Now she’s reportedly on the president’s list to be named US ambassador to Canada. Two years ago Jack’s dad, founder of ESI Design, on lower Fifth Avenue, was appointed by Obama as one of the seven members of the US Commission of Fine Arts. “In 2008,” observed Jack, “everyone was so excited [about Obama], and it was great to be able to talk to my mom and my Uncle Teddy and my sisters [Rose and Tatiana], and sort of talk about politics over three generations, and I was really inspired . . . about the promise Sen. Obama made to us, and now I’m really inspired by what he’s done so far.” Schlossberg views the president as “an incredible ally” to America’s young people and particularly finds Obama’s support of gay marriage momentous, describing it as “very important to my generation.” ALTHOUGH he realizes the seriousness of his family’s legacy, he’s still only 20 years old and acts like it at times. In October, on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack and the son of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev met for the first time at the Kennedy Presidential Library for a major symposium on the historic two-week nuclear confrontation, where Schlossberg was slated to give a speech. Recalls his pal at Yale: “We had a great time on the train goofing off on our way to Boston, and in the taxicab Jack realized he forgot his dress socks, so I had to give him mine. But Jack got up and gave a very intelligent speech.” Schlossberg’s wry and funny style is part of his Kennedy charm. “A sense of humor is not genetic,” Sen. Kerry stated in the Congressional Record in 2011, “but apparently in the Kennedy family it can be inherited. In President Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, this quality seems to abide.” Kerry noted that he got “to know Jack well” during his page and intern duties. This was while Ted Kennedy’s health was deteriorating, and he was absent from his Senate duties. “Ted enjoyed very much the stories he heard and the photos he cherished of his great-nephew hard at work in the Senate Ted loved,” observed Kerry. “I enjoyed hearing from Jack about all the lessons he had learned from his uncle.” Like his Uncle Ted, Jack, too, can hold an audience. For his graduation speech at the Collegiate School, he had his audience of classmates, instructors, and parents applauding, cheering and in stitches, with his one-liners and classroom gossip. “Our teachers encouraged us, just as much as we encouraged each other — to get weird,” he declared at one point. He even revealed that he got his “first kiss in second grade.” He got a standing ovation. For the Yale Herald and its Web site, he’s blogged on subjects ranging from politics to Barbara Walters, whom he declared “may be partially fossilized,” to “A guide to Yale’s public bathrooms.” About the Commons loo, he noted, “There are plenty of urinals, so you never have to worry about peeing too close.” WHEN Schlossberg, who also has written opinion pieces for CNN.com, perceived that a November 2011 article in the New York Times was negative about his grandfather, the president, he took issue, and staunchly defended JFK’s legacy in a published letter to the editor of the Times. He wrote that he was “inspired by politics and history” and noted that his grandfather’s “legacy remains relevant today not because of Camelot or conspiracy, but because Americans find inspiration and meaning there.” That letter “launched the political career” of young Schlossberg, notes Andrew Cohen, a contributing editor to the Atlantic. With all of the attention he’s generating, it appears that Town & Country magazine missed the boat by not including the popular, only grandson of JFK in this month’s “Top 50 Bachelors” cover story, including “The Next JFK Jr.” Instead, it chose Christopher McKelvy, son of Sydney Kennedy Lawford; Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of the “Terminator” and Maria Shriver; and Conor Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s son, who recently had a very Swift romance. T&C’s editor, Jay Fielden, acknowledges that Jack fell through the cracks, but hinted to The Post that he’ll be featured next year. “He seems to be a very poised, intelligent young man, a very interesting guy, and obviously has the greatest of Kennedy traits, and certainly has an incredible head of hair, which is very important,” says the former editor of Men’s Vogue. “That sounds funny, but it just makes you think even more of his grandfather, and even of his uncle, John Jr.” And Fielden wondered, “Do you think he’ll use the Schlossberg name if he runs for president?” Jerry Oppenheimer, author of “The Other Mrs. Kennedy,” a biography of Ethel Kennedy, is writing a book about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His biography of the Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid dynasty will be published this summer. He can be reached at jopp1114@gmail.com. Read more: Jack Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy's son, is JFK's heir apparent - NYPOST.com http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/jfk_heir_apparent_CI5DAX9X8aeqqoAM1yde4M#ixzz2SFQMBWeP

I was interviewed today, April 29, 2013, on the national radio program, The Power Hour, about the JFK assassination and Watergate. If you care to listen to the program, I would suggest skipping the first hour and instead listen to the second hour interview of former NYPD Detective James Rothstein and the third hour interview of Det. Rothstein and me. http://www.thepowerhour.com/schedule.htm

Detective Rothstein and I were interviewed on the national radio show, The Power Hour, today, April 29, 2013. If you care to listen to the program, I would suggest skipping the first hour and instead listen to the second hour interview of Det. Rothstein and the third hour interview of Det. Rothstein and me. http://www.thepowerhour.com/schedule.htm

Libel Cases Now Harder to Bring in England By SARAH LYALL The New York Times April 25,2013 LONDON — London’s reputation as the libel capital of the world, “a town called sue,” is poised to end. A new law enacted Thursday strengthens the position of people sued for libel here and puts an end to most cases of so-called libel tourism, the practice by which powerful foreigners — Russian oligarchs, Arab oil magnates and large corporations, among others — have brought libel cases against authors, journalists, academics, scientists and bloggers, often on the most tenuous of connections to England. Under the new law, claimants wanting to sue defendants who do not live in Europe will have to prove that England is the most appropriate place for the case. This is intended to stop foreigners from suing other foreigners in English courts over, for instance, books or magazines that have sold just a handful of copies here, or Web sites that have been viewed few or even no times. The new law applies only to England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland have different systems. In one of the most notorious cases, the American academic Rachel Ehrenfeld lost a suit in the High Court here filed by a Saudi billionaire, Khalid bin Mahfouz, whom she accused him of funneling money to Al Qaeda in her book “Funding Evil.” The book was published in the United States and sold just 23 copies in England, mostly through the Internet. After a judge ruled that she had indeed libeled Mr. Mahfouz, Ms. Ehrenfeld — who had declined to participate in the case — was ordered to pay more than $225,000. The case caused several American states and the federal government to enact laws saying, essentially, that English libel laws are inconsistent with the American constitutional right to free speech and generally unenforceable in American courts. The law passed here on Thursday does not upend the basic premise of English libel cases, that the burden of proof rests with the defendant, or the person being sued, rather than the plaintiff. But it strengthens a defendant’s position in a number of ways, making it harder for aggrieved parties to sue and easier for people being sued to defend themselves. For instance, individuals who sue will now have to prove that the speech at issue has caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm to their reputations. Corporations and other entities that sue will have to prove that they have suffered, or are likely to suffer, serious financial loss. The law also makes it harder for them to sue intermediaries like Internet service providers, search engines and hosts of Internet forums, focusing instead on the individuals who made the comments. To bolster their cases, defendants in libel suits will now be able to rely on a so-called public interest defense, making the case that they published their statements in good faith, in what they believed to be the “public interest” — whether or not the statements were true. And statements are to be judged defamatory only if they lead to actual damage to the aggrieved party. The old laws have had a chilling effect, with publishers, newspapers and other purveyors of speech proving reluctant to risk offending anyone likely to sue. A variety of people have been sued for libel here in recent years in cases verging on the preposterous; some defendants have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend themselves. They include the science writer Simon Singh, who was pursued by the British Chiropractic Association after writing in The Guardian that chiropractors promoted “bogus treatments”; a British cardiologist who was sued by a Boston company after he criticized one of its products on an American medical news site; and a professor at the University of Iceland, who was sued by an Icelandic businessman over comments he had made on the university’s Web site.

Summary of interview with Richard Belzer last night on coasttocoastam radio program: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2013/04/24

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-18/rupert-murdoch-news-corp-dot-dodge-phone-hacking-ruin Murdoch: The Escape Artist

Was Sinatra a Stoner? Posted by Steven Hager on his Facebook page Editor Emeritus of High Times Magazine April 24, 2012 My copy of Paul Anka’s new tell-all book My Way arrived yesterday. I was hoping this memoir might shed some light on the Sicilian men of honor society since Anka was the youngest member of Sinatra’s Las Vegas ratpack who ruled Vegas throughout the sixties and seventies. The book does not disappoint. In fact, the foreword includes a few paragraphs on Johnny Roselli, who was running Las Vegas for the Chicago family when Anka arrived there as a teenager. Anka says “Handsome Johnny” was working for Frank Costello and Meyer Lankski, but far as I know, he started out doing hits for the Chicago outfit and may have even been the trigger man for the St. Valentine’s day massacre which permanently rearranged the power structure in Chicago. I have a strange connection to Roselli as he frequently came to my hometown to visit one of his favorite mistresses, the owner of the local newspaper, where I worked on the weekends while in high school, hanging up the UPI and AP tapes that were used to automatically set type. Initially, Roselli was moved out to Hollywood, but after Bugsy Siegal invented Las Vegas, he soon shifted his base of operations there. Anka says Casino is probably the closest movie to the truth about Vegas, but even in that movie the violence is exaggerated for theatrical effect. Roselli and his friends were actually the best-dressed, most well-mannered people in Vegas, and any problems that arose for them were usually dealt with very quietly and behind the scenes. In fact, the rat pack may have picked up some of its style from Roselli and his pals because they always dressed to the nines. It was Roselli who got Marilyn Monroe her first movie deal, by the way, which is why she owed the Chicago family big time, and why she had affairs with Sam Giancana, Roselli’s boss. There are many revelations in this book, but one of the biggest is Sinatra actually liked smoking pot? Anka doesn’t make a big deal out of it, just mentions it in passing one time, but obviously many if not most of the professional musicians in the 30′s and 40′s were vipers at one point. We always heard Sinatra didn’t care for illegal drugs, but, in fact, that may not have been true when it came to marijuana. The rat pack spent a lot of time in the steam rooms, sweating out the booze they were drinking, but marijuana would also have provided some much needed hangover relief. Of course, Sammy Davis was the weirdest member of that group. At the invitation of the creepy Col. Michael Aquino, Sammy joined Anton La Vay’s Church of Satan. Sammy was a freak at heart and loved having threesomes with a dude and a lady while imbibing enormous amounts of cocaine and watching porn. Sammy supposedly had the biggest porn collection in Hollywood. Sinatra tried to pull Sammy out of that scene when it was obvious Sammy was losing it. According to Anka, the scene in Casino when they are bundling up the skim in the backroom is not entirely correct. All the cash was put into official wooden boxes and reported except the hundred dollar bills. The hundreds were divided between the families who’d invested in Vegas, and suitcases of hundred dollar bills were constantly being shipped back east. I’m sure Anka knows more that he is revealing, but even so, the book is filled with revelations and I hope this gets turned into a movie soon. Anka comes across as a very smart dude who was there at the beginning of rock and roll. In fact, he was working with Buddy Holly when Holly died and Anka correctly identifies Holly as the most important influence on the British invasion, the man who almost single-handedly created the singer/songwriter/guitar player role model that swept through the culture a few years later. Chuck Berry was very influential too, but Chuck was an older dude, already in his 30s when the rock tidal wave crashed on the beach. In a way, Holly’s death and Berry’s incarceration opened the doors for the British invasion to walk though as they left such a tremendous void. Anka and Bobby Darin were the two most talented dudes in their class, the last to come from the Brill Building, and it’s obvious Anka thinks Darin lost all dignity by joining the counterculture late in life. I disagree in that songs Darin wrote during this period were among his best and make great counterculture anthems today, especially Simple Song of Freedom. So I don’t think Darin lost his dignity, quite the contrary, I think he had a spiritual awakening, but like Ricky Nelson found out at Madison Square Garden, sometimes your audience thinks they’re in charge of your paradigm and they don’t want you to change, or at least they don’t follow you down that road. I didn’t realize Anka was Lebanese, probably because his family is Christian, but he was Adnan Khashoggi’s favorite performer and there’s a lot of praise for that gun runner and Octopus bagman and very little on his criminal behaviors, but then the same goes for the Sicilian men of honor. Anka also goes into detail on the famous fight between Steve Wynn and Donald Trump. But some of his most interesting revelations occur when Howard Hughes arrives in Vegas with the intent of buying up the state. Hughes did buy several casinos before he was mysteriously disappeared, but the men of honor? They were left in place. Hughes needed people to run his casinos, and they were simply the best people for that particular job.

The Sun's Royal Editor among four charged over alleged corrupt payments Duncan Larcombe, the Sun’s Royal Editor, is to be charged over allegations that he paid for information about Princes William and Harry during their time at the Sandhurst Military Academy. Duncan Larcombe to be charged as part of Operation Elveden By Martin Evans, Crime Correspondent The Telegraph 1:49PM BST 24 Apr 2013 Mr Larcombe is to be charged alongside former Colour Sergeant John Hardy and his wife Claire, who allegedly accepted 34 payments totalling £23,000 between February 2006 and October 2008. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) also announced that Tracy Bell, who was employed by the Ministry of Defence as a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, was also to be charged with allegedly accepting corrupt payments for passing information to The Sun. It is alleged that Miss Bell accepted payments totalling £1,250 for five articles that appeared in the newspaper between October 2005 and July 2006. She has been charged with one count of committing misconduct in public office, while the other three have been charged with conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. All four are due to appear before Westminster Magistrates Court on May 8. The charges follow investigations conducted by Scotland Yard as part of Operation Elveden, the inquiry set up to look at allegations of corrupt payments. The investigation was set up in the wake of the phone hacking inquiry and has so far seen more than 60 journalists and public officials arrested. Earlier today a 41-year-old former Surrey Police officer became the latest person arrested as part of Operation Elveden. Explaining the decision to bring the latest charges, Alison Levitt, QC, principal legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions, said: "Following a careful review of the evidence, we have concluded that Duncan Larcombe, John Hardy and Claire Hardy should be charged with a conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. “Duncan Larcombe was employed as Chief Royal Correspondent at The Sun, John Hardy served as a Colour Sergeant based at the Royal Military Training Academy in Sandhurst and Claire Hardy is his wife. "It is alleged that from 10 February 2006 to 15 October 2008, 34 payments were made to either John Hardy or Claire Hardy totalling over £23,000 for stories relating mainly to the Royal Family or matters at Sandhurst.” She added: “In addition we have concluded that Tracy Bell should be charged with one count of misconduct in public office. Tracy Bell was employed by the Ministry of Defence as a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst Medical Centre. “It is alleged that Tracy Bell received £1250 between 17 October 2005 and 7 July 2006 relating to five articles published in The Sun regarding matters at Sandhurst.” The CPS further announced that there was insufficient evidence to charge a second member of the public with any criminal offence.

It should also be noted that in the credits at the end of the documentary that one of the two researchers for the production was Mary Farrell.

News Corp deal: a new way to police corporate political spending? http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/NY/News/ViewNews.aspx?id=75245&terms=@ReutersTopicCodes+CONTAINS+'ANV' 4/22/2013 On Monday, the directors and officers of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp agreed to settle a derivative suit accusing them of breaching their duty to shareholders by failing to avert the phone-hacking scandal at the company's British newspapers. News Corp's insurers will pay $139 million, in what shareholder lawyers at Grant & Eisenhofer called the largest-ever cash settlement of derivative claims in Delaware Chancery Court. The settlement, which comes as News Corp prepares to split its news and entertainment branches into two publicly traded companies, was produced after several months of mediation that took place while the company's motion to dismiss was pending before Vice Chancellor John Noble. The cash portion of the deal (which will be eventually reduced by legal fees paid to G&E, co-lead counsel from Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and several other plaintiffs firms that managed to grab a piece of the case) is obviously the big news, but among the many corporate governance enhancements detailed in the memorandum of understanding between News Corp and shareholders, you'll find what appears to be a historic concession by the company: News Corp has agreed to disclose its campaign and political action committee contributions to shareholders and its lobbying and Super PAC spending to the board. According to two advocates for corporate political transparency, this settlement apparently marks the first time that shareholders have used the vehicle of a derivative suit to obtain enhanced disclosure of corporate political spending. "I think it's terrific," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). "Any way to force companies to disclose spending is good for democracy." Earlier this year, you may recall, New York State's public employee pension fund brought a books-and-records suit against Qualcomm, seeking to force the chipmaker to tell shareholders about its political spending. (Notably, the New York fund, like shareholders in the News Corp case, was represented by Mark Lebovitch of Bernstein Litowitz.) I said at the time that the novel tactic of suing corporations under the Delaware law that grants shareholders the right to request corporate books and records could be a breakthrough in the post-Citizens United effort to force companies to admit their political spending. Qualcomm certainly knuckled under. In February, less than six weeks after the New York fund sued, the previously opaque corporation agreed to disclose online all of its contributions to candidates and parties, as well as donations to Super PACs and trade associations. News Corp's newly agreed-upon disclosures aren't as robust as Qualcomm's. The company said it would tell shareholders about contributions to all state and local candidates (direct corporation contributions to candidates for federal office are prohibited) and political action committees. It also agreed to disclose all donations to political nonprofits that are specifically earmarked as independent expenditures on behalf of a particular candidate or party and all spending in support of or opposition to ballot measures. But the settlement only requires the company to inform the board, and not shareholders, about Super PAC and trade association contributions over $25,000. Nevertheless, the settlement puts News Corp's political transparency obligations in black and white, and that's a real accomplishment for shareholders of such a politically active corporation. Will other shareholders take advantage of pending derivative suits to obtain additional disclosure of corporate political spending? I hope so. The Securities and Exchange Commission continues to mull beefed-up disclosure requirements, and groups like the Center for Political Accountability continue to push for shareholder resolutions demanding transparency. The center's director, Bruce Freed, told me that he expects the "proven vehicle" of shareholder resolutions to lead the way in improving transparency in corporate political spending. (Such resolutions, according to CPA, have prompted 120 companies to enhance their disclosures.) Sloan of CREW, however, told me that between the Qualcomm and News Corp settlements, "I think you'll be seeing people looking at this more and more." If you're among those who contend that shareholders have no need to be informed of political spending approved by officers or directors, either because contributions aren't material or because they serve the corporation's interests, you might want to check out the latest work of law professors Lucien Bebchuk of Harvard and Robert Jackson of Columbia. They've summarized it at the Harvard Law School blog on corporate governance.

All The President's Men Revisited, Parts 1 and 2 http://dsc.discovery.com/search.htm?terms=All+the+president%27s+men+revisited

Unanswered Questions About Watergate There are many—why is no one asking them? By Beverly Gage|Posted Monday, April 22, 2013, at 10:26 AM Slate.com http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/04/robert_redford_watergate_documentary_all_the_president_s_men_revisited.html The title of Robert Redford’s new documentary, which aired on the Discovery Channel last night, is All the President’s Men Revisited. At times, it seems more like All the President’s Men Repeated. Though created to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Watergate, the first half of the film contains little that could not be found in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman. You know the story: A pair of scrappy young reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stick to their guns when nobody else will, and their reporting helps to bring down a president. This is, to be sure, a terrific story. No matter how many times you’ve heard it before, there is something gripping about watching Nixon’s slow, painful descent into national disgrace. Redford’s film hits all the highlights: Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissing the original break-in as a “third-rate burglary”; Woodward and Bernstein scrambling to “follow the money” all the way to the White House; Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield admitting to Congress that his boss maintained a voice-activated taping system; Nixon’s restrained farewell address to the nation, then his devastating, heartfelt goodbye to the White House staff. As far as it goes, the film is a reasonably adequate primer on Watergate mythology, and it’s certainly fun to watch. But it is also a missed opportunity for historical reflection—and one that, given the age of most Watergate participants, is unlikely to come around again. Forty years out, we know most of the basic facts about Watergate. The real challenge is figuring out what they all meant. The film begins with footage of Nixon mugging for cameramen (awkwardly, as always) just before his August 1974 resignation speech. Redford then cuts back to June 1972, when the neophyte reporter Woodward received an assignment involving some sort of botched break-in at DNC headquarters. There is no hint of the controversies that have dogged Woodward in recent years, such as the accusation that his reporting (then and now) relies too heavily on anonymous inside sources. Redford sticks to the script first introduced in Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book All the President’s Men, then repeated in the 1976 film, laying out how the “good guys” in the media got the bad guy in the White House. We now know, however, that Watergate was more complicated than that. Woodward and Bernstein did perform heroic work in the early months after the break-in. But the Watergate story didn’t capture national attention until 1973, well after Nixon had been re-elected to office. In those early months, some of the Post’s best information came straight from government investigators, already conducting their own troubled but expansive inquiries largely outside of public view. By far the most famous of these was Deep Throat—now largely accepted to have been W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s No. 2 man, who died in 2008. The film shows an aged Felt waving at reporters from behind his walker in 2005, when he revealed his identity to Vanity Fair. But Redford barely explores the implications of this revelation: Was Felt using Woodward for his own ends, and if so why? The journalist Max Holland took up this question in his 2012 book, The Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat. Working painstakingly through FBI files and other Watergate material, Holland argued that Felt leaked information to Woodward in order to win a “war of succession” then underway at the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had died in May 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary. Like many top FBI officials, Felt wanted the job. Instead, Nixon appointed FBI outsider L. Patrick Gray, setting off a chain of events that even a conspiracy-minded president could not control. Holland makes a powerful case that Felt was an ambitious, skilled bureaucrat out to serve his own interests rather than the “conscience-stricken” man who appears in Redford’s documentary. Indeed, it’s entirely possible Watergate never would have blown up in the way it did if Hoover had simply lived a few months longer. Hoover and Nixon were close friends and political allies, going back to their work on the Alger Hiss case in the 1940s. They had some serious disagreements during Nixon’s presidency, mainly over issues such as wiretapping and surveillance procedures. But whatever his flaws or resentments, Hoover knew how to keep things quiet in politically delicate situations. On the White House tapes, Nixon can be heard lamenting the loss of his old friend as the Watergate crisis escalated. “I could talk to Hoover about all sorts of things and I talked to him very freely over the years,” he told “hatchet man” Chuck Colson in February 1973, “and there it never, never came out.” One of the great ironies of Watergate is that Nixon actually knew Felt was leaking, but felt powerless to stop him, at least at first. “If we move on him,” Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman warned his boss as early as October 1972, “he’ll go out and unload everything.” Redford could have used a bit more of this lesser-known detail, if only to add some tension and interpretive verve to his good-guys-vs.-bad-guys story. Instead, for historical perspective he mostly relies on celebrity pundits such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Joe Scarborough. Their commentary can be pungent. “Every generation has to lose their virginity,” Stewart says, in one of the film’s more disturbing metaphors, “and it was just the day my generation did.” The result, though, is a certain amount of conventional wisdom. Over the course of the documentary, we learn that Nixon was “fatally flawed” and that the country was in “turmoil” throughout the Watergate years—analysis that could have been offered up by most self-respecting AP history students. For sheer weirdness, no moment in the film surpasses the breakdown of former Nixon speechwriter turned game show host Ben Stein. Asked about Nixon’s resignation, Stein slumps down and begins to cry. “It was really sad, really sad,” he says. “I don’t think any president has been more wrongly persecuted than Nixon—ever. I just think he was a saint.” The effect is mildly ridiculous. All the same, Stein provides one of the film’s few hints that Watergate is not, even now, an entirely settled matter. With four decades’ perspective, there are still big political questions to ask: How did a Republican Party on the verge of collapse in 1974 surge back six years later to launch the Age of Reagan? How much of the scandal was really about Nixon and his paranoia, and how much was about a broader set of institutional and political rivalries? Did the reforms put in place after the scandal—on presidential power, on intelligence prerogatives—effectively constrain the executive branch? To what degree did Watergate, once seen as a great Democratic triumph, help to fuel a conservative anti-government backlash? The film gestures toward a few of these questions. Fundamentally, though, Redford’s main interest is in the media, and in the shining example set long ago by Woodward and Bernstein. And historians themselves have only begun to consider Watergate’s long-term consequences. Accounts of the scandal tend to fall into one of two modes. The first are blow-by-blow histories: What did Nixon know and when did he know it? The second are cultural examinations, looking at how, why, and when we classify Nixon as sinner or saint. Outside of that, Watergate has languished in recent years as a subject for serious research. The ’70s are a hot decade within the historical profession at the moment. But most recent books deal with other matters: deindustrialization, culture and gender, the fracturing of intellectual life, race, and civil rights. Watergate itself is increasingly a footnote, or an obligatory paragraph, rather than the political bombshell it once was. One key question, 40 years out, is what the whole story can tell us about today’s fractious political scene. On this front, Redford’s film does offer a few tantalizing thoughts. Rachel Maddow argues, for instance, that Obama’s fondness for drones and secret intelligence operations owes much to Nixon’s “imperial presidency.” Bernstein himself suggests that the Watergate era may look shockingly good when compared to today’s bitter partisan politics. In 1974, he notes, Republicans and Democrats finally joined together to serve the public interest by ousting the president. What’s unimaginable in our own political age may not be the recurrence of a Watergate-style scandal, but the possibility that things would turn out so well.

http://debka.com/article/22914/The-Tsarnaev-brothers-were-double-agents-who-decoyed-US-into-terror-trap

http://whitehousecallgirl.com/ New release date: September 2013

http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/04/22/was-boston-bombers-uncle-ruslan-with-the-cia/

JFK is profiled quite a bit in this blistering and candid biography. Worth reading for Anka's profiling of other famous persons: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/book-sinatra-drunken-violent-sex-crazed-article-1.1303479