Douglas Caddy
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Posts posted by Douglas Caddy
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Robert
Please stop making these lame threads about LBJ
Please stop posting your list of horrible books in every other post
If you can do those two things I will start reading what you post
Dean, I do think the psychopathic nature to Lyndon Johnson was a key ingredient to the JFK assassination. It has been blithely ignored too long. I think the Lyndon's "cowboy love" manuevers at manipulating Jackie post assassination is a perfect example of that. I'm sure Johnson would have sent flowers to Henry Marshall's funeral in June, 1961, if he had thought of that. Of course, LBJ's hit man Malcolm Wallace was very likely the one who murdered Henry Marshall, according to the testimony of Billie Sol Estes.
I think Lyndon Johnson's cycles of killing, cover up, and pretend play-acting is key to understanding him and how we was able to pull off the JFK assassination. Another good example of this would he LBJ's play acting on Air Force One, crying in the bathroom about "conspiracy, conspiracy." LBJ was carrying on so much that Gen. Godfrey McHugh told author Chris Anderson that he needed to slap him. The Kennedy folks knew what a fraud LBJ was. But they had no idea how DANGEROUS he was.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-m-gillon/a-new-wrinkle-in-the-jfk_b_339026.html
ANOTHER PERFECT EXAMPLE OF PSYCHOPATH LYNDON JOHNSON IN ACTION ("play acting fear of conspiracy" to cover his tracks. LBJ knew the Kennedy entourage suspected HIM right off the bat, so he had to do some acting as a diversionary tactic):
"What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. "I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed," McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, "They're going to get us all. It's a plot. It's a plot. It's going to get us all.'" According to the General, Johnson "was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.""
When I was working to get immunity for Billie Sol Estes with the knowledge of U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples, who had advised Estes to get such immunity, Peoples told me that "It is about time that the truth comes out" in reference to LBJ. Estes needed immunity to tell what he knew about the homicides and other criminal activity committed by LBJ.
Robert, you are doing terrific work in posting this information about LBJ, who indeed was a psychopath. We will know a great deal more if the records of his psychiatrist are ever disclosed.
I have waited for decades for Robert Caro's final volume in his award-winning LBJ biography to be published. If he maintains the high standards of his previous volumes on LBJ, his final conclusion should be earth-shaking shocking.
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Kind of not relevant but it reminds me of this deleted scene from Oliver Stone's 'Nixon'.
Truly spine tingling.
Bernice I always enjoy your posts so much, thank you. You are a wealth of information.
thanks for the link and if i missed saying so,and i believe i did, a late but very welcome to the forum, and your posts are very interesting also, carry on..b
There is Hunt's tape given to his son, St. John, in which he discussed the role of the CIA and LBJ in the Kennedy assassination. See below link.
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The Khan Academy offers free educational videos on 1400 topics. Bill Gates has his son watching these educational aids. If American youth wants to hunker down and learn essentials, it has never been easier.
What I did not like was Gates and Buffet giving away all of their money. Did the power Eastern Power Elite do that?
These people could have been a countering force to all that wealth.
Instead, they neuter themselves like some heros.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2010
Gates Foundation Acknowledges Flaws in Report .ArticleCommentsmore in US
Associated Press
SEATTLE—The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken another step toward increased transparency, acknowledging in its annual report that the world's largest charitable foundation is too secretive and hard to work with.
The report, posted online Tuesday, includes the usual financial information and a look at the foundation's plans. But it also offers a glimpse of the organization's attempts to be more open.
CEO Jeff Raikes draws attention in the report to a grantee survey that gave the foundation poor marks for communicating its goals and strategies, and for confusing people with its complicated grant-making process.
Mr. Raikes originally released the survey results in June—a day before Bill Gates made headlines for launching a campaign with investor Warren Buffett to get other American billionaires to give at least half their wealth to charity.
Few but charity insiders noticed the unfavorable review, and the foundation could have let it fade into obscurity.
Instead, Mr. Raikes points out the results for all to see in the annual report, right next to his letter outlining the foundation's priorities for the near future.
The editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy believes the foundation is clearly making an effort to improve its communications.
Stacy Palmer credits Raikes, with his years at Microsoft Corp., for knowing the importance of customer relations. But she thinks the foundation has a ways to go.
The Gates Foundation also has been criticized for having a small board of directors—the co-chairs and Mr. Buffett—running such a large charitable organization, Ms. Palmer said.
Pablo Eisenberg of Georgetown University's Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership said the foundation has a moral obligation to share its decision-making process more broadly as it distributes what is partly taxpayer dollars they saved on taxes by giving the money away.
"There's no substitute for other points of view and perspectives around the table when a so-called board is about to make a decision on priorities and programs affecting $3 billion a year or more," Mr. Eisenberg said.
The foundation does have several advisory boards and other consultants, but Mr. Eisenberg considers them a poor substitute for a governing board that includes strong outside voices.
He wonders if a larger board would have chosen to spend so much money on vaccines or would have pushed the foundation to move in other directions, both globally and in the U.S.
"The question we might ask is why Gates has not put a huge amount of money into our own dysfunctional health system," Mr. Eisenberg said. "They could have led the way and led public opinion."
The foundation, which has an endowment of $33 billion, made grants totaling $3 billion in 2009. By far the biggest portion went to global health, where grants totaling more than $1.8 billion were made last year.
Global development including agriculture and financial services for the poor was the next biggest grant area, followed by U.S. education and construction of the foundation's new Seattle headquarters.
In his annual letter, Mr. Raikes says eradicating polio will be a major push next year, both in dollars granted and vocal advocacy.
Global health, particularly vaccine research and distribution, will continue to be the focus, with an eye toward meeting the United National's Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
"The next five years offer a historic opportunity to have an impact on the health and welfare of people in the developing world," Mr. Raikes wrote. "Even in the face of very tough economic times across the globe, I am optimistic when I think about all that we can accomplish together with our partners."
The public and the grantees acknowledge the Gates Foundation is making a difference around the world, but they want to know more, Ms. Palmer said.
"Who decides how much to spend? Who do they consult about the best ideas and the smartest ways to do things?" she asks. "They don't have a lot of openness about how that process works."
Foundation spokeswoman Kate James said the organization is making an effort to be more transparent, both to better its relationship with grantees and to help build understanding and awareness of its efforts.
At the same time, the foundation has been finding its voice on social media. In 2009, it established accounts on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, including Bill Gates' verified Twitter account that now has more than 1.4 million followers.
Other new elements in the report include videos of staff and workers in the field, a focus on the organization's nonprofit partners and a section on the foundation's "online communities."
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I knew Ronald Reagan when he was a Democrat. He attended the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church on Gramercy Place, which was right across from where we lived. We were members of the church also. Below is his recorded address as he campaigned in 1948 against the big corporations that he alleged were ripping off the working man.
His election as President in 1980,32 years later, ushered in the era of the Corporate State under which America suffers today.
Who was the real Ronald Reagan?
The real Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, was a staunch anti-Communist
already when he appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October, 1947.
Here is his testimony: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6458
In contrast, look at the guts Pete Seeger showed a mere 8 years later, at great cost to his career: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6457
Likewise for Paul Robeson: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6440
Robeson told the Committee: “You Are the Un-Americans, and You Ought to be Ashamed of Yourselves."
Reagan was well on the way to selling out in 1948, his campaigning for Truman notwithstanding.
Even back then, Reagan understood that in order to get along, you had to go along.
July 15, 1999
The Corruption of Ronald Reagan
by Dan E. Moldea
President Bill Clinton’s enemies love to make much of his Hollywood connections, as well as his testimony before a federal grand jury and an odd land deal in which he and his wife lost money.
Yet, they refuse to compare the Clinton record with the case history of Ronald Reagan, whom most Clinton-haters continue to worship and attempt to canonize.
Once again, the President’s harsh critics continue to demonstrate that they have two conflicting standards for public officials: one for those they like and another for those they don’t like.
For instance, consider the following:
Ronald Reagan was an invention of the Hollywood conglomerate, MCA, which was founded in 1924 by Jules Stein, a Chicago ophthalmologist who quickly became friendly with the local underworld. Every facet of Reagan’s life, from his careers in acting and politics to his financial successes, were directed by MCA, which, with the help of the Mafia, was the most powerful force in Hollywood from the mid-1940s until the Bronfman family purchased the company in 1995.
Reagan came to Los Angeles in 1937 to make motion pictures, and, in 1940, MCA bought out his talent agency. Lew Wasserman became Reagan's personal agent; he negotiated a million-dollar contract with Warner Brothers on Reagan's behalf. In 1946, Wasserman became the president of MCA, and the following year, Reagan, with his film career already in decline, became the president of the Screen Actors Guild. By his own admission, Reagan immediately aligned himself with the corrupt Teamsters and other mob-connected unions in an effort to combat Hollywood Reds.
A sweetheart relationship developed between MCA and the guild, which culminated in July 1952 during Reagan's fifth consecutive term as SAG's president. Reagan and Laurence Beilenson, an attorney for MCA who had previously served as SAG's general counsel and had represented Reagan in his 1949 divorce from Jane Wyman, negotiated an exclusive blanket waiver with SAG that permitted MCA to engage in unlimited film production. The agreement violated SAG's bylaws, which prohibited talent agencies from employing their own clients, and no other talent agency was granted a similar agreement at that time. A Justice Department memorandum indicated that the waiver became "the central fact of MCA's whole rise to power."
At the end of Reagan's fifth term, he began to have serious financial problems, particularly with the IRS. In response, MCA negotiated a deal with the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas--which was then operated by Chicago mobsters--for Reagan to host a song-and-dance show for two weeks and to receive enough money to cover his back tax debt. When Reagan returned to Hollywood, MCA, through its newly formed Revue Productions, hired him to host its flagship television program, The General Electric Theater for $125,000 a year. He was paid additional fees when he produced episodes for the series.
Despite his status as a television producer, Reagan remained on SAG's board in another violation of the guild's bylaws, which prohibited producers from holding office in SAG. In 1959, when Reagan ran for an unprecedented sixth term as SAG's president, his opponents raised the bylaws issue. Publicly, Reagan denied that he had ever produced The General Electric Theater--a flat-out lie.
Wasserman had encouraged Reagan to run again. MCA was facing sensitive negotiations with SAG over residual motion picture rights for actors. The issue eventually forced SAG to strike in 1960, and Reagan became the actors' chief negotiator. Labor attorney Sidney Korshak aided Reagan and the studios in the final settlement. Years later, The New York Times characterized Korshak as the link between the legitimate business world and organized crime.
The contract that Reagan and company arranged with the studios is still known in Hollywood as "The Great Giveaway"; it provided residuals for actors only from films made after 1960. This greatly benefited MCA, which had purchased the film library of Paramount Pictures in 1959. Now, MCA could keep all the profits.
In 1962, the Justice Department filed a federal antitrust suit against MCA on the basis that it was both a talent agency and a production company; SAG was charged as a coconspirator.
Reagan was the subject of criminal and civil investigations by both the FBI and a federal grand jury in Los Angeles. A Justice Department memorandum quoted a Hollywood source as saying, "Ronald Reagan is a complete slave of MCA who would do their bidding on anything."
Reagan was subpoenaed before the grand jury, but he appeared to experience amnesia during his testimony on February 5, 1962, and failed to recall the major decisions that had been made when SAG had granted MCA the exclusive blanket waiver in 1952. Federal prosecutors were so convinced that Reagan had perjured himself repeatedly during his testimony that they subpoenaed his and his wife's income tax returns for the years 1952 to 1955. Nancy Reagan had been a member of SAG's board of directors since 1951.
The entire transcript of this testimony is contained in my 1986 book, Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (Viking Press, pp. 167-201), which is now out of print. (Previously, the most influential book about Reagan--which contained only one brief cite in the index to MCA and no mention of Jules Stein--had been written by Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, whose 1982 book, Reagan, had been published by Putnam, a subsidiary of MCA.)
However, in July 1962--in the wake of MCA's purchase of Decca Records, the parent company of Universal Pictures--MCA agreed to abolish its talent agency. As a result, all charges against and investigations of the company and its alleged coconspirators were dropped and the record of the case was sealed.
Deeply affected by the breakup of MCA, Reagan, a lifelong Democrat, became an anti-big government Republican. He had been urged to do so by his own political mentor, Taft Schreiber, a longtime MCA vice president, and by MCA's founder, Jules Stein, both of whom were active in Republican politics.
On December 13, 1966, the month after Reagan was elected governor of California, Schreiber and Stein, along with Reagan's personal attorney, William French Smith (who later became Reagan’s attorney general), sold 236 of Reagan's 290 acres in Malibu Canyon to Twentieth Century-Fox. The purchase price was $1.93 million, or $8,178 an acre—even though Fox's experts had appraised the land at only $944,000, or $4,000 an acre.
In July 1968, Reagan used the remaining 54 acres in Malibu Canyon (which were appraised at $165,000) as a down payment on a $346,950 property in Riverside, California, that he was buying from Kaiser Aluminum Company. However, there was a proviso in the contract that said that if Kaiser couldn't sell the 54 acres within a year, Reagan would have to buy them back.
By July 1969, Kaiser hadn't sold the land. To bail Governor Reagan out, Stein set up the 57th Madison Corporation, which was chartered in Delaware, and personally purchased the property for $165,000.
Stein died in 1981, soon after Reagan’s inauguration as President of the United States.
As President, Reagan watched as his Justice Department quashed major federal investigations of the Mafia’s penetration of both MCA and the entire motion picture industry, which were being conducted by the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Strike Force Against Organized Crime. Two highly respected Strike Force prosecutors, Marvin Rudnick and Richard Stavin, lost their jobs because of their refusal to succumb to pressure from the Reagan Administration.
Where were the future high-minded critics of Bill Clinton back then? And what are they doing now?
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Until recently, I have tried to compare the "recession" of the early 80's when I just got out of college to the present situation. It is getting harder and harder to do so. There is no interest rate or inflationary comparison for one, and as you mention, so many jobs are not coming back.
The recent plan to rebuild our infrastructure although a good one, is in my opinion, but a zero sum plan.
If you take a close look at rural America, in places that were boom towns a hundred years ago, and now are sleeping farm towns, you can see 100 years of a declining United States already.
Now I see, unlike the situation 25 years ago, when I was young and dumb and full of energy, a situation that is going to be tuff to fix in my lifetime or beyond.
If the American people do not educate themselves in science and math and other subjects that will help this country move forward, there is quite possibly no hope for this country as you suggest.
It would be great if the present generation of Americans could finish High School, and get a high paying job in the factory for life. But we know that is not going to happen.
The factories of our time are Call Centers, where anyone can get in the door , but rarely last very long. The pay is low and turnover high - and any product that can be serviced will be outsourced overseas anyway. So does anyone wonder why the economy is in the shape that it is?
Yet we import IT professionals because we do not have enough - yet some complain about this.
The time is now for American students to hunker down and educate themselves.
The Khan Academy offers free educational videos on 1400 topics. Bill Gates has his son watching these educational aids. If American youth wants to hunker down and learn essentials, it has never been easier.
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lol I started an answer with ''Without having read the link. : Does it matter?''
Thought twice about posting.
However : What I was going to say was an Obama as president has important implications. He is human. ie Blacks are human. One could then even begin to consider neighbours as human....
John, the idea that those pulling the levers in the U.S. might someday regard their neighbours as "human" is a great
way to describe the problem; it amounts to a deficit in their own humanity.
Have you read this purported, mid '00's Citigroup "memo"? Whether it is counterfeit, or not, the employees names on the document are those of real people in the financial industry, now or formally employed at Citigroup.
Their hubris is monumental, but the comments help to explain that Obama was probably put out there to accomplisj just
what has been accomplished. His candidacy and election no matter what has happened subsequently, eased the concerns
of his sponsors about "push back" in response to the destructiveness of the Bush years.
We ad early voting in October, 2008,. in response to distrust of the voting infrastructure after what happened in Ohio in 2004 and in Florida in 2000. Although I had no expectations that Obama's candidacy was going to be any kind of a panacea, my eyes teared up when I drove past a polling place on a sunny October afternoon and I saw a line that
seemed a mile long, with cars parked everywhere. On that afternoon, and then long into 2009, people believed. Their hope was renewed.
The plutocrats do not even regard most of us in the U.S. as human, John. We are considered another resource to be mined and then discarded. We are a complication because, although we seem capable of absorbing whatever they throw
at us or take away from us with nary a whimper, the plutocrats expect that our capacity to be pushed quietly into serfdom is not infinite. Obama, or Hillary if the primary vote went her way, were intended as a chill pill. JFK probably was, also, in his era. His father being at the time, one of the top 15 wealthiest people in the country, influence me to be less certain of that than I am that this is the purpose of Obama being their front man at this time.
https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BzgUudifBc68ZGUyNzA0MzAtZDZkZC00ZmZjLTkwY2ItNzBlZWRmNjI1ZTNm&hl=enEquity Strategy
Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances
page 2
"4) In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK
consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in
number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.
There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for
surprisingly small bites of the national pie."
page 3
"Let’s dive into some of the details. As Figure 1 shows the top 1% of households in the
U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in
2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put
together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both
with similar slices of the income pie! Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S.
households is paramount. The usual analysis of the “average” U.S. consumer is flawed
from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for
33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better
(or worse, depending on your political stripe) - the top 1% of households account for
40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together. This
is data for 2000, from the Survey of Consumer Finances (and adjusted by academic
Edward Wolff)."
(Inequity has grown even worse..)
page 24
"IS THERE A BACKLASH BUILDING?
Plutonomy, we suspect is elastic. Concentration of wealth and spending in the hands of
a few, probably has its limits. What might cause the elastic to snap back? We can see a
number of potential challenges to plutonomy.
The first, and probably most potent, is through a labor backlash. Outsourcing,
offshoring or insourcing of cheap labor is done to undercut current labor costs. Those
being undercut are losers in the short term. While there is evidence that this is positive
for the average worker (for example Ottaviano and Peri) it is also clear that high-cost
substitutable labor loses.
Low-end developed market labor might not have much economic power, but it does have
equal voting power with the rich. We see plenty of examples of the outsourcing or
offshoring of labor being attacked as “unpatriotic” or plain unfair. This tends to lead to
calls for protectionism to save the low-skilled domestic jobs being lost. This is a cause
championed, generally, by left-wing politicians. At the other extreme, insourcing, or
allowing mass immigration, which might price domestic workers out of jobs, leads to
calls for anti-immigration policies, at worst championed by those on the far right. To
this end, the rise of the far right in a number of European countries, or calls (from the
right) to slow down the accession of Turkey into the EU, and calls from the left to
rebuild trade barriers and protect workers (the far left of Mr. Lafontaine, garnered 8.5%
of the vote in the German election, fighting predominantly on this issue), are concerning
signals. This is not something restricted to Europe. Sufficient numbers of politicians in
other countries have championed slowing immigration or free trade (Ross Perot, Pauline
Hanson etc.).
A second related threat, might come from productive labor no longer maintaining its
productive edge. Again, we find Kevin Phillips’s arguments in his book, Wealth and
Democracy, fascinating. Phillips highlights the problems in the late 1700s Netherlands,..."
The Ruling Elite have written off the United States. In fact they want the U.S. destroyed. They have plundered the nation’s wealth and in their wake have left the U.S. a bankrupted shell.
The Ruling Elite are citizens of the world. They feel equally at ease in their numerous multi-million Dollar/Euro/Pound homes located in the most desirable places around the globe.
To the Ruling Elite the average American is now as disposable as tissue paper. They have engineered the exporting of jobs from America to overseas lands so that the prospect of real employment in the U.S. is now and for the foreseeable future merely an illusion. To the Ruling Elite the unemployed and the underemployed in America, which constitute the majority of citizens of mature age, are irrelevant. For the Ruling Elite, money is to be made by paying subhuman wages to workers in foreign lands.
The average American has not wakened to this reality. He still thinks the present recession/depression will eventually go away and the old potential of prosperity will return. However, it is only a matter of short time when the average American will finally put two and two together and come to realize what the Ruling Elite have wrought.
There are millions of Americans, not members of the Ruling Elite, who are highly educated and smart. Once they are aroused, the Ruling Elite may find while they can run, they cannot hide. What American is going to watch his family slowly starve while the Ruling Elite feasts upon caviar?
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I knew Ronald Reagan when he was a Democrat. He attended the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church on Gramercy Place, which was right across from where we lived. We were members of the church also. Below is his recorded address as he campaigned in 1948 against the big corporations that he alleged were ripping off the working man.
His election as President in 1980,32 years later, ushered in the era of the Corporate State under which America suffers today.
Who was the real Ronald Reagan?
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Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry is seeking re-election as governor in November. His opponent is Democrat Bill White of Houston.
Perry plans to seek the GOP Presidential nomination in 2012. To achieve this goal he must be re-elected Governor of Texas this year.
Thus, the November election is pivotal to Perry's presidential hopes.
Question: What is the best way for Perry to defeat White, former Mayor of Houston, who in the normal election cycle would easily carry populous Harris County (Houston) in the governor's race, thus giving him a tremendous lead in the statewide totals?
Answer: Rig the gubernatorial election by destroying the voting machines in Harris County by fire. Forget about stuffing the ballot boxes a la LBJ’s Box 13. Depriving White of his voting base by making is difficult/impossible to vote in Harris County in November is far more effective.
Warehouse blaze still a mystery
Officials still investigating cause of fire that destroyed voting devices
By PAIGE HEWITT
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Aug. 29, 2010, 7:59AM
A day after a fire destroyed virtually all of Harris County's electronic voting gear, officials were still determining the cause of the warehouse blaze and furiously exploring ways to accommodate voters come early November.
Houston's fire marshal's office hasn't made a ruling on whether Friday's early-morning fire was accidental or deliberately set, said Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, who hopes to hear something on the cause early this week.
"It would break my heart to think someone would do something like this to the election process," she said, adding that she was unaware of anyone who might have had a motive to burn down the building.
Houston Fire Department officials did not return phone calls on Saturday.
The building in the 600 block of Canino on the city's north side did have a sprinkler system, but Kaufman said she was unsure if it was properly functioning or if there might have been any failures.
The three-alarm blaze broke out in the 28,000-square-foot warehouse just after 4 a.m., destroying some 10,000 pieces of election gear housed there.
The total loss was valued at about $40 million — $30 million in voting equipment and $10 million for the building, said Kaufman.
The machines were set to supply nearly 800 polling sites for early voting, which begins Oct. 18.
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THE JFK CASE: OSWALD AND HIS TWELVE HANDLERS (Part One: Mother, Meyer, and the Spotters)
By Bill Simpich
opednews.com
August 22, 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/THE-JFK-CASE--OSWALD-AND-by-Bill-Simpich-100315-5.html
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That's right, Bill. You have this faggot who dominated "justice," ( The Justice Department), holding the power within the FBI for decades, who was nothing more than a dirty blackmailer. Weirder than your typical gay man, no one disputes his cross-dressing lifestyle or his live-in boyfriend.
These are the "Men who Killed Kennedy."
And then they buried this family man, flawed as he was:
You do a great disservice to the Education Forum by espousing your offensive hate-filled remarks about gays, such as the phrase “Weirder than your typical gay man.” I am gay and there may be others members of the Forum who are gay. One straight member has written me in the past about his gay brother, with whom he enjoys a close, family relationship.
If you have a picture of J. Edgar Hoover being a cross-dressing gay, please post it. Otherwise, have the decency from refraining from spreading unsubstantiated rumors. He was gay but a masculine man, as shown in the TV interviews of him over the years.
Your characterize JFK as being a married man. It is widely known that one of his closest friends for 30 years was gay. Click on the link below for further information
http://woolfandwilde.com/2009/08/the-untold-story-of-jfk-and-his-gay-best-friend-of-30-years/
Apparently, JFK’s friend was not weird and JFK did not harbor the hate towards gays that you evidence in your posting.
By the way, today’s New York Times carries an article that shows support for gay marriage in the U.S. has either passed or is nearing the 50 percent level. Still more evidence that hate mongering against gays (or "faggots" to use your word)is fast going out of style.
Over Time, a Gay Marriage Groundswell
By ANDREW GELMAN, JEFFREY LAX and JUSTIN PHILLIPS
The New York Times
August 22, 2010
Gay marriage is not going away as a highly emotional, contested issue. Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage, has seen to that, as it winds its way through the federal courts.
But perhaps the public has reached a turning point.
A CNN poll this month found that a narrow majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage — the first poll to find majority support. Other poll results did not go that far, but still, on average, showed that support for gay marriage had risen to 45 percent or more (with the rest either opposed or undecided).
That’s a big change from 1996, when Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act. At that time, only 25 percent of Americans said that gay and lesbian couples should have the right to marry, according to an average of national polls.
The more important turning points in public opinion, however, may be occurring at the state level, especially if states continue to control who can get married.
According to our research, as recently as 2004, same-sex marriage did not have majority support in any state. By 2008, three states had crossed the 50 percent line. *
Today, 17 states are over that line (more if you consider the CNN estimate correct that just over 50 percent of the country supports gay marriage).
In 2008, the year Proposition 8 was approved, just under half of Californians supported same-sex marriage. Today, according to polls, more than half do. A similar shift has occurred in Maine, where same-sex marriage legislation was repealed by ballot measure in 2009.
In both New York and New Jersey, where state legislatures in the past have defeated proposals to allow same-sex marriage, a majority now support it.
And support for same-sex marriage has increased in all states, even in relatively conservative places like Wyoming and Kentucky. Only Utah is still below where national support stood in 1996.
Among the five states that currently allow same-sex marriage, Iowa is the outlier. It is the only one of those states where support falls below half, at 44 percent.
This trend will continue. Nationally, a majority of people under age 30 support same-sex marriage. And this is not because of overwhelming majorities found in more liberal states that skew the national picture: our research shows that a majority of young people in almost every state support it. As new voters come of age, and as their older counterparts exit the voting pool, it’s likely that support will increase, pushing more states over the halfway mark.
State figures are based on a statistical technique has been used to generate state estimates from national polls. Public opinion is estimated in small demographic categories within each state, and then these are averaged using census information to get state-level summaries. Estimates in 2010 are projected from 2008 state-level estimates using an aggregate national estimate of 45 percent (or 50 percent) support for gay marriage.
The authors are professors of political science at Columbia University.
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Biographical details can be obtained by typing "Douglas Caddy" into Google.
My biography also appears in Who'sWho in American Law, Who'sWho in America, and Who'sWho in the World.
I am the author of six books, the latest being "Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How The President of the United States And The Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up" by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy,Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven.
Is it available from Amazon?
Will you be willing to discuss the book on the Forum?
The book will be released publicly on September 8, 2010. It will be available at that time as an E-Book on Kindle from Amazon, I-Pad from Apple, and Nook from Barnes&Noble. Copies of an "Unedited Galley Proof" in printed book form will be provided to key media sources, along with a press release, on Sept. 8th. Before the end of the year the book will be available through Amazon in printed book form.
Some of the book's contents have already been posted in the Watergate Topic of the Education Forum. This was done as a form of insurance since certain entities did not want the book published.
Of course I shall be pleased to discuss the book on the Forum following its release next month.
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Biographical details can be obtained by typing "Douglas Caddy" into Google.
My biography also appears in Who'sWho in American Law, Who'sWho in America, and Who'sWho in the World.
I am the author of six books, the latest being "Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How The President of the United States And The Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up" by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy,Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven.
Is it available from Amazon?
The book will be released publicly on September 8, 2010. It will be available at that time as an E-Book on Kindle from Amazon, I-Pad from Apple, and Nook from Barnes&Noble. Copies of an "Unedited Galley Proof" in printed book form will be provided to key media sources, along with a press release, on Sept. 8th. Before the end of the year the book will be available through Amazon in printed book form.
-
Biographical details can be obtained by typing "Douglas Caddy" into Google.
My biography also appears in Who'sWho in American Law, Who'sWho in America, and Who'sWho in the World.
I am the author of six books, the latest being "Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How The President of the United States And The Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up" by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy,Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven.
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Fascinating reading. Thanks for posting these important historical articles.
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Alex Jones interviews Gerald Celente
In my book, Celente is tops in forecasting U.S. and international trends.
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The CIA and the Assassination of John Kennedy
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The future of Freedom Foundaton
August 4, 2010
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger182.htmlAugust 4, 2010
One of the strangest aspects of the investigation into John Kennedy’s murder was the reaction of federal officials.
Whenever government officials are assassinated, the normal reaction of law enforcement is to pull out all the stops in an attempt to ensure that no one who was involved in the crime escapes punishment.
Yet the more one reads about the Kennedy assassination, the more one gets the uneasy feeling that the reaction of the FBI and other federal officials was precisely the opposite. They seem to have been overeager to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin and overpassive in investigating the possible involvement of others in the killing.
For example, there were several witnesses who were certain that a shot had been fired from the grassy knoll. Whether such a shot was fired or not, one would naturally expect law-enforcement officials to aggressively pursue that possibility, given that a senior federal official had just been shot and killed. Yet, having settled on Oswald as a lone assassin who fired from behind the president, federal investigators not only did not aggressively pursue the possibility of shot’s having been fired from the front, they often actually belittled and berated witnesses who were certain that such a shot had been fired.
That makes no sense to me. That just isn’t the way law-enforcement officials operate when a federal official is killed.
For example, consider what happens when a DEA agent is murdered. Federal agents focus not only on the likely perpetrator but also on all other “likely suspects” who might have been involved in the plot. In fact, that’s one reason that criminal elements generally avoid killing law-enforcement officials. They know that the investigatory hammer is going to fall heavily on the entire criminal community.
I recall this phenomenon in the case of federal Judge John Wood of Texas, who was assassinated in 1979. After Wood was murdered, federal officials embarked on one of the biggest, most expensive, and most aggressive criminal investigations in U.S. history. They were relentless, even going so far as to secretly record jailhouse conversations between a convicted drug kingpin named Jimmy Chagra and his lawyer-brother, Joe Chagra. The investigation ultimately led not only to the conviction of the man who fired the shot, Charles Harrison, but also to conspiracy convictions for Joe Chagra and Jimmy’s wife, Elizabeth. Jimmy Chagra was also prosecuted for the murder but was acquitted.
Suppose that immediately after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. officials had made the following announcement: “Our fellow Americans, we have completed our investigation into this heinous act and have concluded that the only people who were involved in committing it were the deranged terrorist fanatics who hijacked the planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We are closing the case.”
Even if that later proved to be true, wouldn’t you think to yourself, “Wait a minute! That’s not the way the feds operate, especially when federal officials are killed. They pull out all the stops to determine whether there were others involved.”
And in fact, as everyone knows the feds did pull out all the stops after 9/11, rounding up and jailing thousands of people, many of them innocent, establishing secret prison camps around the world, kidnapping and torturing hundreds of suspects, and invading and occupying two countries.
That’s how we expect the feds to react in such a case.
Yet, what is odd is that that was not the way federal officials reacted after the president of the United States was assassinated. Instead, having fairly quickly fixed on Oswald as a lone assassin, federal investigators seem to have then directed their efforts to establishing that thesis and failing to aggressively pursue the possibility that others might have been involved in the shooting.
Why?
Targeting the CIA
One possibility is that early on, federal officials might have begun reaching an uncomfortable suspicion, one that pointed in the direction of the CIA, a suspicion that would be fueled by information provided to the Warren Commission by Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr, who was heading up the state’s investigation into the murder, indicating that Oswald had been on the payroll of the FBI, an allegation denied by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
If federal officials did in fact consider the possibility that the federal government’s primary intelligence agency might have to be accused of murder, conspiracy, and a coup, it is not difficult to imagine their concluding, “This is not a road we want to go down,” especially at the height of the Cold War, when the prospect of an all-out war against the CIA could easily have been seen as a genuine threat to national security.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the CIA was actually involved in the Kennedy assassination, but it is to say this:
First, with one exception, there is virtually no possibility that anyone in the federal government, including the president, the FBI, the Warren Commission, and Congress, would have been willing to openly support targeting the CIA in a criminal investigation into whether it killed the president. The only exception might have been Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, but his ability to initiate such an investigation was nonexistent, not only because the assassination of a president wasn’t a federal criminal offense in 1963 but also because there is no way that President Johnson and Hoover, both of whom hated the younger Kennedy, would have ever supported such an investigation.
Second, there would have been no way that such a conspiracy could have ever been pierced in the absence of a fierce and honest criminal prosecutor, one who had the full support of the president and the FBI, along with an incorruptible and fearless presiding judge willing to enforce subpoenas served on the CIA with contempt charges.
Obviously, the appointment of a federal special prosecutor wasn’t a realistic possibility, not only because the president’s murder didn’t violate a federal law but also because, as a practical matter, Johnson would never have ever gone down that road anyway.
That would have meant that it would have been left to a Texas state prosecutor to have initiated such an investigation. But as we all know, the state of Texas quickly accepted the official federal position that Oswald was a lone-nut assassin and never initiated an investigation specifically targeting the CIA as a possible suspect in the assassination.
To quell concern within the public that Kennedy might have been the victim of a conspiracy, Johnson appointed a political commission composed of prominent, establishment politicians. However, none of them was the type of person who would have had any interest in specifically targeting the CIA as a possible assassin and doing the aggressive investigatory work that would have been needed to pierce such a conspiracy.
After all, don’t forget that the Warren Commission included two U.S. Senators, two U.S. Representatives, the Chief Justice of the United States, a former member of the World Bank, and even the former director of the CIA whom Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Not exactly the type of people who are going to tear the federal government apart in a war in which the CIA is suspected of having assassinated the president of the United States.
“Offensive on its face”
Last October the New York Times published a story that shone a spotlight into one of the CIA’s best-kept secrets involving the Kennedy case; that story can be accessed here. The story involved a CIA agent named George Joannides, whose interesting involvement in the Kennedy case did not become public until after his death in 1990. A former Washington Post reporter, Jefferson Morley, became aware of Joannides’s role from documents that the CIA had released in response to a congressional law enacted after Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which posited that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had conspired to kill Kennedy.
I’ll return to the Joannides story later because it reveals some important things about the CIA and its relationship to the Kennedy assassination. For now, I’d like to focus on a statement made to the Times in that article by a CIA spokesman named Paul Gimigliano, who was defending the CIA’s continued efforts to keep its files on Joannides secret from the public. Responding to implications that the CIA might be hiding something nefarious about possible CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination, Gimigliano stated that any such suggestion was “offensive on its face.”
What Gimigliano was essentially saying is that it is absolutely inconceivable that the CIA would ever commit such a dastardly act as killing the president of the United States. It is a mindset that simply cannot imagine that any such thing is reasonably possible.
Ever since the Kennedy assassination, there have been vast numbers of people on both sides of the divide. One side has steadfastly maintained that Kennedy was killed by a lone-nut gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald.
The other side has steadfastly maintained that Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy involving the CIA, U.S. intelligence, the Mafia, right-wing extremists, anti-Castro Cubans, Fidel Castro, the Soviets, or others.
The lone-nut proponents claim that the overwhelming weight of the evidence supports but one conclusion: that Oswald, a disgruntled communist sympathizer who had defected to the Soviet Union and who returned to the United States, where he lobbied for fair treatment for Cuba, gunned down the president. The lone-nut proponents point to the vast amount of circumstantial evidence that the conspiracy crowd has amassed over the years and pooh-pooh it for lacking a “smoking-gun” quality.
In doing so, however, the lone-nut proponents miss a critically important point: If the CIA was actually involved in the assassination of John Kennedy, there was no way that such involvement could ever have been definitely determined without a fierce, independent, fearless, and incorruptible criminal prosecutor charged with the specific authority of targeting the CIA for investigation, and fully supported by the president of the United States and the FBI, under the auspices of an incorruptible and courageous presiding judge.
A political or bureaucratic panel, such as the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee, never had a chance of piercing such a conspiracy, not only because of the mindset that characterizes people like Gimigliano, the mindset that finds such a notion “offensive on its face,” but also because of the extreme reluctance that members of such a group would have had to target a federal agency that was considered absolutely essential to the national security of the United States, especially at the height of the Cold War.
In other words, suppose a member of the Warren Commission had the same mindset as Paul Gimigliano, which I hold is a very likely possibility. He would have considered the possibility that the CIA was involved in the assassination to be ludicrous on its face and, therefore, would never have permitted the aggressive investigation that would have been needed to pierce such a conspiracy.
But there might well have been members of the Warren Commission – and indeed, many other federal officials – who had a different mindset, one in which they would not have discounted the possibility that the CIA had done such a thing but who would have believed that aggressively targeting the CIA for criminal investigation would have ripped apart the federal government to such an extent that the nation would have been made vulnerable to a surprise attack from the Soviet Union.
Don’t forget, after all, that Kennedy was killed just 13 months after the Cuban missile crisis, which involved the Soviets’ basing nuclear missiles aimed at the United States only 90 miles away from American shores.
Thus, regardless which of these two mindsets characterized the members of the Warren Commission – the one that holds that it is inconceivable that the CIA had done such a thing or the one that holds that we just couldn’t afford to go down that road – the result would have been the same: no aggressive criminal investigation that specifically targeted the CIA.
Was there sufficient evidence to warrant targeting the CIA as a specific suspect in the Kennedy case?
There can be no question about it. Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the CIA was, in fact, involved in such a plot. It is simply to say that there was more than sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation specifically targeting the CIA and that U.S. officials should have supported such an investigation.
Let’s examine that evidence.
Among the reasons the CIA should have been made a specific target of a criminal investigation in the John Kennedy assassination were: (1) the CIA was the world’s premier expert in assassination and coups; and (2) the CIA was in a partnership with one of the most crooked and murderous private organizations in history, the Mafia, a partnership whose express purpose was the assassination of a public official, Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
In 1953 – 10 years before the Kennedy assassination – the CIA pulled off a coup in Iran. The operation was conducted secretly and surreptitiously and successfully. It ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and replaced him with the unelected shah of Iran, a man who would be loyal to the U.S. government for the next 26 years but who also would brutalize his own people in the process.
It is no surprise, then, that the CIA celebrated this regime-change operation in Iran as a great victory for the United States. Never mind that the CIA’s coup installed a cruel dictator who would terrorize and brutalize his own citizenry until the Iranian people ousted him from power in 1979.
One year later – 1954 – the CIA pulled off a similar coup in Guatemala. Successfully employing deceptive tactics, including radio broadcasts reporting a fake military invasion of the country, the CIA induced the democratically elected president of Guatemala to abdicate in favor of an unelected military strongman who was loyal to the U.S. government. The CIA, once again, celebrated its interference with Guatemala’s internal affairs as another great victory for the United States. Of course, it could not know that its coup would precipitate a three-decade civil war in which more than a million Guatemalans would be killed.
Nine years later – 1963 – the CIA pulled off another successful coup, this time in Vietnam. That regime-change operation occurred in October, one month before Kennedy was murdered. Dissatisfied with South Vietnam’s corrupt, autocratic president Ngo Dinh Diem, Kennedy authorized the CIA to oust him from power. With the support of the CIA, the operation was successfully carried out by South Vietnamese generals, who then proceeded to assassinate Diem, albeit apparently without Kennedy’s foreknowledge or approval.
Now, let’s spring forward 10 years – 1973 – to the Chilean coup that ousted communist President Salvador Allende and replaced him with right-wing military strongman Augusto Pinochet. Granted, that coup took place a decade after the Kennedy assassination, but I think it nonetheless holds valuable lessons about how the CIA operates and its attitude toward assassination.
It is commonly claimed that the CIA had nothing to do with the Chilean coup or, at least, that no smoking-gun has ever been uncovered evidencing CIA involvement. However, that claim rings hollow for two reasons. One, it is undisputed that ever since Allende’s election, the U.S. government had been actively trying to figure out how to get rid of him. Second, and much more important, the circumstantial evidence conclusively establishes that the CIA did participate in the Chilean coup, for how else to explain the fact that the CIA played a role in the murder of an American journalist during the coup? In other words, if the CIA really wasn’t playing a role in the coup, why would it have been helping to murder an American during the coup?
The case of Charles Horman
The murder of the 31-year-old American, a man named Charles Horman, reveals quite a lot, not only about the CIA but also about how U.S. public officials respond to a CIA murder of an American citizen.
For one thing, the Horman murder shows that 10 years after the Kennedy assassination, the CIA was not above murdering Americans. Sure, the coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam produced some deaths, but they were foreigners’ deaths. In Chile, among the dead was an American – well, actually, two Americans, for another American journalist named Frank Terrugi also was killed, but it’s not clear yet whether the CIA was involved in his murder too.
But there’s no question about whether the CIA played a role in Horman’s murder. According to an entry on Horman on Wikipedia, “Horman was in the resort town of Vina del Mar, near the port of Valparaiso, which was a key base for both the Chilean coup plotters and U.S. military and intelligence personnel who were supporting them. While there, he spoke with several U.S. operatives and took notes documenting the role of the United States in overthrowing the Allende government.”
For years, the CIA denied any role in Horman’s murder, just as it denied playing any role in the Chilean coup. But at the very least, the first denial turned out to be false, intentionally false. In 1999 – more than 25 years after Horman’s death – the State Department released a document stating that the CIA had, in fact, played an “unfortunate role” in Horman’s murder.
What role exactly? We don’t know. After the release of that document, the CIA did not come forward and explain why it had lied about its participation in Horman’s murder, what its operatives had done to kill Horman, or whether CIA higher-ups had approved the assassination. Even more telling, neither Congress nor the Justice Department pursued the matter with a congressional investigation or with grand-jury subpoenas and indictments.
Think about that. Here was evidence, some 25 years after the fact, that U.S. government officials had helped to murder an American citizen. Yet not one congressional subpoena was issued to any CIA official demanding to know what the CIA’s role in the murder had been, why the CIA had lied and covered up the matter for so long, or whether there were murderers still alive and on the loose. Moreover, no federal grand jury was requested to issue subpoenas to the CIA demanding the production of a single relevant witness to the murder and its cover-up or documents regarding them.
In other words, the CIA got away with obstruction of justice and murder, the murder of an American citizen, because for some reason U.S. officials decided that it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie, at least with respect to the CIA assassination of American Charles Horman.
Now, none of this, of course, establishes that the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination. In fact, it’s not even circumstantial evidence that it was. But it is to say that the CIA’s successful coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam should have made the CIA a suspect in the Kennedy assassination and, consequently, a specific target of a criminal investigation. Moreover, the CIA’s post-Kennedy involvement in the murder of American Charles Horman should have caused people after 1973 to reflect upon the fact that the CIA was fully capable of assassinating an American citizen and lying about it and covering it up.
The CIA-Mafia partnership
The CIA’s expertise in regime-change operations wasn’t the only the thing that should have justified a particular and specific investigatory focus on the CIA. There was also the CIA’s partnership with the Mafia, one of the most crooked, corrupt, and murderous organizations in history.
The whole idea simply boggles the mind. Imagine: A primary agency of the U.S. government, the CIA, actually enters into a partnership with a private organization whose methods involve violence, illegality, murder, narcotics, bribery, perjury, and, well, probably just about every crime on the books.
What was the purpose of the CIA-Mafia partnership? Murder! The partnership was formed for the specific purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro, the president of a sovereign and independent country. The CIA and the Mafia, two organizations whose expertise involved murder, got together to pull off the murder of a foreign public official.
But that’s not all. What is also noteworthy here, at least with respect to the Kennedy assassination, is the fact that U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the brother of the president, was actually waging a federal war against the Mafia during the time that the CIA-Mafia partnership was operating. He was securing federal grand-jury indictments against Mafia leaders, prosecuting them, and doing everything he could to get them incarcerated. In effect, his goal was actually to destroy the Mafia, the very organization that the CIA had chosen to be its assassination partner.
Again, that’s not to say that such facts warrant a conclusion that the CIA assassinated Kennedy out of loyalty to its partner, the Mafia, which the Kennedys were trying to destroy. But it is to say that, once it was known, that relationship – and the specific purpose of the relationship – i.e., murder of a country’s president – should have been more than enough to warrant a specific and targeted investigation of the CIA, to determine whether the CIA-Mafia partnership had turned its sights away from Castro and toward Kennedy.
There’s another interesting aspect to the Mafia-CIA partnership that is worth mentioning here. One of the common things that one hears about the Kennedy assassination is that if the CIA were, in fact, involved in the assassination, someone would have leaked the information by now. That’s not necessarily true. Both the CIA and the Mafia are experts at keeping secrets, especially when it comes to murder.
After all, how much do you know about the Horman murder? Don’t forget that the CIA successfully kept its role in that murder secret for more than 25 years, and that involved just the murder of an ordinary American citizen. Do you know the identities of the CIA agents who were involved in Horman’s murder? Do you know the actual extent of their involvement?
No. And the reason you don’t know these things is that the CIA has successfully kept them secret.
But there is a much more relevant example of silence when it comes to murder, the murder of Mafia kingpin Johnny Roselli. He was the Mafia mobster who served as liaison to the CIA as part of the CIA-Mafia partnership to assassinate Fidel Castro. In 1976, Roselli testified before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the Kennedy assassination and was recalled for further testimony. Before he could respond, however, he was murdered. On August 9, 1976, his body was found in a 55-gallon steel drum floating in the waters off Miami. He had been strangled and shot and his legs had been sawed off. According to an entry on Roselli on Wikipedia, “Some believed that boss [santo] Trafficante ordered Roselli’s death [because he felt] Roselli had revealed too much about the Kennedy assassination and Castro murder plots during his Senate testimony, violating the strict Mafia code of omerta (silence).”
The Roselli murder shows that the Mafia can keep secrets, especially when it comes to murder, for as of this date it is still undetermined who killed Roselli. As we know from the Horman case, the Mafia’s assassination partner, the CIA, can keep secrets too.
Moreover, one who decides to leak information about Mafia operations, especially those involving murder, know that they probably won’t be long for this world. One can wonder whether the Mafia’s partner, the CIA, wouldn’t feel the same way. After all, who can say with certainty that Roselli’s murderers were from the Mafia and not part of the Mafia-CIA partnership?
Did the CIA employ its expertise pulling off coups here in the United States in November 1963? Did the CIA-Mafia partnership to murder Fidel Castro switch its sights from Fidel Castro to John Kennedy? At the very least, that expertise and that partnership warranted making the CIA a specific target in a criminal investigation.
Let’s now examine, in the context of motive, the animosity that existed between John Kennedy and the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban missile crisis.
Even though the CIA was the premier government agency in the world whose expertise was assassination, coups, and regime change, it does not necessarily follow that it employed its talents and abilities here in the United States in November 1963. But it’s an important factor that should have been considered in determining whether to target the CIA in a special criminal investigation.
Another important factor was motive. In my opinion, the overwhelming weight of the evidence establishes that the CIA had much more motive than Oswald to kill Kennedy.
In fact, after all these years, I still don’t have a clear understanding of what Oswald’s motive in killing Kennedy was supposed to have been. If he was nothing more than a disgruntled, unhappy, confused communist sympathizer who was seeking fame for killing the president, then why did he deny committing the offense and, even more mysterious, why did he claim to have been set up? Wouldn’t you think that someone who was seeking fame would glory in his achievement? And if he were planning to deny the offense, then why would he leave such an obvious trail behind him, such as purchasing his rifle by mail order rather than over the counter with cash?
Moreover, one big problem is that Oswald’s strange background, on which the lone-nut proponents base a large part of their case with respect to motive, is entirely consistent with his being an operative for the CIA or military intelligence.
How many committed communists join the U.S. Marines? How did Oswald become fluent in the Russian language while he was in the Marines, given the enormous difficulty in learning a foreign language, especially without a tutor?
Why was a communist Marine assigned a military security clearance? Why wasn’t Oswald arrested on his return from the Soviet Union, where he tried to defect, and hauled before a federal grand jury to face the possibility of indictment for treason? After all, this was the height of the Cold War, when communism was considered a much greater threat to the United States than terrorism is considered today.
When Oswald was living in New Orleans, why did he stamp a return address on pro-Cuba pamphlets that was located in the same building as an ex-FBI agent named Guy Bannister? Was that just a coincidence? When he was jailed for disorderly conduct after an altercation with the head of an anti-Castro group, why did the FBI grant his request to send an agent to talk to him? After Oswald was killed, why did an FBI agent tear up a note that Oswald had delivered to him prior to the assassination?
The questions go on and on. Of course, if it were ultimately to turn out that Oswald was a U.S. intelligence operative, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t assassinate Kennedy. But it would certainly require the lone-nut proponents to totally reevaluate their case. Obviously, the CIA would have some explaining to do as well.
Possible CIA motives
What about the CIA’s motive for killing Kennedy? The best book that sets forth the various factors establishing a CIA motive is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass, which I highly recommend.
Consider, first, the Bay of Pigs disaster. The CIA’s invasion of Cuba had already been planned when Kennedy took office. When he was asked to approve the plan, the CIA assured him that no air support would be needed. But that representation was false and the CIA knew it was false. CIA officials were setting Kennedy up. They felt that once the invasion was under way, he would have no choice but to send in the required air support in order to avert a disaster.
But the CIA miscalculated. Even as CIA operatives and friends were being killed and captured at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy refused to send in the air support, an action that would earn him the everlasting enmity of anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA itself.
While Kennedy took responsibility for the debacle in public, he knew what the CIA had done. He fired the CIA director, Allen Dulles (who would later serve on the Warren Commission!), and vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
We should bear in mind that while Kennedy was threatening to dismantle the CIA, his brother Robert, the U.S. attorney general, was doing his best to dismantle the CIA’s partner, the Mafia.
To make matters worse, from the standpoint of the CIA, to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy vowed that the United States would not invade Cuba, a vow that essentially meant that Castro would remain permanently in power. Kennedy’s pledge served to fuel the rage and distrust that were already boiling within the CIA (and the anti-Castro community).
Did the CIA’s anger over losing friends and associates at the Bay of Pigs and suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of archenemy Fidel Castro, combined with what could have been construed as a vow to dismantle and abolish the CIA, motivate CIA officials to take out Kennedy? Maybe; maybe not. But it was certainly a matter that needed to be investigated fully in a criminal proceeding.
Equally important, as Douglass sets forth in his book, was the epiphany about the Cold War that Kennedy seemed to have reached after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Realizing how close the world had come to nuclear war, he began raising his vision to a higher level, one that involved figuring out a way to end the Cold War. As part of that process, he indicated to close associates his intention to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. He also established communications not only with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who, according to Douglass, was experiencing the same type of epiphany as Kennedy, but also with the CIA’s sworn enemy, Fidel Castro, whom the CIA was committed to assassinating.
Kennedy’s actions were not taken lightly by the CIA, the Pentagon, or the military-industrial complex. It is impossible to adequately describe how dangerous and grave those agencies viewed the international communist threat to America during the 1960s. Communism was considered a thousand times more dangerous than the terrorist threat against America today. The Pentagon and the CIA both felt that unless the United States took an aggressive stand against communism, including an aggressive military stand, a communist takeover of the United States was all but certain. In fact, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, many members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were calling on Kennedy to attack Cuba, which they knew would mean war with the Soviet Union. They had calculated that a nuclear war would cost the Soviet Union many more millions of citizens than it would America.
So here you had a young, inexperienced president who had supposedly double-crossed his own intelligence agency at the Bay of Pigs, threatened to destroy that intelligence agency at the height of the Cold War, permanently surrendered Cuba to the communists, and effectively pledged to surrender Vietnam to the communists, and was now reaching out to communist leaders in an attempt to reach a peaceful accord with them.
What better evidence of a threat to national security than that, at least from the perspective of the CIA? If the CIA honestly believed that the American people had made a mistake in electing Kennedy to office, a mistake that was threatening to place America under communist rule, would that agency, charged with guarding the national security of the country, do what was necessary to save America, no matter how distasteful the task was?
Perhaps; perhaps not. But it was certainly a matter that deserved the close scrutiny of a criminal investigation. After all, other nations’ intelligence agencies had killed their rulers to protect their national security. Consider, as just one example, South Vietnam, where military officials in that country assassinated their president in a coup, a coup that was fully supported by the CIA.
Finally, there was Kennedy’s philandering with Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe; Mafia girlfriend Judith Exner; Mary Meyer, wife of CIA official Cord Meyer; and others. The sexual escapades could have easily been considered more evidence that the American people had made a grave error in their 1960 election, one that jeopardized the security of the nation.
George Joannides
In the 1990s, pursuant to the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, the CIA released documents that raised some serious questions about the CIA. The documents revealed that one of its agents, named George Joannides, who was dead by that time, had played at least two interesting roles.
First, prior to the assassination Joannides had served as the CIA’s liaison to a fiercely anti-Castro group named the Directorio Revolucionarío Estudiantil (DRE) and, in fact, had funneled large sums of CIA money into that organization. The DRE was the group I mentioned previously with which Oswald had had an altercation while he was handing out pro-Castro literature.
On the surface, Joannides’s relationship to the DRE doesn’t seem to be any big deal. For some reason, however, the CIA chose to keep it secret – secret from everyone, including the Warren Commission.
Why did the CIA do that? We don’t know. The CIA refuses to say. Here’s a good article to read on the CIA’s stonewalling in the matter, entitled “CIA Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery,” published last October in the New York Times:
Second, in the 1970s, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the possibility of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, the CIA called Joannides out of retirement to serve as the liaison between the House Committee and the CIA. His job ostensibly was to facilitate CIA cooperation with the investigation.
There was a big problem, however: Again, the CIA did not disclose the connection between Joannides and the DRE prior to the assassination, which meant, at the very least, that Joannides had a serious conflict of interest serving as a liaison to the House committee.
Did the CIA call Joannides out of retirement to serve as a legitimate liaison or to serve as a loyal blocking force for the CIA? Again, we don’t know. The CIA isn’t talking.
What we do know is that the CIA’s conduct verges on obstruction of justice with respect to the House’s official investigation. G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel of the committee, stated, “[Joannides’s] conduct was criminal. He obstructed our investigation.” Federal Judge John R. Tunheim, who chaired the 1990s Assassination Review Board, stated, “I think we were probably misled by the agency. This material should be released.” Even Gerald Posner, author of the famed anti-conspiracy book Case Closed, stated, “The agency is stonewalling. It’s a perfect example of why the public has so little trust in the CIA’s willingness to be truthful.”
The person who discovered the Joannides matter within the CIA’s documents was a journalist named Jefferson Morley, who used to be a reporter for the Washington Post. For more than 10 years, Morley has fought a relentless battle in the courts seeking the release of the CIA’s files on Joannides. The CIA has battled the lawsuit every step of the way, and continues to do so. Morley’s articles on the subject make for fascinating reading, and I highly recommend them. They are listed and linked at the bottom of the article I wrote last year entitled “Appoint a Special Prosecutor in the JFK-Joannides Matter.”
Did the CIA assassinate John F. Kennedy? No one can say with any certainty, one way or the other. What we do know is that there was no intelligence agency in the world that was more capable of pulling off such a feat than the CIA. We also know that if there was ever an agency with a motive for murdering a ruler, it was, again, the CIA.
Safe from prosecution
It bears repeating, though, that motive, ability, and opportunity do not automatically mean that the CIA did, in fact, kill Kennedy. It’s only to say that the CIA should have been made a target of an aggressive criminal investigation. As I stated in the first part of this article, if the CIA did, in fact, participate in Kennedy’s assassination, there was no possibility that a political or bureaucratic panel or commission would have been able to break through the stone wall that the CIA would have constructed to keep its role in the assassination secret. Only a fierce criminal prosecutor, backed by a fearless and incorruptible judge, could have broken through such a wall.
If the CIA did conspire to kill Kennedy, it would have known that the possibility of such an investigation was virtually nonexistent. For one thing, the CIA would have known that it would not have to fear a criminal investigation at the federal level. Why? Because assassinating a president wasn’t a federal crime at the time Kennedy was shot, a fact that the CIA would have been well aware of. That means that the CIA would not have had to fear taking on the FBI, the Justice Department, or an aggressive special federal prosecutor.
The CIA would have also known that it could easily stonewall a political or bureaucratic commission, such as the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee, which generally lack the will and tenacity that characterize a criminal prosecution. The CIA’s successful stonewalling regarding the Joannides matter fully demonstrates that. Moreover, Lyndon Johnson’s appointment of former CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs disaster, to the Warren Commission effectively blocked the possibility of any serious investigation into the CIA’s possible role in the assassination.
Thus, the only thing that the CIA would have had to be concerned about was a criminal prosecution by the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, where the murder took place. But what was the likelihood that a local district attorney would take on the CIA in such a proceeding? Not very high, especially if the president of the United States, a Texan, was calling for all investigations to cease except the one that was to be conducted by the Warren Commission.
In fact, as Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who initiated his own criminal investigation into the Kennedy assassination, discovered, a state-level prosecution had virtually no chance of succeeding without the full cooperation of the president of the United States and the Justice Department. Not only did U.S. officials do their best to obstruct his investigation, they also sent a powerful message to all future district attorneys in Dallas County, which had continuing jurisdiction over the murder, by retaliating against Garrison with a bogus federal criminal indictment for bribery, a charge on which he was ultimately acquitted.
If the CIA conspired to kill Kennedy, it would have known that the chances that Johnson would authorize the Justice Department and the FBI to cooperate with a state criminal investigation targeting the CIA were nil. After all, don’t forget that we’re talking about the Cold War, when U.S. officials genuinely believed that the United States was in grave danger of a communist takeover. And they were even more convinced then that the CIA was absolutely essential to national security than they are today under the war on terrorism.
Therefore, the CIA would have known that the last thing the new president would do was involve himself and his administration in an enormously vicious war between state and federal officials, a war in which state officials would be targeting an agency that most federal officials, including those in Congress, considered absolutely vital to national security.
Persistent doubts
But that’s precisely what Johnson should have done. He should have made it clear from the outset that he expected the Dallas district attorney to pursue all leads, including targeting a very likely suspect in Kennedy’s murder, the CIA. That would have included an order to the Secret Service to cease and desist its efforts to whisk Kennedy’s body out of the state, given that an autopsy was required under Texas state law and was essential to a criminal investigation.
Did the CIA do it or not? Those who say yes will undoubtedly continue to add to their stockpile of circumstantial evidence indicating CIA complicity in the murder. Those who say no will continue to proclaim that there is no “smoking gun” firmly establishing a CIA conspiracy to kill the president.
An aggressive criminal investigation making the CIA a target of interest wouldn’t necessarily have been definitive one way or the other, but at least the American people would have gotten a sense that justice had been served with such an investigation. Given the failure to pursue such an investigation, a cloud of doubt will always hang over whether the CIA played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Reprinted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
August 4, 2010
Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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Marilyn Monroe's last weekend: Told for the first time, an eyewitness's account of the row with Frank Sinatra that friends fear signed her death warrant
By Peter Evans
Last updated at 10:34 AM on 2nd August 2010
DailyMail (U.K.)
On Sunday, August 5, 1962, the body of Marilyn Monroe was found naked and face-down on her bed at her home on Fifth Helena Drive, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Brentwood, California. She was 36 years old.
'The long troubled star clutched a telephone in one hand. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was nearby,' reported the Associated Press that morning.
Long before she was officially discovered dead on the Sunday, neighbours had seen a mysterious - and still unexplained - ambulance parked in front of the film star's residence on the Saturday evening.
Final days: In a never-before-seen photograph, Buddy Greco poses with Marilyn Monroe, as Frank Sinatra looks on, at the notorious Cal-Neva Lodge
They also reported a helicopter hovering overhead. Raised voices and the sound of breaking glass were also heard that night.
Other neighbours reported that in the early hours a hysterical woman - who remains unidentified - had screamed: 'Murderers! You murderers! Are you satisfied now that she's dead?'
For 48 years, Marilyn Monroe's death - and the events that later came to light: reports of a visit that night by her lover Bobby Kennedy; of an ambulance that took her away breathing and brought her back dead - has remained one of Hollywood's most enduring and tantalising mysteries.
I was a reporter in New York at the time and flew to Los Angeles that morning to cover the story. I can still recall the haunting sound of the antique wind chimes - a gift to her from the poet Carl Sandburg - that hung beside her pool, on which floated a child's plastic yellow duck. It was a melancholy sight. I had known her a little and it made me sad.
I don't think the death of any other movie star has intrigued the public as much as Monroe's. Was it murder? Suicide? An accidental overdose?
Some have suggested that her former lover Frank Sinatra, who she had come to rely on, could have saved Monroe - but chose to turn his back on her when she was at her lowest ebb.
The questions and doubts, the revelations and scandals that always follow the sudden death of a celebrity - especially beautiful ones, who die young - have continued to fascinate me, as have the unaccountable silences of several key witnesses.
But after nearly 50 years there seemed little more that could be said or discovered.
Until now. In London as part of a two-month nationwide tour of his much anticipated show, Swinging Las Vegas, the legendary American jazz pianist and singer, Buddy Greco - who once rubbed shoulders with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and now lives in Essex with his fifth wife - talked to me about the mysterious weekend Monroe spent at the notorious Mafia haunt, the Cal-Neva Lodge, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, five days before she died.
Before the fall out: An undated picture of the actress talking to former lover Sinatra at a casino in Nevada
It is the first time anyone has revealed first-hand what happened there. Now 83, he is sitting in Locale Italian restaurant on London's South Bank. Still handsome, with a trademark smile, the performer made famous by such hits as The Lady Is A Tramp and Girl Talk remembers Monroe, who was exactly his age, with both fondness and sadness.
Uncertainty, contradiction and tragedy have always surrounded the mysterious and fateful weekend of July 28 and 29, 1962.
Those who were there - including her former lover Sinatra (who had invited her to Cal-Neva), Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jnr., Juliet Prowse ( who was engaged to Sinatra), Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford, and Paul 'Skinny' D'Amato, who managed the Cal-Neva Lodge for its owners Sinatra and his partner, the notorious Mafia godfather Sam Giancana - are either dead or still refuse to talk about what happened during those 48 hours.
Indeed, while more than 100 books have been written about the life and death of the woman who was probably the greatest sex symbol of the 20th century, not one of them has managed to penetrate the mystery or fill the lacuna in our knowledge of Monroe's final days at Cal-Neva.
And yet these days contain vital clues to her tragic end. Monroe was certainly in a dreadful state at the time. Robert Kennedy - who had inherited Monroe as a mistress from his brother, President John F. Kennedy - had just ended their five-month affair when she took off for Cal-Neva, and the last weekend of her life.
'When she arrived that Saturday, you'd never believe that she had a care in the world'
Buddy Greco recalls of her demeanour later that weekend: 'She was fragile, very fragile - well, she'd gone.' Many blamed the Kennedys.
'Marilyn was distraught and heartbroken. She felt the Kennedys had handed her around like a piece of meat,' Rupert Allan, her publicist and one of her last true Hollywood friends, had said earlier.
Her grip on reality - already weakend by mental illness, drink and drugs - was certainly shaky.
How else to explain the fact that she had persuaded herself Bobby really would divorce the mother of his seven children.
As the attorney general of the United States, a member of the most famous Catholic family in the land and a politician who had just been named Father of the Year, he was never likely to run off with a thrice married Hollywood sex symbol.
When the penny dropped, Monroe felt abused. She had always known how to stage a scene to get what she wanted and she had threatened the Kennedys.
'If I don't hear from Bobby Kennedy soon I'm going to call a press conference and blow the lid off this whole damn thing - I'm going to tell about my relationships with both Kennedy brothers,' she told Robert Slatzer, an ex-lover, a few days earlier.
Those close to Monroe knew that this was no idle threat. It had been a bad time for Monroe. She was hurt and wanted revenge, as only a spoiled movie star could.
A few weeks earlier, she had also been publicly humiliated by 20th Century Fox's studio boss Peter G. Levathes.
Fed up with her chronic absenteeism - in 35 days of filming, she had turned up a dozen times and when she did arrive she was so heavily medicated she could not remember her lines - he had fired her from Something's Got to Give, the film she was making with Dean Martin.
Costly affair: A rare image of Marilyn with President John F. Kennedy (right) and his brother Robert F. Kennedy together after JFK's 19 May 1962 birthday party
He also issued a $500,000 breach-of-contract suit against her and replaced her with Lee Remick.
Although her lawyers were in the middle of patching things up with the studio and were confident that Something's Got To Give would resume filming in the last week of August, with Monroe reinstated, she was still drinking heavily and bingeing on pills.
Of course, she could still shine when she wanted to. But by now her gloss was too often just a thin veneer.
Despite her depression, she initially appeared in good shape when she arrived at Cal-Neva, after flying there on Sinatra's private plane.
'When she arrived that Saturday, you'd never believe that she had a care in the world,' recalls Buddy Greco. 'I was sitting with Frank [sinatra], Peter Lawford and a bunch of other people, outside Frank's bungalow, when a limousine pulls up and this gorgeous woman in dark glasses steps out,' he says.
'She's dressed all in green - everything green: coat, skirt and scarf. Before I realised who it was, I thought: "My God, what a beautiful woman. No taste in clothes, but what a beautiful woman!"
'I knew that she'd been to my concerts and shows. She was a regular at the Crescendo club in Hollywood where I often played.
'It has been suggested that Sinatra invited Monroe to Cal-Neva Lodge to urge her to keep her mouth shut about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers'
'We'd said hello a few times, but were never properly introduced. When Frank introduced us, I said: "You won't remember me, but I was the piano player when you auditioned for the Benny Goodman band in 1948."
'She got emotional at that and hugged me. She had such warmth - and I was moved. Somebody took some wonderful shots of that moment, of us hugging.'
Indeed, Greco still has six black and white prints from a roll of film taken over the course of that weekend. He had kept more in a safety deposit box at the World Trade Center, but they were lost in the 9/11 terror attacks.
'The people in those pictures were among the great entertainers of our time - Marilyn, Frank, Dean Martin,' says Greco.
'It was an unrepeatable moment, a time that would never happen again. July 1962.'
But by the end of the first evening, a darker Monroe was beginning to emerge. Greco had finished his first performance in the hotel's lounge and had joined Sinatra and the other guests at Sinatra's regular table.
'It was a wonderful time, a magical weekend. It is so hard to describe now but it was maybe the best time of my life.
'Then suddenly the room went silent and very still. It was surreal. As if somebody had turned the sound off. I looked at Frank. I could immediately tell he was furious. His eyes were like blue ice cubes.
'He was looking at the doorway where Marilyn was stood, swaying ever so slightly.'
Given her history of chronic alcohol and drug abuse, it was an ominous sign. Indeed, Sinatra had fallen out with Monroe over her addictions before.
He had opened the refurbished Cal-Neva just a month earlier and Monroe had got blind drunk on that occasion, too.
Screen icon: Her death has intrigued the public for decades
He had tried to help and she still held him in high esteem, but Sinatra was tiring of her antics.
'She was still in the same green outfit she'd worn all day,' says Greco. 'But the woman I'd met that afternoon - smart , funny, intelligent, fragile - had gone.
'Now she looked drunk and, well, defiant. She was clearly angry and I think I heard her say: "Who the f*** are they all staring at?"'
Sinatra - who was obviously irritated by her erratic behaviour - acted fast.
'It was clear Sinatra was worried. She was in a state where she could have said anything,' says Greco.
This would have been a major concern for many of those around the table. Monroe, after all, knew an awful lot of secrets - and, in her condition, might have been prepared to share them.
'Sinatra motioned to his bodyguard - Coochie - to get her out of there. Coochie, a big guy, escorted her out. Actually, he picked her up and carried her out. It wasn't the star we were used to seeing.'
The incident upset Buddy Greco. He had felt such warmth and vulnerability in her only a few hours earlier and could not understand how she had changed so terribly and suddenly.
'She was on my mind,' he says. 'I was worried about her. I went outside to find out whether she was okay. I knew that she had taken accidental overdoses in the past.
'I found her by the pool. There was nobody around. It was late and the pool was deserted.
'Maybe it was the moon but she had a ghostly pallor. It still didn't occur to me that she might be a woman not long for this world.
'She was distressed, out of it, but that was all. Maybe her friends were used to seeing her like that but it worried me. Anyway, we talked.
'I walked her back to her bungalow in the complex reserved for the guests of Frank and Giancana where we all stayed.
'I thought that the next morning I could put her with Pat Lawford [the Kennedys' sister], who was her companion, and make sure she got back to L.A. safely.
'But the next day when I called, she had already left. That was the last time I saw her.' So does he think that Sinatra had finally lost patience with Monroe and by abandoning her had left her to her fate?
'That's a possible scenario,' Greco answered thoughtfully. 'After she had created that problem, he certainly wanted her out of there. He could be quite firm with her.'
Indeed, it has been suggested that Sinatra had invited Monroe to Cal-Neva Lodge that weekend to urge her to keep her mouth shut about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers.
The question is: had he already succeeded when he told her to go? Or given it up as a bad job - and thrown her back to the wolves?
Either way, after being ejected out of that bar by one of her closest friends, the clock was already ticking. And within five days, she was dead.
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I am not confused about LBJ's involvement in the JFK murder/cover up. I am mystified that anyone would believe such a fairy tale. There is no basis in fact to support such a story.
And I understand the complexity of the plot. I have lived most of my life in the post-JFK era, and I've seen what's been done to this country by the killers of JFK.
This is no fairy tale; its the only believable possibility and it is based upon facts all the way through, as demonstrated by the 1,827 citations to other works. If you can't get past your pre-conclusions, formed before you've read it, it might be best if you not read the book because you need to have an open mind as you read it.
If you should decide to plow through it anyway, you are welcome to challenge it point by point and I will respond to them. I suggest you might want to consider starting by trying to find Lyndon Johnson in the Altgens photo of the motorcade coming down Elm Street. Only two people have reacted to the first shot(s) in that photo, JFK and LBJ. The former is grasping towards his throat; the latter isn't in the photograph. Go figure.
No one knows what another person is thinking. However, in LBJ’s case we may eventually know some of his thoughts – especially those stemming from his guilt complex of being aware of and involved in the planning of the assassination of JFK. Barr McClellan maintains that the key lies in obtaining the records of the psychiatrist whose professional assistance was sought by LBJ after he left the Presidency.
I have always believed that LBJ might have been driven crazy by the mobs of people that gathered daily outside the White House when he was president who shouted in unison, “Hey, hey, LBJ, who you going to kill today?” Of course, these mobs were outraged about LBJ’s decisions that escalated the Vietnam War after Kennedy’s death, which ultimately resulted in over 56,000 Americans being killed in combat. Little did the mobs know that their daily screams of anger were like a thousand daggers hitting LBJ’s heart since he was only too aware that he was sitting in the Oval Office courtesy of his participation in killing the President whom he had served as Vice President.
There were half a dozen major scandals – ranging from Billie Sol Estes to Bobby Baker – that were about to burst open in 1963. Witness the cover of LIFE magazine about LBJ’s criminal activities that was scheduled for publication about the time of the assassination but then suddenly withdrawn when JFK was shot. With JFK dead, LBJ was able, with the help of J. Edgar Hoover and his cronies on Capitol Hill, to derail the investigations into these scandals.
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This sounds like a vitally important book. As U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples once told me about LBJ, "It is about time that the truth comes out." I certainly plan to purchase your work.
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Forum member Barr McClellan is scheduled to appear on Fox Business Daytime on Monday, July 26, between 11:30 and Noon Eastern Time. He will be interviewed by Fox anchor Dagen McDowell about his new book on American business.
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JFK Assassination Museum Beckons With Lattes, Wi-Fi
Updated: July 22, 2010
AOL. News
[click on link to view photos]
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/jfk-assassination-museum-beckons-with-lattes-wi-fi/19561631
By Linda Jones Contributor
DALLAS (July 22) -- Having spent her high school years in Dallas, Nausheen Ahmed is no stranger to the city's historic landmarks, including Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
But she never had any interest in visiting that popular sightseeing stop until after she had moved away to New Jersey and returned years later with her four children to attend a relative's wedding.
"I just took the place for granted when I lived here," Ahmed said recently during a break from taking her children on a tour of the Sixth Floor Museum, the repository of documents and artifacts from the Kennedy era. "Now that I'm a tourist, I'm acting like one."
Ahmed's story represents a conundrum that museum officials have long faced: With 325,000 visitors annually, the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is the most popular tourist attraction in Dallas, yet it's often overlooked by locals. Less than a third of its visitors, in fact, are from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The cafe at the Museum Store and Cafe, across the street from the Sixth Floor Museum, a repository of documents and artifacts from the Kennedy era, at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, offers coffee, snacks and Wi-Fi.
Now, officials are seeking to remedy the landmark's relative obscurity among natives by luring them with a new store and coffee shop right across the street.
Opened on July 1, the Museum Store and Cafe represents a "strategic opportunity" to increase the visibility of the historic site, said Liza Denton, director of public relations.
"We believed this corner location, with commanding views of Dealey Plaza, would increase visitors' overall engagement to the museum and historic site," she said, "as well as attract those who live and work downtown."
Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, as his presidential motorcade traveled past the former Texas School Book Depository Building, which is now owned and operated by the Dallas County Historical Foundation, a private nonprofit. The museum is housed on the building's two upper floors.
Across the street, the new store and cafe -- outfitted with contemporary, loftlike decor -- is already receiving a steady stream of traffic and positive responses from the local community, with many residents paying return visits, Denton said.
Tourists sit in front of the grassy knoll on March 13 beside the former Texas School Book Depository Building, right, at Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
Like the shop inside the museum itself, the store here is stocked with 1960s-themed merchandise, such as reproductions of Jacqueline Kennedy's three-strand pearl necklaces, as well as books and souvenirs. It also has a variety of items from local artisans that make statements about Dallas today, including jewelry and handbags.
Visitors can refuel with gourmet coffee, sandwiches and pastries at the cafe, which also aims to lure local workers with pre-ordered boxed lunches. Organizers hope that the cafe's free Wi-Fi will further draw in residents, and that the large wall screen showing continuous Kennedy film footage and photos will compel locals and visitors alike to settle in for a while.
"We want our guests to feel inspired from the moment they walk through the door," Denton said.
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http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/7/17_Matt_Simmons.html
Interview with oil guru Matt Simmons who paints a desperate picture of the outcome of BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Rupert Murdoch and the Corruption of the British Media
in Political Conspiracies
Posted
October 2010 issue of Vanity Fair with its article about Murdoch.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/times-versus-wall-street-journal-201010