Douglas Caddy

The article below states that Valenti had a reputation of generally not speaking ill of anyone – but this was not the case when he orchestrated the campaign against Barr McClellan’s book on LBJ and forced the History Channel to withdraw its segment on LBJ in its JFK assassination series. I am reminded in reading the article of a statement made at a legal education seminar I attended years ago. The speaker, an attorney who clients were among the rich and powerful, remarked that in drawing up their testamentary documents he found that his clients viewed “death as an outrageous inconvenience.” I have the impression that Valenti fell into this category. -------------------------------- June 7, 2007 Jack Valenti’s Memoir Suffers Without a Key Salesman By DAVID M. HALBFINGER The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/books/07...amp;oref=slogin LOS ANGELES, June 6 — Jack Valenti’s death has created a marketing problem that would have challenged even him. Mr. Valenti, a onetime Houston advertising man who became a confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson and then, for nearly four decades, Hollywood’s spokesman as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, died on April 26, just weeks before the release of his new memoir. Now his publisher, Harmony Books, and his survivors are struggling to ensure that the autobiography gets a modicum of the attention it would have received had Mr. Valenti, a singular raconteur, been around to talk it up himself. Shaye Areheart, vice president and publisher of Harmony, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, said she last saw Mr. Valenti in February, when the two met to go over a second set of revisions and plans for promoting the book, “This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood.” “He was like a kid in a candy shop,” Ms. Areheart said of the 85-year-old Mr. Valenti. “We had so much lined up for him: the ‘Today’ show. Don Imus, before he fell from grace. Larry King. NPR. CBS and Fox News. Everyone was so drawn to Jack, and he had so many stories to tell.” Mr. Valenti had arranged much of the publicity himself, Ms. Areheart said. “We mentioned ‘Regis and Kelly,’ and he said he’d call Regis Philbin. He said he’d contact Les Moonves, Bob Wright, Roger Ailes. He could make a phone call and get straight to the top.” Mr. Valenti, the master networker, had also arranged to be celebrated by his friends among the rich and powerful at book parties in New York (given by Barry Diller), Washington (Dan Glickman, Mr. Valenti’s successor at the Motion Picture Association, and Franco Nuschese, owner of the Georgetown power spot Café Milano), and Los Angeles (Kirk Douglas, Mr. Valenti’s closest Hollywood friend, and Robert A. Day Jr., founder of Trust Company of the West). But his death left Harmony in a costly, and awkward, bind. The book was the imprint’s lead summer title, with an initial printing of 100,000 copies, and Harmony had bought front-of-store display space in the major booksellers for the two weeks before Father’s Day. “We had an enormous investment in Jack,” Ms. Areheart said. She would not disclose what he had been paid, but called it a “significant advance.” Harmony sought to capitalize on the coverage of Mr. Valenti’s death by shipping the book to retailers early, to go on sale May 15, three weeks before the scheduled on-sale date of June 5. Nielsen BookScan said only 1,000 copies had been sold through June 3 — a grim indication, since the first sales are often the strongest. (BookScan captures about 70 percent of book sales.) But confusion over the correct day to display the title could have made those early numbers less predictive, some industry executives speculated. Many books are published posthumously of course, like David Halberstam’s book on the Korean War, due this fall. This is not the first time an author’s death has created a publisher’s nightmare: In 1992 Sam Walton, the billionaire founder of Wal-Mart, died after having signed a $4 million contract with Doubleday for his memoirs. And Virginia Clinton Kelley, President Clinton’s mother, died in 1994 four months before her memoir was to be published. Mr. Walton’s book, written with John Huey, became a best seller anyway; Ms. Kelley’s did not. Mr. Valenti’s book recounts his bootstraps rise from modest means in Houston; his bombing runs as a World War II pilot; his place in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot; his close relationship with Johnson; and his tenure in Hollywood as a starry-eyed but fierce advocate. It includes little that is newsworthy — no salacious anecdotes or score-settling barbs, which comes as no surprise, given Mr. Valenti’s reputation for seldom speaking ill of anyone. What it had to grab attention, in a word, was him, and he’d promised to devote all of June and July to publicizing the book. In his absence Ms. Areheart has been working with Mr. Valenti’s daughter, Courtenay, a movie executive at Warner Brothers, to line up surrogates from among her father’s friends in Washington and Hollywood, something she said was a welcome distraction from her own grieving. So far, a Harmony publicist said, “Today” has agreed to interview Ms. Valenti and her mother, Mary Margaret, and “Tavis Smiley” on PBS has invited Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount chairwoman, to talk about Mr. Valenti, but no other spots have been confirmed. “It’s awkward,” Ms. Valenti said. “For a lot of these different outlets, it’s harder for them to make the show interesting. We know that talking to us is not what people want.” She added that no celebrity or politician would be able to do justice to the full sweep of her father’s life. “We’re all dealing with the reality that the best salesperson for the book was Daddy.” Ms. Valenti, meanwhile, was able to prevail upon one very famous friend of her father’s, Michael Douglas, to stand in for him in the audio version of “This Time, This Place.” (Mr. Valenti suffered a stroke a week before he was to begin recording the audio version in March.) “I’m in the movie business, so I know what it is to ask somebody to do something like that, knowing how busy he is, and how long it takes to do,” Ms. Valenti said. It took Mr. Douglas three days. “But Michael, without batting an eye, said: ‘Don’t give it another thought. I’ll do it immediately.’ ” Ms. Areheart said she regretted allowing Mr. Valenti to delay publication several times as he dredged up fond memories and thought up new chapters. “I kept saying, ‘Jack, let it go,’ ” she said. If she’d only stuck to a March date, she said, “he’d have been able to enjoy it.”

I failed to note in my report on the interview that Saint John said that he was in discussions with "60 Minutes" about a possible segment on its program dealing with the tape recording that his father had given to him to be released after his death.

E. Howard Hunt Update Filling in for Art Bell, Ian Punnett welcomed back the eldest son of "super-spy" E. Howard Hunt, Saint John Hunt, to coastotocoastam on June 2 for an update on what his father knew about the plot to assassinate President Kennedy and how the news media has reacted to this story. Should you wish to listen to the four hour show at a nominal cost, click on the link below: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2007/06/02.html#recap Among the highlights of the interview were: (1) Saint John said that William F. Buckley refused to write the Introduction to Howard Hunt’s biography, American Spy, until the reference to LBJ’s involvement in the JFK assassination was diluted. The CIA, which had to approve contents of the book, took the same position. (2) Richard Hoagland, former science adviser to Walter Cronkite and former consultant to NASA, phoned in to say that he is writing a book on the history of NASA and that in the course of research he had uncovered evidence of LBJ’s role in the assassination. His said that LBJ was the tool of certain interests that he will describe in his new book and that the same interests told LBJ to “fold his cards” and not seek re-election in 1968 because he had fulfilled his assigned mission. (3) Another caller said that Texans were deeply involved in the JFK assassination and that she spoke from personal knowledge as her father was a close associate of LBJ and that she was at one time married to a relative of Billie Sol Estes. All in all, the interview with Saint John was extremely informative.

Does 'The Decider' Decide on War? by Patrick J. Buchanan May 30, 2007 www.lewrockwell.com Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran? For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war. Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq. The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says Iran is making progress in the enrichment of uranium and denying it access to Iran's nuclear sites. Bush is calling on Russia and China to toughen sanctions. A flotilla of U.S. warships, including the carriers Stennis and Nimitz, has passed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell has told CNN there is "very credible intelligence" Iran is funding Sunni extremists engaged in the roadside bombing of U.S. troops. CBS reports the United States has engaged in the industrial sabotage of Iran's nuclear program by making the equipment Iran acquires on the black market unusable or destructive. ABC reports that Bush has authorized the CIA to mount a "black" operation to destabilize Iran, using "non-lethal" means. The absence of White House outrage over the leak suggests it may have wanted the information out. ABC.com reports U.S. officials are supporting a militant group, Jundallah, in the "tri-border region" of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jundallah, a Sunni Islamist group seeking independence for Baluchistan, claims to have killed hundreds of Iranians. While U.S.-Iran discussions have begun, there are reports Vice President Cheney and the neo-con remnant, along with the Israelis, are opposed to talks and believe that the only solution to Iran's nuclear program is military. Whether this is part of a good-cop, bad-cop routine to convince Tehran to suspend enrichment, we do not know. But this much is sure. If the U.S. government is aiding Islamic militants who are killing Iranians, and Iran is providing roadside bombs to Iraqi militants, Sunni or Shia, to kill Americans, we are in a proxy war. And it could explode into a major war. So the questions come. Where is the Congress, which alone has the power to take us to war? Why are the Democratic candidates parroting the "all-options-are-on-the-table!" mantra, when as ex-Sen. Mike Gravel noted in the first Democratic debate, this means George W. Bush is authorized to attack Iran. Why does Congress not enact the resolution Nancy Pelosi pulled down, which declares that nothing in present law authorizes President Bush to launch a pre-emptive strike or preventive war on Iran – and before launching any such attack, he must get prior approval from both houses of Congress? If we are going to war, is it not imperative that, this time, we know exactly why we must go to war, what exactly the threat is from Iran, what are the likely consequences of a U.S. attack on a third Islamic country and what are the alternatives to war? For there are arguments against war, as well as for war – and the former are not receiving a hearing, as both parties compete in their fulminations against Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler of the Middle East. What are those arguments? On Iran's nuclear progress, there is a real question as to whether they are producing purified uranium. Iran's refusal to let the IAEA see what it is doing suggests it may be covering up failure. Second, though Iranians sound bellicose, Iran has not started a single war since the revolution of 1979. Indeed, Iran was the victim of a war launched by Saddam Hussein, whom we secretly supported. Not within living memory has Iran invaded or attacked another country. But in the last 110 years, peace-loving Americans have fought Spain, Germany twice, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Italy, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq twice and Serbia. We have intervened militarily in the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Lebanon and Grenada. We bombed Libya. Now, a case can be made for most of these wars, whose fallen we honor on Memorial Day. But the point is this. Why would Iran, with no air force or navy that can stand up 24 hours against us, no missile that can reach us, no atom bomb, and no ability to withstand U.S. air and sea attack, want a war with us that could mean the end of Iran as a modern nation and possible breakup of the country, as Iraq is breaking up? Whether one is pro-war or antiwar, ought we not – if we are going into another war – do it the right way, the constitutional way, with Congress declaring war? Or does the Democratic Congress think that what is best for America is to let "the decider" decide? Because that is what George Bush is doing right now. May 30, 2007

President Kennedy and His Gay Best Friend Spring 1933, two schoolmates began a lifelong friendship. LeMoyne Billings, a closeted gay teenager, was immediately attracted to the young Jack Kennedy. Though evidence suggests Lem made sexual advances that Kennedy spurned, their friendship flourished…. By Blase DiStefano Outsmart Magazine Houston, Texas May 2007 http://www.outsmartmagazine.com/this_issue...ryid=1177953009 [Poster’s note: be sure to click on the above link to see the pictures of JFK and Lem Billings together.] For those readers too young to remember the White House in the early '60s, here are a few facts: It was home to the youngest president ever. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was 43 years old (a first ... and a last) and Catholic (also a first ... and a last). The first lady was Jacqueline Kennedy, and the couple had two children, Caroline and John Jr. The First Couple had many gay friends, though the early '60s was not a time when that was discussed. I spoke with David Pitts about his new book, Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings—The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship (Carroll & Graf Publishers). Blase DiStefano: How did you find out about Lem Billings? David Pitts: I found out because of my own interest in the Kennedy presidency. I read all the JFK books, and I became aware of Lem Billings over the years in these books. Some writers suggested that he was gay, and Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest even called Lem "chief faggot of Camelot"—he definitely picks up on Lem being gay. So it was kind of hinted at, but nobody really looked into it. What made you decide to go this route? It was kind of a circuitous route. When I left full-time journalism in 2003, I knew I wanted to do a JFK book because of my interest in the Kennedy presidency. I didn't want to do the same old story that everybody keeps on doing every time about the Cuban Missile Crisis and so on. So I thought to myself that Lem Billings—this kind of a shadowy figure that I'd read about over the years—was probably a close political confidant of the president and that there was a story here about his political influence behind the scenes. That's what I thought was going to be the story when I started this project. And it was only after I got into the interviews and started looking into the documents and the letters that I realized this was a personal friendship and not a political friendship. Was it common knowledge in the administration that Lem Billings was gay? It's not clear that anybody in the administration knew for sure. They certainly thought that because he was at the White House so often, he seemed misplaced there. Some other people who weren't in the administration but were friends of the president certainly picked up on it. I had an interview with Ben Bradlee [former executive editor of The Washington Post] for example, and he certainly sensed LeMoyne was gay. But it was a different time, and there was no real discussion about it, and Ben Bradlee told me he didn't bring it up with the president and the president didn't bring it up with him. So I would say it was generally sensed but not known. Is there any indication that Lem was in love with Jack? Yes. There are various indications of that. I think the best example is a quote that I used in the book. He's on the record as saying, "Jack made a big difference in my life. Because of him, I was never lonely. He may have been the reason I never got married." So there are various indications of his profound attachment to Kennedy. Is there any indication of Jack's response to his finding out that Lem was gay? There is a response early on in the friendship. LeMoyne attempted a sexual proposal to John Kennedy—this was at Choate. About how old were they at this time? This would be when Lem was 17 and Jack was 16. Although we don't have a record of what Lem wrote to Jack, we do have a record of Jack's response, and he essentially rebuffed the sexual advance but not the friendship. So how do you account for Kennedy, especially being Catholic, keeping the friendship going and not being homophobic? Very, very surprising, especially in the 1930s before the Kinsey reports, before everything. This was a question I asked various people who knew John Kennedy, including Gore Vidal and Ben Bradlee. They basically said he was a member of the upper class, that he was comfortable around gay people, even as president, and he wasn't a judgmental type of guy. This was the response they gave to me—that it was never a problem to him, not only with LeMoyne, but with other gay people he knew, such as Gore Vidal. What must it have been like for Lem being gay in the 1930s? Extremely difficult. Like almost every gay man at that time he felt compelled to live a secret life, not only because he was a friend of Jack Kennedy, but in order to have a successful career, which he did in advertising. He knew that was necessary, and, like all gay people, he paid a price for that, which became apparent later in his life when he began drinking quite a bit. It apparently colored his entire life. And I guess it colored how he later talked about his life, like the quote you mentioned about how he could have gotten married. I hate to do what other authors always say, which is say read the book, but there is no substitute for reading the book and seeing what Lem himself said in the various letters and his 815-page oral history, which I used extensively for the book. You can see him struggling with trying to be candid about what he felt. He obviously wanted to be. He died in 1981, and certainly during the time when he was alive, he felt it was not possible for him to be that candid. At the time that Lem and Jack met, basically it was OK for men to be intimate, affectionate without sex. I was thinking specifically of the photo of men and women arm in arm, with Lem and Jack the only two males arm in arm. That to me says a whole lot about that era, because in today's society, certain people would look at that and flinch. That's one point I tried to make in the book in one of the chapters. Ironically, in some ways gay people had more license at that time than they do now. Homosexuality wasn't on the radar screen, the general population wasn't really aware of it, and so, in a sense, gay people could do certain things, such as the example that you gave, and it did not come under suspicion the way it clearly would today. Today it would be assumed they were gay. And about the quote, about Lem never getting married — do you think his love for Jack kept him from having a serious relationship with another man? It seems to have. A major source for the book was a man named Larry Quirk, who is an editor and writer in New York and has published a number of books himself. He knew Lem and had a sexual involvement with Lem, but he told me that even though Lem had various sexual involvements throughout his life, including with him, that there was only one person he really loved and that was Jack Kennedy. Do you think Kennedy's most important relationships were with men? I've thought about it a great deal after writing the book. Our language in society is really inadequate to express the range of involvements and emotions that people have in this regard. But if I were to summarize John Kennedy, I think what I found out in writing this book is that his sexual preferences were women, but his attachments were to men. So I don't know what that makes him—there's no word for that, right? [both laugh] He did have some pretty profound attachments to women, but he also seemed to want and need strong attachments to men that were not sexual. At that time I think it was easier to do that. Now it's more suspect: "If I have this type of relationship with a man, people are going to think I'm gay..." I think you're exactly right. I don't think it was uncommon at the time. This was before the women's movement when women were thought of as sex objects and they weren't allowed into certain clubs, particularly in Washington, or even in the National Press Club where women weren't allowed even as journalists. Women were considerably downgraded in importance in society at large, so it wouldn't be surprising, particularly in elite circles, if men's strongest attachments were to other men. Do you think Jack used Lem as a gofer? It seemed like Lem allowed it, so it wasn't one-sided. Doing the research for the book and talking to some people, I found conflicting evidence on that. Gore Vidal said he was the gofer. I think the phrase he used was, "Lem was the guy who carried the bags for Jack." And he called him "Jack's slave" at one point. But other people discounted that. Jack's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, said that the friendship was very equal. And I did find evidence in the letters when they were both at college—Lem was at Princeton and Jack was at Harvard—I did find evidence when they got together in New York on weekends, it was as much Jack who was suggesting their getting together as it was Lem. So it wasn't always Lem asking for the time. The friendship seems to have been quite mutual. And in one of the interviews with Gore Vidal [Pitts had three interviews with him], he seems to concede that the friendship was a bit more than carrying the bags. Lem was very useful in Kennedy's political campaigns. Exactly. He wasn't very good [both laugh], but the important point that was made was that no matter how inexperienced Lem was politically, no matter how much he messed things up sometimes, Jack wanted him involved, which is another indication of the strength of the friendship, because the president didn't seem to care that he wasn't that efficient at times in the political sense. It does seem like the friendship was serious, because Kennedy could have dropped him easily, especially considering that Kennedy may have been concerned about people finding out that Lem was gay. That's one of the most amazing things. Of course, when it started in 1933 and Jack was at school, you can certainly argue that for the first 10 or 15 years, there was no political threat, but once he started on the road to the White House after World War II, this friendship posed a political threat, and if the Russians would have gotten hold of this information, it could have been problematic. Lem was considered part of the Kennedy family, wasn't he? He certainly was. All the evidence I've found was that every single member of the Kennedy family just adored him. It wasn't just Jack Kennedy. He became close to Robert Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ethel Kennedy, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. The only person who is a little circumspect in her affections was Jackie Kennedy, for maybe obvious reasons. After Jack married Jackie, what was the relationship like between Jack and Lem? From all accounts, it stayed the same. Jackie did like Lem, didn't she? All the evidence seems to indicate she liked him quite a lot. In actuality, she had more things in common with Lem than she did with Jack. Jack was a political animal, and her main interest was in the arts, which was Lem's main interest. So they had much in common. The other point that seemed to be very salient was the fact that in the early years of her marriage when she was having some difficulties with Jack Kennedy, Lem was a kind of humorous intermediary who helped break the tension. But he was always there, and on many occasions she wanted him there, but on other occasions she didn't. What about Lem's relationship with Caroline and John Jr.? With Caroline and John Jr., it seems to have been affectionate and close. After the assassination, Jackie was in New York for roughly five years before she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968. That's when both Caroline and John were quite young, so Jackie Kennedy was keen to have them spend time with Lem so they could learn all about the president in his younger days, pre-dating the time she knew him. I remember reading in the book that Lem had all this information that nobody else seemed to have. Most of the people around Jack Kennedy had met him after the war when his political career began, and Jackie hadn't met him until 1951. So almost nobody outside the family knew him from 1933. So that was important to her. And he saw much less of them when she moved outside of the United States after her marriage to Onassis. But when she returned in the mid-'70s and started working in New York, they were teenagers by then, and they would go over to his place by themselves. So they knew him quite well, Caroline probably a little bit more than John Jr. Didn't Lem basically have his own room in the White House? It was on the third floor. The chief White House usher at the time, J. B. West, confirmed that, and it was basically his room. And Lem himself talked about it in his oral history. How important was that oral history? That document was vital to this book. It's 815 pages. I was working on the book for three years, and for most of the time I couldn't get access to it, because although it's in the Kennedy Library, it's off limits to authors and journalists. The only person who can give you permission to get to it is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he finally gave me permission in the final months when I was preparing the book. Do you know why he finally gave in? I don't. I pestered him a lot, sending letters. That may have been part of the reason. He also probably checked me out as a journalist [Pitts has written various articles on John Kennedy] and realized I wasn't some kind of far-right writer. The Kennedys are getting kind of suspicious of journalists these days, because there have been a lot of trash books or political-attack books from the right about the Kennedys in recent years, so that may have been one reason for his caution, but I really don't know. Wasn't Lem such a regular visitor at the White House that security would let him pass without some kind of badge? Yes, they did. He never had a White House pass. He said all the guys knew him, and he just waltzed right on in there. He was also a frequent guest at the president's retreat outside Washington in Glen Ora, Virginia. Where was Lem when Kennedy was assassinated? He was in New York. He was on his lunch hour from his job at an advertising company called Lennen & Newell. Is there any information on how it affected him at the time? Not immediately. I wasn't able to talk to anybody who talked to him that day. I think the only person he did talk to was Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who was at the White House at the time. But his close friends, Frances McAdoo and John Seigenthaler, talked to him within the next few days after it happened, and they described him as you can imagine—devastated, just unable to process it all. But at the time he was very helpful to the family. He knew this was going to be a time of incredible anguish for the Kennedy family. He knew all of them from the early 1930s, when Jack used to take him to Palm Beach in Hyannis Port. He felt incredibly responsible and loyal to them. He held himself together through the funeral period and then just fell apart. I found it very interesting that a gift from Lem was buried with Kennedy. Were there other things buried with him? I don't know the answer to that, although I understand that Jackie Kennedy was going to have the ring he'd given her buried with him, and somebody persuaded her she should keep it. So that's the only other gift I know about. But the gift from Lem that was buried with him was a set of whale's-tooth scrimshaw. This is apparently something that Kennedy had been interested in collecting over the years, and Lem had given him some, and it had been on the desk of the president in the White House. I find that fascinating. It brings it back again to how close they were. Did Lem ever recover from the assassination? Not in total. Grief is a strange thing. Some days he'd be the same old Lem joking, and other days he would think about what had happened. It was something that he apparently was never able to come to terms with. The best way he seemed to be able to deal with it was to talk about JFK to the younger Kennedys, to journalists, really to anybody who would listen. 1. Didn't he remain a part of the Kennedy family? He became very close to Senator Robert Kennedy. But that wasn't just the post-1963 phenomenon either. He'd known Bobby since the early 1930s, and it was natural that they would become close since he'd seen so much of Jack Kennedy in Bobby, and he had it happen all over again in 1968 when Bobby was killed. Did he help in Bobby's campaign? He was very involved in his campaign first when he ran for senator of New York in 1964 and then in the presidential campaign in 1968. And he was professionally involved. His company, Lennen & Newell, was involved in doing many of the political commercials that aired at the time. He was closely involved in Robert Kennedy's political efforts as well. Wasn't Lem's boss not only a Republican but also charmed by President Kennedy? A guy by the name of Adolph Toigo--yes, he was a Republican, as indeed was Lem until 1960. This is really one of the funny things because Lem's family was a Republican family, and Lem himself was a registered Republican--he switched his registration in 1960--and so were some of the other people we were just talking about. I guess it's part of John Kennedy's charisma. He met with some of Lem's friends, including Lem's boss, because he wanted Lem to help on the campaign, which was the initial reason, but then he also persuaded the boss to change his political allegiance. It's incredible his effect on people. The Kennedys embracing the friendship between Lem and Jack says a whole lot about the family. Yes, it does. There have been various rumors flying over the years, in some of the right-wing periodicals especially, that Lem, being a gay man, tried to seduce some of the younger Kennedys. I did look into that, but I was able to find no evidence of that, and certainly none of the younger Kennedys, including Bobby Kennedy, has said that was the case. How did Lem die? He died of a heart attack in 1981 at the age of 65. Although when I looked into it a little bit more, he did have a heart condition for some time, and to what degree his drinking contributed to that, I'm not really sure. But the technical cause of death was a heart attack. Not long before that, didn't he still see the younger kids? Right. After Senator Robert Kennedy's assassination in June of 1968, he then became close to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the person who gave me permission to look at the documents. This seems to have been the instigation of Ethel Kennedy, who had 11 children. Again, Lem knew Bobby from when he was a little kid, and she asked various people to help out with the boys. Some other guys helped out with the other boys, and she asked Lem to help out with Bobby. So they became really close. Bobby Kennedy Jr. was only 14 when his father was assassinated. So Lem took Bobby under his wing, and they often went on vacations together, and Bobby was often at his New York townhome. Did the fact that you are gay prove a help or a hindrance in writing the book? I don't really feel that it either helped or hindered me in writing the book. I took a journalistic approach in writing this. I only included information in the book that I could verify either through documentary evidence or with interviewees in a position to know. I think President Kennedy--if he were alive today--would be horrified at the resurgence of conservatism and the attack on civil liberties in the United States. Just a few weeks ago even, General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called homosexual acts immoral--and survived in his job, despite the bigotry. But 47 years ago, we had a president whose best friend was gay and who seemed quite comfortable with it.

Mr. Caddy, Thank you for your reply. Chances that you might know Lee or any of his acquaintances from that era are slim, but sometimes it is a small world. Lee lived in (and around) New Orleans at a number of different addresses and at a number of different times, according to my information also from 1/1954- roughly 6/1956, before his military service. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/oswald1.htm During his early childhood and adolescence in New Orleans, Lee Oswald lived with his divorced mother at a number of different locations, usually in small rented houses or apartments in a moderateto-lower-income section of the city. (1) While the record of residences is not complete, one address was 126 Exchange Alley. (2) During her testimony before the Warren Commission, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald indicated that she and her son lived there when Oswald was about to 16 years old, roughly the years 1955-56. (3) They were "living at 126 Exchange Place, which is the Vieux Carre section of the French Quarter of New Orleans." (4) During her testimony, Mrs. Oswald noted that "the papers said we lived over a saloon at that particular address * * * that is just the French part of town. It looks like the devil. Of course I didn't have a fabulous apartment. But very wealthy people and very fine citizens live in that part of town. * * .. (5) While Mrs. Oswald correctly noted that "wealthy" citizens resided in some sections of the French Quarter, Exchange Alley was well known as the location of other elements; it was an area notorious for illicit activities. As the managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, Aaron Kohn recalled, "Exchange Alley, specifically that little block that Oswald lived on, was literally the hub of some of the most notorious underworld joints in the city." (6). He noted further that Exchange Alley was the location of various gambling operations affiliated with the Marcello organization. (7) Noting the openness with which such activities were conducted there, (8) Kohn said, "you couldn't walk down the block without literally being exposed to two or three separate forms of illicit activities and underworld operations." (9) http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/jfkinfo/jfk9/Hscv9b.htm Very interesting. I did not know that Lee and his mother lived in New Orleans from 1955-56. Do you know what high school he attended? I was graduated from Alcee Fortier High School in 1956.

I could be wrong, but I believe Haslam's new witness is Judyth Baker. I just finished listening to the interview on Dreamland with Ed Haslam. You are correct: his new witness is indeed Judyth Baker. In any event the interview is informative and fascinating and time well spent.

You clearly played an important role in establishing the “New Right” movement in 1960. I believe the main intention of the Young Americans for Freedom was to get Barry Goldwater elected as president. (1) Could you explain why you supported Barry Goldwater? Why aspects of John F. Kennedy did you disagree with? What do you think Goldwater would have done differently to LBJ if he had become president in 1964? (2) I know that you no longer hold extreme right-wing views. When and why did you change your political views? I supported Barry Goldwater because I got to know him fairly well as a person and even arranged for him to speak at Georgetown University while I was an undergraduate there. He was a rational person and not a knee-jerk, right-wing zealout. My opposition to Senator Kennedy was based on my being a loyal Republican at the time, holding the position of chairman of the College Young Republican Federation of the District of Columbia. LBJ was a tool of Texas-based Brown and Root, which later became Haliburton. Brown and Root prospered dramatically during the Vietnam war (just as Haliburton has during the present Iraq war.) Goldwater, heir to an Arizona department store fortune, was fiercely independent and not a tool of any entity. My views on Kennedy have changed over the years. From what I gather from research and reading, had he lived he would have made profound changes in our federal government, mostly to the good. An example of this was his threat to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces following the Bay of Pigs debacle. My views began to change in 1974 when Joseph Coors, Ed Fuelner and Paul Weyrich threatened to destroy the directors of the Schuchman Foundation unless we did what they wanted. Schuchman was the first chairman of Young American for Freedom and died at an early age. The directors refused to be threatened. Fuelner then founded the Heritage Foundation and Weyrich the Committee for a Free Congress, both bankrolled by Joseph Coors. Today America and the world are reaping the whirlwind of corruption and evil that these men and their organizations have spawned.

I did not know any of these other individuals. I departed New Orleans in 1956 to enroll in Georgetown University. Lee Harvey Oswald lived in New Orleans in the years immediately preceding the assassination of JFK in 1963, long after I had left the city, and following his return from the Soviet Union.

James -- You are correct as to the intent of the loyalty oath. Senator John Kennedy was indeed sponsor of the bill to repeal the oath from the National Defense Education Act. Our organization was designed to uncover and recruit conservative youth around the nation. It was a strategic move to break away from the Young Republican National Federation by establishing a national conservative youth organization that would appeal to rank-and-file union members and residents of the South who normally would not identify with the GOP. Upon being formed the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath received national publicity. Senator Style Bridges (R.-N.H.) praised the organization on the floor of the Senate as did Congressman H. R. Gross in the House of Representatives. Of course, old line liberals were upset. Gerald Johnson wrote in The New Republic that our Committee was a plea of subservience to the state. In fact, we were just the opposite. I never met Senator Kennedy. However, the Senator and Mrs. Kennedy lived on N St., NW, just a few blocks from the campus of Georgetown University. In my sophmore and junior years I served as editor the student publication, the Foreign Service Courier. To celebrate my birthday a few of the girls on the publication's staff baked a cake. While they were carrying the cake up the the campus to surprise me, Senator Kennedy emerged from his house and, upon being told of the special occasion, promptly stuck his finger into the cake, tasted it and pronounced to be superb. When the cake was presented to me, there was a general discussion of whether we should eat it or have it preserved somehow for posterity. We chose the former option. Doug

From an email announcement received May 23, 2007: Dreamland: Jim Marrs Guest Hosts a Free Blockbuster Conspiracy Show Ed Haslam was a dynamite Dreamland guest on on May 7, 2005 (interview available to our paid subscribers)and now he's back with phenomenal new material about how the unsolved murder of a doctor, a secret laboratory in New Orleans and cancer-causing viruses are linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination and the horrific epidemics of cancer and bizarre diseases that now haunt our world. The last time we talked to Ed, his only missing piece was a key witness. HE HAS FOUND THAT WITNESS. And who better to conduct this interview that one of the world's greatest authorities on JFK, our own guest host Jim Marrs, upholding Dreamland's exclusive tradition of having EXPERTS interview EXPERTS. It doesn't get better than this, so DON'T MISS DREAMLAND this weekend. The show can be accessed free of charge beginning on Saturday, May 26. To listen, click on "Listen Now" on the right side of the Unknowncountry.com masthead. If you can't listen, please click on our "Listening Problems" FAQ. Click on Ed's picture to explore his website. Get Ed's new book with a foreword by Jim Marrs from our Amazon.com store! http://www.unknowncountry.com/

I attended Alcee Fortier High School in New Orleans from 1954 to 1956, the latter year being when I was graduated from that educational institution. While in high school I became active in politics. I first met Kent Courtney in 1954 when he and his wife, Phoebe, sponsored a public meeting in Audubon Park to mobilize support for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was then threatened with being censured by the U.S. Senate. I erected a card table in front of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter and collected signatures on petitions of persons who supported the cause of Senator McCarthy. These petitions were then forwarded to General Bonner Fellers, who headed the national pro-McCarthy movement. It was about this time that Kent and Phoebe Courtney founded Free Men Speak, a monthly newspaper that reprinted editorials from conservative newspapers around the country (such as the Chicago Tribune and the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader.) I worked after school in a voluntary position in helping to publish the newspaper. Their publication later changed its name to The Independent American. I was introduced to Guy Banister by Kent Courtney at a public meeting sponsored by the Kohn Crime Commission, a semi-public entity set up to combat organized crime in New Orleans. I seem to remember attending a meeting in Guy Banister’s office some time later but do not recollect the subject of the meeting. That was the extent of my relationship with Guy Bannister. I never met or knew Leander Perez, who was the king-pin leader of Plaquemines Parish, which adjoins New Orleans. If there were an organizational pecking order among these persons, it never came to my attention. All these events occurred when I was between 16 and 18 years of age. After being graduated from high school, I left New Orleans permanently, having enrolled in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I had no further contact with the Courtneys or with Guy Banister. While at Georgetown University, in 1959 I founded the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, which evolved into Youth for Goldwater. A year later, in 1960, I help found Young Americans for Freedom, which was organized at the family estate of William F. Buckley. The above is a capsule history of how the mass conservative movement began. Mr. Caddy , Thanks for your reply, I didn't realize you were that young then. What year did you meet Mr. Banister ? It would be impossible to state with certainty due to the lapse of time but I think that I first met Guy Banister in 1955.

I attended Alcee Fortier High School in New Orleans from 1954 to 1956, the latter year being when I was graduated from that educational institution. While in high school I became active in politics. I first met Kent Courtney in 1954 when he and his wife, Phoebe, sponsored a public meeting in Audubon Park to mobilize support for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was then threatened with being censured by the U.S. Senate. I erected a card table in front of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter and collected signatures on petitions of persons who supported the cause of Senator McCarthy. These petitions were then forwarded to General Bonner Fellers, who headed the national pro-McCarthy movement. It was about this time that Kent and Phoebe Courtney founded Free Men Speak, a monthly newspaper that reprinted editorials from conservative newspapers around the country (such as the Chicago Tribune and the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader.) I worked after school in a voluntary position in helping to publish the newspaper. Their publication later changed its name to The Independent American. I was introduced to Guy Banister by Kent Courtney at a public meeting sponsored by the Kohn Crime Commission, a semi-public entity set up to combat organized crime in New Orleans. I seem to remember attending a meeting in Guy Banister’s office some time later but do not recollect the subject of the meeting. That was the extent of my relationship with Guy Bannister. I never met or knew Leander Perez, who was the king-pin leader of Plaquemines Parish, which adjoins New Orleans. If there were an organizational pecking order among these persons, it never came to my attention. All these events occurred when I was between 16 and 18 years of age. After being graduated from high school, I left New Orleans permanently, having enrolled in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I had no further contact with the Courtneys or with Guy Banister. While at Georgetown University, in 1959 I founded the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, which evolved into Youth for Goldwater. A year later, in 1960, I help found Young Americans for Freedom, which was organized at the family estate of William F. Buckley. The above is a capsule history of how the mass conservative movement began.

Nuke official's comments stir security concerns Feds seek answers after former chief at Palisades plant told magazine he was a hired assassin. Paul Egan and Gordon Trowbridge / The Detroit News May 18, 2007 http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...METRO/705180372 Federal nuclear watchdogs and members of Congress are seeking answers after a former security director at a western Michigan nuclear plant gave a bizarre series of interviews to Esquire magazine in which he claimed to be a hired assassin. William E. Clark, who until recently was security chief at the Palisades nuclear power plant near South Haven on Lake Michigan, told the magazine for an article in its June edition that he had worked as a government assassin, killing people in Vietnam, New Orleans and Iraq. The article suggested most of Clark's claims were false and that he was emotionally unstable The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is responsible for safety and security at the nation's nuclear plants, has sent questions on the issue to Entergy Corp., the plant's current owner, according to Viktoria Mitlyng , a spokeswoman for the agency's regional office in Illinois. Consumers Energy Co. owned Palisades at the time Clark was hired; a third company, Nuclear Management Co., managed the plant for Consumers. A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, said Entergy has promised to investigate and update him on its findings. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., has called on NRC officials to investigate; Clark was employed at a Massachusetts plant before moving to Palisades. Lana Pollack, president of the Michigan Environmental Council, said the article raises serious concerns about how key personnel at U.S. nuclear and chemical facilities -- prime targets for potential terrorist attacks -- are screened. "If it were a movie, it would be amusing; in real life, it's upsetting," Pollack said Thursday. "The idea that he had full access to the Palisades plant and a fully armed team of guards who answered to him would be a stunning security lapse." Mark Savage, a spokesman for the Palisades plant, said Clark took a medical leave on April 17 and resigned for medical reasons on May 9. Mitlyng would not say specifically what information the NRC was seeking, but said federal rules on security and background checks for sensitive workers had become stricter after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Arline Datu, a spokeswoman for Nuclear Management, said the firm took security very seriously, and that all employees, including Clark, undergo a strict background check. She said she could not comment on whether any procedures were missed in Clark's case.

To read the full research paper as published in the Annals of Applied Statistics, click on the link below and go to the second to the last article listed: http://www.imstat.org/aoas/next_issue.html By the way, the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams tonight devoted a segment to the research paper and interviewed one of its authors, who challenged the one-bullet theory and advocated that further research be conducted on the existing JFK bullet fragments that are in the possession of the National Archives.

An interesting and impressive research effort: http://www.enterprisemission.com/Bees/thebeesneeds.htm

Pat: I agree with you. Weiner overplayed his hand as a book critic by allowing his bias to be self-evident, and thus undercutting any credibility that his review might have. -- Doug

Watergate Warrior By TIM WEINER May 13, 2007 The New York Times Sunday Book Review http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/re...fBook%20Reviews AMERICAN SPY My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond. By E. Howard Hunt with Greg Aunapu. Foreword by William F. Buckley Jr. Illustrated. 340 pp. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95. Howard Hunt, who died in January at the age of 88, was among the last living members of the clandestine service created as part of the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1940s. Hunt wanted to believe he fit the popular image of the C.I.A.’s founders — the American aristocrats, the tough young veterans of the last good war, the daring amateurs who set out to save the world. Hunt, it turned out, was among the worst of them. He was a xxxx, a thief and a con man — all admirable qualities for C.I.A. officers who served overseas during the cold war, aspiring to the British definition of a diplomat: a gentleman who lies for his country abroad. Fine when Hunt was station chief in Uruguay. Dangerous when put to work in Washington. Hunt burned out after two decades at the agency. One night in 1972, his old boss, Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, picked up his bedside phone to hear that the recently retired Hunt was mixed up with a botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. This scene, the beginning of the end of Nixon’s presidency, opens Helms’s posthumously published autobiography. For suspense, it beats any of the countless thrillers Hunt wrote. And it has the benefit of being true, which brings us, unfortunately, to the book at hand. Hunt channeled his creativity into fair-to-middling spy novels and, later, a self-pitying Watergate memoir. He was better when he made things up. “American Spy,” written with Greg Aunapu, is presented as a “secret history,” a double-barreled misrepresentation. There are no real secrets in this book. As history it is bunk. The old hands at the C.I.A.’s publications review board, who maintain the agency’s memory hole, must have had a mordant chuckle over “American Spy,” and connoisseurs of literary crimes and misdemeanors will find much to savor here. Hunt describes a foreign president’s wife as “the true power behind the thrown.” He makes Dwight Eisenhower president in 1950, at the start of the Korean War, instead of 1953, at its end. He mangles the names of, among others, the leaders of Iran and Nicaragua. He also identifies Mark Felt, a k a Deep Throat, as Howard Felt — a howler calling for a psychiatrist as well as an editor. The publishers of this book seem to have received an impossible last draft, handed it to a book doctor and closed their eyes. The low point — and there is strong competition — comes when the author examines the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt was falsely linked to the killing by conspiracy buffs, and this chapter can be read only as a twisted form of bitter revenge. He exhumes worm-eaten theories linking C.I.A. officers and their Cuban agents to the case and pretends to take them seriously. Then, with a straight face, he purports to put Lyndon B. Johnson’s finger on the trigger. “Having Kennedy liquidated,” Hunt writes, “could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson’s part,” for “if he wanted to get rid of the president, he had the ability to do so by corrupting different people in the C.I.A. ... L.B.J. had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas.” Had enough? Hunt closes by arguing that “the C.I.A. needs to clandestinely produce television programs, movies and electronic games” to recruit talented young Americans, citing Fox’s “24” as a model. Great idea — get me Rupert Murdoch! He wants “the PlayStation generation” to revive “the principals and ideals” — sigh — of the C.I.A.’s founding fathers, to go “back to the heart and souls of the ‘daring amateurs.’ ” This comes from the man who helped bungle both the Bay of Pigs and the Watergate break-in. It is not sound counsel. Far more mythology than history has been written about the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of those myths have been produced by C.I.A. officers — starting with Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence under Eisenhower and Kennedy — who constructed fables of derring-do and sold them to publishers and presidents alike. The legends, thanks in part to novels and movies, never die. They hold that a golden age of American intelligence was followed by a long assault on the agency by bleeding hearts, that a revitalized C.I.A. won the cold war under Ronald Reagan and that a new generation of spies now stands tall as America’s first line of defense. This is self-deception. It lands the agency — and the nation — in deep trouble every decade or so. E. Howard Hunt’s work is in a long tradition of arrant nonsense. In short, this is a book to shun. It is a small blessing that its author has been spared the burden of answering for its publication. Tim Weiner, a reporter for The Times, is the author of “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.,” to be published in August.

Editing correction to subtitle to topic -- should read: Chosen by Kennedys to examine autopsy evidence. John K. Lattimer, Urologist of Varied Expertise, Dies at 92 By DENNIS HEVESI The New York Times May 13, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/nyregion...amp;oref=slogin John K. Lattimer, a prominent urologist, ballistics expert and collector of historical relics who treated top-ranking Nazis during the Nuremberg war crimes trials and was the first nongovernmental medical specialist allowed to examine the evidence in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, died Thursday at a hospice near his home in Englewood, N.J. He was 92. His death was announced by his daughter Evan Lattimer. For 25 years, Dr. Lattimer was a professor and chairman of the urology department at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Dr. Lattimer was credited with helping to establish pediatric urology as a discipline, developing a cure for renal tuberculosis, writing 375 scientific papers and representing the United States at the World Health Organization. His interests, however, spanned an array of fields. His 30-room, 1895 Federal-style home in Englewood was a virtual military museum until his collection went into storage last year. Its third floor was lined with medieval armor, Revolutionary and Civil War rifles and swords, a pile of cannonballs, World War II machine guns and German Lugers, and drawings by Adolf Hitler. Dr. Lattimer had been fascinated by weapons since his childhood visits to his grandparents’ farm in Hubbardston, Mich., where he spent summer days hunting. That interest took a more serious turn during World War II, when he treated hundreds of casualties as an Army doctor during the Normandy invasion. He became a ballistics expert and, after the killing of President Kennedy, a student of assassinations. In his collection was a blood-stained collar that President Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater the night he was shot. Dr. Lattimer wrote several articles in medical journals describing experiments he had conducted with rifles, scopes and ammunition similar to those used by President Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Then, in 1972, the Kennedy family chose Dr. Lattimer to be the first nongovernmental expert to examine 65 X-rays, color photos and black-and-white negatives taken during the autopsy. A front-page New York Times article, with a photograph of Dr. Lattimer, quoted him saying that the images “eliminate any doubt completely” about the validity of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald fired all the shots that struck the president. Dr. Lattimer’s wartime experiences also prompted him to write a somewhat controversial book based, in large part, on his assignment to the medical team at the Nuremberg trials. The book, “Hitler’s Fatal Sickness and Other Secrets of the Nazi Leaders” (Hippocrene Books, 1999), records his professional impressions of the men and their conditions. It includes a long chapter concluding that Hitler suffered from advanced Parkinson’s disease — probably the “faster moving post-encephalitic” type, Dr. Lattimer wrote — based on reports of Hitler’s tremors, first in the left hand, then spreading to other limbs, and his well-documented attacks of rage. Dr. Lattimer theorized that the disease prompted him to make bizarre judgments that eventually cost Germany the war. Among the more macabre relics that Dr. Lattimer collected, in this case from his service at Nuremberg, is a glass ampoule that contained the dose of cyanide taken by Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe commander, to commit suicide rather than go to the gallows. And although there is some dispute about its authenticity, Dr. Lattimer also had in his collection what is said to be Napoleon’s penis, which a long tradition holds was removed by the priest who administered the last rites. Dr. Lattimer bought it at an auction in 1969. Asked about its authenticity, his daughter said: “Of course, the French don’t want it here. But there’s ironclad provenance.” John Kingsley Lattimer was born in Mount Clemens, Mich., on Oct. 14, 1914, the only child of Irvie and Gladys Lenfesty Lattimer. His family moved to New York when he was 2. Besides his daughter, of Kansas City, Mo., Dr. Lattimer is survived by his wife of 59 years, the former Jamie Hill; two sons, Jon, of Kona, Hawaii, and D. Gary Lattimer, of Honolulu; and one grandson. A lanky 6-foot-4, Dr. Lattimer was a track star at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1935. He won eight metropolitan area Amateur Athletic Union hurdling championships. He graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 1938. Among Dr. Lattimer’s most prized possessions was a sword that belonged to Ethan Allen, who in the predawn hours of May 10, 1775, led a band of Green Mountain Boys in capturing strategic Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain in upstate New York — a turning point in the Revolution. Two hundred years later to the hour, Dr. Lattimer — Ethan Allen’s sword in hand — led a re-enactment of that battle. For several years in the 1980s, Dr. Lattimer was chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Medieval Festival, held outside the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan. At the 1983 festival, clad in armor and bearing a shield, he told a reporter about his fascination with medieval armaments. “In my front hall, I have a suit of armor from a Knight of Malta, with the Maltese Cross,” he said. “I also have a beheading ax.”

Miles: No, I do not know why the full tape has not been posted. I wondered at the tme when it was played on coasttocoastam on two occasions why the full tape was not played then. However, I shall attempt to find out why from Saint John, although it is my understanding that he is overwhelmed with the response to his radio appearances and with related media projects stemming from his father entrusting the tape to him. Doug

Honeybee Die-Off Threatens U.S. Food Supply By SETH BORENSTEIN AP http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/ho...990001?cid=2194 BELTSVILLE, Md. (May 3) - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet. About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons. In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program. "This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said. While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming. U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies _ or about five times the normal winter losses _ because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe. Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite. Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins. "Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer." Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney 's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter. "This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement. A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply. Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too. Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse _ and we took it for granted." "We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday. Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks. USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them. The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it. A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation. The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus. However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy. Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October. First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005. Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum. What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said. University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed. Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming. Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before. Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem. "The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."

Some random thoughts: Perhaps one reason Howard Hunt was confident that Nixon would come up with the Watergate “hush” money after the arrests was because he knew that Nixon was aware of Hunt’s involvement in another Presidential historical event: the assassination of JFK. Nixon in his Oval Office tapes spoke of the danger of lifting the “scab” that covered Hunt’s past activities. As Saint John Hunt, his son, revealed in his coasttocoastam interview Monday night, Hunt continued to file reports with the top officials at the CIA even after he ostensibly left its employment and began working for the Mullen Company and subsequently at the White House in the “plumber’s unit.” So what was the best way to send a signal to Hunt that he should under all circumstances – even when facing a criminal trial and imprisonment – remain silent on what he knew about the Kennedy assassination? The best way was to kill his wife, Dorothy, who had also been a CIA agent and who undoubtedly knew of the truth about JFK’s murder. Dorothy was killed in a plane crash in Chicago in December 1972, on the eve of the first Watergate trial. Hunt subsequently pleaded guilty at that trial, rather than be forced to answer questions if he chose to testify in his own behalf. One never knows what twists a criminal case might take. What was Dorothy carrying besides the $10,000 recovered? (Saint John Hunt says it was more than that amount.) Could she have been carrying documentation as to the Kennedy assassination to be entrusted to a relative or close friend as a form of protection to be utilized depending how the Watergate scandal played out? Was this documentation seized by a designated member of the horde of 50-plus FBI and DIA agents that arrived upon the scene within minutes after the plane crash? Dorothy, probably knowing that she and her husband were in imminent danger, had the foresight to purchase a $250,000 life insurance policy at the air port just prior to departure. Did Hunt get the intended message that was sent by the mysterious death of his wife? My guess is that he did. He was then weighed down with the worry of raising four children who would be captives of fortune if he were also killed. So he kept his mouth shut about the Kennedy assassination and went to prison and later even testified falsely before congressional committees about it and went so far as to file a notarized sworn affidavit with the Rockefeller Commission, which was filled with falsehoods. This served to appease those who might be tempted to silence him forever. And like the intelligence agent that he was, he bided his time and made arrangements for the truth to come out after he died. Hence, his sending a tell-all tape recording to Saint John, which millions of radio listeners have heard in recent days. A fuse has been lit post-mortem by Hunt. Brace yourself. Before it is all over we may yet have the full story of the assassination and also what might have been on the 18 ½ minutes erased from a key Nixon Oval Office tape. This is because both Nixon and Hunt knew the full story of the Kennedy assassination. As I wrote at the beginning, these are merely some random thoughts by me.

Below is the posting today on the coasttocoastam website regarding Saint John Hunt’s interview on the May 1, 2007 radio show: Hunt & the JFK Assassination First hour guest, Saint John Hunt, the son of the late 'super-spy' E. Howard Hunt, discussed his father's connection to the JFK assassination. Via a tape he sent to his son (an excerpt can be heard here), E. Howard said that he was a "benchwarmer" to the "big event" (his code phrase for the JFK assassination). LBJ had a "maniacal urge" to be President and was involved in the "coup" along with CIA operative Cord Meyer, Saint John said he learned from his father, adding that a second gunman in addition to Oswald was a Corsican sharpshooter. He also shared that in the photo of the "three tramps" at Dealy Plaza, the man in the hat greatly resembles his father. Streamlink members can hear a full show with Saint John Hunt hosted by Ian Punnett. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2007/05/01.html

I listened to Ian Punnett interview Saint John Hunt on coasttocoastam on Saturday night... I find it ironic that if what Howard Hunt maintains is true, that I considered him a close friend n the early 1970's while never divining of his knowledge of LBJ’s role in the Kennedy assassination, and that some dozen years later, through my representation of Billie Sol Estes, I was provided additional information linking LBJ to the killing, which I have previously disclosed in this Forum. Mr. Caddy, Thank you for the alert to the Coasttocoast broadcast. I visited Saint John Hunt's website ( http://www.saintjohnhunt.com/ ) several times & found that the link there to the full tape did not work. My guess is that he is still constructing his site. However, if there is an overlooked problem you might want to advise Saint of this, since you have e-mail commo with him. "..., I was provided additional information linking LBJ to the killing, which I have previously disclosed in this Forum." Could you please supply a URL or link to the Forum thread(s) or posts where you disclosed this information here in the Forum? Thanks! Yes, my information on LBJ can be found in the Forum’s topic Douglas Caddy – Question and Answer, using the link below: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5892 One of the mysteries of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes was his use of the coded phrase “Bay of Pigs,” which he closest aides assumed he meant the Kennedy assassination. On one of his tapes, Nixon remarked about the danger of exposing Hunt to additional publicity because of the “scab” that covered certain activities of Hunt. In light of Saint John’s revelations, it may be that Nixon was worried about Hunt being linked directly to the Kennedy assassination.

I listened to Ian Punnett interview Saint John Hunt on coasttocoastam on Saturday night. Saint John inherited his father’s excellent command of the English language and was precise in what he talked about. Saint John said that he had received from his father in January 2004 by U.S. mail an unsolicited tape recording, four-and-one-half minutes of which were played on the radio show Saturday night, and which is scheduled to be played again tonight on coastocoastam. In the tape recording Hunt named CIA officer Cord Meyer as the principal ringleader of the group that assassinated JFK. Mary Meyer, Cord Meyer’s ex-wife and mistress of JFK, was the victim of a mysterious killing one year after JFK was assassinated. Howard Hunt said that as a result of JFK’s adulterous affair with Cord Meyer’s then wife, Cord was ripe for the opportunity to assassinate JFK upon being approached by LBJ, whom Hunt in the tape identified as being at the top of the conspiracy pyramid. Saint John named one Cuban-American who was a member of the conspiracy and who is still alive, indicating that he had talked with this individual about the JFK assassination In the tape Hunt referred to himself as a “benchwarmer” in the assassination conspiracy. Because Hunt was precise in his use of the English language, Ian Punnett in the radio interview focused on the word and asked Saint John if this meant that Hunt was privy to the plot but kept in reserve in case his unique abilities were needed. Saint John agreed that this was a proper description of what a “benchwarmer” is and that might well describe his father’s role in the affair. However, the information provided by Hunt in his tape recording contradicts in its entirety the sworn affidavit that he provided to the Rockefeller Commission in 1974 as printed verbatim on pages 128-129 of his recently published book, “American Spy.” Still, he might have been confident that no one with direct knowledge would dare dispute him in 1974, making him feel safe in filing a sworn affidavit at that time. I have established email communication with Saint John, offering to provide him with the information that I have tying LBJ to the murder. He has responded that he remembers my name well, as his father, my Watergate legal client, talked about me on many occasions. I find it ironic that if what Howard Hunt maintains is true, that I considered him a close friend n the early 1970's while never divining of his knowledge of LBJ’s role in the Kennedy assassination, and that some dozen years later, through my representation of Billie Sol Estes, I was provided additional information linking LBJ to the killing, which I have previously disclosed in this Forum.